“The hour was early, the morning still, warm, and beautiful,”
a Hiroshima physician, Michihiko Hachiya, the director of the
Hiroshima Communications Hospital, begins a diary of the
events Little Boy entrained on August 6. “Shimmering leaves,
reflecting sunlight from a cloudless sky, made a pleasant
contrast with shadows in my garden.”
2601 The temperature at
eight o’clock was 80 degrees, the humidity 80 percent, the
wind calm. The seven branches of the ta flowed past crowds
of citizens walking and bicycling to work. The streetcars that
clanged outside Fukuya department store two blocks north of
Aioi Bridge were packed. Thousands of soldiers, bare to the
waist, exercised at morning calesthenics on the east and west
parade grounds that flanked Hiroshima Castle a long block west
of the T-shaped bridge. More than eight thousand schoolgirls,
ordered to duty the day before, worked outdoors in the central
city helping to raze houses to clear firebreaks against the
possibility of an incendiary attack. An air raid alert at 7:09—the
509th weather plane—had been called off at 7:31 when the
B-29 left the area. Three more B-sans approaching just before
8:15 sent hardly anyone to cover, though many raised their
eyes to the high silver instruments to watch.
“Just as I looked up at the sky,” remembers a girl who was
five years old at the time and safely at home in the suburbs,
“there was a flash of white light and the green in the plants
looked in that light like the color of dry leaves.”2602
Closer was more brutal illumination. A young woman helping
to clear firebreaks, a junior-college student at the time, recalls:
“Shortly after the voice of our teacher, saying ‘Oh, there’s a B!’
made us look up at the sky, we felt a tremendous flash of
lightning. In an instant we were blinded and everything was
just a frenzy of delirium.”2603
Closer still, in the heart of the city, no one survived to report
the coming of the light; the constrained witness of investigative
groups must serve instead for testimony. A Yale Medical School
pathologist working with a joint American-Japanese study
commission a few months after the war, Averill A. Liebow,
observes:
Accompanying the flash of light was an instantaneous flash of
heat . . . Its duration was probably less than one tenth of a
second and its intensity was sufficient to cause nearby
flammable objects . . . to burst into flame and to char poles as
far as 4,000 yards away from the hypocenter [i.e., the point
on the ground directly below the fireball]. . . . At 600–700 yards
it was sufficient to chip and roughen granite. . . . The heat also
produced bubbling of tile to about 1,300 yards. It has been
found by experiment that to produce this effect a temperature
of [3,000° F] acting for four seconds is necessary, but under
these conditions the effect is deeper, which indicates that the
temperature was higher and the duration less during the
Hiroshima explosion.2604
“Because the heat in [the] flash comes in such a short time,”
adds a Manhattan Project study, “there is no time for any
cooling to take place, and the temperature of a person’s skin
can be raised [120° F] . . . in the first millisecond at a distance
of [2.3 miles].”2605
The most authoritative study of the Hiroshima bombing,
begun in 1976 in consultation with thirty-four Japanese scientists
and physicians, reviews the consequences of this infernal
insolation, which at half a mile from the hypocenter was more
than three thousand times as energetic as the sunlight that had
shimmered on Dr. Hachiya’s leaves:
The temperature at the site of the explosion . . . reached [5,400°
F] . . . and primary atomic bomb thermal injury . . . was found
in those exposed within [2 miles] of the hypocenter. . . . Primary
burns are injuries of a special nature and not ordinarily
experienced in everyday life.2606
This Japanese study distinguishes five grades of primary
thermal burns ranging from grade one, red burn, through
grade three, white burn, to grade five, carbonized skin with
charring. It finds that “severe thermal burns of over grade 5
occurred within [0.6 to 1 mile] of the hypocenter . . . and those
of grades 1 to 4 [occurred as far as 2 to 2.5 miles] from the
hypocenter. . . . Extremely intense thermal energy leads not only
to carbonization but also to evaporation of the viscerae.”2607
People exposed within half a mile of the Little Boy fireball, that
is, were seared to bundles of smoking black char in a fraction
of a second as their internal organs boiled away. “Doctor,” a
patient commented to Michihiko Hachiya a few days later, “a
human being who has been roasted becomes quite small,
doesn’t he?” The small black bundles now stuck to the streets
and bridges and sidewalks of Hiroshima numbered in the
thousands.
2608
At the same instant birds ignited in midair. Mosquitoes and
flies, squirrels, family pets crackled and were gone. The fireball
flashed an enormous photograph of the city at the instant of
its immolation fixed on the mineral, vegetable and animal
surfaces of the city itself. A spiral ladder left its shadow in
unburned paint on the surface of a steel storage tank. Leaves
shielded reverse silhouettes on charred telephone poles. The
black-brushed calligraphy burned out of a rice-paper name card
posted on a school building door; the dark flowers burned out
of a schoolgirl’s light blouse. A human being left the memorial
of his outline in unspalled granite on the steps of a bank.
Another, pulling a handcart, protected a handcart- and
human-shaped surface of asphalt from boiling. Farther away, in
the suburbs, the flash induced dark, sunburn-like pigmentation
sharply shadowed deep in human skin, streaking the shape of
an exposed nose or ear or hand raised in gesture onto the
faces and bodies of startled citizens: the mask of Hiroshima,
Liebow and his colleagues came to call that pigmentation. They
found it persisting unfaded five months after the event.
The world of the dead is a different place from the world of
the living and it is hardly possible to visit there. That day in
Hiroshima the two worlds nearly converged. “The inundation
with death of the area closest to the hypocenter,” writes the
American psychiatrist Robert Jay Lifton, who interviewed
survivors at length, “was such that if a man survived within a
thousand meters (.6 miles) and was out of doors . . . more than
nine tenths of the people around him were fatalities.”2609 Only
the living, however inundated, can describe the dead; but
where death claimed nine out of ten or, closer to the
hypocenter, ten out of ten, a living voice describing necessarily
distorts. Survivors are like us; but the dead are radically
changed, without voice or civil rights or recourse. Along with
their lives they have been deprived of participation in the
human world. “There was a fearful silence which made one feel
that all people and all trees and vegetation were dead,”
remembers Yōko ta, a Hiroshima writer who survived.2610
The silence was the only sound the dead could make. In what
follows among the living, remember them. They were nearer
the center of the event; they died because they were members
of a different polity and their killing did not therefore count
officially as murder; their experience most accurately models the
worst case of our common future. They numbered in the
majority in Hiroshima that day.
Still only light, not yet blast: Hachiya:
I asked Dr. Koyama what his findings had been in patients
with eye injuries.2611
“Those who watched the plane had their eye grounds
burned,” he replied. “The flash of light apparently went through
the pupils and left them with a blind area in the central
portion of their visual fields.
“Most of the eye-ground burns are third degree, so cure is
impossible.”
And a German Jesuit priest reporting on one of his brothers
in Christ:
Father Kopp . . . was standing in front of the nunnery ready to
go home. All of a sudden he became aware of the light, felt
that wave of heat, and a large blister formed on his hand.2612
A white burn with the formation of a bleb is a grade-four
burn.
Now light and blast together; they seemed simultaneous to
those close in. A junior-college girl:
Ah, that instant! I felt as though I had been struck on the
back with something like a big hammer, and thrown into
boiling oil. . . . I seem to have been blown a good way to the
north, and I felt as though the directions were all changed
around.2613
The first junior-college girl, the one whose teacher called
everyone to look up:
The vicinity was in pitch darkness; from the depths of the
gloom, bright red flames rise crackling, and spread moment by
moment. The faces of my friends who just before were
working energetically are now burned and blistered, their
clothes torn to rags; to what shall I liken their trembling
appearance as they stagger about? Our teacher is holding her
students close to her like a mother hen protecting her chicks,
and like baby chicks paralyzed with terror, the students were
thrusting their heads under her arms.2614
The light did not burn those who were protected inside
buildings, but the blast found them out:
That boy had been in a room at the edge of the river, looking
out at the river when the explosion came, and in that instant
as the house fell apart he was blown from the end room
across the road on the river embankment and landed on the
street below it.
2615 In that distance he passed through a
couple of windows inside the house and his body was stuck
full of all the glass it could hold. That is why he was
completely covered with blood like that.
The blast wave, rocketing several hundred yards from the
hypocenter at 2 miles per second and then slowing to the
speed of sound, 1,100 feet per second, threw up a vast cloud
of smoke and dust. “My body seemed all black,” a Hiroshima
physicist told Lifton, “everything seemed dark, dark all over. . . .
