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A Discussion of Whether The Us Bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki Was Justified

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Published: Nov 6, 2018

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Was the United States Justified in Using the Atomic Bomb?

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Hiroshima: History, City, Event

The name Hiroshima has come to stand for the catastrophic tragedy of war in general and for the horrifying potential for nuclear annihilation that has loomed in human affairs since the day in August 1945 when an atomic weapon was first used over that southwestern Japanese city. And yet, as important in world history as Hiroshima as cataclysmic event was, Hiroshima as a place, as a city, has a rich history, too. It is one that certainly now includes the war-time bombing, but that should not be reduced to the horrifically important event of the bombing alone.

Expanding the story of the city of Hiroshima beyond a tale of the atomic bombing can provide a fascinating lens onto the broader themes of Japanese historical experience. Resituating Hiroshima into its longer early modern and modern history also helps reveal the ways that Japan can serve as a national case study of common experiences of modern change around the world. The history of Hiroshima extends far back into centuries prior to the bomb. The formative era of the city was a time when samurai represented the ruling class of Japan, a time when the clash of modern empires that eventually resulted in Hiroshima’s obliteration could not have been imagined. The city also occupied an important place in the modern rise of the Japanese nation as an imperial power in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. And finally, the history of Hiroshima also continued forward from the mid-summer date of its destruction in 1945. It became a city rebuilt by its citizens, one that lives on today as a bustling, thoroughly contemporary, global city, albeit one whose self-professed identity is now inextricably tied to the atom bomb and a postwar mission to promote disarmament around the world.

In this essay, I hope to provide some insight into the topic of Hiroshima in history as I have been exploring it in a course that I have taught a number of times. The class certainly explores the history of the atomic bombing of the city. But my goal also has been to expand the story of Hiroshima beyond that of the bomb alone and to use its history as a lens onto the history of cities, modern change, empire, and the newer field of what might be termed post-disaster studies. One of the challenges in this pedagogical endeavor, however, is the scarcity of historical writing about the city as such. The overwhelming preponderance of scholarship on Hiroshima, especially in the English language, is devoted to the bomb--the decision to drop it, the dramatic final days of the war in the U.S. and Japan leading up to the event, and the experience of those on the ground during the attack and the days after.

Among historians of urban history, Tokyo, in its earlier incarnation as the shogun’s city of Edo and in its later transformations as the capital of the modern nation, has enjoyed the lion’s share of attention both in Japan and the English-speaking world. Historical writing related to other important urban areas, such cities with national significance as Hiroshima, is not plentiful 1 .

The very first task I assign in my course is indeed designed to hint at the multiple stories of Hiroshima city that await to be discovered in the historical record but that have rarely been written about at any length in English. It serves certainly to show how the atomic bombing became the story of the city in later accounts. But the assignment also provides hints about the multiple perspectives of that event that have competed with one another over time. The assignment asks students to investigate encyclopedias published at various points during the modern period and to compare the entries in which Hiroshima city appears. Students have found that assignment yields interesting insights about the mostly cultural and economic portraits of the city written before the war, the later mid-century importance attached to the atomic bombing, and the way that those from different political perspectives viewed the history of the city as refracted through that wartime event. (If library—or on-line—resources allow, be sure that students study encyclopedias from different national perspectives. Those of the U.S., the Soviet Union, and Japan, in particular, suggest varying interpretations of the bombing. Another hint, too, is to encourage students to think creatively about the entries under which they search for the city. Not all references to Hiroshima will appear under the “Hiroshima” entry heading.)

What follows are introductions to seven facets of Hiroshima up to the time of the bombing that are helpful in placing the city, and the bomb itself, into larger historical contexts. I hope they suggest the outlines of the broader history of the city and its importance in national developments, while remaining mindful of the significance of the event of the bombing itself. In a following essay, I will also speak about life of the city after its obliteration in 1945. 1. Hiroshima as Warring-States Castle Town Beginning in the earliest years of the Japanese imperial state, the territory that makes up today’s Hiroshima prefecture was divided between two provinces, Bingo and Aki. The area was well situated and grew as a link between the western-most areas of the main Japanese island of Honshû, the Inland Sea, the island of Shikoku, and the imperial heartland of the rising Japanese state to the east. Long before Hiroshima was founded as a city, the Aki region was known for its religious significance. Possibly dating from as early as the late 6th c., though not cited in contemporary historical records until 811, the famous Itsukushima Shrine (Shinto) was located in Aki province on a small island (sometimes known as Miyajima, Shrine Island), a short distance west of where the later Hiroshima city would stand. Built in reverence for the island of Itsukushima and its Mount Misen, the shrine complex grew during the Heian period with the support of the powerful aristocratic clan, the Taira of the imperial capital. Over time this shrine to the sacred island became an important pilgrimage site. Today, Itsukushima Shrine has been designated a UNESCO World Heritage Site. With its famous torii Shinto gate that appears to float in the water, it remains a major tourist and pilgrimage site just a short journey by train or ferry from Hiroshima 2 .

The city of Hiroshima itself was founded as a castle town on Hiroshima Bay in the late sixteenth century, a period when most of Japan’s medium and large-sized cities were founded, nearly all of them as castle towns constructed throughout Japan by competing warlords. The early history of the city is thus closely linked to the broader--and relatively long--history of urbanization in Japan. Urbanization began in this period of civil warfare and later witnessed, under different circumstances, successive waves of expansion in later centuries, particularly in the decades after the Meiji Restoration, then in the 1910s and 1920s, and then again after the Second World War.

The founder of Hiroshima was the powerful warlord Môri Terumoto, who was closely aligned by the late 1580s with Toyotomi Hideyoshi , the lord who was rapidly bringing the warring clans of sixteenth century Japan under his dominion. The home base of the Môri clan had long been western inland areas of the island of Honshu, where they had originally been assigned by the Kamakura Shogunate centuries before. By the end of the 1580s, Terumoto was flush from the successes of his alliance with Hideyoshi and Hideyoshi’s achievement of a sort of unifying overlordship among all warrior clans. In 1589, inspired no doubt by the construction by Hideyoshi himself of a massive new castle in Osaka, Terumoto set about building a grand castle headquarters for his clan on the shores of Hiroshima Bay, a location blessed by strategic and commercial advantages. This building project followed a pattern being repeated all over the country, as warlords, either in open battle with one another, or newly victorious, built immense fortifications and lavish headquarters. Terumoto moved in to his new castle, even before completion, in 1593.

Hiroshima castle was surrounded on three sides by mountains and situated on the delta of the river Ôta where it emptied into the bay. The branches of the river formed a series of islands before merging with the Inland Sea. One theory about the derivation of the name of Hiroshima castle is that the fortification was constructed on the largest of these low, flat islands of the time (“hiro” meaning wide and “shima” meaning island). From this location, the Môri clan controlled a large part of the commerce in the western portion of the Seto Inland Sea.

Paralleling the history of many other urban settlements in Japan during the last quarter of the sixteenth and the first quarter of the seventeenth centuries, Hiroshima soon became more than a mere castle fortification. As Terumoto’s samurai retainers gathered there, it grew into a bustling castle town. These samurai were soon joined in the new city by artisans, merchants, and workers of all stripes who made their lives around the castle. The Môri clan oversaw the building of bridges linking the islands of the Ôta river delta. The successors to the Môri in Hiroshima eventually also rerouted the Sanyô highway, which connected the expanding city to points east and west, so that the road went directly through the center of the burgeoning commercial center. The city would become by far the largest in the Chûgoku region of the main island of Japan and probably the sixth or seventh largest overall in Japan during the next three centuries. 2. Hiroshima as an Early-Modern City After Hideyoshi Toyotomi’s death and the competition to replace him as the lord of lords in Japan ensued, Môri Terumoto became the leader of the federation of warlords who attempted to stave off the rising power of the upstart Tokugawa Ieyasu far to the east. The Tokugawa forces defeated the forces allied against him, however, at the Battle of Sekigahara in 1600. As a result, the Tokugawa removed the Môri clan from their choice location in Hiroshima, dramatically reduced the size of their land holdings, and relocated them to the Chôshû domain in the very western tip of Honshû. In this way, the history of Hiroshima even has a link of sorts to the Meiji Restoration, the modern rebellion that 268 years later would overthrow the Tokugawa and launch Japanese society toward the construction of the modern nation-state: It was vassals of the Môri clan in the Chôshû domain who led the alliance of rebels that in the early days of 1868 orchestrated the final removal of the house of Tokugawa as shogun.

Tokugawa Ieyasu assigned the newly vacated, powerful Hiroshima domain and its capital city to Fukushima Masanori, who had allied himself with Tokugawa Ieyasu at the Battle of Sekigahara. By 1619, however, the Tokugawa shogun removed the Fukushima clan itself from Hiroshima for failing to receive permission from the shogun to rebuild portions of the Hiroshima castle damaged in a flood. The dismissal of the Fukushima clan from Hiroshima reflected the new, intricate system of political and military checks placed on the hundreds of lords enfiefed throughout Japan by the Tokugawa house. Each lord was allowed to maintain precisely one castle in his domain, and the shogun strictly surveilled any activity relating to the castle city fortifications of the lords or to their relations with neighboring domainal clan heads. Domainal lords ruled their fiefs at the pleasure of the shogun. Their relocation or demotion to non- daimyo (domainal lord) status could be the penalties for infractions within the quid pro quo alliance system of the Tokugawa regime .

In that same 1619, the Tokugawa shogun then assigned the Hiroshima fief to another ally, Asano Nagaakira, who was expected to serve there as a linchpin in the shogun’s network of control over the entire Chûgoku region of far southwestern Honshû. Hiroshima was thus ruled as the capital city of the Asano clan’s domain, in close alliance to the Tokugawa, until the end of the Tokugawa period.

These early years of the Tokugawa era continued to be a time of great city building. Nagaakira and his successors expanded on the earlier programs of the Môri and Fukushima lords to increase the infrastructure of the city. The Asano lords also promoted the continued expansion of the city through land reclamation projects in the bay. Much like its other important castle town counterparts during the relatively peaceful centuries of the Tokugawa period, Hiroshima became an early modern city, a place where samurai and commoner cultures intermingled and flourished, a center of intellectual production, the relatively cosmopolitan home of an expanding reading public, and a commercial hub during an era when Japan was to undergo a dramatic explosion in the scale of realm-wide commerce and a proto-industrial revolution in modes of economic production. 3. Hiroshima as Post-Meiji Restoration Modern City In the tumultuous and politically experimental first years following the Meiji revolution that overthrew the Tokugawa house, the new government set about to reconsider the administrative and political boundaries that had defined the old bakuhan (shogunal government and domainal governments) system of territorial rule in Japan. In 1871, the Meiji government dramatically announced the abolition of the domains and, by extension, their daimyo rulers. The new national government in Tokyo remade Hiroshima domain and the neighboring domain of Fukuyama into Hiroshima prefecture ( ken ), a new category of administrative unit over which the top executive official would be an appointed governor.

These changes were sudden and affected more than the domainal lords or those of the samurai caste alone. Commoners, too, felt great anxiety and suspicion over the rapid political and administrative changes. These uncertainties led to frequent uprising around Japan during the uncertain years after the Meiji revolution, including the incident when commoners led by a farmer named Buichirô launched a large armed uprising against local officials throughout the new prefecture of Hiroshima. The riot eventually was suppressed, and as so often happened in these cases, officials executed Buichirô and eight other leaders. In the eyes of those in charge at the prefectural and national levels, the progress represented in their eyes by the new political systems being erected could not be impeded. 3

A more thorough-going and formalized system of local rule, at the village, town, city, and prefectural levels, emerged during the 1880s and continued largely unchanged to 1945. In 1889, under this modern system of local and municipal governance, the national government in Tokyo officially designated Hiroshima as an incorporated city. It had roughly 83,000 residents. One of 31 cities recognized under the new system, Hiroshima took its place within the hierarchical administrative structures of the centralized nation-state system with which Japanese were rapidly replacing the institutions of centuries past. 4. Hiroshima as Industrial City Hiroshima city was also becoming modern in ways other than those related to its official municipal designation. As Japanese pursued new forms of economic and military strength during the Meiji period, Hiroshima grew in importance as a city of heavy industrial manufacturing. While not in those areas of the country most commonly identified with the industrial urban powerhouses--the Kantô area centered on Tokyo and the Nagoya-Kobe-Osaka nexus of cities--Hiroshima nevertheless also became an important city in the rise of Japanese industrial capitalism.

Recalling some of the economic reasons behind the original founding of the city, Hiroshima’s location on an important harbor and at the crossroads between the industrial centers of Kyûshû (especially the increasingly important city of Fukuoka), the Inland Sea and industrial cities further east contributed to its continuing success in the emerging new economy. The city became a critical modern transportation hub with the construction of the port of Ujina at the end of the 1880s. By the mid-1890s, the Sanyô Railroad was extended to Hiroshima, providing a link to Kobe and Shimonoseki in the east, and a new branch line from Ujina port connected the port to the main Sanyô Railroad station in the heart of the city. Entrepreneurs also constructed the sorts of light-industrial plants in Hiroshima that formed the basis of much of Japanese early industrialization during the modern period, including especially cotton mills. Located near the coal producing regions of northern Kyûshû and able to receive shipments of coal from overseas suppliers, the iron and steel industries also flourished in Hiroshima. In the city was also founded Tôyô Industries in 1920, later renamed the Mazda Corporation and famous in the post-WWII period as a global manufacturer of automobiles. By the wartime 1940s, Mitsubishi Heavy Industries constructed a major naval ship-building factory on the port waterfront of the city.

As measured by its ranking in terms of total population size, Hiroshima displayed a remarkable resilience in the face of the transformations from the end of the Tokugawa period through the modern economic changes of the first half of the twentieth century. At the end of the Tokugawa period, Hiroshima was the sixth most populous city in Japan. In 1935, its position was virtually unchanged at number seven. The top four cities in size also remained virtually unchanged in rank during that nearly 70-year period. Yet other cities did not fare so well in the transition to a modern economy, including most obviously the fifth largest city at the time of the Meiji transformation, Kanazawa. By 1935 its rank had fallen to number 22! Other major Tokugawa-era cities suffered similar fates, those such as Tôyama, Fukui, and Tottori, the latter of which dropped in size ranking from number 15 to 100 4 .

In the era of Japanese urban history before the rise of modern technologies, Hiroshima had flourished due to its location at the cross-roads of regional commerce, a location that had been decided based not only on economic advantage, but also pure military-strategic calculations. Many other major Tokugawa-era cities, however, had become large simply because the domains in which they were located were large and their lords were economically well off, though often not well aligned with the shogun. This weak position in relation to the shogun meant that such lords were placed in peripheral areas of the realm such as along the Sea of Japan coast, in the far north, or on the far side of the island of Shikoku. Such locations meant that during the modern period the cities associated with these old domainal lords found themselves located in peripheral regions of the emerging industrial economy. They often, therefore, shrank dramatically in size. Moreover, other cities that had been of smaller size under the Tokugawa system (e.g. Nagasaki) or that had not yet even existed as separate cities as such (e.g. Kobe) grew dramatically during the modern period based on their situational advantages given the growth industries of the modern economy.

Hiroshima’s advantages as a geographical crossroads, by contrast, remained undiminished across the early-modern and modern transition. Furthermore, Hiroshima was in the modern era also fortunately situated for taking advantage of the new fossil-fuel driven industrial technologies and shipping opportunities of the age. The result was Hiroshima’s extraordinarily long history as one of the premier cities in both the Tokugawa and modern eras. 5. Hiroshima as Imperial City  

"The almost exclusive attention given to the day of the bombing itself ironically works to efface the key roles that the city did indeed play in modern empire and war-making."

  Hiroshima’s modernity was also determined by the central role it played in the history of Japanese imperialism in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and in the important place that the modern Japanese military would play in the life of the city. The almost exclusive attention given to the day of the bombing itself ironically works to efface the key roles that the city did indeed play in modern empire and war-making. These modern historical roles do not necessarily by themselves make any case as to the morality or necessity of the dropping of the bomb. They do however place Hiroshima at the center of a longer history of national expansionism that by the end of 1945 did, rightly or wrongly, place Japan in the cross hairs of an atomic attack. Understanding the history of Japanese national strategies and expansion overseas as reflected in part in the history of Hiroshima helps to contextualize the bombing.

Hiroshima was a city where hundreds of thousands of civilians made their lives. Shops, small businesses, factories, banks, schools, hospitals, and government offices lined its streets. It was, however, also a military city. So common was the image of military personnel in the daily life of the city that it was dubbed by residents a “soldier’s city.” Military personnel could regularly be seen at the Chûgoku Regional Army and Fifth Army Division headquarters complex at Hiroshima castle, at their barracks and on drill grounds, and marching to and from transport ships and train stations as they entered the city or shipped out during the successive wars of the modern period by which Japanese extended their imperial reach.

Hiroshima first became a garrison city of the emerging modern military in 1871, and by 1886 the Fifth Division (of six total) of the military was headquartered at the old castle in the heart of the city. In addition, just two years later, the Japanese Imperial Naval Academy was relocated from Tokyo to the large island of Etajima in Hiroshima Bay. Etajima remained the officer training facility for the navy until the end of the war. It continues today as the Officer Candidate School of the Japanese Maritime Self-Defense Force and is also the location of the Museum of Naval History.

Beginning with the First Sino-Japanese war of 1894-95, Hiroshima became an assembly area for troops from all over the rest of Japan shipping out from the new Ujina port to the war zones of the Meiji period. In the first war with China, and then the war with Russia ten years later, the territory given over to military facilities in the city increased dramatically. By the end of those victorious wars, Hiroshima had also become a key military supply and ordinance depot, a training area, and communications center. As much as 10% of the city was dedicated to military purposes 5 . In addition, the war with China was the impetus behind the construction on the harbor island of Ninojima of a quarantine and disinfection station for all troops returning to Japan from war theaters and, soon enough, other parts of the empire. Because some of the very few medical facilities of any kind still standing after the atomic attack were on Ninojima, rescue troops ferried as many as 10,000 injured victims from the heart of the city to the island that day and over the following weeks. Many thousands died on the island, and their remains were buried there.

For a remarkable moment, Hiroshima’s place in the history of imperial wars even included the transformation of the city into the virtual imperial capital of the nation. During the First Sino-Japanese War, leaders moved the Meiji Emperor’s imperial command headquarters from Tokyo to Hiroshima to be at the center of the military logistics of this most important city in the war effort. During much of the war, the emperor thus resided in Hiroshima. Even the national parliament pulled up stakes and moved to Hiroshima, convening for a time during the war in a building hastily constructed for the purpose.

When Japan initiated full-scale war with China in 1937, the Fifth Army Division in Hiroshima once again was one of the first to the front. Over the successive years of the China war and then the war in the Pacific, the military appropriated increasing amounts of city land for facilities and military functions. As American forces seemed poised to launch an invasion of the Japanese home islands, the headquarters for the Second General Army, which had the job of defending the entire western part of Japan, was moved in April 1945 from Okinawa to Hiroshima northeast of the central military complex at the castle.

