HIROSHIMA, JAPAN
AUGUST 6, 1945
7:10 A.M.
The humid air is filled with warning. Air-raid sirens again awaken the citizens of Hiroshima. The morning has dawned warm and clear, with just a few wispy clouds in the sky. A single American B-29 has been seen flying toward the city, causing the alert to sound and disrupting the start of the business day—a time for cooking the morning meal and boarding the streetcar to work. Air-raid warnings are now a constant nuisance, but at this late point in the war it seems unlikely the Americans will finally bomb the city. So while some residents dutifully flee into bomb shelters, others go about their day.
In the huge harbor, shrimp fishermen tend to their nets, as their ancestors have done for centuries. They ignore the air-raid warnings, as they have nowhere to flee. In the southern section of town near the port, the Ujina fire station is relatively calm, and fireman Yosaku Mikami looks at the clock. He is less than sixty minutes away from the end of his twenty-four-hour shift, but any bombing will cause fires, meaning Yosaku’s services will be needed immediately.
Despite the evacuation of his family yesterday and the empty house that awaits him, Yosaku is eager to get home. He patiently waits for the sound of the all-clear siren, and at 7:32 he hears it. The danger has passed—or so it seems.
* * *
On the other side of town, sixteen-year-old Akira Onogi is executing his plan to take the day off from work at the Mitsubishi shipbuilding plant. A studious boy, Akira is angry that he can no longer attend school due to the war. But he now lies content on the floor of his parents’ home, reading a book. Akira is looking forward to a day of leisure—he has no plans at all.
* * *
The all-clear siren alerts the people who took shelter at the Hatchobori streetcar station that they can now emerge. Twenty-year-old Akiko Takakura is a cautious young woman, but she now resumes her journey to the Geibi Bank, where she does secretarial work. The bank, with its stone walls and armored window coverings that let in almost no light, is less than a half mile from the T-shaped Aioi Bridge spanning the Ota River—what will soon be ground zero.
Three days ago, the clock tower at Hiroshima University stopped working at precisely 8:15. The city lacks the spare parts and material to fix it, so the great clock looking down on all of Hiroshima remains frozen in time.
As Akiko enters the lobby of her workplace, she notices that the bank clock in the lobby is just a few moments away from striking 8:15.
It is an omen Akiko will never forget.
* * *
Enola Gay flies over Japan at an altitude of 30,700 feet. The overloaded bomber can climb no higher. Weather plane Straight Flush, which caused the air-raid sirens to sound in Hiroshima this morning, has reported that the weather is fine for visual bombing. With that message, the fate of the city is sealed.
“It’s Hiroshima,” Colonel Paul Tibbets barks into Enola Gay’s intercom.
Six hours ago, shortly after taking off from Tinian, Captain Deak Parsons and his assistant, Lieutenant Morris Jeppson, wriggled through the small pressurized opening separating the bomb bay from the rest of the aircraft. Little Boy almost entirely fills the cavernous space. The ugly bomb is bulbous, with four square tail fins to guide its descent, a design predicated upon performance instead of appearance.
A single shackle holds Little Boy in place. Braces keep the bomb from swaying side to side. Standing on a small catwalk, Parsons positions himself at the rear of the device. He needs light to see what he is doing, so Jeppson, a physicist educated at Harvard, Yale, and MIT, provides it.
The captain works quickly, running through an eleven-step checklist that arms Little Boy. Opening a small panel, he inserts four silk packages of cordite powder. This smokeless propellant will detonate the uranium “bullet” at one end of the bomb’s inner cannon barrel. The small chunk of enriched U-235 will race down the barrel and collide with a separate sphere of uranium known as the nucleus at the opposite end. Within one-trillionth of a second of the bullet striking the nucleus—a “picosecond,” in technical terms—the splitting of one atom into two smaller atoms will begin the process of nuclear fission. The explosion will follow immediately, releasing deadly heat and radioactive gamma rays.
As Parsons arms Little Boy, the sharp, machined edges of the rear panel cut his fingertips. Undaunted, he finishes the job in twenty-five minutes. His final act is to insert three green dummy plugs between Little Boy’s battery and its firing mechanism.
Little Boy is armed but fragile. Anything that ignites the cordite charges will cause it to explode, killing all the men on Enola Gay; thus, the green plugs placed between the electrical connections. As long as those plugs are secure, Little Boy will not detonate.
* * *
Just before they enter Japanese airspace, Deak Parsons sends Morris Jeppson back into the bomb bay one last time. The blond lieutenant replaces the green plugs with three red arming plugs, thus establishing an electrical circuit between the battery and the bomb.
Little Boy is now alive.
* * *
One hour later, Enola Gay bombardier Thomas Ferebee announces, pointing straight out the front bubble window of the aircraft, “I’ve got the bridge.”
The Aioi Bridge was chosen as Little Boy’s aiming point because of its location in the center of Hiroshima and its unique T-shaped appearance, visible from the air.
Looking down, Colonel Tibbets can see the white buildings of downtown Hiroshima; he can actually see a mass of movement that looks like people walking to work. “My eyes were fixed on the center of the city, which shimmered in the early morning light,” he will later remember.
Enola Gay flies the last miles to Hiroshima uncontested. No enemy planes or antiaircraft fire greet the Americans. Japanese air defense officials, having already sounded three air-raid warnings during the night, choose to ignore the B-29’s approach, thinking it to be on a simple reconnaissance mission.