2616 Then I thought, ‘The world is ending.’ ” Yōko ōta, the
writer, felt the same chill:
I just could not understand why our surroundings had
changed so greatly in one instant. . . . I thought it might have
been something which had nothing to do with the war, the
collapse of the earth which it was said would take place at the
end of the world.
2617
“Within the city,” notes Hachiya, who was severely injured,
“the sky looked as though it had been painted with light sumi
[i.e., calligraphy ink], and the people had seen only a sharp,
blinding flash of light; while outside the city, the sky was a
beautiful, golden yellow and there had been a deafening roar of
sound.”2618 Those who experienced the explosion within the
city named it pika, flash, and those who experienced it farther
away named it pika-don, flash-boom.
The houses fell as if they had been scythed. A fourth-grade
boy:
When I opened my eyes after being blown at least eight yards,
it was as dark as though I had come up against a
black-painted fence. After that, as if thin paper was being
peeled off one piece at a time, it gradually began to grow
brighter. The first thing that my eyes lighted upon then was
the flat stretch of land with only dust clouds rising from it.
Everything had crumbled away in that one moment, and
changed into streets of rubble, street after street of ruins.2619
Hachiya and his wife ran from their house just before it
collapsed and terror opened out into horror:
The shortest path to the street lay through the house next
door so through the house we went—running, stumbling, falling,
and then running again until in headlong flight we tripped over
something and fell sprawling into the street. Getting to my feet,
I discovered that I had tripped over a man’s head.2620
“Excuse me! Excuse me, please!” I cried hysterically.
A grocer escaped into the street:
The appearance of people was . . . well, they all had skin
blackened by burns. . . . They had no hair because their hair
was burned, and at a glance you couldn’t tell whether you
were looking at them from in front or in back. . . .2621 They
held their arms [in front of them] . . . and their skin—not only
on their hands, but on their faces and bodies too—hung
down. . . . If there had been only one or two such people . . .
perhaps I would not have had such a strong impression. But
wherever I walked I met these people. . . . Many of them died
along the road—I can still picture them in my mind—like
walking ghosts. . . . They didn’t look like people of this world. . . .
They had a very special way of walking—very slowly. . . . I
myself was one of them.
The peeled skin that hung from the faces and bodies of these
severely injured survivors was skin that the thermal flash had
instantly blistered and the blast wave had torn loose. A young
woman:
I heard a girl’s voice clearly from behind a tree. “Help me,
please.” Her back was completely burned and the skin peeled
off and was hanging down from her hips. . . .2622
The rescue party . . . brought [my mother] home. Her face
was larger than usual, her lips were badly swollen, and her
eyes remained closed. The skin of both her hands was hanging
loose as if it were rubber gloves. The upper part of her body
was badly burned.
A junior-college girl:
On both sides of the road, bedding and pieces of cloth had
been carried out and on these were lying people who had
been burned to a reddish-black color and whose entire bodies
were frightfully swollen. Making their way among them are
three high school girls who looked as though they were from
our school; their faces and everything were completely burned
and they held their arms out in front of their chests like
kangaroos with only their hands pointed downward; from their
whole bodies something like thin paper is dangling—it is their
peeled-off skin which hangs there, and trailing behind them the
unburned remnants of their puttees, they stagger exactly like
sleepwalkers.2623
A young sociologist:
Everything I saw made a deep impression—a park nearby
covered with dead bodies waiting to be cremated . . . very badly
injured people evacuated in my direction. . . . The most
impressive thing I saw was some girls, very young girls, not
only with their clothes torn off but with their skin peeled off as
well. . . . My immediate thought was that this was like the hell I
had always read about.
2624
A five-year-old boy:
That day after we escaped and came to Hijiyama Bridge, there
were lots of naked people who were so badly burned that the
skin of their whole body was hanging from them like rags.
2625
A fourth-grade girl:
The people passing along the street are covered with blood and
trailing the rags of their torn clothes after them.2626 The skin
of their arms is peeled off and dangling from their finger tips,
and they go walking silently, hanging their arms before them.
A five-year-old girl:
People came fleeing from the nearby streets. One after another
they were almost unrecognizable. The skin was burned off
some of them and was hanging from their hands and from
their chins; their faces were red and so swollen that you could
hardly tell where their eyes and mouths were. From the
houses smoke black enough to scorch the heavens was
covering the sky. It was a horrible sight.
2627
A fifth-grade boy compiling a list:
The flames which blaze up here and there from the collapsed
houses as though to illuminate the darkness. The child making
a suffering, groaning sound, his burned face swollen up
balloon-like and jerking as he wanders among the fires. The
old man, the skin of his face and body peeling off like a potato
skin, mumbling prayers while he flees with faltering steps.
Another man pressing with both hands the wound from which
blood is steadily dripping, rushing around as though he has
gone mad and calling the names of his wife and child—ah—my
hair seems to stand on end just to remember. This is the way
war really looks.2628
But skin peeled by a flash of light and a gust of air was only
a novelty among the miseries of that day, something unusual
the survivors could remember to remember. The common lot
was random, indiscriminate and universal violence inflicting
terrible pain, the physics of hydraulics and leverage and heat
run riot. A junior-college girl:
Screaming children who have lost sight of their mothers; voices
of mothers searching for their little ones; people who can no
longer bear the heat, cooling their bodies in cisterns; every one
among the fleeing people is dyed red with blood.2629
The thermal flash and the blast started fires and very quickly
the fires became a firestorm from which those who could
ambulate ran away and those who sustained fractures or were
pinned under houses could not; two months later Liebow’s
group found the incidence of fractures among Hiroshima
survivors to be less than 4.5 percent. “It was not that injuries
were few,” the American physicians note; “rather, almost none
who had lost the capacity to move escaped the flames.”2630 A
five-year-old girl:
The whole city . . . was burning. Black smoke was billowing up
and we could hear the sound of big things exploding. . . . Those
dreadful streets. The fires were burning. There was a strange
smell all over. Blue-green balls of fire were drifting around. I
had a terrible lonely feeling that everybody else in the world
was dead and only we were still alive.2631
Another girl the same age:
I really have to shudder when I think of that atom bomb
which licked away the city of Hiroshima in one or two minutes
on the 6th of August, 1945. . . .2632
We were running for our lives. On the way we saw a soldier
floating in the river with his stomach all swollen. In desperation
he must have jumped into the river to escape from the sea of
fire. A little farther on dead people were lined up in a long
row. Al little farther on there was a woman lying with a big
log fallen across her legs so that she couldn’t get away.
When Father saw that he shouted, “Please come and help!”
But not a single person came to help. They were all too
intent on saving themselves.
Finally Father lost his patience, and shouting, “Are you people
Japanese or not?” he took a rusty saw and cut off her leg
and rescued her.
A little farther on we saw a man who had been burned
black as he was walking.
A first-grade girl whose mother was pinned under the
wreckage of their house:
I was determined not to escape without my mother.2633 But
the flames were steadily spreading and my clothes were already
on fire and I couldn’t stand it any longer. So screaming,
“Mommy, Mommy!” I ran wildly into the middle of the flames.
No matter how far I went it was a sea of fire all around and
there was no way to escape. So beside myself I jumped into
our [civil defense] water tank. The sparks were falling
everywhere so I put a piece of tin over my head to keep out
the fire. The water in the tank was hot like a bath. Beside me
there were four or five other people who were all calling
someone’s name. While I was in the water tank everything
became like a dream and sometime or other I became
unconscious. . . . Five days after that [I learned that] Mother
had finally died just as I had left her.
Similarly a woman who was thirteen at the time who was still
haunted by guilt when Lifton interviewed her two decades later:
I left my mother there and went off. . . . I was later told by a
neighbor that my mother had been found dead, face down in
a water tank . . . very close to the spot where I left her. . . .
2634 If I had been a little older or stronger I could have
rescued her. . . . Even now I still hear my mother’s voice calling
me to help her.
“Beneath the wreckage of the houses along the way,” recounts
the Jesuit priest, “many have been trapped and they scream to
be rescued from the oncoming flames.”2635
“I was completely amazed,” a third-grade boy remembers of
the destruction:2636
While I had been thinking it was only my house that had
fallen down, I found that every house in the neighborhood was
either completely or half-collapsed. The sky was like twilight.
Pieces of paper and cloth were caught on the electric wires. . . .
On that street crowds were fleeing toward the west. Among
them were many people whose hair was burned, whose clothes
were torn and who had burns and injuries. . . . Along the way
the road was full to overflowing with victims, some with great
wounds, some burned, and some who had lost the strength to
move farther. . . . While we were going along the embankment,
a muddy rain that was dark and chilly began to fall. Around
the houses I noticed automobiles and footballs, and all sorts of
household stuff that had been tossed out, but there was no
one who stopped to pick up a thing.
