Vice President Harry S. Truman knew nothing about the development of the bomb prior to President Franklin Roosevelt’s death in April 1945. Two weeks later, top military advisers briefed Truman about the Manhattan Project and told him that the first bombs would be ready for use on Japan by August. There were no consequential debates on whether to use the bomb at all or prohibit its use on noncombatant Japanese citizens. Top U.S. officials briefly discussed but ultimately vetoed proposals to issue an official warning to Japan or detonate a demonstration bomb over an uninhabited area to intimidate Japan into surrendering. Final plans were made to deliver the bombs as soon as they were ready.
That spring, a group of U.S. military personnel and scientists met to establish target criteria for the atomic bombings. The committee did not prioritize the military activity within potential target cities; instead, its two primary goals were “obtaining the greatest psychological effect against Japan,” and making the attack “sufficiently spectacular” so that “the weapon [would] be internationally recognized when publicity on it is released.” Specifications for target cities included their size (larger than three miles in diameter), location (within B-29 bombers’ 1,500-mile maximum flight range from the U.S. airbase in the South Pacific), capacity for “being damaged effectively by a blast,” and the existence of a war-related factory surrounded by workers’ houses. For accuracy—particularly because of the $2 billion price tag of the bombs—predictable, clear weather was required for a visual sighting (versus radar) of the predetermined aiming point. To measure the effects of the bomb, Japanese cities already destroyed by incendiary bomb attacks could not be considered. From an original list of seventeen possible cities, the Target Committee narrowed the choices to four that met all or most of the criteria: Hiroshima, Kokura, Nagasaki, and Niigata. General Carl A. Spaatz, commander of the Strategic Air Forces in the Pacific, informed the War Department about one of Nagasaki’s POW camps near the center of the city; ultimately, this information did not exclude Nagasaki as a priority target.
For Japan’s part, Hirohito and Japanese foreign minister Togo Shigenori made tentative requests in June and July for the Soviets’ assistance in surrender mediation. The United States knew of these communications, but because of Japan’s simultaneous preparation for the invasion of Kyushu and its need for Cabinet consensus, U.S. analysts debated about how close Japanese leaders were to actually agreeing on surrender. Japan also sought guarantees of the USSR’s continued neutrality—not knowing that the Soviets had already agreed to join the Allies against Japan and that Soviet entry into the war was now set for early August.
Allied leaders were preparing to convene in Potsdam, Germany, to deliberate over the division of postwar Germany and draft a unified demand for Japanese surrender when—in the predawn hours of July 16—the United States conducted its first nuclear weapon test, code-named Trinity, in the desert of Alamogordo, New Mexico. The detonation ignited a terrifying, massive fireball that melted sand into glass, warmed the faces of official witnesses ten miles away, released radioactive debris, and confirmed that an implosion-type plutonium device was feasible for use as a weapon against Japan. To maintain tight secrecy and appease local citizens’ concerns, area media outlets cooperated with the U.S. Office of Censorship by releasing the story that the explosion was a “harmless accident in a remote ammunition dump.”
Ten days later, the United States, Britain, and China issued the Potsdam Declaration, an ultimatum calling for Japan’s unconditional surrender and demanding immediate disarmament, postwar occupation, prosecution of war criminals, and the end of Japan’s imperial system. “The alternative for Japan,” the declaration read, “is prompt and utter destruction.” Some of Truman’s advisers believed this message could hasten Japan’s surrender and had advocated the inclusion of a clause guaranteeing Japan’s retention of the emperor, but this idea was rejected for the final draft. The atomic bomb was not mentioned.
Unable to agree on a response to these conditions, the Japanese Cabinet announced its mokusatsu position—reported in the United States as “silent contempt,” though the word can also be translated as “withholding comment” or “remaining in wise and masterly inactivity.” But Japan’s delay in responding to the Potsdam Declaration had no impact on the United States’ decision to use its atomic bombs on Japan; that is, on the day before the declaration was issued, Truman had already ordered the bombing of Hiroshima—scheduled for early August “as soon as weather will permit.” Less than two weeks later, at 8:15 a.m. on August 6, 1945, a uranium bomb nicknamed Little Boy detonated 1,900 feet above Hiroshima’s Shima Hospital, decimating the city and its residents with an explosive force equal to sixteen thousand tons of TNT. One hundred and forty thousand people were killed that day or died from injuries by the end of the year.