The military nature of the city was not always celebrated by its civilian citizens, however. In the early 1930s those in business complained to city and military authorities that too many city resources were being monopolized by the military. Particularly at issue was the desire of those in trade and manufacturing to have more facilities available for non-military shipping from Ujina port. In 1933 work began on facilities in the harbor to promote trade. Again in 1940, construction began on a new Hiroshima Industrial Port to promote the economic interests of the city. Reflecting the dominance of military concerns by the 1940s, however, part of the reclaimed land for the project ended up being used for an army airfield instead 6 . 6. Hiroshima as Targeted City In May 1945, American strategists placed Hiroshima on the short list of Japanese cities targeted for atomic attack. It was at that moment that the history of Hiroshima as a city intersected with the history of the event that would signal the dawn of the nuclear age. At the time that the United States dropped the bomb, Hiroshima was the 7th largest city in Japan (roughly comparable in relative ranking in today’s United States to the instantaneous obliteration of nearly all of San Diego). While estimates vary, the number of people believed to be in the city on the morning of the attack was about 370,000, including permanent civilian residents, commuters who came into the city that morning from surrounding suburbs for their jobs, military personnel stationed in Hiroshima, and Korean forced laborers. An estimated 70,000 to 80,000 people were vaporized, carbonized or otherwise killed in the initial heat (the fire-ball reached 300,000 degrees centigrade 1/10,000 of a second after the explosion), blast, and fires. At least that many again died by November of 1945 due to injuries and radiation.

Hiroshima was one of just two very large cities in August 1945 that had not yet been the target of massive B-29 Superfortress air-raids (the other was Kyoto). This was not by logistical accident. American commanders purposely left the city untouched by fire-bomb attacks with the expressed idea that it might serve as a virgin testing ground for measuring the effects of an atomic weapon on a modern city. The city was among the few (including Kokura and Nagasaki) selected as final target choices (from among a much longer list) due to a variety of factors, including the shape of the landscape in which it sat. The bowl created by the hills surrounding the city on all but the harbor side would, planners believed, be especially conducive to achieving maximum destructive effect. Moreover, Hiroshima was a city in which many military troops were stationed and in which the Mitsubishi shipyard was located. In addition, American planners noted its importance as a transportation link.

The making of the atom bomb and the decision to drop it on Japan are the most familiar, though highly controversial aspects of the story of Hiroshima. Debate has raged about the decision to bomb since soon after the war ended. It is not possible here to canvass the massive literature related to the decision to use the bomb. Whether the Hiroshima bombing was morally justified, necessary, fundamentally different from the use of other highly destructive methods for attacking cities, ended the war, saved American lives, averted further deaths at the hands of Japanese aggressors, or unnecessarily initiated a costly and dangerous nuclear arms race with the Soviets are all huge subjects requiring their own separate treatments. The Japan Society has a resource page that can direct interested readers to works related to these questions and help them navigate this thorny terrain. My comments here are intended merely to point outward towards this ever-growing bomb scholarship and to give a sense of the contested nature of memory with respect to the atomic attack.

The orthodox perspective in the United States holds that the bomb brought the war to an early end and saved lives--American lives that would have been lost in any invasion of the main islands of Japan and perhaps Japanese lives, too, that would have been sacrificed in defense of the nation. This view was enunciated by American decision-makers at the time and held strong sway among most in the U.S. after the war. Yet relief that the war had ended was also accompanied by fears even in the U.S. of what the atomic age would bring. Many Americans assumed it was only a matter of time before they themselves would fall victim to bombing by others while others called for idealistic political responses, even a one-world government, as the only means to avoid mutual annihilation.

Soon enough after the war, some in the U.S., like the Federal Council of Churches, declared that the dropping of the bomb on innocent civilians was morally wrong. A more surprising evaluation was made in the summer of 1946 by the U.S. Strategic Bombing Survey, which had been charged by FDR with assessing wartime air attacks. The Survey concluded that Japanese leaders would certainly have surrendered prior to the end of December 1945 even had the bomb not been used 8 . By the early 1960s, such scholars in the U.S. as Herbert Feis, began to support the argument that the bomb was not necessary. So-called revisionist scholars expanded on these views and over the following decades became more critical. They argued that the desire to cow the Soviets, racism, and the goal of punishing Japanese for Pearl Harbor and atrocities against POWs were all at work in the decision to use the new weapon. They also maintained that the supposed numbers of American lives saved were exaggerated after the fact by defenders of Truman’s decision. Some also offered a synthesis of these positions, suggesting that intimidating the Soviets was not a necessary consideration in the final decision, but that the possibility of also achieving this effect tended to foreclose any possibility of reconsideration of the decision to use the bomb 9 .

By the end of the twentieth century, contention over the way the bombing was remembered flared again to the surface. This was most famously true with the National Air and Space Musuem’s planned 50th anniversary exhibition of the Enola Gay, the airship used to drop the “Little Boy” atom bomb. Curators had designed the exhibit to display parts of the Enola Gay, but also to examine the reasons the bomb was used and review the debate that had taken place about the issue up to that time in 1995. These plans were met, however, by a barrage of criticism from veterans’ groups, politicians and others who attacked the planned exhibit as being “politically correct,” unjustifiably critical of American actions, and even unpatriotic. Under withering pressure from Congress and others, the Smithsonian scuttled nearly the entire exhibit. In the end, the forward fuselage of the Enola Gay was displayed, accompanied only by video interviews of the crew that had flown the mission to drop the bomb and text that discussed the development of the B-29 bombers used in air attacks on Japan 10 . Separate from questions related to the ultimate justification for the bomb, many among the scholarly community believed that the complete retreat of the museum marked a sad day for intellectual openness in the United States and the ways we view the complexities of history.

In the wake of the controversies over the Enola Gay exhibit, debate in the post-1995 years has been characterized by a resurgence of writing that justifies the bombing given the history of the war up to the summer of 1945 and the intractability of Japanese leaders. Defenders of the bombing have published works in recent years that maintain that revisionist critiques have held sway for too long. They claim that revisionists have made inaccurate and politically slanted use of the historical evidence and denounce those who criticize the bombing without consideration of Japanese actions in Asia leading up to that decision, actions that led to the death of millions of Asian soldiers and civilians. Such defenders as Robert P. Newman argue that the bombing did not represent the simple victimization of Japanese, but was justified given the number of lives potentially saved in the rest of East and Southeast Asia in light of the estimated rate of killing in the last days of the war being done by Japanese soldiers 11 . It should be noted, however, that, while it may not matter in terms of the ex post facto moral calculus being carried out in many of these arguments, saving specifically Asian lives does not ever seem to have figured as one of the expressed motives behind the decision of the Americans to launch the atomic strike.

For their part, Japanese forms of memorializing have themselves been criticized in the past as portraying Japanese as merely victims. Japanese public memories of the event, many pointed out, were presented without historical context, conveniently failing to address the aggression that Japanese had carried out throughout Asia beginning at least since 1931 and the many documented atrocities carried out by members of the Japanese military. Such was certainly true, for example, of the exhibits in the original main building of the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum. The exhibits documented the devastating effects of the bomb on the city and its people, but provided no treatment of the war that led up to the event. The Peace Museum now, however, includes a newer east wing (opened 1994), which includes material on the long history of Japanese empire, the deaths of Koreans in Hiroshima under a slave labor regime, and Hiroshima’s own history as a military city. Such exhibits go some distance toward remedying the limited historical perspectives of the original approach. They are a testament to the fact that there has been at least some widening of perspectives in social memory of the war in Japan in the previous two decades or so. 7. Hiroshima as a Destroyed City Justified, tragic mistake, or war crime, the atomic attack reshaped the history of Hiroshima as an urban place as indelibly as any man-made or natural disaster ever could. A targeted city, Hiroshima became on that August morning also a thoroughly destroyed city. Accounts of the bomb never fail to mention that it packed the power of 15,000 tons of TNT. Yet this figure by itself means little to most of us. The conversion of the destructive force of the atom bomb to an equivalency in conventional explosives seems somehow, as large as the number is, to shrink the awfulness of the thing to something almost “normal.”

It is not until we see the photographs of the city taken the day of the event and soon after that the scale and completeness of the destruction begin dimly to be understood. And photographed the destroyed city was. There were photos of the still climbing mushroom cloud, as seen from nearly directly below and from immensely far away. There were photos of the effects of the impossibly powerful blast--photos of demolished massive granite buildings and of flying shrapnel wedged perfectly under heavy stone objects, lodged there in the moment that the stones had been momentarily tilted up by the blast. There were photos of dazed survivors gathering in small dusty, half-clothed groups. In the days and weeks that followed, there were also panoramic photos of kilometer after kilometer of the once crowded city now quite utterly flattened and blackened. From the hypocenter in nearly all directions stood nothing to impede one’s view from one side of the city to the other. Staring at these photos today, the horrible power of the bomb is frightening, even more so when it is remembered how small that 1945 weapon was by comparison to those in nuclear stockpiles today. 

These photographs became just one category of evidence among many gathered after the attack in a massive attempt to catalogue, measure, and analyze just what had been done to the city at what moment of the bomb’s explosion and by which of the three means of destruction that the bomb meted out (heat rays, blast, and radiation). Scientists and medical teams from the United States, aided in the Occupation months that followed by Japanese counterparts, pieced together the details of the explosion and its effects. In essence, Hiroshima was transformed at the moment of its destruction into a city-sized laboratory for discovering the outcomes on structures and people of an atomic attack. The technical dispassion of the American documents ordering the “recording of all of the available data” about the destroyed city betrays the wartime context that underlay the research projects, but also a queasy realization by those at the time that Hiroshima might now represent the new face of warfare. Such research was “of vital importance to our country” declared one such U.S. document, which chillingly went on to explain that such a “unique opportunity may not again be offered until the next world war.” 12

Even the survivors, along with their offspring, became scientific specimens as scientists in the U.S. and Japan examined them for decades following the attack to record the exotic disorders that resulted from their exposure to the bombing. For example, medical teams studied the thick “keloid” scarring of heat flash burns. Little was also known about the dangerous effects of radiation exposure, and as surprising as it may seem today, most scientists and medical professionals believed before entering the city that there was “little indication” that much disease and death would be caused by the radiation of the bomb. 13 Facts to the contrary were quickly evident, however, as thousands died appalling radiation deaths in the months that followed. Research on the long-term, multi-generational consequences of radiation poisoning is still being studied today among survivors and their progeny.

The destroyed city also soon enough became a mapped city. Researchers eventually translated their findings on the destruction of the city into detailed maps that displayed the geographic distribution of damage. The effects of the blast were further disaggregated on these maps into various categories, color-coded to indicate partial and complete destruction and building loss by blast and later fire. Other maps recorded the geography of radiation. Bulbous swathes of color spreading northwest from the point of explosion at the middle of the city indicated the deadly reach of fall-out plumes and the territory as far as fifteen miles distant from the hypocenter over which black, radioactive rain had fallen as a consequence of the mushroom cloud. With their concentric rings marking the distance in kilometers from the hypocenter of the blast, all of these maps were bleak foreshadows of the similarly scientific maps of New York City, Washington, D.C. or Moscow that would soon enough registered the potential for even greater thermonuclear destruction so familiar during the nuclear arms race of the Cold War.

The extent of destruction that these maps displayed was almost unimaginable. 63% of all buildings within the city were totally destroyed and another 29% severely damaged beyond all repair. At a distance of two kilometers in all directions all wooden buildings were destroyed and burned. Anyone within 500 meters of the explosion would have had no time to feel the thermal flash or hear the blast. The entire area was nearly instantaneously destroyed and burned to ashes. The survivor believed to have been closest to ground zero was a mere 100 meters away, but he was in a basement room at the time and one of the very few to survive anywhere near that close to the point of explosion. Researchers estimate that between 80 to 100% of those who were exposed near the location of the blast died on the day of bombing. Even as far as 1.2 kilometers away, 50% perished that day. All survivors of the initial blast who were within a kilometer of the explosion received a dose of radiation that would be expected to kill half of those exposed to it within a month.

Hiroshima destroyed also became a city of relics and reminders. Much like Americans’ current desire to remember the September 11th attacks by displaying large chunks of the broken steel of the World Trade Center, citizens of Hiroshima, on a larger scale, dismantled and saved parts of the broken city--twisted iron and steel; the chemically altered surfaces of marble blocks; radioactive “black rain”-streaked walls; the shadows on stone of persons instantly incinerated. They did so to record what had occurred, to warn against the violence of the past, and simply to remember. Many of these monuments to the experience of the bombed city can be seen on display at the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum ( official site ).

The destroyed city was obviously a space of great death and suffering, but also of survival. A number of accounts by survivors have become well-known around the world, translated into many languages and a variety of media. Barefoot Gen , a “comic” (what today would be called a graphic novel) written and drawn by Nakazawa Keiji beginning in 1973, is based on Nakazawa’s own boyhood experience as a bomb victim, but also includes a critical portrayal of the jingoistic militarism of wartime Japanese society. Later repackaged in multi-volume book form, Barefoot Gen has sold millions of copies around the world and been adapted several times for film and television.

Several writers already of some renown at the time of the bombing attempted immediately to put their experiences of survival into first-person forms. One was Ôta Yôkô, whose City of Corpses features a documentary style of description of her experiences and reactions to the bombing, but is also often didactic in tone. Hara Tamiki was another such professional writer. He produced an autobiographical short story, “Summer Flowers,” that is an elegiac yet also hauntingly simple account, in slightly fictionalized form, of his experiences in the destroyed city. As in the laconic mode with which the narrator describes his being in the toilet at the moment of the bombing, Hara’s restrained story records the frequent happenstances determining life and death during the attack. Although he first jotted the notes for “Summer Flowers” in the immediate midst of great death, Hara was accompanied by others like himself whom pure accident had put relatively out of harm’s way on the day of the bomb and who managed to survive in the improbable circumstances of the burned out city. In an essay to follow, I will consider the survival of Hiroshima after its destruction. The essay will discuss the city in four of its interconnected postwar guises: reconstructed city, peace city, memorial city, and global city.

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Was It Right?

Most of the debate over the atomic bombing of Japan focuses on the unanswerable question of whether it was necessary. But that skirts the question of its morality.  

I imagine that the persistence of that question irritated Harry Truman above all other things. The atomic bombs that destroyed the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki fifty years ago were followed in a matter of days by the complete surrender of the Japanese empire and military forces, with only the barest fig leaf of a condition—an American promise not to molest the Emperor. What more could one ask from an act of war? But the two bombs each killed at least 50,000 people and perhaps as many as 100,000. Numerous attempts have been made to estimate the death toll, counting not only those who died on the first day and over the following week or two but also the thousands who died later of cancers thought to have been caused by radiation. The exact number of dead can never be known, because whole families—indeed, whole districts—were wiped out by the bombs; because the war had created a floating population of refugees throughout Japan; because certain categories of victims, such as conscript workers from Korea, were excluded from estimates by Japanese authorities; and because as time went by, it became harder to know which deaths had indeed been caused by the bombs. However many died, the victims were overwhelming civilians, primarily the old, the young, and women; and all the belligerents formally took the position that the killing of civilians violated both the laws of war and common precepts of humanity. Truman shared this reluctance to be thought a killer of civilians. Two weeks before Hiroshima he wrote of the bomb in his diary, “I have told [the Secretary of War] Mr. Stimson to use it so that military objectives and soldiers and sailors are the target and not women and children.” The first reports on August 6, 1945, accordingly described Hiroshima as a Japanese army base.

This fiction could not stand for long. The huge death toll of ordinary Japanese citizens, combined with the horror of so many deaths by fire, eventually cast a moral shadow over the triumph of ending the war with two bombs. The horror soon began to weigh on the conscience of J. Robert Oppenheimer, the scientific director of the secret research project at Los Alamos, New Mexico, that designed and built the first bombs. Oppenheimer not only had threatened his health with three years of unremitting overwork to build the bombs but also had soberly advised Henry Stimson that no conceivable demonstration of the bomb could have the shattering psychological impact of its actual use. Oppenheimer himself gave an Army officer heading for the Hiroshima raid last minute instructions for proper delivery of the bomb.

Don’t let them bomb through clouds or through an overcast. Got to see the target. No radar bombing; it must be dropped visually. ... Of course, they must not drop it in rain or fog. Don't let them detonate it too high. The figure fixed on is just right. Don't let it go up or the target won’t get as much damage.