But against the background of horror the eye of the survivor
persisted in isolating the exceptional. A thirty-five-year-old man:
A woman with her jaw missing and her tongue hanging out of
her mouth was wandering around the area of Shinsho-machi in
the heavy, black rain.2637 She was heading toward the north
crying for help.
A four-year-old boy:
There were a lot of people who were burned to death and
among them were some who were burned to a cinder while
they were standing up.2638
A sixth-grade boy:
Nearby, as if he were guarding these people, a policeman was
standing, all covered with burns and stark naked except for
some scraps of his trousers.2639
A seventeen-year-old girl:
I walked past Hiroshima Station . . . and saw people with their
bowels and brains coming out. . . . I saw an old lady carrying a
suckling infant in her arms. . . . I saw many children . . . with
dead mothers. . . . I just cannot put into words the horror I
felt.2640
At Aioi Bridge:
I was walking among dead people. . . . It was like hell. The sight
of a living horse burning was very striking.2641
A schoolgirl saw “a man without feet, walking on his ankles.”
2642 A woman remembers:
A man with his eyes sticking out about two inches called me
by name and I felt sick. . . . People’s bodies were tremendously
swollen—you can’t imagine how big a human body can swell
up.
2643
A businessman whose son was killed:
In front of the First Middle School there were . . . many young
boys the same age as my son . . . and what moved me most
to pity was that there was one dead child lying there and
another who seemed to be crawling over him in order to run
away, both of them burned to blackness.2644
A thirty-year-old woman:
The corpse lying on its back on the road had been killed
immediately. . . . Its hand was lifted to the sky and the fingers
were burning with blue flames.2645 The fingers were
shortened to one-third and distorted. A dark liquid was running
to the ground along the hand.
A third-grade girl:
There was also a person who had a big splinter of wood stuck
in his eye—I suppose maybe he couldn’t see—and he was
running around blindly.2646
A nineteen-year-old Ujina girl:
I saw for the first time a pile of burned bodies in a water tank
by the entrance to the broadcasting station.2647 Then I was
suddenly frightened by a terrible sight on the street 40 to 50
meters from Shukkeien Garden. There was a charred body of
a woman standing frozen in a running posture with one leg
lifted and her baby tightly clutched in her arms. Who on earth
could she be?
A first-grade girl:
A streetcar was all burned and just the skeleton of it was left,
and inside it all the passengers were burned to a cinder. When
I saw that I shuddered all over and started to tremble.2648
“The more you hear the sadder the stories get,” writes a girl
who was five years old at Hiroshima.
2649 “Since just in my
family there is so much sadness from it,” deduces a boy who
was also five, “I wonder how much sadness other people must
also be having.”2650
Eyes watched as well from the other side. A history professor
Lifton interviewed:
I went to look for my family. Somehow I became a pitiless
person, because if I had pity, I would not have been able to
walk through the city, to walk over those dead bodies. The
most impressive thing was the expression in people’s
eyes—bodies badly injured which had turned black—their eyes
looking for someone to come and help them.2651 They looked
at me and knew that I was stronger than they. . . . I saw
disappointment in their eyes. They looked at me with great
expectation, staring right through me. It was very hard to be
stared at by those eyes.
Massive pain and suffering and horror everywhere the
survivors turned was their common lot. A fifth-grade boy:
I and Mother crawled out from under the house. There we
found a world such as I had never seen before, a world I’d
never even heard of before. I saw human bodies in such a
state that you couldn’t tell whether they were humans or
what. . . . There is already a pile of bodies in the road and
people are writhing in death agonies.2652
A junior-college girl:
At the base of the bridge, inside a big cistern that had been
dug out there, was a mother weeping and holding above her
head a naked baby that was burned bright red all over its
body, and another mother was crying and sobbing as she gave
her burned breast to her baby. In the cistern the students
stood with only their heads above the water and their two
hands, which they clasped as they imploringly cried and
screamed, calling their parents. But every single person who
passed was wounded, all of them, and there was no one to
turn to for help.2653
A six-year-old boy:
Near the bridge there were a whole lot of dead people.2654
There were some who were burned black and died, and there
were others with huge burns who died with their skins
bursting, and some others who died all stuck full of broken
glass. There were all kinds. Sometimes there were ones who
came to us asking for a drink of water. They were bleeding
from their faces and from their mouths and they had glass
sticking in their bodies. And the bridge itself was burning
furiously. . . . The details and the scenes were just like Hell.
Two first-grade girls:
We came out to the Miyuki Bridge. Both sides of the street
were piled with burned and injured people. And when we
looked back it was a sea of bright red flame.2655
*
The fire was spreading furiously from one place to the next
and the sky was dark with smoke. . . .2656
The [emergency aid station] was jammed with people who
had terrible wounds, some whose whole body was one big
burn. . . . The flames were spreading in all directions and finally
the whole city was one sea of fire and sparks came flying over
our heads.
A fifth-grade boy:
I had the feeling that all the human beings on the face of the
earth had been killed off, and only the five of us [i.e., his
family] were left behind in an uncanny world of the dead. . . . I
saw several people plunging their heads into a half-broken
water tank and drinking the water. . . . When I was close
enough to see inside the tank I said “Oh!” out loud and
instinctively drew back. What I had seen in the tank were the
faces of monsters reflected from the water dyed red with blood.
2657 They had clung to the side of the tank and plunged their
heads in to drink and there in that position they had died.
From their burned and tattered middy blouses I could tell that
they were high school girls, but there was not a hair left on
their heads; the broken skin of their burned faces was stained
bright red with blood. I could hardly believe that these were
human faces.
A physician sharing his horror with Hachiya:
Between the [heavily damaged] Red Cross Hospital and the
center of the city I saw nothing that wasn’t burned to a crisp.
Streetcars were standing at Kawaya-cho and Kamiya-cho and
inside were dozens of bodies, blackened beyond recognition. I
saw fire reservoirs filled to the brim with dead people who
looked as though they had been boiled alive. In one reservoir I
saw a man, horribly burned, crouching beside another man
who was dead. He was drinking blood-stained water out of the
reservoir. . . .2658 In one reservoir there were so many dead
people there wasn’t enough room for them to fall over. They
must have died sitting in the water.
A husband helping his wife escape the city:
While taking my severely-wounded wife out to the riverbank by
the side of the hill of Nakahiro-machi, I was horrified, indeed,
at the sight of a stark naked man standing in the rain with his
eyeball in his palm. He looked to be in great pain but there
was nothing that I could do for him.2659
The naked man may have been the same victim one of
Hachiya’s later visitors remembered noticing, or he may have
been another:
There were so many burned [at a first-aid station] that the
odor was like drying squid. They looked like boiled
octopuses. . . . I saw a man whose eye had been torn out by
an injury, and there he stood with his eye resting in the palm
of his hand. What made my blood run cold was that it looked
like the eye was staring at me.
2660
The people ran to the rivers to escape the firestorm; in the
testimony of the survivors there is an entire subliterature of the
rivers. A third-grade boy:
Men whose whole bodies were covered with blood, and women
whose skin hung from them like a kimono, plunged shrieking
into the river. All these become corpses and their bodies are
carried by the current toward the sea.
2661
A first-grade girl:
We were still in the river by evening and it got cold. No
matter where you looked there was nothing but burned people
all around.2662
A sixth-grade girl:
Bloated corpses were drifting in those seven formerly beautiful
rivers; smashing cruelly into bits the childish pleasure of the
little girl, the peculiar odor of burning human flesh rose
everywhere in the Delta City, which had changed to a waste of
scorched earth.2663
A young ship designer whose response to the bombing was to
rush home immediately to Nagasaki:
I had to cross the river to reach the station.2664 As I came
to the river and went down the bank to the water, I found
that the stream was filled with dead bodies. I started to cross
by crawling over the corpses, on my hands and knees. As I
got about a third of the way across, a dead body began to
sink under my weight and I went into the water, wetting my
burned skin. It pained severely. I could go no further, as there
was a break in the bridge of corpses, so I turned back to the
shore.
A third-grade boy:
I got terribly thirsty so I went to the river to drink. From
upstream a great many black and burned corpses came
floating down the river. I pushed them away and drank the
water. At the margin of the river there were corpses lying all
over the place.2665
A fifth-grade boy:
The river became not a stream of flowing water but rather a
stream of drifting dead bodies. No matter how much I might
exaggerate the stories of the burned people who died shrieking
and of how the city of Hiroshima was burned to the ground,
the facts would still be clearly more terrible.2666
Terrible was what a Hachiya patient found beyond the river:
There was a man, stone dead, sitting on his bicycle as it
leaned against a bridge railing. . . . You could tell that many had
gone down to the river to get a drink of water and had died
where they lay.