“This is the greatest thing in history,” Truman exclaimed when the news reached him on board the USS Augusta on his return from Germany. Later that day, Secretary of War Henry L. Stimson released a statement on behalf of the president, written prior to Potsdam, announcing the Hiroshima attack and introducing the atomic bomb to the American public. “We are now prepared to obliterate more rapidly and completely every productive enterprise the Japanese have above ground in any city,” the statement read. “We shall destroy their docks, their factories, and their communications. Let there be no mistake; we shall completely destroy Japan’s power to make war.”
Again, no immediate response came from Tokyo. On the day of the bombing, Japanese officials had heard that Hiroshima had been hit by some kind of new bomb, and that night, the Domei News Agency had reported Truman’s announcement about the atomic bomb used over Hiroshima. But it took two days for a team of thirty Japanese scientists and military specialists to get to Hiroshima to investigate the bombing, and it took several more days for them to scientifically confirm that the August 6 weapon was indeed an atomic bomb. Their official report would arrive in Tokyo on August 11.
The delivery of additional atomic bombs, however, did not depend on a reply from Tokyo or any further directive from President Truman. His original order was to use them on Japan “as ready”—and on August 8, two days after the Hiroshima attack, the second atomic bomb’s assembly was complete.
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News of the Hiroshima bombing reached Nagasaki on August 8, when a newspaper headline announced: “Enemy Drops New-Type Bomb on Hiroshima—Considerable Damage Done.” Many in the city didn’t see the story that day, but those who did were alarmed: By then, most people understood that the Japanese media drastically underplayed the impact of Allied attacks on Japanese cities, so they knew that the words “considerable damage” meant that something far worse had happened.
Some members of Nagasaki’s medical community heard about the bombing from Nagasaki Medical College president Tsuno-o Susumu, who had passed through Hiroshima by train on his way home from Tokyo. As soon as he arrived in Nagasaki on August 8, he hurriedly gathered college faculty and staff to describe reports of “a great flash . . . violent blast . . . and fire.” With extreme agitation, he told the group about the damages and burned bodies he had seen, and he warned them that Nagasaki’s air raid shelters might not provide sufficient protection. Medical College officials decided to suspend classes starting on August 10. That evening, Nishioka Takejiro, chairman of the Nagasaki Shimbun Company, which published the city’s newspaper, rushed into Nagasaki Prefecture governor Nagano Wakamatsu’s office to similarly report his own eyewitness details of Hiroshima’s damages, shocking the governor with descriptions of total devastation, death, and injuries unlike anyone had ever seen. Hoping there was still time to somehow protect Nagasaki, Governor Nagano called a meeting for the next morning with local police chiefs and administrators to formulate a citywide evacuation order.
• • •
As the night of August 8 came to a close, the world’s first plutonium bomb lay waiting in a specially constructed concrete-lined pit next to the airstrip o
n Tinian Island—a tiny dot in the Northern Marianas chain, ten miles long and three miles wide, just north of Guam and southwest of Saipan in the vast western Pacific. Fat Man, they called the bomb, and at ten feet eight inches in length and five feet in diameter, and weighing 10,800 pounds, the name fit. At the bomb’s core, a small amount of subcritical, enriched plutonium-239 was ringed by sixty-four timed high explosives that, when detonated, would compress the plutonium into a critical mass, triggering a nuclear explosion. The bomb’s nose, sides, and tail were covered with the signatures and hometowns of ground and mission crew members, along with brief handwritten messages. “Here’s to you!” wrote one soldier from Chicago.
By eleven p.m., the bomb had been hydraulically lifted and loaded into the womb of a specially modified B-29 named Bockscar. Members of the 509th Composite Group of the U.S. Army Air Forces, who had trained for more than a year to successfully deliver the nuclear bombs over their target cities, were making final preparations for the second atomic bomb mission. The crews of Bockscar and the two companion planes—tasked with visually recording the bombing and collecting scientific data at the time of the blast—gathered for a final briefing. At midnight, as they studied maps and aerial photographs of Kokura and Nagasaki, the mission’s primary and secondary targets, the USSR declared war on Japan. One and a half million Soviet troops entered Japanese-occupied Manchuria on three fronts.