These detailed instructions were the result of careful committee work by Oppenheimer and his colleagues. Mist or rain would absorb the heat of the bomb blast and thereby limit the conflagration, which experiments with city bombing in both Germany and Japan had shown to be the principal agent of casualties and destruction. Much thought had also been given to finding the right city. It should be in a valley, to contain the blast; it should be relatively undamaged by conventional air raids, so that there would be no doubt of the bomb's destructive power; an educated citizenry was desired, so that it would understand the enormity of what had happened. The military director of the bomb project, General Leslie Groves, thought the ancient Japanese imperial capital of Kyoto would be ideal, but Stimson had spent a second honeymoon in Kyoto, and was afraid that the Japanese would never forgive or forget its wanton destruction; he flatly refused to leave the city on the target list. Hiroshima and Nagasaki were destroyed instead. On the night of August 6 Oppenheimer was thrilled by the bomb's success. He told an auditorium filled with whistling, cheering, foot-stomping scientists and technicians that he was sorry only that the bomb had not been ready in time for use on Germany. The adrenaline of triumph drained away following the destruction of Nagasaki, on August 9. Oppenheimer, soon offered his resignation and by mid-October had severed his official ties. Some months later he told Truman in the White House, “Mr. President, I have blood on my hands.” Truman was disgusted by this cry-baby attitude. “I told him,” Truman said later, “the blood was on my hands—let me worry about that.” Till the end of his life Truman insisted that he had suffered no agonies of regret over his decision to bomb Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and the pungency of his language suggests that he meant what he said. But it is also true that he ordered a halt to the atomic bombing on August 10, four days before the Japanese Emperor surrendered, and the reason, according to a Cabinet member present at the meeting, was that “he didn’t like the idea of killing ... ‘all those kids.’” Was it right? Harry Truman isn’t the only one to have disliked the question. Historians of the war, of the invention of the atomic bomb, and of its use on Japan have almost universally chosen to skirt the question of whether killing civilians can be morally justified. They ask instead, Was it necessary? Those who say it was necessary argue that a conventional invasion of Japan, scheduled to begin on the southernmost island of Kyushu on November 1, 1945, would have cost the lives of large numbers of Americans and Japanese alike. Much ink has been spilled over just how large these numbers would have been. Truman in later life sometimes said that he had used the atomic bomb to save the lives of half a million or even a million American boys who might have died in an island-by-island battle to the bitter end for the conquest of Japan. Where Truman got those numbers is hard to say. In the spring of 1945, when it was clear that the final stage of the war was at hand, Truman received a letter from former President Herbert Hoover urging him to negotiate an end to the war in order to save the “500,000 to 1 million American lives” that might be lost in an invasion. But the commander of the invasion force, General Douglas MacArthur, predicted nothing on that scale. In a paper prepared for a White House strategy meeting held on June 18, a month before the first atomic bomb was tested, MacArthur estimated that he would suffer about 95,000 casualties in the first ninety days—a third of them deaths. The conflict of estimates is best explained by the fact that they were being used at the time as weapons in a larger argument. Admirals William Leahy and Ernest J. King thought that Japan could be forced to surrender by a combination of bombing and naval blockade. Naturally they inflated the number of casualties that their strategy would avoid. MacArthur and other generals, convinced that the war would have to be won on the ground, may have deliberately guessed low to avoid frightening the President. It was not easy to gauge how the battle would go. From any conventional military perspective, by the summer of 1945 Japan had already lost the war. The Japanese navy mainly rested on the bottom of the ocean; supply lines to the millions of Japanese soldiers in China and other occupied territories had been severed; the Japanese air force was helpless to prevent the almost nightly raids by fleets of B-29 bombers, which had been systematically burning Japanese cities since March; and Japanese petroleum stocks were close to gone. The battleship Yamato , dispatched on a desperate mission to Okinawa in April of 1945, set off without fuel enough to return. But despite this hopeless situation the Japanese military was convinced that a “decisive battle” might inflict so many casualties on Americans coming ashore in Kyushu that Truman would back down and grant important concessions to end the fighting. Japan’s hopes were pinned on “special attack forces,” a euphemism for those engaged in suicide missions, such as kamikaze planes loaded with explosives plunging into American ships, as had been happening since 1944. During the spring and summer of 1945 about 8,000 aircraft, along with one-man submarines and “human torpedoes,” had been prepared for suicide missions, and the entire Japanese population had been exhorted to fight, with bamboo spears if necessary, as “One Hundred Million Bullets of Fire.” Military commanders were so strongly persuaded that honor and even victory might yet be achieved by the “homeland decisive battle” that the peace faction in the Japanese cabinet feared an order to surrender would be disobeyed. The real question is not whether an invasion would have been a ghastly human tragedy, to which the answer is surely yes, but whether Hoover, Leahy, King, and others were right when they said that bombing and blockade would end the war. Here the historians are on firm ground. American cryptanalysts had been reading high-level Japanese diplomatic ciphers and knew that the government in Tokyo was eagerly pressing the Russians for help in obtaining a negotiated peace. The sticking point was narrow: the Allies insisted on unconditional surrender; the Japanese peace faction wanted assurances that the imperial dynasty would remain. Truman knew this at the time. What Truman did not know, but what has been well established by historians since, is that the peace faction in the Japanese cabinet feared the utter physical destruction of the Japanese homeland, the forced removal of the imperial dynasty, and an end to the Japanese state. After the war it was also learned that Emperor Hirohito, a shy and unprepossessing man of forty-four whose first love was marine biology, felt pressed to intervene by his horror at the bombing of Japanese cities. The devastation of Tokyo left by a single night of firebomb raids on March 9–10, 1945, in which 100,000 civilians died, had been clearly visible from the palace grounds for months thereafter. It is further known that the intervention of the Emperor at a special meeting, or gozen kaigin , on the night of August 9–10 made it possible for the government to surrender. The Emperor’s presence at a gozen kaigin is intended to encourage participants to put aside all petty considerations, but at such a meeting, according to tradition, the Emperor does not speak or express any opinion whatever. When the cabinet could not agree on whether to surrender or fight on, the Premier, Kantaro Suzuki, broke all precedent and left the military men speechless when he addressed Hirohito, and said, “With the greatest reverence I must now ask the Emperor to express his wishes.” Of course, this had been arranged by the two men beforehand. Hirohito cited the suffering of his people and concluded, “The time has come when we must bear the unbearable.” After five days of further confusion, in which a military coup was barely averted, the Emperor broadcast a similar message to the nation at large in which he noted that “the enemy has begun to employ a new and most cruel bomb. ... “ Are those historians right who say that the Emperor would have submitted if the atomic bomb had merely been demonstrated in Tokyo Bay, or had never been used at all? Questions employing the word “if” lack rigor, but it is very probable that the use of the atomic bomb only confirmed the Emperor in a decision he had already reached. What distressed him was the destruction of Japanese cities, and every night of good bombing weather brought the obliteration by fire of another city. Hiroshima, Nagasaki, and several other cities had been spared from B-29 raids and therefore offered good atomic-bomb targets. But Truman had no need to use the atomic bomb, and he did not have to invade. General Curtis LeMay had a firm timetable in mind for the 21st Bomber Command; he had told General H. H. (“Hap”) Arnold, the commander in chief of the Army Air Corps, that he expected to destroy all Japanese cities before the end of the fall. Truman need only wait. Steady bombing, the disappearance of one city after another in fire storms, the death of another 100,000 Japanese civilians every week or ten days, would sooner or later have forced the cabinet, the army, and the Emperor to bear the unbearable. Was it right? The bombing of cities in the Second World War was the result of several factors: the desire to strike enemies from afar and thereby avoid the awful trench-war slaughter of 1914–1918; the industrial capacity of the Allies to build great bomber fleets; the ability of German fighters and anti-aircraft to shoot down attacking aircraft that flew by daylight or at low altitudes; the inability of bombers to strike targets accurately from high altitudes; the difficulty of finding all but very large targets (that is, cities) at night; the desire of airmen to prove that air forces were an important military arm; the natural hardening of hearts in wartime; and the relative absence of people willing to ask publicly if bombing civilians was right. “Strategic bombing” got its name between the wars, when it was the subject of much discussion. Stanley Baldwin made a deep impression in the British House of Commons in 1932 when he warned ordinary citizens that bombing would be a conspicuous feature of the next war and that “the bomber will always get through.” This proved to be true, although getting through was not always easy. The Germans soon demonstrated that they could shoot down daytime low-altitude “precision” bombers faster than Britain could build new planes and train new crews. By the second year of the war the British Bomber Command had faced the facts and was flying at night, at high altitudes, to carry out “area bombing.” The second great discovery of the air war was that high-explosive bombs did not do as much damage as fire. Experiments in 1942 on medieval German cities on the Baltic showed that the right approach was high-explosive bombs first, to smash up houses for kindling and break windows for drafts, followed by incendiaries, to set the whole alight. If enough planes attacked a small enough area, they could create a fire storm—a conflagration so intense that it would begin to burn the oxygen in the air, creating hundred-mile-an-hour winds converging on the base of the fire. Hamburg was destroyed in the summer of 1943 in a single night of unspeakable horror that killed perhaps 45,000 Germans. While the British Bomber Command methodically burned Germany under the command of Sir Arthur Harris (called Bomber Harris in the press but Butch—short for “Butcher”—by his own men), the Americans quietly insisted that they would have no part of this slaughter but would instead attack “precision” targets with “pinpoint” bombing. But American confidence was soon eroded by daylight disasters, including the mid-1943 raid on ball-bearing factories in Schweinfurt, in which sixty-three of 230 B-17s were destroyed for only paltry results on the ground. Some Americans continued to criticize British plans for colossal city-busting raids as "baby-killing schemes," but by the end of 1943, discouraged by runs of bad weather and anxious to keep planes in the air, the commander of the American Air Corps authorized bombing “by radar”—that is, attacks on cities, which radar could find through cloud cover. The ferocity of the air war eventually adopted by the United States against Germany was redoubled against Japan, which was even better suited for fire raids, because so much of the housing was of paper and wood, and worse suited for “precision” bombing, because of its awful weather and unpredictable winds at high altitudes. On the night of March 9–10, 1945, General LeMay made a bold experiment: he stripped his B-29s of armament to increase bomb load and flew at low altitudes. As already described, the experiment was a brilliant success. By the time of Hiroshima more than sixty of Japan’s largest cities had been burned, with a death toll in the hundreds of thousands. No nation could long resist destruction on such a scale—a conclusion formally reached by the United States Strategic Bombing Survey in its Summary Report ( Pacific War ): “Japan would have surrendered [by late 1945] even if the atomic bombs had not been dropped, even if Russia had not entered the war [on August 8], and even if no invasion had been planned or contemplated.” Was it right? There is an awkward, evasive cast to the internal official documents of the British and American air war of 1939–1945 that record the shift in targets from factories and power plants and the like toward people in cities. Nowhere was the belief ever baldly confessed that if we killed enough people, they would give up; but that is what was meant by the phrase “morale bombing,” and in the case of Japan it worked. The mayor of Nagasaki recently compared the crime of the destruction of his city to the genocide of the Holocaust, but whereas comparisons—and especially this one—are invidious, how could the killing of 100,000 civilians in a day for a political purpose ever be considered anything but a crime? Fifty years of argument over the crime against Hiroshima and Nagasaki has disguised the fact that the American war against Japan was ended by a larger crime in which the atomic bombings were only a late innovation—the killing of so many civilians that the Emperor and his cabinet eventually found the courage to give up. Americans are still painfully divided over the right words to describe the brutal campaign of terror that ended the war, but it is instructive that those who criticize the atomic bombings most severely have never gone on to condemn all the bombing. In effect, they give themselves permission to condemn one crime (Hiroshima) while enjoying the benefits of another (the conventional bombing that ended the war). Ending the war was not the only result of the bombing. The scale of the attacks and the suffering and destruction they caused also broke the warrior spirit of Japan, bringing to a close a century of uncontrolled militarism. The undisguisable horror of the bombing must also be given credit for the following fifty years in which no atomic bombs were used, and in which there was no major war between great powers. It is this combination of horror and good results that accounts for the American ambivalence about Hiroshima. It is part of the American national gospel that the end never justifies the means, and yet it is undeniable that the end—stopping the war with Japan—was the immediate result of brutal means. Was it right? When I started to write this article, I thought it would be easy enough to find a few suitable sentences for the final paragraph when the time came, but in fact it is not. What I think and what I feel are not quite in harmony. It was the horror of Hiroshima and fear of its repetition on a vastly greater scale which alarmed me when I first began to write about nuclear weapons (often in these pages), fifteen years ago. Now I find I have completed some kind of ghastly circle. Several things explain this. One of them is my inability to see any significant distinction between the destruction of Tokyo and the destruction of Hiroshima. If either is a crime, then surely both are. I was scornful once of Truman’s refusal to admit fully what he was doing; calling Hiroshima an army base seemed a cruel joke. Now I confess sympathy for the man—responsible for the Americans who would have to invade; conscious as well of the Japanese who would die in a battle for the home islands; wielding a weapon of vast power; knowing that Japan had already been brought to the brink of surrender. It was the weapon he had. He did what he thought was right, and the war ended, the killing stopped, Japan was transformed and redeemed, fifty years followed in which this kind of killing was never repeated. It is sadness, not scorn, that I feel now when I think of Truman's telling himself he was not “killing ‘all those kids.’” The bombing was cruel, but it ended a greater, longer cruelty. They say that the fiftieth anniversaries of great events are the last. Soon after that the people who took part in them are all dead, and the young have their own history to think about, and the old questions become academic. It will be a relief to move on.

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The legacy of john hersey’s “hiroshima”.

Seventy-five years ago, journalist John Hersey’s article “Hiroshima” forever changed how Americans viewed the atomic attack on Japan.

On August 31, 1946, the editors of The New Yorker  announced that the most recent edition “will be devoted entirely to just one article on the almost complete obliteration of a city by one atomic bomb.” Though President Harry S. Truman had ordered the use of two atomic bombs  on Hiroshima and Nagasaki a year earlier, the staff at The New Yorker  believed that “few of us have yet comprehended the all but incredible destructive power of this weapon, and that everyone might well take time to consider the terrible implications of its use.”

Theirs was a weighty introduction to wartime reporter John Hersey’s four-chapter account of the wreckage of the atomic bomb, but such a warning was necessary for the stories of human suffering The New Yorker ’s readers would be exposed to.

Hersey was certainly not the first journalist to report on the aftermath of the bombs. Stories and newsreels provided details of the attacks: the numbers wounded and dead, the staggering estimated costs—numerically and culturally—of property lost, and some of the visual horrors. But Hersey’s account focused on the human toll of the bombs and the individual stories of six survivors of the nuclear attack on Hiroshima rather than statistics. 

View of Hiroshima after the bombing, courtesy of the National Archives and Records Administration.

Hersey was both a respected reporter and a gifted novelist, two occupations that provided him with the skills and compassion necessary to write his extensive essay on Hiroshima. Born in Tientsin, China in 1914 to missionary parents, Hersey later returned to the states and graduated from Yale University in 1936. Shortly after, he began a career as a foreign correspondent for Time  and Life  magazines and covered current events in Asia, Italy, and the Soviet Union from 1937 to 1946. Hersey won the Pulitzer Prize for his novel A Bell For Adano  (a story of the Allied occupation of a town in Sicily) in 1944, and his talents for fiction inspired his later nonfiction writing. He spent three weeks in May of 1946 on assignment for The New Yorker  interviewing survivors of the atomic attacks and returned home where he began to write what would become “Hiroshima.”

Hersey was determined to present a real and raw image of the impact of the bomb to American readers. They could not depend on censored materials from the US Occupying Force in Japan to accurately present the wreckage of the atomic blast. Hersey’s graphic and gut-wrenching descriptions of the misery he encountered in Hiroshima offered what officials could not: the human cost of the bomb. He wanted the story of the victims he interviewed to speak for themselves, and to reconstruct in dramatic yet relatable detail their experiences. 

Portrait of John Hersey by Carl Van Vechten from 1958, courtesy of The Library of Congress.

Hersey organized his article around six survivors he met in Hiroshima. These were “ordinary” Japanese with families, friends, and jobs just like Americans. Miss Toshiko Sasaki was a 20 year old former clerk whose leg had been severely damaged by fallen debris during the attack and she was forced to wait for days for medical treatment. Kiyoshi Tanimoto was a pastor of a Methodist Church who appeared to be suffering from “radiation sickness,” a plight that befell another of Hersey’s interviewees, German-born Jesuit Priest Father Wilhelm Kleinsorge. Mrs. Hatsuyo Nakamura’s husband died while serving with the Japanese army, and she struggled to rebuild her life with her young children after the attack. Finally, two doctors—Masakazu Fujii and Terufumi Sasaki—were barely harmed but witnessed the death and destruction around them as they tended to the victims.

Each of the essay’s four chapters delves into the experiences of the six individuals before, during, and after the bombing, but it’s Hersey’s unembellished language that makes his writing so haunting. Unvarnished descriptions of “pus oozing” from wounds and the stench of rotting flesh are found throughout all of the survivors’ stories. Mr. Tanimoto recounted his search for victims and encountering several naked men and women with “great burns…yellow at first, then red and swollen with skin sloughed off and finally in the evening suppurated and smelly.” Tanimoto—for all of the chaos that surrounded him—recalled that “the silence in the grove by the river, where hundreds of gruesomely wounded suffered together, was one of the most dreadful and awesome phenomena of his whole experience.” 

“The hurt ones were quiet; no one wept, much less screamed in pain; no one complained; none of the many who died did so noisily; not even the children cried; very few people even spoke.” 

John Hershey 

At the same time, Hersey also describes the prevalence of radiation sickness amongst the victims. Many who had suffered no physical injuries, including Mrs. Nakamura, reported feeling nauseated long after the attack. Father Kleinsorge “complained that the bomb had upset his digestion and given him abdominal pains” and his white blood count was elevated to seven times the normal level while he consistently ran a 104 degree temperature. Doctors encountered many instances of what would become known as radiation poisoning but often assured their patients that they would “be out of the hospital in two weeks.” Meanwhile, they told families, “All these people will die—you’ll see. They go along for a couple of weeks and then they die.”

Hersey’s interviews also highlighted the inconceivable impact of the nuclear blast. Americans may have believed that such a powerful explosion would be deafening, but the interviewees offered a different take. More than a sound, most of the interviewees described blinding light at the moment of the attack. Dr. Terufumi Sasaki remembered the light of the bomb “reflected, like a gigantic photographic flash,” through an open window while Father Kleinsorge later realized that the “terrible flash” had “reminded him of something he had read as a boy about a large meteor colliding with the earth.” Hersey’s title of the first chapter is, in fact, “A Noiseless Flash.”

The attack also left a bizarre mark on the landscape. While buildings were reduced to rubble, the power of the bomb “had not only left the underground organs of plants intact; it had stimulated them.” Miss Sasaki was surprised upon her return to Hiroshima in September by the “blanket of fresh, vivid, lush, optimistic green” plants that grew over the destruction and the day lilies that blossomed from the heaps of debris. Others remembered eating pumpkins and potatoes that were perfectly roasted in the ground by the fantastic heat and energy of the bomb.

With its raw descriptions of the terror and destruction faced by the residents of Hiroshima, Hersey’s article broke records for The New Yorker  and became the first human account of the attack for most Americans. All 300,000 editions of The New Yorker  sold out almost immediately. The success of the article resulted in a reprinted book edition in November that continues to be read by many around the world. Meanwhile, Hersey remained relatively removed from his work, refusing most interviews on the book and choosing instead to let the work speak for itself. 

Decades later, his six interviewees remain a human connection to the attacks and the deep, philosophical questions they raised. “A hundred thousand people were killed by the atomic bomb, and these six were among the survivors,” Hersey said, leaving them to “still wonder why they lived when so many others died,” or “too busy or too weary or too badly hurt to care that they were the objects of the first great experiment in the use of the atomic power which…no country except the United States, with its industrial know-how, its willingness to throw two billion gold dollars into an important wartime gamble, could possibly have developed.”

This article is part of a series commemorating the 75th anniversary of the end of World War II made possible by the Department of Defense.

Stephanie Hinnershitz, PhD

Stephanie Hinnershitz is a historian of twentieth century US history with a focus on the Home Front and civil-military relations during World War II.

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Bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki

By: History.com Editors

Updated: July 31, 2024 | Original: November 18, 2009

On August 6, 1945, during World War II (1939-45), an American B-29 bomber dropped the world’s first deployed atomic bomb over the Japanese city of Hiroshima. The explosion immediately killed an estimated 80,000 people; tens of thousands more would later die of radiation exposure. Three days later, a second B-29 dropped another A-bomb on Nagasaki, killing an estimated 40,000 people. Japan’s Emperor Hirohito announced his country’s unconditional surrender in World War II in a radio address on August 15, citing the devastating power of “a new and most cruel bomb.”

The Manhattan Project

Even before the outbreak of war in 1939, a group of American scientists—many of them refugees from fascist regimes in Europe—became concerned with nuclear weapons research being conducted in Nazi Germany . In 1940, the U.S. government began funding its own atomic weapons development program, which came under the joint responsibility of the Office of Scientific Research and Development and the War Department after the U.S. entry into World War II . The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers was tasked with spearheading the construction of the vast facilities necessary for the top-secret program, codenamed “The Manhattan Project ” (for the engineering corps’ Manhattan district).