2667 I saw a few live people still in the water,
knocking against the dead as they floated down the river.
There must have been hundreds and thousands who fled to
the river to escape the fire and then drowned.2668
The sight of the soldiers, though, was more dreadful than the
dead people floating down the river. I came onto I don’t know
how many, burned from the hips up; and where the skin had
peeled, their flesh was wet and mushy. . . .
And they had no faces! Their eyes, noses and mouths had
been burned away, and it looked like their ears had melted off.
It was hard to tell front from back.
The suffering in the crowded private park of the Asano family
was doubled when survivors faced death a second time,
another Hachiya confidant saw:
Hundreds of people sought refuge in the Asano Sentei Park.
They had refuge from the approaching flames for a little while,
but gradually, the fire forced them nearer and nearer the river,
until at length everyone was crowded onto the steep bank
overlooking the river. . . .
Even though the river is more than one hundred meters
wide along the border of the park, balls of fire were being
carried through the air from the opposite shore and soon the
pine trees in the park were afire. The poor people faced a
fiery death if they stayed in the park and a watery grave if
they jumped in the river. I could hear shouting and crying,
and in a few minutes they began to fall like toppling dominoes
into the river. Hundreds upon hundreds jumped or were
pushed in the river at this deep, treacherous point and most
were drowned.
“Along the streetcar line circling the western border of the
park,” adds Hachiya, “they found so many dead and wounded
they could hardly walk.”2669
The setting of the sun brought no relief. A fourteen-year-old
boy:
Night came and I could hear many voices crying and groaning
with pain and begging for water.
2670 Someone cried, “Damn
it! War tortures so many people who are innocent!” Another
said, “I hurt! Give me water!” This person was so burned that
we couldn’t tell if it was a man or a woman.
The sky was red with flames. It was burning as if scorching
heaven.
A fifth-grade girl:
Everybody in the shelter was crying out loud.2671 Those
voices. . . . They aren’t cries, they are moans that penetrate to
the marrow of your bones and make your hair stand on
end. . . .
I do not know how many times I called begging that they
would cut off my burned arms and legs.
A six-year-old boy:
If you think of Brother’s body divided into left and right halves,
he was burned on the right side, and on the inside of the left
side. . . .2672
That night Brother’s body swelled up terribly badly. He looked
just like a bronze Buddha. . . .
[At Danbara High School field hospital] every classroom . . .
was full of dreadfully burned people who were lying about or
getting up restlessly. They were all painted with mercurochrome
and white salve and they looked like red devils and they were
waving their arms around like ghosts and groaning and
shrieking. Soldiers were dressing their burns.
The next morning, remembers a boy who was five years old
at the time, “Hiroshima was all a wasted land.”2673 The
Jesuit, coming in from a suburb to aid his brothers, testifies to
the extent of the destruction:
The bright day now reveals the frightful picture which last
night’s darkness had partly concealed. Where the city stood,
everything as far as the eye could reach is a waste of ashes
and ruin. Only several skeletons of buildings completely burned
out in the interior remain. The banks of the rivers are covered
with dead and wounded, and the rising waters have here and
there covered some of the corpses.2674 On the broad street
in the Hakushima district, naked, burned cadavers are
particularly numerous. Among them are the wounded who are
still alive. A few have crawled under the burned-out autos and
trams. Frightfully injured forms beckon to us and then collapse.
Hachiya corroborates the priest’s report:
The streets were deserted except for the dead. Some looked as
if they had been frozen by death while still in the full action of
flight; others lay sprawled as though some giant had flung
them to their death from a great height. . . .2675
Nothing remained except a few buildings of reinforced
concrete. . . . For acres and acres the city was like a desert
except for scattered piles of brick and roof tile. I had to revise
my meaning of the word destruction or choose some other
word to describe what I saw. Devastation may be a better
word, but really, I know of no word or words to describe the
view.2676
The history professor Lifton interviewed is similarly at a loss:
I climbed Hikiyama Hill and looked down. I saw that Hiroshima
had disappeared. . . . I was shocked by the sight. . . . What I felt
then and still feel now I just can’t explain with words. Of
course I saw many dreadful scenes after that—but that
experience, looking down and finding nothing left of
Hiroshima—was so shocking that I simply can’t express what I
felt. . . . Hiroshima didn’t exist—that was mainly what I
saw—Hiroshima just didn’t exist.2677
Without familiar landmarks, the streets filled with rubble, many
had difficulty finding their way. For Yōko ta the city’s history
itself had been demolished:
I reached a bridge and saw that the Hiroshima Castle had
been completely leveled to the ground, and my heart shook like
a great wave. . . .2678 The city of Hiroshima, entirely on flat
land, was made three-dimensional by the existence of the white
castle, and because of this it could retain a classical flavor.
Hiroshima had a history of its own. And when I thought about
these things, the grief of stepping over the corpses of history
pressed upon my heart.
Of 76,000 buildings in Hiroshima 70,000 were damaged or
destroyed, 48,000 totally. “It is no exaggeration to say,” reports
the Japanese study, “that the whole city was ruined
instantaneously.”2679 Material losses alone equaled the annual
incomes of more than 1.1 million people. “In Hiroshima many
major facilities—prefectural office, city hall, fire departments,
police stations, national railroad stations, post offices, telegram
and telephone offices, broadcasting station, and schools—were
totally demolished or burned. Streetcars, roads, and electricity,
gas, water, and sewage facilities were ruined beyond use.
Eighteen emergency hospitals and thirty-two first-aid clinics were
destroyed.”2680 Ninety percent of all medical personnel in the
city were killed or disabled.
Not many of the survivors worried about buildings; they had
all they could do to deal with their injuries and find and
cremate their dead, an obligation of particular importance to the
Japanese. A man remembers seeing a woman bloody in torn
wartime mompei pantaloons, naked above the waist, her child
strapped to her back, carrying a soldier’s helmet:
[She was] in search of a place to cremate her dead child. The
burned face of the child on her back was infested with
maggots. I guess she was thinking of putting her child’s bones
in a battle helmet she had picked up. I feared she would have
to go far to find burnable material to cremate her child.
2681
A young woman who had been in charge of a firebreak
group and who was badly burned on one shoulder recalls the
mass cremations:
We gathered the dead bodies and made big mountains of the
dead and put oil on them and burned them. And people who
were unconscious woke up in the piles of the dead when they
found themselves burning and came running out.
2682
Another Hachiya visitor:
After a couple of days, there were so many bodies stacked up
no one knew who was who, and decomposition was so
extensive the smell was unbearable. During those days,
wherever you went, there were so many dead lying around it
was impossible to walk without encountering them—swollen,
discolored bodies with froth oozing from their noses and
mouths.2683
A first-grade girl:
On the morning of the 9th, what the soldiers on the clearance
team lifted out of the ruins was the very much changed shape
of Father. The Civil Defense post [where he worked] was at
Yasuda near Kyobashi, in front of the tall chimney that was
demolished last year. He must have died there at the foot of it;
his head was already just a white skull. . . . Mother and my
little sister and I, without thinking, clutched that dead body and
wailed. After that Mother went with it to the crematory at
Matsukawa where she found corpses piled up like a mountain.
2684
Having moved his hospital sickbed to a second-floor room
with blown-out windows that fire had sterilized, Hachiya himself
could view and smell the ruins:
Towards evening, a light southerly wind blowing across the city
wafted to us an odor suggestive of burning sardines. . . .
Towards Nigitsu was an especially large fire where the dead
were being burned by the hundreds. . . . These glowing ruins
and the blazing funeral pyres set me to wondering if Pompeii
had not looked like this during its last days. But I think there
were not so many dead in Pompeii as there were in
Hiroshima.
2685
Those who did not die seemed for a time to improve. But
then, explains Lifton, they sickened:
Survivors began to notice in themselves and others a strange
form of illness. It consisted of nausea, vomiting, and loss of
appetite; diarrhea with large amounts of blood in the stools;
fever and weakness; purple spots on various parts of the body
from bleeding into the skin . . . inflammation and ulceration of
the mouth, throat and gums . . . bleeding from the mouth,
gums, throat, rectum, and urinary tract . . . loss of hair from the
scalp and other parts of the body . . . extremely low white blood
cell counts when those were taken . . . and in many cases a
progressive course until death.2686
Only gradually did the few surviving and overworked Japanese
doctors realize that they were seeing radiation sickness; “atomic
bomb illness,” explains the authoritative Japanese study, “is the
first and only example of heavy lethal and momentary doses of
whole body irradiation” in the history of medicine.2687 A few
human beings had been accidentally overexposed to X rays
and laboratory animals had been exposed and sacrificed for
study but no large population had ever experienced so
extensive and deadly an assault of ionizing radiation before.
