No one is spared the suffering. A group of students from the Hiroshima Girls Business School are “covered with blisters the size of balls, on their backs, their faces, their shoulders and their arms. The blisters were starting to burst open and their skin hung down like rugs,” Japanese photojournalist Yoshito Matsushige will remember.
A Hiroshima streetcar amid the ruins of what was once downtown Hiroshima
The heat incinerates the clothes of many victims, such as the fifteen passengers on a streetcar on the outskirts of the city. They all now lie dead in a naked pile. Because dark colors absorb heat while light colors reflect it, some of the unclothed women have burns in the shape of flowers on their bodies as a result of the designs on the kimonos they were wearing at the time of their death.
* * *
If the designers of Little Boy imagined a single bomb blast would inflict instant death on thousands, they were correct. The truth is that it does not take much imagination to foresee puncture wounds caused by shards of exploded glass and wood hurtling through the air. The atomic blast wave travels at two miles per second, knocking flat anything in its path. Then there is the horror of radiation—radioactive particles of dust that will slowly kill residents of Hiroshima for months and years to come. But there is even more.
Thousands of Japanese die from fire and water. The flames come first, individual blazes that begin at the instant Little Boy explodes. Within five minutes, almost every structure within a two-mile radius of the blast is ablaze, a raging firestorm that propels a powerful flaming wind. Soon, that wind reaches hurricane strength, reducing much of Hiroshima to cinders.
Many residents are now buried in the rubble of their collapsed homes. Trapped beneath thick wooden beams and tons of ceramic roof tiling, they frantically plead for rescue as the fires burn closer. Their screams echo throughout the streets of Hiroshima.
To escape the firestorm, or to cool the burns covering their bodies, many Japanese leap into the city’s firefighting cisterns. But what happens next is yet another cruel twist of fate: the explosion has superheated the water, and everyone immersing himself or herself in it immediately boils to death.
Others try to escape the flames by diving into one of the seven rivers that flow through Hiroshima, only to find the water clogged with dead bodies. Many are actually pushed into the water by the enormous crowds trying to flee the firestorm. Once they are caught in the current, the number of corpses makes it impossible to swim. “I saw a few live people still in the water, knocking against the dead as they floated down the river,” one eyewitness will later recall. “There must have been hundreds and thousands who fled to the river to escape the fire and then drowned.”
Hiroshima is chaos. Some confused citizens maintain almost total silence as they endure the horrors of Little Boy. Many wander the streets in a daze, arms held away from their bodies to prevent them rubbing against their burns, staring at the carbon lumps on the street, picking their way through the debris, and absorbing the surreal nature of what has happened. Others, their homes destroyed, join the long line of Hiroshima’s citizens frantically retreating to the safety of the countryside.
* * *
Just seconds after Little Boy’s detonation, the Japan Broadcasting Corporation in Tokyo notices that their Hiroshima station is off the air. The control operator gets on the phone to see if he can help fix the problem but gets no response.
Soon it becomes clear that Hiroshima’s train station, telegraph operators, and military garrison have also severed communications. Fearing an American bombing, the headquarters of the Japanese military, the general staff office, dispatches a young officer from Tokyo to investigate. His orders are to fly to Hiroshima immediately and ascertain whether or not the city has been the target of an American attack.
The next day, the chilling results of what the young officer saw from the air are reported on Japanese radio: “Practically all living things, human and animal, were literally seared to death.”
* * *
Those who survive the bombing of Hiroshima will forever be known in Japan as the hibakusha—the “explosion-affected people.”
The difference between survival and death is often luck: standing inside a concrete building that blocks the shock waves, or having the good fortune of not being pinned beneath a large beam when a house collapses.
“The atomic bomb does not discriminate,” Hiroshima weatherman Isao Kita will remember. “The atomic bomb kills everyone from little babies to old people. And it’s not an easy death. It’s a very cruel and very painful way to die.”
* * *
Among the hibakusha is fireman Yosaku Mikami, who is spared death on his way home because his streetcar is shielded from the blast by a tunnel.
“The car passed through Miyuki Bashi and was approaching the train office, when I saw the blue flash from the window. At the same time, smoke filled the car, which prevented me even from seeing the person standing directly in front of me.”
Yosaku returns to the fire station, where he joins his colleague on the fire truck. They are confronted by utter chaos and unimaginable horror as they come upon scores of victims “swearing, screaming, shouting, asking for help.” Yosaku and his fellow firefighters immediately go to work, hoping to find a hospital where they might take the worst of the victims. “We tried to open the eyes of the injured and we found out they were still alive. We tried to carry them by their arms and legs and to place them onto the fire truck. But this was difficult because their skin was peeled off as we tried to move them.… But they never complained they felt pain, even when their skin was peeling off.”
Yosaku and the other firemen travel through the city, tending to the wounded and visiting other fire stations to determine the fate of their brother firefighters. They find many still alive, combating the blazes. But they also come upon scenes of horrifying death.