Over the next several years, the program’s scientists worked on producing the key materials for nuclear fission—uranium-235 and plutonium (Pu-239). They sent them to Los Alamos, New Mexico , where a team led by J. Robert Oppenheimer worked to turn these materials into a workable atomic bomb. Early on the morning of July 16, 1945, the Manhattan Project held its first successful test of an atomic device —a plutonium bomb—at the Trinity test site at Alamogordo, New Mexico.

No Surrender for the Japanese

By the time of the Trinity test, the Allied powers had already defeated Germany in Europe . Japan, however, vowed to fight to the bitter end in the Pacific, despite clear indications (as early as 1944) that they had little chance of winning. In fact, between mid-April 1945 (when President Harry Truman took office) and mid-July, Japanese forces inflicted Allied casualties totaling nearly half those suffered in three full years of war in the Pacific, proving that Japan had become even more deadly when faced with defeat. In late July, Japan’s militarist government rejected the Allied demand for surrender put forth in the Potsdam Declaration, which threatened the Japanese with “prompt and utter destruction” if they refused.

General Douglas MacArthur and other top military commanders favored continuing the conventional bombing of Japan already in effect and following up with a massive invasion, codenamed “Operation Downfall.” They advised Truman that such an invasion would result in U.S. casualties of up to 1 million. In order to avoid such a high casualty rate, Truman decided–over the moral reservations of Secretary of War Henry Stimson, General Dwight Eisenhower and a number of the Manhattan Project scientists–to use the atomic bomb in the hopes of bringing the war to a quick end. Proponents of the A-bomb—such as James Byrnes, Truman’s secretary of state—believed that its devastating power would not only end the war, but also put the U.S. in a dominant position to determine the course of the postwar world.

Why Did the U.S. Bomb Hiroshima and Nagasaki?

Hiroshima, a manufacturing center of some 350,000 people located about 500 miles from Tokyo, was selected as the first target. After arriving at the U.S. base on the Pacific island of Tinian, the more than 9,000-pound uranium-235 bomb was loaded aboard a modified B-29 bomber christened Enola Gay (after the mother of its pilot, Colonel Paul Tibbets). The plane dropped the bomb—known as “Little Boy”—by parachute at 8:15 in the morning, and it exploded 2,000 feet above Hiroshima in a blast equal to 12-15,000 tons of TNT, destroying five square miles of the city.

Hiroshima’s devastation failed to elicit immediate Japanese surrender, however, and on August 9 Major Charles Sweeney flew another B-29 bomber, Bockscar , from Tinian. Thick clouds over the primary target, the city of Kokura, drove Sweeney to a secondary target, Nagasaki, where the plutonium bomb “Fat Man” was dropped at 11:02 that morning. More powerful than the one used at Hiroshima, the bomb weighed nearly 10,000 pounds and was built to produce a 22-kiloton blast. The topography of Nagasaki, which was nestled in narrow valleys between mountains, reduced the bomb’s effect, limiting the destruction to 2.6 square miles.

Aftermath of the Bombing

At noon on August 15, 1945 (Japanese time), Emperor Hirohito announced his country’s surrender in a radio broadcast. The news spread quickly, and “Victory in Japan” or “V-J Day” celebrations broke out across the United States and other Allied nations. The formal surrender agreement was signed on September 2, aboard the U.S. battleship Missouri, anchored in Tokyo Bay.

Because of the extent of the devastation and chaos—including the fact that much of the two cities' infrastructure was wiped out—exact death tolls from the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki remain unknown. However, it's estimated roughly 70,000 to 135,000 people died in Hiroshima and 60,000 to 80,000 people died in Nagasaki, both from acute exposure to the blasts and from long-term side effects of radiation. 

HISTORY Vault: Hiroshima - 75 Years Later

Marking the anniversary of the 1945 Hiroshima bombing, this special—told entirely from the first-person perspective of leaders, physicists, soldiers and survivors—provides a unique understanding of the most devastating experiment in human history.

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History | August 5, 2020

Nine Eyewitness Accounts of the Bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki

More than seventy-five years ago, the atomic blasts killed an estimated 200,000 people

Meilan Solly

Senior Associate Digital Editor, History

When photographer Haruka Sakaguchi first tried to connect with survivors of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki , her cold calls and emails went unanswered. Then, in 2017, the Brooklyn-based artist decided to visit Japan herself in hopes of meeting someone who knew a hibakusha —the Japanese word for those affected by the August 1945 attacks.

“I sat at the Nagasaki Peace Park for hours trying to differentiate between tourists and locals who were visiting to pray for a loved one—they often wore juzu , or prayer beads,” says Sakaguchi, who immigrated to the U.S. from Japan as an infant in the 1990s. After five hours of people watching, she struck up a conversation with the daughter of a survivor, who agreed to introduce her to eight hibakusha.

Elizabeth Chappell , an oral historian at the Open University in the United Kingdom, encountered similar difficulties after setting out to catalog atomic bomb survivors’ testimony. “When you have a silenced group like that, they have a very internal culture,” she explains. “They’re very protective of their stories. I was told I wouldn’t get interviews.”

Survivors’ reluctance to discuss their experiences stems in large part from the stigma surrounding Japan’s hibakusha community. Due to a limited understanding of radiation poisoning’s long-term effects, many Japanese avoided (or outright abused) those affected out of fear that their ailments were contagious. This misconception, coupled with a widespread unwillingness to revisit the bombings and Japan’s subsequent surrender, led most hibakusha to keep their trauma to themselves. But in the past decade or so, documentary efforts like Sakaguchi’s 1945 Project and Chappell’s The Last Survivors of Hiroshima have become increasingly common—a testament to both survivors’ willingness to defy the long-standing culture of silence and the pressing need to preserve these stories as hibakusha’s numbers dwindle.

When planning for the war in the Pacific's next phase, the U.S. invasion of mainland Japan, the Truman administration estimated that American casualties would be between 1.7 and 4 million, while Japanese casualties could number up to 10 million. Per the National WWII Museum , U.S. intelligence officers warned that “there are no civilians in Japan,” as the imperial government had strategically made newly mobilized combatants’ attire indistinguishable from civilians. They also predicted that Japanese soldiers and civilians alike would choose to fight to the death rather than surrender.

Throughout World War II, the Japanese code of bushido , or “way of the warrior,” guided much of Emperor Hirohito’s strategy. With its actions in China , the Philippines , the surprise attack on Pearl Harbor and elsewhere in Asia, the Imperial Japanese army waged a brutal, indiscriminate campaign against enemy combatants, civilians and prisoners of war. Prizing sacrifice, patriotism and loyalty above all else, the bushido mindset led Japanese soldiers to view their lives as expendable in service of the emperor and consider suicide more honorable than yielding to the enemy. Later in the war, as American troops advanced on the Japanese mainland, civilians indoctrinated to believe that U.S. soldiers would torture and kill those who surrendered also started engaging in mass suicides . The Battle of Okinawa was a particularly bloody example of this practice , with Japanese soldiers even distributing hand grenades to civilians caught in the crossfire.

The accuracy of the U.S. government’s projections, and the question of whether Emperor Hirohito would have surrendered without the use of atomic weapons, is the subject of great historical debate . But the facts remain: When the bombing of Hiroshima failed to produce Japan’s immediate surrender, the U.S. moved forward with plans to drop a second atomic bomb on Nagasaki. That same week, the Soviet Union officially declared war on Japan after years of adhering to a 1941 neutrality pact.

In total, the August 6 and 9 bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, respectively, killed more than 200,000 people . Six days after the second attack, Hirohito announced Japan’s unconditional surrender. The American occupation of Japan , which set out to demilitarize the country and transform it into a democracy, began soon after.

An estimated 650,000 people survived the atomic blasts, only to find their post-war lives marred by health issues and marginalization. Hibakusha received little official aid from the temporary occupying government, as American scientists’ understanding of radiation’s effects was only “marginally better” than that of the Japanese, according to the Atomic Heritage Foundation . In September 1945, the New York Times reported that the number of Japanese people who’d died of radiation “was very small.”

Survivors faced numerous forms of discrimination. Survivor Shosho Kawamoto , for instance, proposed to his girlfriend more than a decade after the bombing, but her father forbade the marriage out of fear that their children would bear the brunt of his radiation exposure. Heartbroken, Kawamoto vowed to remain unmarried for the rest of his life.

“Widespread fears that hibakusha are physically or psychologically impaired and that their children might inherit genetic defects stigmatize first- and second-generation hibakusha to this day, especially female survivors,” Sakaguchi says. (Scientists who monitored almost all pregnancies in Hiroshima and Nagasaki between 1948 and 1954 found no “ statistically significant ” increase in birth defects.)

Sakaguchi also cites accounts of workplace discrimination: Women with visible scars were told to stay home and avoid “front-facing work,” while those issued pink booklets identifying them as hibakusha—and indicating their eligibility for healthcare subsidies—were often refused work due to fears of future health complications. Many hibakusha interviewed for the 1945 Project avoided obtaining this paperwork until their children were “gainfully employed [and] married or they themselves became very sick” in order to protect their loved ones from being ostracized.

Perhaps the most jarring aspect of hibakusha’s experiences was the lack of recognition afforded to survivors. As Chappell explains, far from reversing the empire’s decades-long policy of strict censorship , U.S. officials in charge of the postwar occupation continued to wield control of the press , even limiting use of the Japanese word for atomic bomb: genbaku. After the Americans left in 1952, Japan’s government further discounted hibakusha, perpetuating what the historian deems “global collective amnesia.” Even the 1957 passage of legislation providing benefits for hibakusha failed to spark meaningful discussion—and understanding—of survivors’ plight.

Writing in 2018, Chappell added, “[T]he hibakusha were the unwelcome reminder of an unknown, unclassifiable event, something so unimaginable society tried to ignore it.”

More recently, aging hibakusha have grown more vocal about their wartime experiences. They share their stories in hopes of helping the next “generations imagine a different kind of future,” according to Chappell, and to plead for nuclear disarmament, says Sakaguchi. Many organizations dedicated to preserving survivors’ testimony—the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum , the Nagasaki Atomic Bomb Museum and the Hiroshima Peace Culture Foundation , among others—were actually founded by hibakusha: “They had to be the first researchers, [and] they had to be their own researchers,” Chappell notes.

Today, hibakusha still face widespread discrimination. Several individuals who agreed to participate in Sakaguchi’s 1945 Project later withdrew, citing fears that friends and colleagues would see their portraits. Still, despite fear of retaliation, survivors continue to speak out. Below, find nine such firsthand accounts of the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, collected here to mark the 75th anniversary of the attacks.

This article contains graphic depictions of the atomic bombings’ aftermath. The survivor quotes chosen from interviews with Sakaguchi were spoken in Japanese and translated by the photographer.

Taeko Teramae

Hiroshima survivor Taeko Teramae didn’t realize the full extent of her injuries until her younger brothers started making fun of her appearance . Confused, the 15-year-old asked her parents for a mirror—a request they denied, leading her to surreptitiously track one down on a day they’d left the house.

“I was so surprised I found my left eye looked just like a pomegranate, and I also found cuts on my right eye and on my nose and on my lower jaw,” she recalled . “It was horrible. I was very shocked to find myself looking like a monster.”

On the day of the bombing, Teramae was one of thousands of students mobilized to help fill Hiroshima’s wartime labor shortages. Assigned to the city’s Telephone Bureau, she was on the building’s second floor when she heard a “tremendous noise.” The walls collapsed, momentarily blanketing the workers in darkness. “I began to choke on the consequent smoke— poisonous gas, it seemed like—and vomited uncontrollably,” wrote Teramae in a 1985 article for Heiwa Bunka magazine .

Amid the din of cries for help, a single voice called out: “We must endure this, like the proud scholars that we are!” It was Teramae’s homeroom teacher, Chiyoko Wakita, who was herself not much older than her students. Comforted by Wakita’s words, the children gradually quieted down.

Teramae managed to escape by jumping out of a second-story window and climbing down a telephone pole. But when she tried to cross the Kyobashi River to safety, she found its only bridge in flames and the city she’d left behind “engulfed in a sea of fire.” Once again, Wakita came to her charge’s rescue, accompanying her on the swim across the river and offering encouragement throughout the arduous journey. After dropping Teramae off at an evacuation center, the young teacher returned to Hiroshima to help her other students. She died of her injuries on August 30.

“[Wakita] saved my life, yet I was not able to tell her a simple ‘thank you,’” Teramae later said. “I deeply regret this, to this day.”

Sachiko Matsuo

Sometime before the bombing of Nagasaki, 11-year-old Sachiko Matsuo ’s father happened upon a leaflet dropped by American pilots to warn the city’s residents of an imminent attack. Taking the message seriously, he constructed a makeshift cabin high up on a mountain overlooking Nagasaki and, in the days leading up to the scheduled bombing, implored his extended family to take shelter there from morning until evening. But when August 8—the supposed day of the attack—passed without incident, Matsuo’s mother and aunt told him they wanted to stay home.

Reflecting on the argument that followed in an interview with Sakaguchi , Matsuo said her father demanded that the pair return to the barracks, pointing out that the United States’ time zone was one day behind Japan’s. “When they opposed, he got very upset and stormed out to go to work,” she added. Meanwhile, his remaining family members “changed our minds and decided to hide out in the barrack for one more day.” The bomb struck just hours later. All those hidden in the cabin survived the initial impact, albeit with a number of severe burns and lacerations.

“After a while, we became worried about our house, so I walked to a place from where I would be able to see the house, but there was something like a big cloud covering the whole city, and the cloud was growing and climbing up toward us,” Matsuo explained in 2017. “I could see nothing below. My grandmother started to cry, ‘Everybody is dead. This is the end of the world.’”

Matsuo’s father, who’d been stationed outside of an arms factory with his civil defense unit when the bomb struck, returned to the cabin that afternoon. He’d sustained several injuries, including wounds to the head, hands and legs, and required a cane to walk. His eldest son, who’d also been out with a civil defense unit, died in the blast. The family later spotted his corpse resting on a rooftop, but by the time they returned to retrieve it, the body was gone.

In the weeks after the bombing, Matsuo’s father began suffering from the effects of radiation. “He soon came down with diarrhea and a high fever,” she told Sakaguchi. “His hair began to fall out and dark spots formed on his skin. My father passed away—suffering greatly—on August 28.”

Norimitsu Tosu

Every morning, Norimitsu Tosu ’s mother took him and his twin brother on a walk around their Hiroshima neighborhood. August 6 was no different: The trio had just returned from their daily walk, and the 3-year-olds were in the bathroom washing their hands. Then, the walls collapsed, trapping the brothers under a pile of debris. Their mother, who’d briefly lost consciousness, awoke to the sound of her sons’ cries. Bleeding “all over,” Tosu told the National Catholic Reporter ’s David E. DeCosse in 2016, she pulled them from the rubble and brought them to a relative’s house.

Five of Tosu’s seven immediate family members survived the bombing. His father, temporarily jailed over an accusation of bribery, was shielded by the prison’s strong walls, but two siblings—an older brother named Yoshihiro and a sister named Hiroko—died. The family was only able to learn of Yoshihiro’s fate: According to Tosu, “We didn't know what happened to [Hiroko], and we never located her body. Nothing. We didn't even know where exactly she was when the bomb exploded.”

Given his age at the time of the attack, Tosu doesn’t remember much of the actual aftermath. But as he explained to grandson Justin Hsieh in 2019 , one memory stands out:

When we were evacuating, there were dead horses, dogs, animals and people everywhere. And the smells I remember. There was this terrible smell. It smelled like canned salmon. So for a long time after that, I couldn’t eat canned salmon because the smell reminded me of that. It was sickening. So more than anything I saw or heard, it was the smell that I remember the most.

Yoshiro Yamawaki

The day after the U.S. dropped an atomic bomb on Nagasaki, 11-year-old Yoshiro Yamawaki went out in search of his father, who had failed to return from a shift at the local power station. On the way to the factory, Yamawaki and two of his brothers saw unspeakable horrors , including corpses whose “skin would come peeling off just like that of an over-ripe peach, exposing the white fat underneath”; a young woman whose intestines dragged behind her in what the trio at first thought was a long white cloth belt; and a 6- or 7-year-old boy whose parasitic roundworms had come “shooting out” of his mouth post-mortem.

The boys soon arrived at the power station, which was situated near the bomb’s hypocenter and had been reduced to little more than a pile of scorched metal. Spotting three men with shovels, they called out, “Our name is Yamawaki. Where is our father?” In response, one of the men pointed toward a demolished building across the street and simply said, “Your father is over there.”

Joy quickly turned to anguish as the brothers spotted their father’s corpse, “swollen and scorched just like all the others.” After consulting with the older men, they realized that they’d need to either cremate his remains to bring home to their mother or bury his body onsite. Unsure what else to do, they gathered smoldering pieces of wood and built a makeshift funeral pyre.

The men advised the brothers to come back for their father’s ashes the following day. Too overcome with emotion to remain, they agreed. But upon returning to the factory the following morning, they found their father’s half-cremated body abandoned and coated in ash.

“My brother looked at our father's body for a while longer, and then said, ‘We can't do anything more. We’ll just take his skull home and that will be the end,’” Yamawaki recalled at age 75.

When the young boy went to retrieve the skull with a pair of tongs brought from home, however, “it crumbled apart like a plaster model and the half-burned brains came flowing out.”

“Letting out a scream, my brother threw down the tongs, and darted away,” said Yamawaki. “The two of us ran after him. [These] were the circumstances under which we forsook our father's body.”

Sakaguchi, who photographed Yamawaki for the 1945 Project , offers another perspective on the incident, saying, “Aside from the traumatic experience of having to cremate your own father, I was awestruck by Mr. Yamawaki and his brothers’ persistence—at a young age, no less—to send their father off with quietude and dignity under such devastating circumstances.”

Kikue Shiota

August 6 was “an unimaginably beautiful day” punctuated by a “blinding light that flashed as if a thousand magnesium bulbs had been turned on all at once,” Hiroshima survivor Kikue Shiota later recalled. The blast trapped 21-year-old Shiota and her 16-year-old sister beneath the remains of their razed house, more than a mile from the bomb’s hypocenter.

After Shiota’s father rescued his daughters from the rubble, they set out in search of their remaining family members. Burned bodies were scattered everywhere, making it impossible to walk without stepping on someone. The sisters saw a newborn baby still attached to its dead mother’s umbilical cord lying on the side of the road.

As the pair walked the streets of Hiroshima, their 10-year-old brother conducted a similar search. When Shiota finally spotted him standing among a crowd of people, she was horrified: “All the skin on his face was peeling off and dangling,” she said. “He was limping feebly, all the skin from his legs burned and dragging behind him like a heap of rags.”

The young boy survived his injuries. His 14-year-old sister, Mitsue, did not. Though the family never recovered her body, they were forced to face the worst after finding a scrap of Mitsue’s school uniform burned into the asphalt.

“I thought my heart would surely stop because the very cloth I found was my sister’s, Mitsue, my little sister,” Shiota remembered. “‘Mi-chan!’ I called out to her. ‘It must have been terribly hot. The pain must have been unbearable. You must have screamed for help.’ … My tears falling, I searched for my sister in vain.”