The radiation brought further suffering, Hachiya reports in his
diary:
Following the pika, we thought that by giving treatment to
those who were burned or injured recovery would follow.2688
But now it was obvious that this was not true. People who
appeared to be recovering developed other symptoms that
caused them to die. So many patients died without our
understanding the cause of death that we were all in
despair. . . .
Hundreds of patients died during the first few days; then the
death rate declined. Now, it was increasing again. . . . As time
passed, anorexia [i.e., loss of appetite] and diarrhea proved to
be the most persistent symptoms in patients who failed to
recover.
Direct gamma radiation from the bomb had damaged tissue
throughout the bodies of the exposed.2689 The destruction
required cell division to manifest itself, but radiation temporarily
suppresses cell division; hence the delayed onset of symptoms.
The blood-forming tissues were damaged worst, particularly
those that produce the white blood cells that fight infection.
Large doses of radiation also stimulate the production of an
anticlotting factor.
2690 The outcome of these assaults was
massive tissue death, massive hemorrhage and massive infection.
“Hemorrhage was the cause of death in all our cases,” writes
Hachiya, but he also notes that the pathologist at his hospital
“found changes in every organ of the body in the cases he . . .
autopsied.”2691, 2692 Liebow reports “evidence of
generalization of infection with masses of bacteria in . . . organs
as remote from the surface [of the body] as the brain, bone
marrow and eye.”2693 The operator of a crematorium in the
Hiroshima suburbs, a connoisseur of mortality, told Lifton “the
bodies were black in color . . . most of them had a peculiar
smell, and everyone thought this was from the bomb. . . . The
smell when they burned was caused by the fact that these
bodies were decayed, many of them even before being
cremated—some of them having their internal organs decay
even while the person was living.”2694 Yōko ta raged:
We were being killed against our will by something completely
unknown to us. . . . It is the misery of being thrown into a
world of new terror and fear, a world more unknown than
that of people sick with cancer.2695
In the depths of his loss a boy who was a fourth-grader at
Hiroshima found words for the unspeakable:
Mother was completely bedridden. The hair of her head had
almost all fallen out, her chest was festering, and from the
two-inch hole in her back a lot of maggots were crawling in
and out. The place was full of flies and mosquitoes and fleas,
and an awfully bad smell hung over everything. Everywhere I
looked there were many people like this who couldn’t move.
From the evening when we arrived Mother’s condition got
worse and we seemed to see her weakening before our eyes.
Because all night long she was having trouble breathing, we did
everything we could to relieve her. The next morning
Grandmother and I fixed some gruel. As we took it to Mother,
she breathed her last breath. When we thought she had
stopped breathing altogether, she took one deep breath and did
not breathe any more after that. This was nine o’clock in the
morning of the 19th of August. At the site of the Japan Red
Cross Hospital, the smell of the bodies being cremated is
overpowering. Too much sorrow makes me like a stranger to
myself, and yet despite my grief I cannot cry.2696
Not human beings alone died at Hiroshima. Something else
was destroyed as well, the Japanese study explains—that shared
life Hannah Arendt calls the common world:
In the case of an atomic bombing . . . a community does not
merely receive an impact; the community itself is destroyed.
2697 Within 2 kilometers of the atomic bomb’s hypocenter all
life and property were shattered, burned, and buried under
ashes. The visible forms of the city where people once carried
on their daily lives vanished without a trace. The destruction
was sudden and thorough; there was virtually no chance to
escape. . . . Citizens who had lost no family members in the
holocaust were as rare as stars at sunrise. . . .
The atomic bomb had blasted and burned hospitals, schools,
city offices, police stations, and every other kind of human
organization. . . . Family, relatives, neighbors, and friends relied
on a broad range of interdependent organizations for everything
from birth, marriage, and funerals to firefighting, productive
work, and daily living. These traditional communities were
completely demolished in an instant.
Destroyed, that is, were not only men, women and thousands
of children but also restaurants and inns, laundries, theater
groups, sports clubs, sewing clubs, boys’ clubs, girls’ clubs, love
affairs, trees and gardens, grass, gates, gravestones, temples and
shrines, family heirlooms, radios, classmates, books, courts of
law, clothes, pets, groceries and markets, telephones, personal
letters, automobiles, bicycles, horses—120 war-horses—musical
instruments, medicines and medical equipment, life savings,
eyeglasses, city records, sidewalks, family scrapbooks,
monuments, engagements, marriages, employees, clocks and
watches, public transportation, street signs, parents, works of
art. “The whole of society,” concludes the Japanese study, “was
laid waste to its very foundations.”2698 Lifton’s history
professor saw not even foundations left. “Such a weapon,” he
told the American psychiatrist, “has the power to make
everything into nothing.”2699
There remains the question of how many died. The U.S.
Army Medical Corps officer who proposed the joint
American-Japanese study to Douglas MacArthur thought as late
as August 28 that “the total number of casualties reported at
Hiroshima is approximately 160,000 of which 8,000 are dead.”
2700 The Jesuit priest’s contemporary reckoning approaches
the appalling reality and illuminates further the destruction of
the common world:
How many people were a sacrifice to this bomb? Those who
had lived through the catastrophe placed the number of dead
at at least 100,000. Hiroshima had a population of 400,000.
Official statistics place the number who had died at 70,000 up
to September 1st, not counting the missing—and 130,000
wounded, among them 43,500 severely wounded. Estimates
made by ourselves on the basis of groups known to us show
that the number of 100,000 dead is not too high. Near us
there are two barracks, in each of which forty Korean workers
lived. On the day of the explosion they were laboring on the
streets of Hiroshima.
2701 Four returned alive to one barracks
and sixteen to the other. Six hundred students of the
Protestant girls’ school worked in a factory, from which only
thirty or forty returned. Most of the peasant families in the
neighborhood lost one or more of their members who had
worked at factories in the city. Our next door neighbor,
Tamura, lost two children and himself suffered a large wound
since, as it happened, he had been in the city on that day.
The family of our reader suffered two dead, father and son;
thus a family of five members suffered at least two losses,
counting only the dead and severely wounded. There died the
mayor, the president of the central Japan district, the
commander of the city, a Korean prince who had been
stationed in Hiroshima in the capacity of an officer, and many
other high-ranking officers. Of the professors of the University
thirty-two were killed or severely wounded. Especially hard-hit
were the soldiers. The Pioneer Regiment was almost entirely
wiped out. The barracks were near the center of the explosion.
More recent estimates place the number of deaths up to the
end of 1945 at 140,000. The dying continued; five-year deaths
related to the bombing reached 200,000. The death rate for
deaths up to the end of 1945 was 54 percent, an extraordinary
density of killing; by contrast, the death rate for the March 9
firebombing of Tokyo, 100,000 deaths among 1 million
casualties, was only 10 percent. Back at the U.S. Army Institute
of Pathology in Washington in early 1946 Liebow used a British
invention, the Standardized Casualty Rate, to compute that Little
Boy produced casualties, including dead, 6,500 times more
efficiently than an ordinary HE bomb.2702 “Those scientists
who invented the . . . atomic bomb,” writes a young woman
who was a fourth-grade student at Hiroshima—“what did they
think would happen if they dropped it?”
2703
Harry Truman learned of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima at
lunch on board the Augusta en route home from Potsdam.
“This is the greatest thing in history,” he told a group of sailors
dining at his table. “It’s time for us to get home.”2704
Groves called Oppenheimer from Washington on August 6 at
two in the afternoon to pass along the news:
Gen. G:
I’m very proud of you and all of your people.
Dr. O:
It went all right?
Gen. G:
Apparently it went with a tremendous bang.
Dr. O:
When was this, was it after sundown?
Gen. G:
No, unfortunately, it had to be in the daytime on account of
security of the plane and that was left in the hands of the
Commanding General over there. . . .
Dr. O:
Right. Everybody is feeling reasonably good about it and I
extend my heartiest congratulations. It’s been a long road.
Gen. G:
Yes, it has been a long road and I think one of the wisest
things I ever did was when I selected the director of Los
Alamos.
