Word: umuahia
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...walled villages, the crisis is worse. When one of the Catholic priests visits he is immediately surrounded by haggard faces begging for medicine, food, anything. At the Seventh-day Adventist Hospital in Okpala, a sign at the gate reads "No Vacancy." At Queen Elizabeth Hospital in Umuahia, the largest in the region, doctors one day recently counted 1,800 patients suffering from kwashiorkor: during the whole of 1963, the same hospital treated 18 such cases. At the military hospital in the same city, Major David Ofomata, chief medical adviser, tells visitors that everything from antibiotics to catgut is needed...
Without prelude, the rapid approach of a loud, metallic whine overhead transformed normal activity in the township of Umuahia, which now serves as the rebels' headquarters, into frightened cries and panicked running about. A few seconds later, a single low-flying jet plane cut a straight line across the town, releasing as it went six pairs of rockets. Two plowed caverns into the grass huts outside the Red Cross headquarters at Saint Stephen's School, where schoolgirl volunteers sat outside preparing garri for the evening meal...
...teen-agers were killed instantly. After the raid, as I walked through the heart of Umuahia's residential quarter, a Ministry of Works dump truck had begun plying the streets to collect other victims...
...scene I witnessed at Umuahia's Queen Elizabeth Hospital following the air raid was repeated in nearly every Biafran town I visited. Under tall shade trees outside an already filled mortuary lay a score of corpses, including pregnant women and months-old babies, charred, disfigured and mangled. Amid the tearful cries of keening women, workers carried into the morgue mashed human fragments piled on stretchers, and limbs and torsos balanced on shovels. The next morning, clutching handkerchiefs over nose and mouth against the stench and carrying freshly sawed unpainted wood coffins, the families lined up patiently under the trees...
Since the air war can only be waged with outside aid, Biafra's Oxford-educated leader, Lieut. Colonel Odumegwu Ojukwu, 34, is understandably outraged at the Russians and Egyptians. When I met Ojukwu on the evening of the Umuahia air raid in his closely guarded stucco house atop a hill outside town, he spoke of the "hot and cold flashes that go through my mind" when he sees the air raid victims. "Viewing their mangled remains on a mortuary slab," he said, "I feel anger with those who made devastating weapons available to primitive men. I even find myself...