One month after the bombing, the family lost another loved one: Shiota’s mother, who had appeared to be in good health up until the day before her passing, died of acute leukemia caused by the blast’s radioactive rays. She was cremated in a pit dug by a neighbor as her grief-stricken daughter looked on.

Akiko Takakura

Decades after the bombing of Hiroshima, the image of a man whose charred fingertips had been engulfed in blue flames remained imprinted in Akiko Takakura ’s memory. “With those fingers, the man had probably picked up his children and turned the pages of books,” the then-88-year-old told the Chugoku Shimbun in 2014. The vision so haunted Takakura that she immortalized it in a 1974 drawing and recounted it to the many schoolchildren she spoke to as a survivor of the August 6 attack. “More than 50 years later, / I remember that blue flame, / and my heart nearly bursts / with sorrow,” she wrote in a poem titled “ To Children Who Don’t Know the Atomic Bomb .”

Takakura was 19 years old when the bomb fell, detonating above a quiet street close to her workplace, the Hiroshima branch of the Sumitomo Bank . She lost consciousness after seeing a “white magnesium flash” but later awoke to the sound of a friend, Kimiko Usami, crying out for her mother, according to testimony preserved by the Hiroshima Peace Culture Foundation . The pair managed to escape the building, which had partially shielded those inside with its reinforced concrete walls, and venture into the street. There, they encountered a “whirlpool of fire” that burned everything it touched.

“It was just like a living hell,” Takakura recalled. “After a while, it began to rain. The fire and the smoke made us so thirsty and there was nothing to drink. … People opened their mouths and turned their faces toward the sky [to] try to drink the rain, but it wasn't easy to catch the rain drops in our mouths. It was a black rain with big drops.” ( Kikue Shiota described the rain as “inky black and oily like coal tar.”)

The fire eventually died down, enabling Takakura and Usami to navigate through streets littered with the “ reddish-brown corpses of those who were killed instantly.” Upon reaching a nearby drill ground, the young women settled in for the night with only a sheet of corrugated tin for warmth. On August 10, Takakura’s mother took her daughter, who had sustained more than 100 lacerations all over her body, home to begin the lengthy recovery process. Usami succumbed to her injuries less than a month later.

Hiroyasu Tagawa

In the spring of 1945, government-mandated evacuations led 12-year-old Hiroyasu Tagawa and his sister to move in with their aunt, who lived a short distance away from Nagasaki, while his parents relocated to a neighborhood close to their workplace in the city center.

On the morning of August 9, Tagawa heard what he thought might be a B-29 bomber flying overhead. Curious, he rushed outside to take a look. “Suddenly everything turned orange,” Tagawa told Forbes ’ Jim Clash in 2018. “I quickly covered my eyes and ears and laid down on the ground. This was the position we practiced daily at school for times like this. Soon dust and debris and pieces of glass were flying everywhere. After that, silence.”

All those living at the aunt’s house survived the blast with minor injuries. But after three days passed with no news of his parents, Tagawa decided to go to the city center and search for them. There, he found piles of corpses and people similarly looking for missing family members. “Using long bamboo sticks, they were turning over one corpse after the other as they floated down the river,” he recalled. “There was an eerie silence and an overwhelming stench.”

Tagawa’s mother found him first, calling out his name as he walked down the street. She and her husband had been staying in a shelter, too badly injured to make the trek back to their children. Mr. Tagawa was in particularly poor shape: A factory worker, he’d been handling dangerous chemicals when the bomb struck. Its impact sent the toxic materials flying, severely burning his feet.

Determined to aid his ailing father, Tagawa recruited several neighbors to help carry him to a temporary hospital, where doctors were forced to amputate with a carpenter’s saw. His father died three days later, leaving his grieving son uncertain of whether he’d done the right thing. “I wondered if I had done wrong by taking him over there,” Tagawa told the Japan Times ’ Noriyuki Suzuki in 2018. “Had I not brought him to have the surgery, maybe he would’ve lived for a longer time. Those regrets felt like thorns in my heart.”

More tragedy was still to come: Shortly after Tagawa returned to his aunt’s town to deliver news of his father’s death, he received word that his mother—suffering from radiation poisoning—was now in critical condition. Bicycling back to her bedside, he arrived just in time to say goodbye :

My aunt said, “Your mother almost died last night, but she wanted to see you one last time. So she gave it her best to live one more day.” My mother looked at me and whispered, “Hiro-chan, my dear child, grow up fast, okay?” And with these words, she drew her last breath.

Shoso Kawamoto

Eleven-year-old Shoso Kawamoto was one of some 2,000 children evacuated from Hiroshima’s city center ahead of the August 6 bombing. As he told the Chugoku Shimbun in 2013, he’d been working in a field north of the city alongside other young evacuees when he noticed a white cloud rising in the sky above Hiroshima. That night, caretakers told the group of 6- to 11-year-olds that the city center—where many of the children’s families lived—had been obliterated.

Three days later, Kawamoto’s 16-year-old sister, Tokie, arrived to pick him up. She arrived with sobering news: Their mother and younger siblings had “died at home, embracing one another,” and their father and an older sister were missing. Kawamoto never learned exactly what happened to them. (According to Elizabeth Chappell , who has interviewed Kawamoto extensively, his “samurai mother and ... farmer father” came from different backgrounds and raised their children in a strict neo-Confucian household.)

After reuniting, the siblings moved into a ruined train station, where they witnessed the plight of other orphaned children. “[W]e did not have enough food to survive,” Kawamoto later explained to author Charles Pellegrino . “We were in a constant tug-of-war over food—sometimes only one dumpling. In the end, the strong survived and the weak died one after another.” Most orphans died within months, wrote Chappell for the Conversation in 2019: Though local women tried to feed them, there simply weren’t enough rations to go around.

Tokie died of an undiagnosed illness, likely leukemia, in February 1946. Following her passing, a soy sauce factory owner took Kawamoto in, feeding and sheltering him in exchange for 12 years of labor. At the end of this period, the man rewarded his surrogate son with a house.

Tsutomu Yamaguchi

To date, the Japanese government has recognized only one survivor of both the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings: naval engineer Tsutomu Yamaguchi , who died in 2010 at age 93. A longtime Nagasaki resident, he’d spent the summer of 1945 on temporary assignment in Hiroshima. August 6 was set to be his last day of work before returning home to his wife and infant son.

That morning, the 29-year-old was walking to the shipyard when a “great flash in the sky” rendered him unconscious. Upon waking up, Yamaguchi told the Times ’ Richard Lloyd Parry, he saw “a huge mushroom-shaped pillar of fire rising up high into the sky. It was like a tornado, although it didn't move, but it rose and spread out horizontally at the top. There was prismatic light, which was changing in a complicated rhythm, like the patterns of a kaleidoscope.”

The blast ruptured Yamaguchi’s eardrums and burned his face and forearms. But after reuniting with two co-workers—Akira Iwanaga and Kuniyoshi Sato—the trio managed to retrieve their belongings from a dormitory and start making their way to the train station. On the way, “We saw a mother with a baby on her back,” Yamaguchi recalled. “She looked as if she had lost her mind. The child on her back was dead and I don’t know if she even realized.”

Sato, who along with Iwanaga also survived both bombings, lost track of his friends on the train ride back to Nagasaki. He ended up sitting across from a young man who spent the journey clasping an awkwardly covered bundle on his lap. Finally, Sato asked what was in the package. The stranger responded, “I married a month ago, but my wife died yesterday. I want to take her home to her parents.” Beneath the cloth, he revealed, rested his beloved’s severed head.

Upon reaching Nagasaki, Yamaguchi visited a hospital to receive treatment for his burns. Deeming himself fit to work, he reported for duty the next day and was in the middle of recounting the bombing when another blinding flash of light filled the room. “I thought the mushroom cloud had followed me from Hiroshima,” he explained to the Independent ’s David McNeill in 2009.

Yamaguchi was relatively unhurt, and when he rushed to check on his wife and son, he found them in a similar state. But over the next several days, he started suffering from the effects of radiation poisoning: As Evan Andrews wrote for History.com in 2015, “His hair fell out, the wounds on his arms turned gangrenous, and he began vomiting incessantly.”

With time, Yamaguchi recovered and went on to live a normal life. He was, in fact, so healthy that he avoided speaking out about his experiences for fear of being “unfair to people who were really sick,” as his daughter Toshiko told the Independent. In total, an estimated 165 people survived both bombings. Yamaguchi remains the only one to receive official recognition.

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Meilan Solly | | READ MORE

Meilan Solly is Smithsonian magazine's senior associate digital editor, history.

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I—A Noiseless Flash

At exactly fifteen minutes past eight in the morning, on August 6, 1945, Japanese time, at the moment when the atomic bomb flashed above Hiroshima, Miss Toshiko Sasaki, a clerk in the personnel department of the East Asia Tin Works, had just sat down at her place in the plant office and was turning her head to speak to the girl at the next desk. At that same moment, Dr. Masakazu Fujii was settling down cross-legged to read the Osaka Asahi on the porch of his private hospital, overhanging one of the seven deltaic rivers which divide Hiroshima; Mrs. Hatsuyo Nakamura, a tailor’s widow, stood by the window of her kitchen, watching a neighbor tearing down his house because it lay in the path of an air-raid-defense fire lane; Father Wilhelm Kleinsorge, a German priest of the Society of Jesus, reclined in his underwear on a cot on the top floor of his order’s three-story mission house, reading a Jesuit magazine, Stimmen der Zeit ; Dr. Terufumi Sasaki, a young member of the surgical staff of the city’s large, modern Red Cross Hospital, walked along one of the hospital corridors with a blood specimen for a Wassermann test in his hand; and the Reverend Mr. Kiyoshi Tanimoto, pastor of the Hiroshima Methodist Church, paused at the door of a rich man’s house in Koi, the city’s western suburb, and prepared to unload a handcart full of things he had evacuated from town in fear of the massive B-29 raid which everyone expected Hiroshima to suffer. A hundred thousand people were killed by the atomic bomb, and these six were among the survivors. They still wonder why they lived when so many others died. Each of them counts many small items of chance or volition—a step taken in time, a decision to go indoors, catching one streetcar instead of the next—that spared him. And now each knows that in the act of survival he lived a dozen lives and saw more death than he ever thought he would see. At the time, none of them knew anything.

The Reverend Mr. Tanimoto got up at five o’clock that morning. He was alone in the parsonage, because for some time his wife had been commuting with their year-old baby to spend nights with a friend in Ushida, a suburb to the north. Of all the important cities of Japan, only two, Kyoto and Hiroshima, had not been visited in strength by B-san , or Mr. B, as the Japanese, with a mixture of respect and unhappy familiarity, called the B-29; and Mr. Tanimoto, like all his neighbors and friends, was almost sick with anxiety. He had heard uncomfortably detailed accounts of mass raids on Kure, Iwakuni, Tokuyama, and other nearby towns; he was sure Hiroshima’s turn would come soon. He had slept badly the night before, because there had been several air-raid warnings. Hiroshima had been getting such warnings almost every night for weeks, for at that time the B-29s were using Lake Biwa, northeast of Hiroshima, as a rendezvous point, and no matter what city the Americans planned to hit, the Super-fortresses streamed in over the coast near Hiroshima. The frequency of the warnings and the continued abstinence of Mr. B with respect to Hiroshima had made its citizens jittery; a rumor was going around that the Americans were saving something special for the city.

Mr. Tanimoto is a small man, quick to talk, laugh, and cry. He wears his black hair parted in the middle and rather long; the prominence of the frontal bones just above his eyebrows and the smallness of his mustache, mouth, and chin give him a strange, old-young look, boyish and yet wise, weak and yet fiery. He moves nervously and fast, but with a restraint which suggests that he is a cautious, thoughtful man. He showed, indeed, just those qualities in the uneasy days before the bomb fell. Besides having his wife spend the nights in Ushida, Mr. Tanimoto had been carrying all the portable things from his church, in the close-packed residential district called Nagaragawa, to a house that belonged to a rayon manufacturer in Koi, two miles from the center of town. The rayon man, a Mr. Matsui, had opened his then unoccupied estate to a large number of his friends and acquaintances, so that they might evacuate whatever they wished to a safe distance from the probable target area. Mr. Tanimoto had had no difficulty in moving chairs, hymnals, Bibles, altar gear, and church records by pushcart himself, but the organ console and an upright piano required some aid. A friend of his named Matsuo had, the day before, helped him get the piano out to Koi; in return, he had promised this day to assist Mr. Matsuo in hauling out a daughter’s belongings. That is why he had risen so early.

Mr. Tanimoto cooked his own breakfast. He felt awfully tired. The effort of moving the piano the day before, a sleepless night, weeks of worry and unbalanced diet, the cares of his parish—all combined to make him feel hardly adequate to the new day’s work. There was another thing, too: Mr. Tanimoto had studied theology at Emory College, in Atlanta, Georgia; he had graduated in 1940; he spoke excellent English; he dressed in American clothes; he had corresponded with many American friends right up to the time the war began; and among a people obsessed with a fear of being spied upon—perhaps almost obsessed himself—he found himself growing increasingly uneasy. The police had questioned him several times, and just a few days before, he had heard that an influential acquaintance, a Mr. Tanaka, a retired officer of the Toyo Kisen Kaisha steamship line, an anti-Christian, a man famous in Hiroshima for his showy philanthropies and notorious for his personal tyrannies, had been telling people that Tanimoto should not be trusted. In compensation, to show himself publicly a good Japanese, Mr. Tanimoto had taken on the chairmanship of his local tonarigumi , or Neighborhood Association, and to his other duties and concerns this position had added the business of organizing air-raid defense for about twenty families.

Before six o’clock that morning, Mr. Tanimoto started for Mr. Matsuo’s house. There he found that their burden was to be a tansu , a large Japanese cabinet, full of clothing and household goods. The two men set out. The morning was perfectly clear and so warm that the day promised to be uncomfortable. A few minutes after they started, the air-raid siren went off—a minute-long blast that warned of approaching planes but indicated to the people of Hiroshima only a slight degree of danger, since it sounded every morning at this time, when an American weather plane came over. The two men pulled and pushed the handcart through the city streets. Hiroshima was a fan-shaped city, lying mostly on the six islands formed by the seven estuarial rivers that branch out from the Ota River; its main commercial and residential districts, covering about four square miles in the center of the city, contained three-quarters of its population, which had been reduced by several evacuation programs from a wartime peak of 380,000 to about 245,000. Factories and other residential districts, or suburbs, lay compactly around the edges of the city. To the south were the docks, an airport, and the island-studded Inland Sea. A rim of mountains runs around the other three sides of the delta. Mr. Tanimoto and Mr. Matsuo took their way through the shopping center, already full of people, and across two of the rivers to the sloping streets of Koi, and up them to the outskirts and foothills. As they started up a valley away from the tight-ranked houses, the all-clear sounded. (The Japanese radar operators, detecting only three planes, supposed that they comprised a reconnaissance.) Pushing the handcart up to the rayon man’s house was tiring, and the men, after they had maneuvered their load into the driveway and to the front steps, paused to rest awhile. They stood with a wing of the house between them and the city. Like most homes in this part of Japan, the house consisted of a wooden frame and wooden walls supporting a heavy tile roof. Its front hall, packed with rolls of bedding and clothing, looked like a cool cave full of fat cushions. Opposite the house, to the right of the front door, there was a large, finicky rock garden. There was no sound of planes. The morning was still; the place was cool and pleasant.

Then a tremendous flash of light cut across the sky. Mr. Tanimoto has a distinct recollection that it travelled from east to west, from the city toward the hills. It seemed a sheet of sun. Both he and Mr. Matsuo reacted in terror—and both had time to react (for they were 3,500 yards, or two miles, from the center of the explosion). Mr. Matsuo dashed up the front steps into the house and dived among the bedrolls and buried himself there. Mr. Tanimoto took four or five steps and threw himself between two big rocks in the garden. He bellied up very hard against one of them. As his face was against the stone, he did not see what happened. He felt a sudden pressure, and then splinters and pieces of board and fragments of tile fell on him. He heard no roar. (Almost no one in Hiroshima recalls hearing any noise of the bomb. But a fisherman in his sampan on the Inland Sea near Tsuzu, the man with whom Mr. Tanimoto’s mother-in-law and sister-in-law were living, saw the flash and heard a tremendous explosion; he was nearly twenty miles from Hiroshima, but the thunder was greater than when the B-29s hit Iwakuni, only five miles away.)

When he dared, Mr. Tanimoto raised his head and saw that the rayon man’s house had collapsed. He thought a bomb had fallen directly on it. Such clouds of dust had risen that there was a sort of twilight around. In panic, not thinking for the moment of Mr. Matsuo under the ruins, he dashed out into the street. He noticed as he ran that the concrete wall of the estate had fallen over—toward the house rather than away from it. In the street, the first thing he saw was a squad of soldiers who had been burrowing into the hillside opposite, making one of the thousands of dugouts in which the Japanese apparently intended to resist invasion, hill by hill, life for life; the soldiers were coming out of the hole, where they should have been safe, and blood was running from their heads, chests, and backs. They were silent and dazed.

Under what seemed to be a local dust cloud, the day grew darker and darker.

At nearly midnight, the night before the bomb was dropped, an announcer on the city’s radio station said that about two hundred B-29s were approaching southern Honshu and advised the population of Hiroshima to evacuate to their designated “safe areas.” Mrs. Hatsuyo Nakamura, the tailor’s widow, who lived in the section called Nobori-cho and who had long had a habit of doing as she was told, got her three children—a ten-year-old boy, Toshio, an eight-year-old girl, Yaeko, and a five-year-old girl, Myeko—out of bed and dressed them and walked with them to the military area known as the East Parade Ground, on the northeast edge of the city. There she unrolled some mats and the children lay down on them. They slept until about two, when they were awakened by the roar of the planes going over Hiroshima.

As soon as the planes had passed, Mrs. Nakamura started back with her children. They reached home a little after two-thirty and she immediately turned on the radio, which, to her distress, was just then broadcasting a fresh warning. When she looked at the children and saw how tired they were, and when she thought of the number of trips they had made in past weeks, all to no purpose, to the East Parade Ground, she decided that in spite of the instructions on the radio, she simply could not face starting out all over again. She put the children in their bedrolls on the floor, lay down herself at three o’clock, and fell asleep at once, so soundly that when planes passed over later, she did not waken to their sound.

The siren jarred her awake at about seven. She arose, dressed quickly, and hurried to the house of Mr. Nakamoto, the head of her Neighborhood Association, and asked him what she should do. He said that she should remain at home unless an urgent warning—a series of intermittent blasts of the siren—was sounded. She returned home, lit the stove in the kitchen, set some rice to cook, and sat down to read that morning’s Hiroshima Chugoku . To her relief, the all-clear sounded at eight o’clock. She heard the children stirring, so she went and gave each of them a handful of peanuts and told them to stay on their bedrolls, because they were tired from the night’s walk. She had hoped that they would go back to sleep, but the man in the house directly to the south began to make a terrible hullabaloo of hammering, wedging, ripping, and splitting. The prefectural government, convinced, as everyone in Hiroshima was, that the city would be attacked soon, had begun to press with threats and warnings for the completion of wide fire lanes, which, it was hoped, might act in conjunction with the rivers to localize any fires started by an incendiary raid; and the neighbor was reluctantly sacrificing his home to the city’s safety. Just the day before, the prefecture had ordered all able-bodied girls from the secondary schools to spend a few days helping to clear these lanes, and they started work soon after the all-clear sounded.