Dr. O:
Well, I have my doubts, General Groves.
Gen. G:
Well, you know I’ve never concurred with those doubts at
any time.2705

If Oppenheimer, who knew nothing yet of the extent of the
destruction, was only feeling “reasonably good” about his
handiwork, Leo Szilard felt terrible when the story broke. The
press release issued from the White House that day called the
atomic bomb “the greatest achievement of organized science in
history” and threatened the Japanese with “a rain of ruin from
the air, the like of which has never been seen on this earth.”
2706 In Chicago on Quadrangle Club stationery Szilard scribbled
a hasty letter to Gertrud Weiss:
I suppose you have seen today’s newspapers. Using atomic
bombs against Japan is one of the greatest blunders of history.
Both from a practical point of view on a 10-year scale and
from the point of view of our moral position. I went out of my
way and very much so in order to prevent it but as today’s
papers show without success. It is very difficult to see what
wise course of action is possible from here on.2707
Otto Hahn, interned with the German atomic scientists on a
rural estate in England, was shattered:
At first I refused to believe that this could be true, but in the
end I had to face the fact that it was officially confirmed by
the President of the United States. I was shocked and
depressed beyond measure. The thought of the unspeakable
misery of countless innocent women and children was
something that I could scarcely bear.
2708
After I had been given some gin to quiet my nerves, my
fellow-prisoners were also told the news. . . . By the end of a
long evening of discussion, attempts at explanation, and
self-reproaches I was so agitated that Max von Laue and the
others became seriously concerned on my behalf. They ceased
worrying only at two o’clock in the morning, when they saw
that I was asleep.
But if some were disturbed by the news, others were elated,
Otto Frisch found at Los Alamos:
Then one day, some three weeks after [Trinity], there was a
sudden noise in the laboratory, of running footsteps and yelling
voices.2709 Somebody opened my door and shouted,
“Hiroshima has been destroyed!”; about a hundred thousand
people were thought to have been killed. I still remember the
feeling of unease, indeed nausea, when I saw how many of my
friends were rushing to the telephone to book tables at the La
Fonda Hotel in Santa Fe, in order to celebrate. Of course they
were exalted by the success of their work, but it seemed rather
ghoulish to celebrate the sudden death of a hundred thousand
people, even if they were “enemies.”
The American writer Paul Fussell, an Army veteran,
emphasizes “the importance of experience, sheer vulgar
experience, in influencing one’s views about the first use of the
bomb.”
2710 The experience Fussell means is “that of having
come to grips, face to face, with an enemy who designs your
death”:
I was a 21-year-old second lieutenant leading a rifle platoon.
Although still officially in one piece, in the German war I had
been wounded in the leg and back severely enough to be
adjudged, after the war, 40 percent disabled. But even if my
leg buckled whenever I jumped out of the back of the truck,
my condition was held to be satisfactory for whatever lay
ahead. When the bombs dropped and news began to circulate
that [the invasion of Japan] would not, after all, take place,
that we would not be obliged to run up the beaches near
Tokyo assault-firing while being mortared and shelled, for all the
fake manliness of our facades we cried with relief and joy. We
were going to live. We were going to grow up to adulthood
after all.
In Japan the impasse persisted between civilian and military
leaders. To the civilians the atomic bomb looked like a golden
opportunity to surrender without shame, but the admirals and
the generals still despised unconditional surrender and refused
to concur. Foreign Minister Togo continued to pursue Soviet
mediation as late as August 8. Ambassador Sato asked for a
meeting with Molotov that day; Molotov set the meeting for
eight in the evening, then moved it up to five o’clock. Despite
earlier notice of the power of the new weapon, news of the
devastation of a Japanese city by an American atomic bomb
had surprised and shocked Stalin and prompted him to
accelerate his war plans; Molotov announced that afternoon to
the Japanese ambassador that the Soviet Union would consider
itself at war with Japan as of the next day, August 9.
Well-armed Soviet troops, 1.6 million strong, waited in readiness
on the Manchurian border and attacked the ragged Japanese
an hour after midnight.
In the meantime a progaganda effort that originated in the
U.S. War Department was developing in the Marianas.2711 Hap
Arnold cabled Spaatz and Farrell on August 7 ordering a crash
program to impress the facts of atomic warfare on the
Japanese people. The impetus probably came from George
Marshall, who was surprised and shocked that the Japanese
had not immediately sued for peace. “What we did not take
into account,” he said long afterward, “ . . . was that the
destruction would be so complete that it would be an
appreciable time before the actual facts of the case would get
to Tokyo.2712 The destruction of Hiroshima was so complete
that there was no communication at least for a day, I think,
and maybe longer.”
The Navy and the Air Force both lent staff and facilities,
including Radio Saipan and a printing press previously used to
publish a Japanese-language newspaper distributed weekly over
the Empire by B-29s. The working group that assembled on
August 7 in the Marianas decided to attempt to distribute 6
million leaflets to forty-seven Japanese cities with populations
exceeding 100,000. Writing the leaflet occupied the group
through the night. A historical memorandum prepared for
Groves in 1946 notes that the working group discovered in a
midnight conference with Air Force commanders “a certain
reluctance to fly single B-29’s over the Empire, reluctance
arising from the fact that enemy opposition to single flights was
expected to be increased as the result of the total damage to
Hiroshima by one airplane.”2713
The proposed text of the leaflet was ready by morning and
was flown from Saipan to Tinian at dawn for Farrell’s approval.
Groves’ deputy edited it and ordered the revised text called to
Radio Saipan by inter-island telephone for broadcast to the
Japanese every fifteen minutes; radio transmission probably
began the same day. The text described the atomic bomb as
“the equivalent in explosive power to what 2,000 of our giant
B-29’s can carry on a single mission,” suggested skeptics “make
inquiry as to what happened to Hiroshima” and asked the
Japanese people to “petition the Emperor to end the war.”
Otherwise, it threatened, “we shall resolutely employ this bomb
and all our other superior weapons.”2714 Printing millions of
copies of a leaflet took time, and distribution was delayed some
hours further by a local shortage of T-3 leaflet bombs. Such
was the general confusion that Nagasaki did not receive its
quota of warning leaflets until August 10.2715
Assembly of Fat Man unit F31 was progressing at Tinian in
the airconditioned assembly building designed for that purpose.
F31 was the second Fat Man with real high explosives that the
Tinian team had assembled; the first, with lower-quality HE
castings and a non-nuclear core, unit F33, had been ready
since August 5 for a test drop but would not be dropped until
August 8 because the key 509th crews were busy delivering
Little Boy and being debriefed. The F31 Fat Man, Norman
Ramsey writes,
was originally scheduled for dropping on August 11 local
time. . . . However, by August 7 it became apparent that the
schedule could be advanced to August 10.2716 When Parsons
and Ramsey proposed this change to Tibbets, he expressed
regret that the schedule could not be advanced two days
instead of only one since good weather was forecast for August
9 and the five succeeding days were expected to be bad. It
was finally agreed that [we] would try to be ready for August
9 provided all concerned understood that the advancement of
the date by two full days introduced a large measure of
uncertainty into the probability of meeting such a drastically
revised schedule.
One member of the Fat Man assembly team, a young Navy
ensign named Bernard J. O’Keefe, remembers the mood of
urgency in the Marianas, where the war was still a daily threat:
With the success of the Hiroshima weapon, the pressure to be
ready with the much more complex implosion device became
excruciating.2717 We sliced off another day, scheduling it for
August 10. Everyone felt that the sooner we could get off
another mission, the more likely it was that the Japanese would
feel that we had large quantities of the devices and would
surrender sooner. We were certain that one day saved would
mean that the war would be over one day sooner. Living on
that island, with planes going out every night and people dying
not only in B-29s shot down, but in naval engagements all
over the Pacific, we knew the importance of one day; the
Indianapolis sinking also had a strong effect on us.
Despite that urgency, O’Keefe adds, August 9 sat less well; “the
scientific staff, dog-tired, met and warned Parsons that cutting
two full days would prevent us from completing a number of
important checkout procedures, but orders were orders.”
The young Providence, Rhode Island, native had been a
student at George Washington University in 1939 and had
attended the conference there on January 25 at which Niels
Bohr announced the discovery of fission. Now on Tinian more
than six years later, on the night of August 7, it became
O’Keefe’s task to check out Fat Man for the last time before its
working parts were encased beyond easy access in armor. In
particular, he was required to connect the firing unit mounted
on the front of the implosion sphere with the four radar units
mounted in the tail by plugging in a cable inaccessibly threaded
around the sphere inside its dural casing:
When I returned at midnight, the others in my group left to
get some sleep; I was alone in the assembly room with a
single Army technician to make the final connection. . . .2718
I did my final checkout and reached for the cable to plug it
into the firing unit. It wouldn’t fit!