At one station Yosaku finds a fireman scorched to death inside his truck: “He looked as if he was about to start the fire engine to fight the fire.”
* * *
Stunned by the shock waves, sixteen-year-old Akira Onogi is thrown through the air and knocked unconscious. When Akira comes to, he walks outside to find his neighbor standing naked in the rubble of his ruined home, too consumed with searching for lost family members to care about the flaps of burned flesh hanging off his own body.
“I talked to him but he was too exhausted to give me a reply. He was looking for his family desperately,” Akira will long remember.
“We found this small girl crying and she asked us to help her mother … trapped by a fallen beam on top of the lower half of her body.” Akira and a group of onlookers work together to lift the crushing section of wood, but their efforts are in vain.
“Finally a fire broke out, endangering us. So we had no choice but to leave her. She was conscious and we deeply bowed to her with clasped hands to apologize to her and then we left.”
For the next ten years, sparks given off by electric streetcars will startle Akira, reminding him of the A-bomb’s instantaneous flash—the pikadon, or “spark and bang,” as it is so often called by survivors. And he will never sit by a window, having seen far too many corpses pierced by exploding panes of glass.
But the most vivid moment, the one that will stay with Akira the rest of his life, is the memory of the daughter and her doomed mother. Thirty years after the atomic bomb blast, Akira will immortalize his sorrow on canvas, painting the scene with unbridled emotion. He places himself in the painting’s bottom right-hand corner, hands pressed together in remorse as the sobbing little girl begs him to save her mother’s life.1
Akira Onogi’s vivid memories of the aftermath of the Hiroshima atomic bomb would haunt him for years to come.
* * *
Geibi Bank employee Akiko Takakura is also among those spared. She stepped into work just moments before her workplace exploded at 8:15, stopping the bank’s clock at that precise time. “When I was doing my morning routine, dusting the desks and thi
ngs like that, the A-bomb was dropped. All I remember was that I saw something flash suddenly.”
Though the bank is just three hundred yards from the center of the bomb blast, its stone walls and armored window coverings provide perfect protection. Just on the other side of those walls, on the steps leading into the bank, Akiko would have been instantly burned into a carbon lump.
Momentarily knocked unconscious from the blast, Akiko wakes up a short time later and staggers out into the street to a scene of profound horror: “Many people on the street were killed almost instantly. The fingertips of those dead bodies caught fire and the fire gradually spread over their entire bodies from their fingers. A light gray liquid dripped down their hands, scorching their fingers. I was so shocked to know that fingers and bodies could be burned and deformed like that.”
Akiko wanders through the city in a daze, her progress slowed by the countless dead bodies she carefully steps over. She makes her way to the former military garrison, where bare-chested soldiers were performing their morning calisthenics just an hour ago.
“At the drill ground, the burnt field was strewn with what must have been dead soldiers.”
She lies down on the ground to rest. “I don’t know how much time passed, but at dusk I suddenly vomited what must have been the remnants of my breakfast.… I vomited bloody phlegm twice. I knew then that I, too, would die in that place.”
Despite 102 cuts on her back from flying glass and debris, along with two serious burns and many bruises, Akiko finds the will to go on. “I’m going to live. I’ve got to live,” she tells herself. A half century from now, determined that a new generation of Japanese must never forget the horror she is experiencing today, Akiko will write the poem “To Children Who Don’t Know the Atomic Bomb,” describing that morning in graphic detail and ending with the following unforgettable image.2
One woman walking on the road
died and then
her fingers burned,
a blue flame shortening them like candles.
* * *
The time in Tokyo is 7:50 p.m. It has been eleven hours and thirty-five minutes since Little Boy was dropped on Hiroshima. Many in the Japanese high command believe that the bomb was atomic, but the generals have withheld this news from their emperor all afternoon.
It is dusk, and Hirohito takes advantage of the warm August night to stroll the gardens of the Imperial Palace, completely unaware of what has happened in Hiroshima.
Suddenly, an aide from the Imperial Japanese Army approaches, which can only mean bad news. Such an intrusion on the emperor’s solitude is unheard of except in a time of tragedy. In somber tones, the aide informs Hirohito that Hiroshima has been “attacked with a special bomb from a US bomber.” The aide goes on to state that the Navy Ministry, which has been investigating the attacks, believes that “most parts of the city” have ceased to exist.
The aide leaves, allowing Emperor Hirohito to ruminate on what he has just heard. Since the fall of Okinawa six weeks ago, he has known that Japan cannot win this war. For a reminder of the Americans’ dominance, Hirohito need only look around the Imperial Palace: despite standing orders by the US military that the emperor’s palace should not be bombed, fires started by B-29 raids on Tokyo have leaped the great stone walls and moats surrounding his fortress and burned Hirohito’s wooden residence to the ground. Hirohito and his family now live in the imperial library, adjacent to the enormous gardens in which the emperor now walks. All of the emperor’s official business is conducted in a bunker sixty feet underground. In that way, he is similar to his deceased ally, the German leader Adolf Hitler.