Mrs. Nakamura went back to the kitchen, looked at the rice, and began watching the man next door. At first, she was annoyed with him for making so much noise, but then she was moved almost to tears by pity. Her emotion was specifically directed toward her neighbor, tearing down his home, board by board, at a time when there was so much unavoidable destruction, but undoubtedly she also felt a generalized, community pity, to say nothing of self-pity. She had not had an easy time. Her husband, Isawa, had gone into the Army just after Myeko was born, and she had heard nothing from or of him for a long time, until, on March 5, 1942, she received a seven-word telegram: “Isawa died an honorable death at Singapore.” She learned later that he had died on February 15th, the day Singapore fell, and that he had been a corporal. Isawa had been a not particularly prosperous tailor, and his only capital was a Sankoku sewing machine. After his death, when his allotments stopped coming, Mrs. Nakamura got out the machine and began to take in piecework herself, and since then had supported the children, but poorly, by sewing.

As Mrs. Nakamura stood watching her neighbor, everything flashed whiter than any white she had ever seen. She did not notice what happened to the man next door; the reflex of a mother set her in motion toward her children. She had taken a single step (the house was 1,350 yards, or three-quarters of a mile, from the center of the explosion) when something picked her up and she seemed to fly into the next room over the raised sleeping platform, pursued by parts of her house.

Timbers fell around her as she landed, and a shower of tiles pommelled her; everything became dark, for she was buried. The debris did not cover her deeply. She rose up and freed herself. She heard a child cry, “Mother, help me!,” and saw her youngest—Myeko, the five-year-old—buried up to her breast and unable to move. As Mrs. Nakamura started frantically to claw her way toward the baby, she could see or hear nothing of her other children.

In the days right before the bombing, Dr. Masakazu Fujii, being prosperous, hedonistic, and, at the time, not too busy, had been allowing himself the luxury of sleeping until nine or nine-thirty, but fortunately he had to get up early the morning the bomb was dropped to see a house guest off on a train. He rose at six, and half an hour later walked with his friend to the station, not far away, across two of the rivers. He was back home by seven, just as the siren sounded its sustained warning. He ate breakfast and then, because the morning was already hot, undressed down to his underwear and went out on the porch to read the paper. This porch—in fact, the whole building—was curiously constructed. Dr. Fujii was the proprietor of a peculiarly Japanese institution, a private, single-doctor hospital. This building, perched beside and over the water of the Kyo River, and next to the bridge of the same name, contained thirty rooms for thirty patients and their kinfolk—for, according to Japanese custom, when a person falls sick and goes to a hospital, one or more members of his family go and live there with him, to cook for him, bathe, massage, and read to him, and to offer incessant familial sympathy, without which a Japanese patient would be miserable indeed. Dr. Fujii had no beds—only straw mats—for his patients. He did, however, have all sorts of modern equipment: an X-ray machine, diathermy apparatus, and a fine tiled laboratory. The structure rested two-thirds on the land, one-third on piles over the tidal waters of the Kyo. This overhang, the part of the building where Dr. Fujii lived, was queer-looking, but it was cool in summer and from the porch, which faced away from the center of the city, the prospect of the river, with pleasure boats drifting up and down it, was always refreshing. Dr. Fujii had occasionally had anxious moments when the Ota and its mouth branches rose to flood, but the piling was apparently firm enough and the house had always held.

Dr. Fujii had been relatively idle for about a month because in July, as the number of untouched cities in Japan dwindled and as Hiroshima seemed more and more inevitably a target, he began turning patients away, on the ground that in case of a fire raid he would not be able to evacuate them. Now he had only two patients left—a woman from Yano, injured in the shoulder, and a young man of twenty-five recovering from burns he had suffered when the steel factory near Hiroshima in which he worked had been hit.

Dr. Fujii had six nurses to tend his patients. His wife and children were safe; his wife and one son were living outside Osaka, and another son and two daughters were in the country on Kyushu. A niece was living with him, and a maid and a manservant. He had little to do and did not mind, for he had saved some money. At fifty, he was healthy, convivial, and calm, and he was pleased to pass the evenings drinking whiskey with friends, always sensibly and for the sake of conversation. Before the war, he had affected brands imported from Scotland and America; now he was perfectly satisfied with the best Japanese brand, Suntory.

Dr. Fujii sat down cross-legged in his underwear on the spotless matting of the porch, put on his glasses, and started reading the Osaka Asahi . He liked to read the Osaka news because his wife was there. He saw the flash. To him—faced away from the center and looking at his paper—it seemed a brilliant yellow. Startled, he began to rise to his feet. In that moment (he was 1,550 yards from the center), the hospital leaned behind his rising and, with a terrible ripping noise, toppled into the river. The Doctor, still in the act of getting to his feet, was thrown forward and around and over; he was buffeted and gripped; he lost track of everything, because things were so speeded up; he felt the water.

Dr. Fujii hardly had time to think that he was dying before he realized that he was alive, squeezed tightly by two long timbers in a V across his chest, like a morsel suspended between two huge chopsticks—held upright, so that he could not move, with his head miraculously above water and his torso and legs in it. The remains of his hospital were all around him in a mad assortment of splintered lumber and materials for the relief of pain. His left shoulder hurt terribly. His glasses were gone.

Father Wilhelm Kleinsorge, of the Society of Jesus, was, on the morning of the explosion, in rather frail condition. The Japanese wartime diet had not sustained him, and he felt the strain of being a foreigner in an increasingly xenophobic Japan; even a German, since the defeat of the Fatherland, was unpopular. Father Kleinsorge had, at thirty-eight, the look of a boy growing too fast—thin in the face, with a prominent Adam’s apple, a hollow chest, dangling hands, big feet. He walked clumsily, leaning forward a little. He was tired all the time. To make matters worse, he had suffered for two days, along with Father Cieslik, a fellow-priest, from a rather painful and urgent diarrhea, which they blamed on the beans and black ration bread they were obliged to eat. Two other priests then living in the mission compound, which was in the Nobori-cho section—Father Superior LaSalle and Father Schiffer—had happily escaped this affliction.

Father Kleinsorge woke up about six the morning the bomb was dropped, and half an hour later—he was a bit tardy because of his sickness—he began to read Mass in the mission chapel, a small Japanese-style wooden building which was without pews, since its worshippers knelt on the usual Japanese matted floor, facing an altar graced with splendid silks, brass, silver, and heavy embroideries. This morning, a Monday, the only worshippers were Mr. Takemoto, a theological student living in the mission house; Mr. Fukai, the secretary of the diocese; Mrs. Murata, the mission’s devoutly Christian housekeeper; and his fellow-priests. After Mass, while Father Kleinsorge was reading the Prayers of Thanksgiving, the siren sounded. He stopped the service and the missionaries retired across the compound to the bigger building. There, in his room on the ground floor, to the right of the front door, Father Kleinsorge changed into a military uniform which he had acquired when he was teaching at the Rokko Middle School in Kobe and which he wore during air-raid alerts.

After an alarm, Father Kleinsorge always went out and scanned the sky, and this time, when he stepped outside, he was glad to see only the single weather plane that flew over Hiroshima each day about this time. Satisfied that nothing would happen, he went in and breakfasted with the other Fathers on substitute coffee and ration bread, which, under the circumstances, was especially repugnant to him. The Fathers sat and talked a while, until, at eight, they heard the all-clear. They went then to various parts of the building. Father Schiffer retired to his room to do some writing. Father Cieslik sat in his room in a straight chair with a pillow over his stomach to ease his pain, and read. Father Superior LaSalle stood at the window of his room, thinking. Father Kleinsorge went up to a room on the third floor, took off all his clothes except his underwear, and stretched out on his right side on a cot and began reading his Stimmen der Zeit .

After the terrible flash—which, Father Kleinsorge later realized, reminded him of something he had read as a boy about a large meteor colliding with the earth—he had time (since he was 1,400 yards from the center) for one thought: A bomb has fallen directly on us. Then, for a few seconds or minutes, he went out of his mind.

Father Kleinsorge never knew how he got out of the house. The next things he was conscious of were that he was wandering around in the mission’s vegetable garden in his underwear, bleeding slightly from small cuts along his left flank; that all the buildings round about had fallen down except the Jesuits’ mission house, which had long before been braced and double-braced by a priest named Gropper, who was terrified of earthquakes; that the day had turned dark; and that Murata- san , the housekeeper, was nearby, crying over and over, “ Shu Jesusu, awaremi tamai! Our Lord Jesus, have pity on us!”

On the train on the way into Hiroshima from the country, where he lived with his mother, Dr. Terufumi Sasaki, the Red Cross Hospital surgeon, thought over an unpleasant nightmare he had had the night before. His mother’s home was in Mukaihara, thirty miles from the city, and it took him two hours by train and tram to reach the hospital. He had slept uneasily all night and had wakened an hour earlier than usual, and, feeling sluggish and slightly feverish, had debated whether to go to the hospital at all; his sense of duty finally forced him to go, and he had started out on an earlier train than he took most mornings. The dream had particularly frightened him because it was so closely associated, on the surface at least, with a disturbing actuality. He was only twenty-five years old and had just completed his training at the Eastern Medical University, in Tsingtao, China. He was something of an idealist and was much distressed by the inadequacy of medical facilities in the country town where his mother lived. Quite on his own, and without a permit, he had begun visiting a few sick people out there in the evenings, after his eight hours at the hospital and four hours’ commuting. He had recently learned that the penalty for practicing without a permit was severe; a fellow-doctor whom he had asked about it had given him a serious scolding. Nevertheless, he had continued to practice. In his dream, he had been at the bedside of a country patient when the police and the doctor he had consulted burst into the room, seized him, dragged him outside, and beat him up cruelly. On the train, he just about decided to give up the work in Mukaihara, since he felt it would be impossible to get a permit, because the authorities would hold that it would conflict with his duties at the Red Cross Hospital.

At the terminus, he caught a streetcar at once. (He later calculated that if he had taken his customary train that morning, and if he had had to wait a few minutes for the streetcar, as often happened, he would have been close to the center at the time of the explosion and would surely have perished.) He arrived at the hospital at seven-forty and reported to the chief surgeon. A few minutes later, he went to a room on the first floor and drew blood from the arm of a man in order to perform a Wassermann test. The laboratory containing the incubators for the test was on the third floor. With the blood specimen in his left hand, walking in a kind of distraction he had felt all morning, probably because of the dream and his restless night, he started along the main corridor on his way toward the stairs. He was one step beyond an open window when the light of the bomb was reflected, like a gigantic photographic flash, in the corridor. He ducked down on one knee and said to himself, as only a Japanese would, “Sasaki, gambare! Be brave!” Just then (the building was 1,650 yards from the center), the blast ripped through the hospital. The glasses he was wearing flew off his face; the bottle of blood crashed against one wall; his Japanese slippers zipped out from under his feet—but otherwise, thanks to where he stood, he was untouched.

Dr. Sasaki shouted the name of the chief surgeon and rushed around to the man’s office and found him terribly cut by glass. The hospital was in horrible confusion: heavy partitions and ceilings had fallen on patients, beds had overturned, windows had blown in and cut people, blood was spattered on the walls and floors, instruments were everywhere, many of the patients were running about screaming, many more lay dead. (A colleague working in the laboratory to which Dr. Sasaki had been walking was dead; Dr. Sasaki’s patient, whom he had just left and who a few moments before had been dreadfully afraid of syphilis, was also dead.) Dr. Sasaki found himself the only doctor in the hospital who was unhurt.

Dr. Sasaki, who believed that the enemy had hit only the building he was in, got bandages and began to bind the wounds of those inside the hospital; while outside, all over Hiroshima, maimed and dying citizens turned their unsteady steps toward the Red Cross Hospital to begin an invasion that was to make Dr. Sasaki forget his private nightmare for a long, long time.

Miss Toshiko Sasaki, the East Asia Tin Works clerk, who is not related to Dr. Sasaki, got up at three o’clock in the morning on the day the bomb fell. There was extra housework to do. Her eleven-month-old brother, Akio, had come down the day before with a serious stomach upset; her mother had taken him to the Tamura Pediatric Hospital and was staying there with him. Miss Sasaki, who was about twenty, had to cook breakfast for her father, a brother, a sister, and herself, and—since the hospital, because of the war, was unable to provide food—to prepare a whole day’s meals for her mother and the baby, in time for her father, who worked in a factory making rubber earplugs for artillery crews, to take the food by on his way to the plant. When she had finished and had cleaned and put away the cooking things, it was nearly seven. The family lived in Koi, and she had a forty-five-minute trip to the tin works, in the section of town called Kannon-machi. She was in charge of the personnel records in the factory. She left Koi at seven, and as soon as she reached the plant, she went with some of the other girls from the personnel department to the factory auditorium. A prominent local Navy man, a former employee, had committed suicide the day before by throwing himself under a train—a death considered honorable enough to warrant a memorial service, which was to be held at the tin works at ten o’clock that morning. In the large hall, Miss Sasaki and the others made suitable preparations for the meeting. This work took about twenty minutes. Miss Sasaki went back to her office and sat down at her desk. She was quite far from the windows, which were off to her left, and behind her were a couple of tall bookcases containing all the books of the factory library, which the personnel department had organized. She settled herself at her desk, put some things in a drawer, and shifted papers. She thought that before she began to make entries in her lists of new employees, discharges, and departures for the Army, she would chat for a moment with the girl at her right. Just as she turned her head away from the windows, the room was filled with a blinding light. She was paralyzed by fear, fixed still in her chair for a long moment (the plant was 1,600 yards from the center).

Everything fell, and Miss Sasaki lost consciousness. The ceiling dropped suddenly and the wooden floor above collapsed in splinters and the people up there came down and the roof above them gave way; but principally and first of all, the bookcases right behind her swooped forward and the contents threw her down, with her left leg horribly twisted and breaking underneath her. There, in the tin factory, in the first moment of the atomic age, a human being was crushed by books.

II—The Fire

Immediately after the explosion, the Reverend Mr. Kiyoshi Tanimoto, having run wildly out of the Matsui estate and having looked in wonderment at the bloody soldiers at the mouth of the dugout they had been digging, attached himself sympathetically to an old lady who was walking along in a daze, holding her head with her left hand, supporting a small boy of three or four on her back with her right, and crying, “I’m hurt! I’m hurt! I’m hurt!” Mr. Tanimoto transferred the child to his own back and led the woman by the hand down the street, which was darkened by what seemed to be a local column of dust. He took the woman to a grammar school not far away that had previously been designated for use as a temporary hospital in case of emergency. By this solicitous behavior, Mr. Tanimoto at once got rid of his terror. At the school, he was much surprised to see glass all over the floor and fifty or sixty injured people already waiting to be treated. He reflected that, although the all-clear had sounded and he had heard no planes, several bombs must have been dropped. He thought of a hillock in the rayon man’s garden from which he could get a view of the whole of Koi—of the whole of Hiroshima, for that matter—and he ran back up to the estate.

From the mound, Mr. Tanimoto saw an astonishing panorama. Not just a patch of Koi, as he had expected, but as much of Hiroshima as he could see through the clouded air was giving off a thick, dreadful miasma. Clumps of smoke, near and far, had begun to push up through the general dust. He wondered how such extensive damage could have been dealt out of a silent sky; even a few planes, far up, would have been audible. Houses nearby were burning, and when huge drops of water the size of marbles began to fall, he half thought that they must be coming from the hoses of firemen fighting the blazes. (They were actually drops of condensed moisture falling from the turbulent tower of dust, heat, and fission fragments that had already risen miles into the sky above Hiroshima.)

Mr. Tanimoto turned away from the sight when he heard Mr. Matsuo call out to ask whether he was all right. Mr. Matsuo had been safely cushioned within the falling house by the bedding stored in the front hall and had worked his way out. Mr. Tanimoto scarcely answered. He had thought of his wife and baby, his church, his home, his parishioners, all of them down in that awful murk. Once more he began to run in fear—toward the city.

Mrs. Hatsuyo Nakamura, the tailor’ s widow, having struggled up from under the ruins of her house after the explosion, and seeing Myeko, the youngest of her three children, buried breast-deep and unable to move, crawled across the debris, hauled at timbers, and flung tiles aside, in a hurried effort to free the child. Then, from what seemed to be caverns far below, she heard two small voices crying, “ Tasukete! Tasukete! Help! Help!”

She called the names of her ten-year-old son and eight-year-old daughter: “Toshio! Yaeko!”

The voices from below answered.

Mrs. Nakamura abandoned Myeko, who at least could breathe, and in a frenzy made the wreckage fly above the crying voices. The children had been sleeping nearly ten feet apart, but now their voices seemed to come from the same place. Toshio, the boy, apparently had some freedom to move, because she could feel him undermining the pile of wood and tiles as she worked from above. At last she saw his head, and she hastily pulled him out by it. A mosquito net was wound intricately, as if it had been carefully wrapped, around his feet. He said he had been blown right across the room and had been on top of his sister Yaeko under the wreckage. She now said, from underneath, that she could not move, because there was something on her legs. With a bit more digging, Mrs. Nakamura cleared a hole above the child and began to pull her arm. “ Itai! It hurts!” Yaeko cried. Mrs. Nakamura shouted, “There’s no time now to say whether it hurts or not,” and yanked her whimpering daughter up. Then she freed Myeko. The children were filthy and bruised, but none of them had a single cut or scratch.

Mrs. Nakamura took the children out into the street. They had nothing on but underpants, and although the day was very hot, she worried rather confusedly about their being cold, so she went back into the wreckage and burrowed underneath and found a bundle of clothes she had packed for an emergency, and she dressed them in pants, blouses, shoes, padded-cotton air-raid helmets called bokuzuki , and even, irrationally, overcoats. The children were silent, except for the five-year-old, Myeko, who kept asking questions: “Why is it night already? Why did our house fall down? What happened?” Mrs. Nakamura, who did not know what had happened (had not the all-clear sounded?), looked around and saw through the darkness that all the houses in her neighborhood had collapsed. The house next door, which its owner had been tearing down to make way for a fire lane, was now very thoroughly, if crudely, torn down; its owner, who had been sacrificing his home for the community’s safety, lay dead. Mrs. Nakamoto, wife of the head of the local air-raid-defense Neighborhood Association, came across the street with her head all bloody, and said that her baby was badly cut; did Mrs. Nakamura have any bandage? Mrs. Nakamura did not, but she crawled into the remains of her house again and pulled out some white cloth that she had been using in her work as a seamstress, ripped it into strips, and gave it to Mrs. Nakamoto. While fetching the cloth, she noticed her sewing machine; she went back in for it and dragged it out. Obviously, she could not carry it with her, so she unthinkingly plunged her symbol of livelihood into the receptacle which for weeks had been her symbol of safety—the cement tank of water in front of her house, of the type every household had been ordered to construct against a possible fire raid.