“I must be doing something wrong,” I thought. “Go slowly;
you’re tired and not thinking straight.”
I looked again. To my horror, there was a female plug on
the firing set and a female plug on the cable. I walked around
the weapon and looked at the radars and the other end of the
cable. Two male plugs. . . . I checked and double-checked. I had
the technician check; he verified my findings. I felt a chill and
started to sweat in the air-conditioned room.
What had happened was obvious. In the rush to take
advantage of good weather, someone had gotten careless and
put the cable in backward.
Removing the cable and reversing it would mean partly
disassembling the implosion sphere. It had taken most of a day
to assemble it. They would miss the window of good weather
and slip into the five days of bad weather that had worried
Paul Tibbets. The second atomic bomb might be delayed as
long as a week. The war would go on, O’Keefe thought. He
decided to improvise. Although “nothing that could generate
heat was ever allowed in an explosive assembly room,” he
determined to “unsolder the connectors from the two ends of
the cable, reverse them, and resolder them”:2719
My mind was made up. I was going to change the plugs
without talking to anyone, rules or no rules. I called in the
technician. There were no electrical outlets in the assembly
room. We went out to the electronics lab and found two long
extension cords and a soldering iron. We . . . propped the door
open so it wouldn’t pinch the extension cords (another safety
violation). I carefully removed the backs of the connectors and
unsoldered the wires. I resoldered the plugs onto the other
ends of the cable, keeping as much distance between the
soldering iron and the detonators as I could as I walked
around the weapon. . . . We must have checked the cable
continuity five times before plugging the connectors into the
radars and the firing set and tightening up the joints. I was
finished.
2720
So, the next day, was Fat Man, the two armored steel
ellipsoids of its ballistic casing bolted together through bathtub
fittings to lugs cast into the equatorial segments of the
implosion sphere, its boxed tail sprouting radar antennae just
as Little Boy’s had done. By 2200 on August 8 it had been
loaded into the forward bomb bay of a B-29 named Bock’s
Car after its usual commander, Frederick Bock, but piloted on
this occasion by Major Charles W. Sweeney. Sweeney’s primary
target was Kokura Arsenal on the north coast of Kyushu; his
secondary was the old Portuguese- and Dutchinfluenced port
city of Nagasaki, the San Francisco of Japan, home of that
country’s largest colony of Christians, where the Mitsubishi
torpedoes used at Pearl Harbor had been made.
Bock’s Car flew off Tinian at 0347 on August 9.
2721 The Fat
Man weaponeer, Navy Commander Frederick L. Ashworth,
remembers the flight to rendezvous:
The night of our takeoff was one of tropical rain squalls, and
flashes of lightning stabbed into the darkness with disconcerting
regularity. The weather forecast told us of storms all the way
from the Marianas to the Empire.2722 Our rendezvous was to
be off the southeast coast of Kyushu, some fifteen hundred
miles away. There we were to join with our two companion
observation B-29s that took off a few minutes behind us.
Fat Man was fully armed at takeoff except for its green plugs,
which Ashworth changed to red only ten minutes into the
mission so that Sweeney could cruise above the squalls at
17,000 feet, St. Elmo’s fire glowing on the propellers of his
plane.2723 The pilot soon discovered he would enjoy no
reserve of fuel; the fuel selector that would allow him to feed
his engines from a 600-gallon tank of gasoline in his aft bomb
bay refused to work. He circled over Yakoshima between 0800
and 0850 Japanese time waiting for his escorts, one of which
never did catch up. The finger plane at Kokura reported
three-tenths low clouds, no intermediate or high clouds and
improving conditions, but when Bock’s Car arrived there at
1044 heavy ground haze and smoke obscured the target. “Two
additional runs were made,” Ashworth notes in his flight log,
“hoping that the target might be picked up after closer
observation.2724 However, at no time was the aiming point
seen.”
Jacob Beser controlled electronic countermeasures on the Fat
Man mission as he had done on the Little Boy mission before.
He remembers of Kokura that “the Japs started to get curious
and began sending fighters up after us. We had some flak
bursts and things were getting a little hairy, so Ashworth and
Sweeney decided to make a run down to Nagasaki, as there
was no sense dragging the bomb home or dropping it in the
ocean.”
2725
Sweeney had enough fuel left for only one pass over the
target before nursing his aircraft to an emergency landing on
Okinawa. When he approached Nagasaki he found the city
covered with cloud; with his fuel low he could either bomb by
radar or jettison a bomb worth several hundred million dollars
into the sea. It was Ashworth’s call and rather than waste the
bomb he authorized a radar approach. At the last minute a
hole opened in the cloud cover long enough to give the
bombardier a twenty-second visual run on a stadium several
miles upriver from the original aiming point nearer the bay. Fat
Man dropped from the B-29, fell through the hole and
exploded 1,650 feet above the steep slopes of the city at 11:02
A.M., August 9, 1945, with a force later estimated at 22
kilotons. The steep hills confined the larger explosion; it caused
less damage and less loss of life than Little Boy.
But 70,000 died in Nagasaki by the end of 1945 and
140,000 altogether across the next five years, a death rate like
Hiroshima’s of 54 percent. The survivors spoke with equal
eloquence of unspeakable suffering. A U.S. Navy officer visited
the city in mid-September and described its condition then,
more than a month after the bombing, in a letter home to his
wife:
A smell of death and corruption pervades the place, ranging
from the ordinary carrion smell to somewhat subtler stenches
with strong overtones of ammonia (decomposing nitrogenous
matter, I suppose).
2726 The general impression, which
transcends those derived from the evidence of our physical
senses, is one of deadness, the absolute essence of death in
the sense of finality without hope of resurrection. And all this is
not localized. It’s everywhere, and nothing has escaped its
touch. In most ruined cities you can bury the dead, clean up
the rubble, rebuild the houses and have a living city again. One
feels that is not so here. Like the ancient Sodom and
Gomorrah, its site has been sown with salt and ichabod1 is
written over its gates.
The military leaders of Japan had still not agreed to
surrender.2727 The Emperor Hirohito therefore took the
extraordinary step of forcing the issue. The resulting surrender
offer, delivered through Switzerland, reached Washington on
Friday morning, August 10. It acknowledged acceptance of the
Potsdam Declaration except in one crucial regard: that it “does
not comprise any demand which prejudices the prerogatives of
His Majesty as a Sovereign Ruler.”2728
Truman met immediately with his advisers, including Stimson
and Byrnes. Stimson thought the President would accept the
Japanese offer; doing so, he wrote in his diary, would be
“taking a good plain horse sense position that the question of
the Emperor was a minor matter compared with delaying a
victory in the war which was now in our hands.”2729 Jimmy
Byrnes persuasively disagreed. “I cannot understand,” he
argued, “why we should go further than we were willing to go
at Potsdam when we had no atomic bomb, and Russia was
not in the war.”2730 He was thinking as usual of domestic
politics; accepting Japan’s condition, he warned, might mean the
“crucifixion of the President.”2731 Secretary of the Navy James
Forrestal proposed a compromise: the President should
communicate to the Japanese his “willingness to accept [their
offer], yet define the terms of surrender in such a manner that
the intents and purposes of the Potsdam Declaration would be
clearly accomplished.”2732
Truman bought the compromise but Byrnes drafted the reply.
It was deliberately ambiguous in its key provisions:
From the moment of surrender the authority of the Emperor
and the Japanese Government to rule the state shall be subject
to the Supreme Commander of the Allied Powers. . . .
The Emperor and the Japanese High Command will be
required to sign the surrender terms. . . .
The ultimate form of government shall, in accordance with the
Potsdam Declaration, be established by the freely expressed will
of the Japanese people.
Nor did Byrnes hurry the message along; he kept it in hand
overnight and only released it for broadcast by radio and
delivery through Switzerland the following morning.
Stimson, still trying to bring his Air Force under control, had
argued at the Friday morning meeting that the United States
should suspend bombing, including atomic bombing. Truman
thought otherwise, but when he met with the cabinet that
afternoon he had partly reconsidered. “We would keep up the
war at its present intensity,” Forrestal paraphrases the
President, “until the Japanese agreed to these terms, with the
limitation however that there will be no further dropping of the
atomic bomb.”
2733, 2734 Henry Wallace, the former Vice
President who was now Secretary of Commerce, recorded in
his diary the reason for the President’s change of mind:
Truman said he had given orders to stop the atomic bombing.