With ninety seconds to go, bombardier Thomas Ferebee positions his left eye over the Norden bombsight’s viewfinder. If he does his job properly, allowing for Enola Gay’s airspeed of 330 miles per hour and the slight amount of wind that will cause the bomb to drift, Little Boy should fall to the ground with pinpoint accuracy.
“One minute out,” Tibbets announces, breaking radio silence.
Ferebee flicks a switch that sends a sharp tone into the headphones of the Enola Gay crew and those of the men in the two scientific planes following behind, reminding them of what is to come. They are to put specially darkened goggles over their eyes to protect their vision. All three planes have been ordered to flee the vicinity as soon as possible to avoid the aftershock of the atomic explosion.
“Thirty seconds,” says Tibbets.
“Twenty.”
The bomb bay doors open at precisely 8:15 a.m.—the exact moment at which the Hiroshima University clock froze three days ago.
“Ten … nine … eight … seven … six … five …
“Four … three … two … one…”
At 8:15:17 a.m., Little Boy is set loose from its shackle.
* * *
Instantly, Enola Gay lurches upward, finally rid of the four extra tons beneath her nose. Tibbets wrestles her sharply to the right, almost standing her on a wing as he turns away from Hiroshima. He has less than fifty seconds to distance himself from the blast. If he fails to cover enough ground, Enola Gay will be destroyed by shock waves.
Despite the 60-degree bank, a move more suited to a lithe fighter aircraft than a massive bomber, bombardier Ferebee keeps his left eye affixed to his Norden bombsight, allowing him to watch Little Boy plummet to earth. The bomb wobbles after first being dropped, but the four stabilizing fins soon force the nose down, propelling it toward the heart of Hiroshima.
Ferebee is transfixed, knowing that he is witnessing history. Ten seconds pass. Twenty. Thirty. Almost too late, he remembers that the explosion’s brightness will blind anyone who stares at it. Just in time, Ferebee unglues his eye from the bombsight and turns away from Little Boy’s descent.
Forty-three seconds after its release, at an altitude of 1,890 feet over the Aioi Bridge in downtown Hiroshima, Little Boy’s radar proximity fuse detonates. Within the bomb’s inner cannon, the four cordite charges explode, sending the uranium bullet hurtling the length of the barrel, where it collides with the second mass of U-235. The chain reaction is instantaneous. In the blast that follows, a fireball spreads out over the target zone. It travels at one hundred times the speed of sound, rendering it silent. One-millionth of a second later, the people of Hiroshima begin to incinerate.
Almost twelve miles away, the shock wave slams into the escaping Enola Gay so hard that Tibbets shouts “Flak,” thinking the plane has been hit by ground fire. He feels a strange “tingling sensation” in his mouth, the result of his fillings interacting with the radioactive elements now billowing thousands of feet into the air.
But Enola Gay is safe. All twelve men on board are alive. In six hours they will celebrate with whiskey and lemonade and spend the night far from the hell they have just created.
* * *
Little Boy explodes three hundred yards from its primary target. The temperature inside the bomb at the moment of nuclear fission is more than a million degrees Fahrenheit, which sends out a white flash of light ten times the brightness of the sun. Millionths of a second later, the heat on the ground directly below the bomb spikes to 6,000 degrees, bringing with it deadly radioactive gamma rays.
A thirty-five-year-old widow, Mrs. Aoyama, has sent her young son off to his mandatory work detail early. Per her daily routine, she is outdoors, working in the vegetable garden she shares with monks from a nearby Buddhist temple. The vegetable garden is located directly beneath the exploding Little Boy, the precise spot on the earth that will be known as the hypocenter.
Mrs. Aoyama is vaporized.
Death comes so quickly that her nerve endings do not have time to react to pain, nor even acknowledge the presence of the light and heat liquefying her bones and boiling her brain at a temperature five times greater than that of boiling water.
Thousands of men, women, and children within a half-mile radius of Mrs. Aoyama are simultaneously reduced to lumps of charcoal, their internal organs evaporating inside their charred corpses. Downtown Hiroshima is instantly covered in smoking black piles that were once human bodies. One woman standing in front of the Hiroshima Central Broadcasting Station tries to flee, only to be carbonized in a running position, her baby pressed tightly to her body.
But that is just the beginning.
Three milliseconds later, the sky erupts into a fireball three hundred yards wide as the surrounding air ignites, liquefying everyone in its proximity.
Then comes the blast as the explosion rockets outward with the force of twenty thousand tons of TNT, followed immediately by a billowing mushroom cloud that rises more than fifty thousand feet into the air, sucking up dust, dirt, and bodily gases from the vaporized remains of those killed at the hypocenter.
Within seconds, seventy thousand people are dead.
Almost every person and building within a one-mile radius of the hypocenter has vanished.
Pets, birds, rats, ants, cockroaches—gone.
Homes, fishing boats, telephone poles, the centuries-old Hiroshima Castle—all disappeared.
Day turns into night as the mushroom cloud blots out the sun. Beyond the one-mile radius of the hypocenter, some have survived, though at a horrible cost. Flash burns blind all those unfortunate to be caught looking in the direction of the blast, while the intense heat maims and disfigures thousands, many of whom live miles away. One group of Japanese soldiers is burned so badly that their faces literally melt away; it is impossible to distinguish the back of their heads from the front.
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 things 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.