A nervous neighbor, Mrs. Hataya, called to Mrs. Nakamura to run away with her to the woods in Asano Park—an estate, by the Kyo River not far off, belonging to the wealthy Asano family, who once owned the Toyo Kisen Kaisha steamship line. The park had been designated as an evacuation area for their neighborhood. Seeing fire breaking out in a nearby ruin (except at the very center, where the bomb itself ignited some fires, most of Hiroshima’s citywide conflagration was caused by inflammable wreckage falling on cookstoves and live wires), Mrs. Nakamura suggested going over to fight it. Mrs. Hataya said, “Don’t be foolish. What if planes come and drop more bombs?” So Mrs. Nakamura started out for Asano Park with her children and Mrs. Hataya, and she carried her rucksack of emergency clothing, a blanket, an umbrella, and a suitcase of things she had cached in her air-raid shelter. Under many ruins, as they hurried along, they heard muffled screams for help. The only building they saw standing on their way to Asano Park was the Jesuit mission house, alongside the Catholic kindergarten to which Mrs. Nakamura had sent Myeko for a time. As they passed it, she saw Father Kleinsorge, in bloody underwear, running out of the house with a small suitcase in his hand.

Right after the explosion, while Father Wilhelm Kleinsorge, S. J., was wandering around in his underwear in the vegetable garden, Father Superior LaSalle came around the corner of the building in the darkness. His body, especially his back, was bloody; the flash had made him twist away from his window, and tiny pieces of glass had flown at him. Father Kleinsorge, still bewildered, managed to ask, “Where are the rest?” Just then, the two other priests living in the mission house appeared—Father Cieslik, unhurt, supporting Father Schiffer, who was covered with blood that spurted from a cut above his left ear and who was very pale. Father Cieslik was rather pleased with himself, for after the flash he had dived into a doorway, which he had previously reckoned to be the safest place inside the building, and when the blast came, he was not injured. Father LaSalle told Father Cieslik to take Father Schiffer to a doctor before he bled to death, and suggested either Dr. Kanda, who lived on the next corner, or Dr. Fujii, about six blocks away. The two men went out of the compound and up the street.

The daughter of Mr. Hoshijima, the mission catechist, ran up to Father Kleinsorge and said that her mother and sister were buried under the ruins of their house, which was at the back of the Jesuit compound, and at the same time the priests noticed that the house of the Catholic-kindergarten teacher at the foot of the compound had collapsed on her. While Father LaSalle and Mrs. Murata, the mission housekeeper, dug the teacher out, Father Kleinsorge went to the catechist’s fallen house and began lifting things off the top of the pile. There was not a sound underneath; he was sure the Hoshijima women had been killed. At last, under what had been a corner of the kitchen, he saw Mrs. Hoshijima’s head. Believing her dead, he began to haul her out by the hair, but suddenly she screamed, “ Itai! Itai! It hurts! It hurts!” He dug some more and lifted her out. He managed, too, to find her daughter in the rubble and free her. Neither was badly hurt.

A public bath next door to the mission house had caught fire, but since there the wind was southerly, the priests thought their house would be spared. Nevertheless, as a precaution, Father Kleinsorge went inside to fetch some things he wanted to save. He found his room in a state of weird and illogical confusion. A first-aid kit was hanging undisturbed on a hook on the wall, but his clothes, which had been on other hooks nearby, were nowhere to be seen. His desk was in splinters all over the room, but a mere papier-mâché suitcase, which he had hidden under the desk, stood handle-side up, without a scratch on it, in the doorway of the room, where he could not miss it. Father Kleinsorge later came to regard this as a bit of Providential interference, inasmuch as the suitcase contained his breviary, the account books for the whole diocese, and a considerable amount of paper money belonging to the mission, for which he was responsible. He ran out of the house and deposited the suitcase in the mission air-raid shelter.

At about this time, Father Cieslik and Father Schiffer, who was still spurting blood, came back and said that Dr. Kanda’s house was ruined and that fire blocked them from getting out of what they supposed to be the local circle of destruction to Dr. Fujii’s private hospital, on the bank of the Kyo River.

Dr. Masakazu Fujii’s hospital was no longer on the bank of the Kyo River; it was in the river. After the overturn, Dr. Fujii was so stupefied and so tightly squeezed by the beams gripping his chest that he was unable to move at first, and he hung there about twenty minutes in the darkened morning. Then a thought which came to him—that soon the tide would be running in through the estuaries and his head would be submerged—inspired him to fearful activity; he wriggled and turned and exerted what strength he could (though his left arm, because of the pain in his shoulder, was useless), and before long he had freed himself from the vise. After a few moments’ rest, he climbed onto the pile of timbers and, finding a long one that slanted up to the riverbank, he painfully shinnied up it.

Dr. Fujii, who was in his underwear, was now soaking and dirty. His undershirt was torn, and blood ran down it from bad cuts on his chin and back. In this disarray, he walked out onto Kyo Bridge, beside which his hospital had stood. The bridge had not collapsed. He could see only fuzzily without his glasses, but he could see enough to be amazed at the number of houses that were down all around. On the bridge, he encountered a friend, a doctor named Machii, and asked in bewilderment, “What do you think it was?”

Dr. Machii said, “It must have been a Molotoffano hanakago ”—a Molotov flower basket, the delicate Japanese name for the “bread basket,” or self-scattering cluster of bombs.

At first, Dr. Fujii could see only two fires, one across the river from his hospital site and one quite far to the south. But at the same time, he and his friend observed something that puzzled them, and which, as doctors, they discussed: although there were as yet very few fires, wounded people were hurrying across the bridge in an endless parade of misery, and many of them exhibited terrible burns on their faces and arms. “Why do you suppose it is?” Dr. Fujii asked. Even a theory was comforting that day, and Dr. Machii stuck to his. “Perhaps because it was a Molotov flower basket,” he said.

There had been no breeze earlier in the morning when Dr. Fujii had walked to the railway station to see a friend off, but now brisk winds were blowing every which way; here on the bridge the wind was easterly. New fires were leaping up, and they spread quickly, and in a very short time terrible blasts of hot air and showers of cinders made it impossible to stand on the bridge any more. Dr. Machii ran to the far side of the river and along a still unkindled street. Dr. Fujii went down into the water under the bridge, where a score of people had already taken refuge, among them his servants, who had extricated themselves from the wreckage. From there, Dr. Fujii saw a nurse hanging in the timbers of his hospital by her legs, and then another painfully pinned across the breast. He enlisted the help of some of the others under the bridge and freed both of them. He thought he heard the voice of his niece for a moment, but he could not find her; he never saw her again. Four of his nurses and the two patients in the hospital died, too. Dr. Fujii went back into the water of the river and waited for the fire to subside.

The lot of Drs. Fujii, Kanda, and Machii right after the explosion—and, as these three were typical, that of the majority of the physicians and surgeons of Hiroshima—with their offices and hospitals destroyed, their equipment scattered, their own bodies incapacitated in varying degrees, explained why so many citizens who were hurt went untended and why so many who might have lived died. Of a hundred and fifty doctors in the city, sixty-five were already dead and most of the rest were wounded. Of 1,780 nurses, 1,654 were dead or too badly hurt to work. In the biggest hospital, that of the Red Cross, only six doctors out of thirty were able to function, and only ten nurses out of more than two hundred. The sole uninjured doctor on the Red Cross Hospital staff was Dr. Sasaki. After the explosion, he hurried to a storeroom to fetch bandages. This room, like everything he had seen as he ran through the hospital, was chaotic—bottles of medicines thrown off shelves and broken, salves spattered on the walls, instruments strewn everywhere. He grabbed up some bandages and an unbroken bottle of mercurochrome, hurried back to the chief surgeon, and bandaged his cuts. Then he went out into the corridor and began patching up the wounded patients and the doctors and nurses there. He blundered so without his glasses that he took a pair off the face of a wounded nurse, and although they only approximately compensated for the errors of his vision, they were better than nothing. (He was to depend on them for more than a month.)

Dr. Sasaki worked without method, taking those who were nearest him first, and he noticed soon that the corridor seemed to be getting more and more crowded. Mixed in with the abrasions and lacerations which most people in the hospital had suffered, he began to find dreadful burns. He realized then that casualties were pouring in from outdoors. There were so many that he began to pass up the lightly wounded; he decided that all he could hope to do was to stop people from bleeding to death. Before long, patients lay and crouched on the floors of the wards and the laboratories and all the other rooms, and in the corridors, and on the stairs, and in the front hall, and under the porte-cochère, and on the stone front steps, and in the driveway and courtyard, and for blocks each way in the streets outside. Wounded people supported maimed people; disfigured families leaned together. Many people were vomiting. A tremendous number of schoolgirls—some of those who had been taken from their classrooms to work outdoors, clearing fire lanes—crept into the hospital. In a city of two hundred and forty-five thousand, nearly a hundred thousand people had been killed or doomed at one blow; a hundred thousand more were hurt. At least ten thousand of the wounded made their way to the best hospital in town, which was altogether unequal to such a trampling, since it had only six hundred beds, and they had all been occupied. The people in the suffocating crowd inside the hospital wept and cried, for Dr. Sasaki to hear, “ Sensei! Doctor!,” and the less seriously wounded came and pulled at his sleeve and begged him to come to the aid of the worse wounded. Tugged here and there in his stockinged feet, bewildered by the numbers, staggered by so much raw flesh, Dr. Sasaki lost all sense of profession and stopped working as a skillful surgeon and a sympathetic man; he became an automaton, mechanically wiping, daubing, winding, wiping, daubing, winding.

Some of the wounded in Hiroshima were unable to enjoy the questionable luxury of hospitalization. In what had been the personnel office of the East Asia Tin Works, Miss Sasaki lay doubled over, unconscious, under the tremendous pile of books and plaster and wood and corrugated iron. She was wholly unconscious (she later estimated) for about three hours. Her first sensation was of dreadful pain in her left leg. It was so black under the books and debris that the borderline between awareness and unconsciousness was fine; she apparently crossed it several times, for the pain seemed to come and go. At the moments when it was sharpest, she felt that her leg had been cut off somewhere below the knee. Later, she heard someone walking on top of the wreckage above her, and anguished voices spoke up, evidently from within the mess around her: “Please help! Get us out!”

Father Kleinsorge stemmed Father Schiffer’s spurting cut as well as he could with some bandage that Dr. Fujii had given the priests a few days before. When he finished, he ran into the mission house again and found the jacket of his military uniform and an old pair of gray trousers. He put them on and went outside. A woman from next door ran up to him and shouted that her husband was buried under her house and the house was on fire; Father Kleinsorge must come and save him.

Father Kleinsorge, already growing apathetic and dazed in the presence of the cumulative distress, said, “We haven’t much time.” Houses all around were burning, and the wind was now blowing hard. “Do you know exactly which part of the house he is under?” he asked.

“Yes, yes,” she said. “Come quickly.”

They went around to the house, the remains of which blazed violently, but when they got there, it turned out that the woman had no idea where her husband was. Father Kleinsorge shouted several times, “Is there anyone there?” There was no answer. Father Kleinsorge said to the woman, “We must get away or we will all die.” He went back to the Catholic compound and told the Father Superior that the fire was coming closer on the wind, which had swung around and was now from the north; it was time for everybody to go.

Just then, the kindergarten teacher pointed out to the priests Mr. Fukai, the secretary of the diocese, who was standing in his window on the second floor of the mission house, facing in the direction of the explosion, weeping. Father Cieslik, because he thought the stairs unusable, ran around to the back of the mission house to look for a ladder. There he heard people crying for help under a nearby fallen roof. He called to passersby running away in the street to help him lift it, but nobody paid any attention, and he had to leave the buried ones to die. Father Kleinsorge ran inside the mission house and scrambled up the stairs, which were awry and piled with plaster and lathing, and called to Mr. Fukai from the doorway of his room.

Mr. Fukai, a very short man of about fifty, turned around slowly, with a queer look, and said, “Leave me here.”

Father Kleinsorge went into the room and took Mr. Fukai by the collar of his coat and said, “Come with me or you’ll die.”

Mr. Fukai said, “Leave me here to die.”

Father Kleinsorge began to shove and haul Mr. Fukai out of the room. Then the theological student came up and grabbed Mr. Fukai’ s feet, and Father Kleinsorge took his shoulders, and together they carried him downstairs and outdoors. “I can’t walk!” Mr. Fukai cried. “Leave me here!” Father Kleinsorge got his paper suitcase with the money in it and took Mr. Fukai up pickaback, and the party started for the East Parade Ground, their district’s “safe area.” As they went out of the gate, Mr. Fukai, quite childlike now, beat on Father Kleinsorge’s shoulders and said, “I won’t leave. I won’t leave.” Irrelevantly, Father Kleinsorge turned to Father LaSalle and said, “We have lost all our possessions but not our sense of humor.”

The street was cluttered with parts of houses that had slid into it, and with fallen telephone poles and wires. From every second or third house came the voices of people buried and abandoned, who invariably screamed, with formal politeness, “ Tasukete kure! Help, if you please!” The priests recognized several ruins from which these cries came as the homes of friends, but because of the fire it was too late to help. All the way, Mr. Fukai whimpered, “Let me stay.” The party turned right when they came to a block of fallen houses that was one flame. At Sakai Bridge, which would take them across to the East Parade Ground, they saw that the whole community on the opposite side of the river was a sheet of fire; they dared not cross and decided to take refuge in Asano Park, off to their left. Father Kleinsorge, who had been weakened for a couple of days by his bad case of diarrhea, began to stagger under his protesting burden, and as he tried to climb up over the wreckage of several houses that blocked their way to the park, he stumbled, dropped Mr. Fukai, and plunged down, head over heels, to the edge of the river. When he picked himself up, he saw Mr. Fukai running away. Father Kleinsorge shouted to a dozen soldiers, who were standing by the bridge, to stop him. As Father Kleinsorge started back to get Mr. Fukai, Father LaSalle called out, “Hurry! Don’t waste time!” So Father Kleinsorge just requested the soldiers to take care of Mr. Fukai. They said they would, but the little, broken man got away from them, and the last the priests could see of him, he was running back toward the fire.

Mr. Tanimoto, fearful for his family and church, at first ran toward them by the shortest route, along Koi Highway. He was the only person making his way into the city; he met hundreds and hundreds who were fleeing, and every one of them seemed to be hurt in some way. The eyebrows of some were burned off and skin hung from their faces and hands. Others, because of pain, held their arms up as if carrying something in both hands. Some were vomiting as they walked. Many were naked or in shreds of clothing. On some undressed bodies, the burns had made patterns—of undershirt straps and suspenders and, on the skin of some women (since white repelled the heat from the bomb and dark clothes absorbed it and conducted it to the skin), the shapes of flowers they had had on their kimonos. Many, although injured themselves, supported relatives who were worse off. Almost all had their heads bowed, looked straight ahead, were silent, and showed no expression whatever.

After crossing Koi Bridge and Kannon Bridge, having run the whole way, Mr. Tanimoto saw, as he approached the center, that all the houses had been crushed and many were afire. Here the trees were bare and their trunks were charred. He tried at several points to penetrate the ruins, but the flames always stopped him. Under many houses, people screamed for help, but no one helped; in general, survivors that day assisted only their relatives or immediate neighbors, for they could not comprehend or tolerate a wider circle of misery. The wounded limped past the screams, and Mr. Tanimoto ran past them. As a Christian he was filled with compassion for those who were trapped, and as a Japanese he was overwhelmed by the shame of being unhurt, and he prayed as he ran, “God help them and take them out of the fire.”

He thought he would skirt the fire, to the left. He ran back to Kannon Bridge and followed for a distance one of the rivers. He tried several cross streets, but all were blocked, so he turned far left and ran out to Yokogawa, a station on a railroad line that detoured the city in a wide semicircle, and he followed the rails until he came to a burning train. So impressed was he by this time by the extent of the damage that he ran north two miles to Gion, a suburb in the foothills. All the way, he overtook dreadfully burned and lacerated people, and in his guilt he turned to right and left as he hurried and said to some of them, “Excuse me for having no burden like yours.” Near Gion, he began to meet country people going toward the city to help, and when they saw him, several exclaimed, “Look! There is one who is not wounded.” At Gion, he bore toward the right bank of the main river, the Ota, and ran down it until he reached fire again. There was no fire on the other side of the river, so he threw off his shirt and shoes and plunged into it. In midstream, where the current was fairly strong, exhaustion and fear finally caught up with him—he had run nearly seven miles—and he became limp and drifted in the water. He prayed, “Please, God, help me to cross. It would be nonsense for me to be drowned when I am the only uninjured one.” He managed a few more strokes and fetched up on a spit downstream.

Mr. Tanimoto climbed up the bank and ran along it until, near a large Shinto shrine, he came to more fire, and as he turned left to get around it, he met, by incredible luck, his wife. She was carrying their infant son. Mr. Tanimoto was now so emotionally worn out that nothing could surprise him. He did not embrace his wife; he simply said, “Oh, you are safe.” She told him that she had got home from her night in Ushida just in time for the explosion; she had been buried under the parsonage with the baby in her arms. She told how the wreckage had pressed down on her, how the baby had cried. She saw a chink of light, and by reaching up with a hand, she worked the hole bigger, bit by bit. After about half an hour, she heard the crackling noise of wood burning. At last the opening was big enough for her to push the baby out, and afterward she crawled out herself. She said she was now going out to Ushida again. Mr. Tanimoto said he wanted to see his church and take care of the people of his Neighborhood Association. They parted as casually—as bewildered—as they had met.

Mr. Tanimoto’s way around the fire took him across the East Parade Ground, which, being an evacuation area, was now the scene of a gruesome review: rank on rank of the burned and bleeding. Those who were burned moaned, “ Mizu, mizu! Water, water!” Mr. Tanimoto found a basin in a nearby street and located a water tap that still worked in the crushed shell of a house, and he began carrying water to the suffering strangers. When he had given drink to about thirty of them, he realized he was taking too much time. “Excuse me,” he said loudly to those nearby who were reaching out their hands to him and crying their thirst. “I have many people to take care of.” Then he ran away. He went to the river again, the basin in his hand, and jumped down onto a sandspit. There he saw hundreds of people so badly wounded that they could not get up to go farther from the burning city. When they saw a man erect and unhurt, the chant began again: “ Mizu, mizu, mizu. ” Mr. Tanimoto could not resist them; he carried them water from the river—a mistake, since it was tidal and brackish. Two or three small boats were ferrying hurt people across the river from Asano Park, and when one touched the spit, Mr. Tanimoto again made his loud, apologetic speech and jumped into the boat. It took him across to the park. There, in the underbrush, he found some of his charges of the Neighborhood Association, who had come there by his previous instructions, and saw many acquaintances, among them Father Kleinsorge and the other Catholics. But he missed Fukai, who had been a close friend. “Where is Fukai- san ?” he asked.