He said the thought of wiping out another 100,000 people was
too horrible. He didn’t like the idea of killing, as he said, “all
those kids.”2735
The restriction came none too soon. Groves had reported to
Marshall that morning that he had gained four days in
manufacture and expected to ship a second Fat Man plutonium
core and initiator from New Mexico to Tinian on August 12 or
13. “Provided there are no unforeseen difficulties in
manufacture, in transportation to the theatre or after arrival in
the theatre,” he concluded cautiously, “the bomb should be
ready for delivery on the first suitable weather after 17 or 18
August.”2736 Marshall told Groves the President wanted no
further atomic bombing except by his express order and
Groves decided to hold up shipment, a decision in which
Marshall concurred.
The Japanese government learned of Byrnes’ reply to its offer
of conditional surrender not long after midnight on Sunday,
August 12, but civilian and military leaders continued to struggle
in deadlocked debate. Hirohito resisted efforts to persuade him
to reverse his earlier commitment to surrender and called a
council of the imperial family to collect pledges of support from
the princes of the blood. The Japanese people were not yet
told of the Byrnes reply but knew of the peace negotiations
and waited in suspense. The young writer Yukio Mishima found
the suspense surreal:
It was our last chance. People were saying that Tokyo would
be [atomicbombed] next. Wearing white shirts and shorts, I
walked about the streets. The people had reached the limits of
desperation and were now going about their affairs with
cheerful faces.2737 From one moment to the next, nothing
happened. Everywhere there was an air of cheerful excitement.
It was just as though one was continuing to blow up an
already bulging toy balloon, wondering: “Will it burst now? Will
it burst now?”
Strategic Air Forces commander Carl Spaatz cabled Lauris
Norstad on August 10 proposing “placing [the] third atomic
bomb . . . on Tokyo,” where he thought it would have a
salutary “psychological effect on government officials.”2738 On
the other hand, continuing area incendiary bombing disturbed
him; “I have never favored the destruction of cities as such
with all inhabitants being killed,” he confided to his diary on
August 11. He had sent off 114 B-29’s on August 10; because
of bad weather and misgivings he canceled a mission scheduled
for August 11 and restricted operations thereafter to “attacks on
military targets visually or under very favorable blind bombing
conditions.” American weather planes over Tokyo were no
longer drawing anti-aircraft fire; Spaatz thought that fact
“unusual.”2739
The vice chief of the Japanese Navy’s general staff, the man
who had conceived and promoted the kamikaze attacks of the
past year that had added to American bewilderment and
embitterment at Japanese ways, crashed a meeting of
government leaders on the evening of August 13 with tears in
his eyes to offer “a plan for certain victory”: “sacrifice
20,000,000 Japanese lives in a special [kamikaze] attack.”2740
Whether he meant the 20 million to attack the assembled
might of the Allies with rocks or bamboo spears the record
does not reveal.
A B-29 leaflet barrage forced the issue the next morning.
Leaflet bombs showered what remained of Tokyo’s streets with
a translation of Byrnes’ reply. The Lord Keeper of the Privy
Seal knew such public revelation would harden the military
against surrender. He carried the leaflet immediately to the
Emperor and just before eleven that morning, August 14,
Hirohito assembled his ministers and counselors in the imperial
air raid shelter. He told them he found the Allied reply
“evidence of the peaceful and friendly intentions of the enemy”
and considered it “acceptable.”2741 He did not specifically
mention the atomic bomb; even that terrific leviathan
submerged in the general misery:
I cannot endure the thought of letting my people suffer any
longer. A continuation of the war would bring death to tens,
perhaps even hundreds, of thousands of persons. The whole
nation would be reduced to ashes. How then could I carry on
the wishes of my imperial ancestors?
He asked his ministers to prepare an imperial rescript—a formal
edict—that he might broadcast personally to the nation. The
officials were not legally bound to do so—the Emperor’s
authority lay outside the legal structure of the government—but
by older and deeper bonds than law they were bound, and
they set to work.
In the meantime Washington had grown impatient. Groves
was asked on August 13 about “the availability of your patients
together with the time estimate that they could be moved and
placed.”2742 Stimson recommended proceeding to ship the
nuclear materials for the third bomb to Tinian. Marshall and
Groves decided to wait another day or two. Truman ordered
Arnold to resume area incendiary attacks. Arnold still hoped to
prove that his Air Force could win the war; he called for an
all-out attack with every available B-29 and any other bombers
in the Pacific theater and mustered more than a thousand
aircraft. Twelve million pounds of high-explosive and incendiary
bombs destroyed half of Kumagaya and a sixth of Isezaki,
killing several thousand more Japanese, even as word of the
Japanese surrender passed through Switzerland to Washington.
The first hint of surrender reached American bases in the
Pacific by radio in the form of a news bulletin from the
Japanese news agency Dōmei at 2:49 P.M. on August 14—1:49
A.M
. in Washington:
Flash! Flash! Tokyo, Aug. 14—It is learned an imperial message
accepting the Potsdam Proclamation is forthcoming soon.2743
The bombers droned on even after that, but eventually that
day the bombs stopped falling. Truman announced the
Japanese acceptance in the afternoon. There were last-minute
acts of military rebellion in Tokyo—a high officer assassinated,
an unsuccessful attempt to steal the phonograph recording of
the imperial rescript, a brief takeover of a division of Imperial
Guards, wild plans for a coup. But loyalty prevailed. The
Emperor broadcast to a weeping nation on August 15; his 100
million subjects had never heard the high, antique Voice of the
Crane before:
Despite the best that has been done by everyone . . . the war
situation has developed not necessarily to Japan’s advantage,
while the general trends of the world have all turned against
her interest.2744 Moreover, the enemy has begun to employ a
new and most cruel bomb, the power of which to do damage
is indeed incalculable, taking the toll of many innocent lives. . . .
This is the reason why We have ordered the acceptance of the
provisions of the Joint declaration of the Powers. . . .
The hardships and sufferings to which Our nation is to be
subjected hereafter will be certainly great. We are keenly aware
of the inmost feelings of all ye, Our subjects. However, it is
according to the dictate of time and fate that We have resolved
to pave the way for a grand peace for all generations to come
by enduring the unendurable and suffering what is
insufferable. . . .
Let the entire nation continue as one family from generation
to generation.
“If it had gone on any longer,” writes Yukio Mishima, “there
would have been nothing to do but go mad.”2745
“An atomic bomb,” the Japanese study of Hiroshima and
Nagasaki emphasizes, “ . . . is a weapon of mass slaughter.”
2746 A nuclear weapon is in fact a total-death machine,
compact and efficient, as a simple graph prepared from
Hiroshima statistics demonstrates:
The percentage of people killed depends simply on distance
from the hypocenter; the relation between death percentage
and distance is inversely proportional and the killing, as Gil
Elliot emphasizes, is no longer selective:
By the time we reach the atom bomb, Hiroshima and
Nagasaki, the ease of access to target and the instant nature of
macro-impact mean that both the choice of city and the
identity of the victim has become completely randomized, and
human technology has reached the final platform of
self-destructiveness.2747 The great cities of the dead, in
numbers, remain Verdun, Leningrad and Auschwitz. But at
Hiroshima and Nagasaki the “city of the dead” is finally
transformed from a metaphor into a literal reality. The city of
the dead of the future is our city and its victims are—not
French and German soldiers, nor Russian citizens, nor
Jews—but all of us without reference to specific identity.
“The experience of these two cities,” the Japanese study
emphasizes, “was the opening chapter to the possible
annihilation of mankind.”2748
On August 24, having recently heard about the man holding
an eyeball, Dr. Michihiko Hachiya suffered a nightmare. Like the
myth of the Sphinx—destruction to those who cannot answer
its riddle, whom ignorance or inattention or arrogance
misleads—the dream of this Japanese doctor who was wounded
in the world’s first atomic bombing and who ministered to
hundreds of victims must be counted one of the millennial
visions of mankind:
The night had been close with many mosquitoes. Consequently,
I slept poorly and had a frightful dream.2749
It seems I was in Tokyo after the great earthquake and
around me were decomposing bodies heaped in piles, all of
whom were looking right at me. I saw an eye sitting on the
palm of a girl’s hand. Suddenly it turned and leaped into the
sky and then came flying back towards me, so that, looking
up, I could see a great bare eyeball, bigger than life, hovering
over my head, staring point blank at me. I was powerless to
move.
“I awakened short of breath and with my heart pounding,”
Michihiko Hachiya remembers.
So do we all.