Like Hitler, Hirohito has refused to surrender. He has persisted in the belief that the Russians will help him negotiate peace with America. The emperor still believes that now. However, he is staggered by the news from Hiroshima.
If the reports from the city are true, Hirohito knows that only unconditional surrender will save Japan from complete destruction. This will mean the end of the 2,500-year-old imperial dynasty—and perhaps the end of Hirohito’s own life, should he be tried and found guilty of war crimes.
But five hours later, when American president Harry Truman once again demands unconditional surrender from Japan, Hirohito’s response is utter silence.
While his devastated people suffer and die, the god-man continues his stroll.
22
USS AUGUSTA
MID-ATLANTIC
AUGUST 6, 1945
NOON
Harry Truman is feeling powerful. Holding court just before lunch in the USS Augusta’s enlisted men’s mess hall, he banters with the six sailors at his table, asking about their hometowns and life in the navy. Truman could have flown home after his three-week stay at the Potsdam Conference in Germany, but his security agents recommended making the five-day transatlantic journey by sea because they feared an attack in the sky.
The voyage has been blustery, the windblown Atlantic covered in whitecaps and rolling swells. Yet Truman has risen early each morning for a walk on deck in the open air. The crew has been surprised to see the president wearing a broad smile during these morning constitutionals, despite the ongoing conflict in the Pacific. They cannot possibly know the tremendous feeling of success he feels after holding his own on the world stage at Potsdam, and even more important, they do not know that Truman is awaiting confirmation that an atomic bomb has been dropped on Japan.
The president has had a hard time keeping this top secret news to himself. There are a handful of journalists on board the ship, and on the day Augusta set sail from Plymouth, England, Truman met with them to explain that America possessed the atomic bomb. He shares this staggering news safe in the knowledge that the media are forbidden from using the ship’s radios and have no way of communicating the information. In this particular isolation, the talkative Truman gets to explain the A-bomb on his terms, and yet the weapon maintains its confidential status.
As Truman now chats with the young sailors prior to eating lunch, Captain Frank H. Graham approaches the table holding a map of Japan and a teletype message. Hiroshima is circled in red pencil on the map. The message reads: “Hiroshima bombed visually … Results clear cut successful in all respects. Visible effects greater than in any test. Conditions normal in airplane following delivery.”
Truman’s face lights up. “This is the greatest thing in history,” he proclaims to Graham, enthusiastically shaking his hand. “It’s time for us to get home.”
The president then orders Graham to share the secret message with Secretary of State James F. Byrnes, sitting just a few tables away. A second teletype arrives moments later from Secretary of War Henry Stimson confirming the previous report. “Big bomb dropped on Hiroshima August 5 at 7:15 p.m. Washington time. First reports indicate complete success.”
Truman can’t help himself: leaping to his feet, he taps his water glass with a fork. At first, there is confusion. These military men immediately rise to attention, realizing the impropriety of the president standing as they sit. But Truman waves them back down: “Please keep your seats and listen for a moment. I have an announcement to make. We have just dropped a new bomb on Japan which has more power than twenty thousand tons of TNT. It has been an overwhelming success!”
Bedlam sweeps through the mess hall. Cheers echo down the ship’s passageways. A grinning Truman holds the teletype message aloft as he races from the mess hall and runs down the corridor to share the news with Augusta’s officers. “We won the gamble,” he shouts above the jubilant celebration.
Everyone believes that the end of the war has arrived.
They are wrong.
* * *
Within moments, dressed in a tan double-breasted suit and dark tie, President Truman films a message to the American people from his stateroom aboard the Augusta. He sits at a desk, a porthole visible over his right shoulder. The text of his speech was prepared long ago but only just released to the national media by the White House. But Truman’s words, which
are also being broadcast live on the radio, have a far more powerful effect than a print dispatch. For while this message may seem to be aimed at the American people, it is in fact a warning to the Japanese leadership.
“Sixteen hours ago an American plane dropped one bomb on Hiroshima and destroyed its usefulness to the enemy,” he begins. Truman’s tone is somber, but there is no doubt he feels justified in his decision. Even as he speaks, more leaflets are being dropped on Japan, encouraging the people to rise up and demand that their leaders surrender.
“The Japanese began the war from the air at Pearl Harbor. They have been repaid many fold. And the end is not yet. With this bomb we have now added a new and revolutionary increase in destruction to supplement the growing power of our armed forces. In their present form these bombs are now in production and even more powerful forms are in development.
“It is an atomic bomb. It is a harnessing of the basic power of the universe. The force from which the sun draws its power has been loosed against those who brought war to the Far East.”
Truman then tells the history of the bomb’s development, concluding with an unmistakable reminder that the job is not yet done. Only Japan’s acceptance of the Potsdam Declaration and its terms of unconditional surrender will stop the bombings.
“We are now prepared to destroy more rapidly and completely every productive enterprise the Japanese have in any city. 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.… If they do not now accept our terms they may expect a rain of ruin from the air, the like of which has never been seen on earth.”
Killing the Rising Sun Page 16