At nearly four a.m. (three a.m. Japan time), Major Charles Sweeney climbed into Bockscar’s pilot seat, started the engines, rolled the plane forward, and accelerated down the runway. Weighing more than seventy-seven tons, with thirteen crew members, seven thousand gallons of fuel, and the plutonium bomb, Bockscar barely lifted off the Tinian airfield and lumbered upward over the ocean. The two companion planes followed. With radio contact between them silenced to prevent detection, Sweeney and the men in all three planes settled in for their 1,500-mile flight through darkness to southern Japan.
• • •
The people of Nagasaki hardly slept that night. After eleven p.m., air raid alarms blared, and families across the city awakened and fled to the tiny shelters beneath their houses. Night-shift workers at factories, city services, and watchtowers took refuge in the nearest hillside shelters, and physicians, nurses, and medical personnel at Nagasaki’s hospitals and clinics pulled themselves out of bed or left their work areas to carry patients down to basements for protection.
Taniguchi Sumiteru in his post-office uniform, age fifteen, ca. 1944. (Courtesy of Taniguchi Sumiteru)
Sixteen-year-old Taniguchi Sumiteru was working the night shift at Michino-o Post Office, where he watched for fires and prepared, if needed, to evacuate records. Taniguchi was fourteen when he was mobilized to work for the postal service, and the extra income, though small, was vital to his family’s survival. His mother had died in 1930 when he was a year old, and that year, his father had left to work as a train engineer in Japanese-held Manchuria, leaving Taniguchi and his older brother and sister to be raised by their grandparents. “My father came back in 1946,” Taniguchi said, “so I didn’t see him for sixteen years. I had one photo of him. He wrote letters and sent money home to help my grandparents.”
As a young boy, Taniguchi had helped plant and harvest soybeans, potatoes, cucumbers, watermelons, and chrysanthemums on his grandparents’ small plot of land halfway up Mount Inasa, which helped supplement their tiny rations of food during the war. He followed the rules—of his grandparents, his school, and his government. “I was a child then,” he reflected. “I pretty much thought that whatever adults said was correct: that the war was good, that Japan—and only Japan—was good, and that the Koreans, Chinese, and Americans were bad. These weren’t my thoughts,” he clarified. “They’re what the adults taught me. When I grew older, I understood that these were lies.”
When he finished his shift in the early hours of August 9, Taniguchi lay down on a tatami mat on the post-office floor and fell asleep. He awoke in the morning with the expectation of several hours off until his next shift started at noon. Instead, a superior asked him to cover his morning route, so Taniguchi packed his assigned mail into his mailbag, attached the bag to his red bicycle, and headed out. Though he was sixteen, he was small and slight, and with his soft, round face, he looked closer to twelve. As he rode through the rural countryside, his feet barely reached the pedals.
• • •
By 9:45 a.m., Bockscar had crossed the Pacific, but as it approached Kokura on the northwest coast of Kyushu, it was now accompanied only by the mission’s instrument plane; the third plane, equipped to film the atomic bombing, had mistakenly missed their planned rendezvous point. The operation’s plans were thwarted again when the wind over the region changed, causing cloud cover and heavy smoke to blow in from the nearby city of Yawata, which was still burning from a U.S. firebombing attack the day before. The two U.S. pilots dodged antiaircraft fire from the ground and flak from approaching Japanese planes, but after three runs over Kokura, Bockscar’s crew still could not make a visual sighting of the city, so Sweeney turned his plane and directed it 150 miles southwest toward Nagasaki. It was 10:30 a.m.
At the same time, more than seven hundred miles north in Tokyo, an emergency meeting of Japan’s “Big Six” Supreme Council for the Direction of the War (Prime Minister Suzuki Kantaro, Foreign Minister Togo Shigenori, Navy Minister Yonai Mitsumasa, Army Minister Anami Korechika, Army Chief of Staff Umezu Yoshijiro, and Navy Chief of Staff Toyoda Soemu) convened to discuss the Soviet Union’s surprise invasion of Manchuria and to try again to find agreement on Japan’s surrender terms. The mood was somber. Even without yet knowing the scale of the Soviet attack, Japan’s leaders knew that their troops could not effectively retaliate, and the Soviet declaration of war had ended any last hope of Japan’s securing Soviet neutrality or its assistance in attaining better surrender terms. Prime Minister Suzuki had met Emperor Hirohito earlier that morning and received approval to advocate for acceptance of the Potsdam surrender terms. Grave concern over Japan’s dire domestic situation and the Hiroshima bombing fortified the arguments of those pressing for immediate surrender.
Meanwhile, on the ground in Nagasaki, different levels of air raid alarms had continued to sound during the morning, and people had scurried to and from nearby shelters. Some were so exhausted and frustrated with the routine that they ignored the alarms and went on with whatever they were doing. Thirteen-year-old Yoshida Katsuji and six of his childhood friends had walked from their homes across the mountains into the Urakami Valley to the Nagasaki Prefecture Technical School, where Yoshida was a student in the shipbuilding course. When they tried to get into one of his school’s air raid shelters, they found it was already filled to capacity with teachers and staff. Instead, they fled to a shelter in the woods and crouched inside.
“Us?” Yoshida said. “We thought Japan would win for sure. We had to endure until we won. That’s how it was. Everyone wanted to fight in the war. We longed to. We were educated this way starting in elementary school. We were brainwashed, so we didn’t think it was possible for us to lose.” The emperor, he explained, “was considered a descendant of God. At school, there was a portrait of him. We would bow and pay our respects when we entered a room. That was the Japanese way.” For more than a year, Yoshida’s classes had been canceled; instead, he had dug air raid shelters, joined bucket brigades, made bamboo spears, and participated in drills to use them to fight the enemy.
When the alarm lifted on the morning of August 9, Yoshida and his friends—seven in all—were supposed to return directly to school, but they took their time coming down from the mountain as they tried to decide whether to skip their assigned duties and go swimming instead. They stopped for a drink of water at a roadside well in the hills bordering the western edge of the Urakami Valley.
Yoshida Katsuji, age ten, ca. 1942. (Courtesy of Yoshida Naoji)
By then it was eleven a.m. People throug
hout the city were back to their daily routines, hanging laundry, reading newspapers, weeding gardens, visiting sick family members, scouring the hills for food, lining up at ration stations, or chatting with neighbors. Twenty-four parishioners and two priests gathered inside Urakami Church for confession. One mother set some beans out to dry in preparation for cooking a special dish for the annual Catholic Feast of the Assumption on August 15. A child played near his family’s front door. Of nine Nagasaki residents who had survived the Hiroshima bombing, some had already returned to Nagasaki, while others arrived in the city that morning by train. One man, who had dug into the ruins of his Hiroshima home to find the bones of his wife, now walked through the streets of Nagasaki carrying a washbasin filled with her ashes to give to her parents.
Northeastern section of the Urakami Valley, from the hills slightly south of where Yoshida stood just before the bomb detonated. In the foreground is a rice field, behind which a Japanese National Railways train can be seen traveling from north (left) to south (right). Urakami Church is visible in the back center of the photo. (U.S. Army Institute of Pathology/Courtesy of Nagasaki Atomic Bomb Museum)
Korean and Chinese workers, prisoners of war, and mobilized adults and students had returned to their work sites; some dug or repaired shelters, others piled sandbags against the windows of City Hall for protection against machine-gun fire. In the Mitsubishi sports field, bamboo spear drills in preparation for an invasion had just concluded. Classes had resumed at Nagasaki Medical College. Streetcars meandered through the city. Hundreds of people injured in the air raids just over a week earlier continued to be treated in Nagasaki’s hospitals, and at the tuberculosis hospital in the northern Urakami Valley, staff members served a late breakfast to their patients. One doctor, trained in German, thought to himself, Im Westen nichts neues (All quiet on the western front). In the concrete-lined shelter near Suwa Shrine that served as the Nagasaki Prefecture Air Defense Headquarters, Governor Nagano had just begun his meeting with Nagasaki police leaders about an evacuation plan. The sun was hot, and the high-pitched, rhythmic song of cicadas vibrated throughout the city.
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