“He didn’t want to come with us, Father Kleinsorge said. “He ran back.”

When Miss Sasaki heard the voices of the people caught along with her in the dilapidation at the tin factory, she began speaking to them. Her nearest neighbor, she discovered, was a high-school girl who had been drafted for factory work, and who said her back was broken. Miss Sasaki replied, “I am lying here and I can’t move. My left leg is cut off.”

Some time later, she again heard somebody walk overhead and then move off to one side, and whoever it was began burrowing. The digger released several people, and when he had uncovered the high-school girl, she found that her back was not broken, after all, and she crawled out. Miss Sasaki spoke to the rescuer, and he worked toward her. He pulled away a great number of books, until he had made a tunnel to her. She could see his perspiring face as he said, “Come out, Miss.” She tried. “I can’t move,” she said. The man excavated some more and told her to try with all her strength to get out. But books were heavy on her hips, and the man finally saw that a bookcase was leaning on the books and that a heavy beam pressed down on the bookcase. “Wait,” he said. “I’ll get a crowbar.”

The man was gone a long time, and when he came back, he was ill-tempered, as if her plight were all her fault. “We have no men to help you!” he shouted in through the tunnel. “You’ll have to get out by yourself.”

“That’s impossible,” she said. “My left leg . . .” The man went away.

Much later, several men came and dragged Miss Sasaki out. Her left leg was not severed, but it was badly broken and cut and it hung askew below the knee. They took her out into a courtyard. It was raining. She sat on the ground in the rain. When the downpour increased, someone directed all the wounded people to take cover in the factory’s air-raid shelters. “Come along,” a torn-up woman said to her. “You can hop.” But Miss Sasaki could not move, and she just waited in the rain. Then a man propped up a large sheet of corrugated iron as a kind of lean-to, and took her in his arms and carried her to it. She was grateful until he brought two horribly wounded people—a woman with a whole breast sheared off and a man whose face was all raw from a burn—to share the simple shed with her. No one came back. The rain cleared and the cloudy afternoon was hot; before nightfall the three grotesques under the slanting piece of twisted iron began to smell quite bad.

The former head of the Nobori-cho Neighborhood Association, to which the Catholic priests belonged, was an energetic man named Yoshida. He had boasted, when he was in charge of the district air-raid defenses, that fire might eat away all of Hiroshima but it would never come to Nobori-cho. The bomb blew down his house, and a joist pinned him by the legs, in full view of the Jesuit mission house across the way and of the people hurrying along the street. In their confusion as they hurried past, Mrs. Nakamura, with her children, and Father Kleinsorge, with Mr. Fukai on his back, hardly saw him; he was just part of the general blur of misery through which they moved. His cries for help brought no response from them; there were so many people shouting for help that they could not hear him separately. They and all the others went along. Nobori-cho became absolutely deserted, and the fire swept through it. Mr. Yoshida saw the wooden mission house—the only erect building in the area—go up in a lick of flame, and the heat was terrific on his face. Then flames came along his side of the street and entered his house. In a paroxysm of terrified strength, he freed himself and ran down the alleys of Nobori-cho, hemmed in by the fire he had said would never come. He began at once to behave like an old man; two months later his hair was white.

As Dr. Fujii stood in the river up to his neck to avoid the heat of the fire, the wind grew stronger and stronger, and soon, even though the expanse of water was small, the waves grew so high that the people under the bridge could no longer keep their footing. Dr. Fujii went close to the shore, crouched down, and embraced a large stone with his usable arm. Later it became possible to wade along the very edge of the river, and Dr. Fujii and his two surviving nurses moved about two hundred yards upstream, to a sandspit near Asano Park. Many wounded were lying on the sand. Dr. Machii was there with his family; his daughter, who had been outdoors when the bomb burst, was badly burned on her hands and legs but fortunately not on her face. Although Dr. Fujii’s shoulder was by now terribly painful, he examined the girl’s burns curiously. Then he lay down. In spite of the misery all around, he was ashamed of his appearance, and he remarked to Dr. Machii that he looked like a beggar, dressed as he was in nothing but torn and bloody underwear. Late in the afternoon, when the fire began to subside, he decided to go to his parental house, in the suburb of Nagatsuka. He asked Dr. Machii to join him, but the Doctor answered that he and his family were going to spend the night on the spit, because of his daughter’s injuries. Dr. Fujii, together with his nurses, walked first to Ushida, where, in the partially damaged house of some relatives, he found first-aid materials he had stored there. The two nurses bandaged him and he them. They went on. Now not many people walked in the streets, but a great number sat and lay on the pavement, vomited, waited for death, and died. The number of corpses on the way to Nagatsuka was more and more puzzling. The Doctor wondered: Could a Molotov flower basket have done all this?

Dr. Fujii reached his family’s house in the evening. It was five miles from the center of town, but its roof had fallen in and the windows were all broken.

All day, people poured into Asano Park. This private estate was far enough away from the explosion so that its bamboos, pines, laurel, and maples were still alive, and the green place invited refugees—partly because they believed that if the Americans came back, they would bomb only buildings; partly because the foliage seemed a center of coolness and life, and the estate’s exquisitely precise rock gardens, with their quiet pools and arching bridges, were very Japanese, normal, secure; and also partly (according to some who were there) because of an irresistible, atavistic urge to hide under leaves. Mrs. Nakamura and her children were among the first to arrive, and they settled in the bamboo grove near the river. They all felt terribly thirsty, and they drank from the river. At once they were nauseated and began vomiting, and they retched the whole day. Others were also nauseated; they all thought (probably because of the strong odor of ionization, an “electric smell” given off by the bomb’s fission) that they were sick from a gas the Americans had dropped. When Father Kleinsorge and the other priests came into the park, nodding to their friends as they passed, the Nakamuras were all sick and prostrate. A woman named Iwasaki, who lived in the neighborhood of the mission and who was sitting near the Nakamuras, got up and asked the priests if she should stay where she was or go with them. Father Kleinsorge said, “I hardly know where the safest place is.” She stayed there, and later in the day, though she had no visible wounds or burns, she died. The priests went farther along the river and settled down in some underbrush. Father LaSalle lay down and went right to sleep. The theological student, who was wearing slippers, had carried with him a bundle of clothes, in which he had packed two pairs of leather shoes. When he sat down with the others, he found that the bundle had broken open and a couple of shoes had fallen out and now he had only two lefts. He retraced his steps and found one right. When he rejoined the priests, he said, “It’s funny, but things don’t matter any more. Yesterday, my shoes were my most important possessions. Today, I don’t care. One pair is enough.”

Father Cieslik said, “I know. I started to bring my books along, and then I thought, ‘This is no time for books.’ ”

When Mr. Tanimoto, with his basin still in his hand, reached the park, it was very crowded, and to distinguish the living from the dead was not easy, for most of the people lay still, with their eyes open. To Father Kleinsorge, an Occidental, the silence in the grove by the river, where hundreds of gruesomely wounded suffered together, was one of the most dreadful and awesome phenomena of his whole experience. The hurt ones were quiet; no one wept, much less screamed in pain; no one complained; none of the many who died did so noisily; not even the children cried; very few people even spoke. And when Father Kleinsorge gave water to some whose faces had been almost blotted out by flash burns, they took their share and then raised themselves a little and bowed to him, in thanks.

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Mr. Tanimoto greeted the priests and then looked around for other friends. He saw Mrs. Matsumoto, wife of the director of the Methodist School, and asked her if she was thirsty. She was, so he went to one of the pools in the Asanos’ rock gardens and got water for her in his basin. Then he decided to try to get back to his church. He went into Nobori-cho by the way the priests had taken as they escaped, but he did not get far; the fire along the streets was so fierce that he had to turn back. He walked to the riverbank and began to look for a boat in which he might carry some of the most severely injured across the river from Asano Park and away from the spreading fire. Soon he found a good-sized pleasure punt drawn up on the bank, but in and around it was an awful tableau—five dead men, nearly naked, badly burned, who must have expired more or less all at once, for they were in attitudes which suggested that they had been working together to push the boat down into the river. Mr. Tanimoto lifted them away from the boat, and as he did so, he experienced such horror at disturbing the dead—preventing them, he momentarily felt, from launching their craft and going on their ghostly way—that he said out loud, “Please forgive me for taking this boat. I must use it for others, who are alive.” The punt was heavy, but he managed to slide it into the water. There were no oars, and all he could find for propulsion was a thick bamboo pole. He worked the boat upstream to the most crowded part of the park and began to ferry the wounded. He could pack ten or twelve into the boat for each crossing, but as the river was too deep in the center to pole his way across, he had to paddle with the bamboo, and consequently each trip took a very long time. He worked several hours that way.

Early in the afternoon, the fire swept into the woods of Asano Park. The first Mr. Tanimoto knew of it was when, returning in his boat, he saw that a great number of people had moved toward the riverside. On touching the bank, he went up to investigate, and when he saw the fire, he shouted, “All the young men who are not badly hurt come with me!” Father Kleinsorge moved Father Schiffer and Father LaSalle close to the edge of the river and asked people there to get them across if the fire came too near, and then joined Tanimoto’s volunteers. Mr. Tanimoto sent some to look for buckets and basins and told others to beat the burning underbrush with their clothes; when utensils were at hand, he formed a bucket chain from one of the pools in the rock gardens. The team fought the fire for more than two hours, and gradually defeated the flames. As Mr. Tanimoto’s men worked, the frightened people in the park pressed closer and closer to the river, and finally the mob began to force some of the unfortunates who were on the very bank into the water. Among those driven into the river and drowned were Mrs. Matsumoto, of the Methodist School, and her daughter.

When Father Kleinsorge got back after fighting the fire, he found Father Schiffer still bleeding and terribly pale. Some Japanese stood around and stared at him, and Father Schiffer whispered, with a weak smile, “It is as if I were already dead.” “Not yet,” Father Kleinsorge said. He had brought Dr. Fujii’s first-aid kit with him, and he had noticed Dr. Kanda in the crowd, so he sought him out and asked him if he would dress Father Schiffer’s bad cuts. Dr. Kanda had seen his wife and daughter dead in the ruins of his hospital; he sat now with his head in his hands. “I can’t do anything,” he said. Father Kleinsorge bound more bandage around Father Schiffer’s head, moved him to a steep place, and settled him so that his head was high, and soon the bleeding diminished.

The roar of approaching planes was heard about this time. Someone in the crowd near the Nakamura family shouted, “It’s some Grummans coming to strafe us!” A baker named Nakashima stood up and commanded, “Everyone who is wearing anything white, take it off.” Mrs. Nakamura took the blouses off her children, and opened her umbrella and made them get under it. A great number of people, even badly burned ones, crawled into bushes and stayed there until the hum, evidently of a reconnaissance or weather run, died away.

It began to rain. Mrs. Nakamura kept her children under the umbrella. The drops grew abnormally large, and someone shouted, “The Americans are dropping gasoline. They’re going to set fire to us!” (This alarm stemmed from one of the theories being passed through the park as to why so much of Hiroshima had burned: it was that a single plane had sprayed gasoline on the city and then somehow set fire to it in one flashing moment.) But the drops were palpably water, and as they fell, the wind grew stronger and stronger, and suddenly—probably because of the tremendous convection set up by the blazing city—a whirlwind ripped through the park. Huge trees crashed down; small ones were uprooted and flew into the air. Higher, a wild array of flat things revolved in the twisting funnel—pieces of iron roofing, papers, doors, strips of matting. Father Kleinsorge put a piece of cloth over Father Schiffer’s eyes, so that the feeble man would not think he was going crazy. The gale blew Mrs. Murata, the mission housekeeper, who was sitting close by the river, down the embankment at a shallow, rocky place, and she came out with her bare feet bloody. The vortex moved out onto the river, where it sucked up a waterspout and eventually spent itself.

After the storm, Mr. Tanimoto began ferrying people again, and Father Kleinsorge asked the theological student to go across and make his way out to the Jesuit Novitiate at Nagatsuka, about three miles from the center of town, and to request the priests there to come with help for Fathers Schiffer and LaSalle. The student got into Mr. Tanimoto’s boat and went off with him. Father Kleinsorge asked Mrs. Nakamura if she would like to go out to Nagatsuka with the priests when they came. She said she had some luggage and her children were sick—they were still vomiting from time to time, and so, for that matter, was she—and therefore she feared she could not. He said he thought the fathers from the Novitiate could come back the next day with a pushcart to get her.

Late in the afternoon, when he went ashore for a while, Mr. Tanimoto, upon whose energy and initiative many had come to depend, heard people begging for food. He consulted Father Kleinsorge, and they decided to go back into town to get some rice from Mr. Tanimoto’s Neighborhood Association shelter and from the mission shelter. Father Cieslik and two or three others went with them. At first, when they got among the rows of prostrate houses, they did not know where they were; the change was too sudden, from a busy city of two hundred and forty-five thousand that morning to a mere pattern of residue in the afternoon. The asphalt of the streets was still so soft and hot from the fires that walking was uncomfortable. They encountered only one person, a woman, who said to them as they passed, “My husband is in those ashes.” At the mission, where Mr. Tanimoto left the party, Father Kleinsorge was dismayed to see the building razed. In the garden, on the way to the shelter, he noticed a pumpkin roasted on the vine. He and Father Cieslik tasted it and it was good. They were surprised at their hunger, and they ate quite a bit. They got out several bags of rice and gathered up several other cooked pumpkins and dug up some potatoes that were nicely baked under the ground, and started back. Mr. Tanimoto rejoined them on the way. One of the people with him had some cooking utensils. In the park, Mr. Tanimoto organized the lightly wounded women of his neighborhood to cook. Father Kleinsorge offered the Nakamura family some pumpkin, and they tried it, but they could not keep it on their stomachs. Altogether, the rice was enough to feed nearly a hundred people.

Just before dark, Mr. Tanimoto came across a twenty-year-old girl, Mrs. Kamai, the Tanimotos’ next-door neighbor. She was crouching on the ground with the body of her infant daughter in her arms. The baby had evidently been dead all day. Mrs. Kamai jumped up when she saw Mr. Tanimoto and said, “Would you please try to locate my husband?”

Mr. Tanimoto knew that her husband had been inducted into the Army just the day before; he and Mrs. Tanimoto had entertained Mrs. Kamai in the afternoon, to make her forget. Kamai had reported to the Chugoku Regional Army Headquarters—near the ancient castle in the middle of town—where some four thousand troops were stationed. Judging by the many maimed soldiers Mr. Tanimoto had seen during the day, he surmised that the barracks had been badly damaged by whatever it was that had hit Hiroshima. He knew he hadn’t a chance of finding Mrs. Kamai’s husband, even if he searched, but he wanted to humor her. “I’ll try,” he said.

“You’ve got to find him,” she said. “He loved our baby so much. I want him to see her once more.”

III—Details Are Being Investigated

Early in the evening of the day the bomb exploded, a Japanese naval launch moved slowly up and down the seven rivers of Hiroshima. It stopped here and there to make an announcement—alongside the crowded sandspits, on which hundreds of wounded lay; at the bridges, on which others were crowded; and eventually, as twilight fell, opposite Asano Park. A young officer stood up in the launch and shouted through a megaphone, “Be patient! A naval hospital ship is coming to take care of you!” The sight of the shipshape launch against the background of the havoc across the river; the unruffled young man in his neat uniform; above all, the promise of medical help—the first word of possible succor anyone had heard in nearly twelve awful hours—cheered the people in the park tremendously. Mrs. Nakamura settled her family for the night with the assurance that a doctor would come and stop their retching. Mr. Tanimoto resumed ferrying the wounded across the river. Father Kleinsorge lay down and said the Lord’s Prayer and a Hail Mary to himself, and fell right asleep; but no sooner had he dropped off than Mrs. Murata, the conscientious mission housekeeper, shook him and said, “Father Kleinsorge! Did you remember to repeat your evening prayers?” He answered rather grumpily, “Of course,” and he tried to go back to sleep but could not. This, apparently, was just what Mrs. Murata wanted. She began to chat with the exhausted priest. One of the questions she raised was when he thought the priests from the Novitiate, for whom he had sent a messenger in midafternoon, would arrive to evacuate Father Superior LaSalle and Father Schiffer.

The messenger Father Kleinsorge had sent—the theological student who had been living at the mission house—had arrived at the Novitiate, in the hills about three miles out, at half past four. The sixteen priests there had been doing rescue work in the outskirts; they had worried about their colleagues in the city but had not known how or where to look for them. Now they hastily made two litters out of poles and boards, and the student led half a dozen of them back into the devastated area. They worked their way along the Ota above the city; twice the heat of the fire forced them into the river. At Misasa Bridge, they encountered a long line of soldiers making a bizarre forced march away from the Chugoku Regional Army Headquarters in the center of the town. All were grotesquely burned, and they supported themselves with staves or leaned on one another. Sick, burned horses, hanging their heads, stood on the bridge. When the rescue party reached the park, it was after dark, and progress was made extremely difficult by the tangle of fallen trees of all sizes that had been knocked down by the whirlwind that afternoon. At last—not long after Mrs. Murata asked her question—they reached their friends, and gave them wine and strong tea.

The priests discussed how to get Father Schiffer and Father LaSalle out to the Novitiate. They were afraid that blundering through the park with them would jar them too much on the wooden litters, and that the wounded men would lose too much blood. Father Kleinsorge thought of Mr. Tanimoto and his boat, and called out to him on the river. When Mr. Tanimoto reached the bank, he said he would be glad to take the injured priests and their bearers upstream to where they could find a clear roadway. The rescuers put Father Schiffer onto one of the stretchers and lowered it into the boat, and two of them went aboard with it. Mr. Tanimoto, who still had no oars, poled the punt upstream.

About half an hour later, Mr. Tanimoto came back and excitedly asked the remaining priests to help him rescue two children he had seen standing up to their shoulders in the river. A group went out and picked them up—two young girls who had lost their family and were both badly burned. The priests stretched them on the ground next to Father Kleinsorge and then embarked Father LaSalle. Father Cieslik thought he could make it out to the Novitiate on foot, so he went aboard with the others. Father Kleinsorge was too feeble; he decided to wait in the park until the next day. He asked the men to come back with a handcart, so that they could take Mrs. Nakamura and her sick children to the Novitiate.

Mr. Tanimoto shoved off again. As the boatload of priests moved slowly upstream, they heard weak cries for help. A woman’s voice stood out especially: “There are people here about to be drowned! Help us! The water is rising!” The sounds came from one of the sandspits, and those in the punt could see, in the reflected light of the still-burning fires, a number of wounded people lying at the edge of the river, already partly covered by the flooding tide. Mr. Tanimoto wanted to help them, but the priests were afraid that Father Schiffer would die if they didn’t hurry, and they urged their ferryman along. He dropped them where he had put Father Schiffer down and then started back alone toward the sandspit.

The night was hot, and it seemed even hotter because of the fires against the sky, but the younger of the two girls Mr. Tanimoto and the priests had rescued complained to Father Kleinsorge that she was cold. He covered her with his jacket. She and her older sister had been in the salt water of the river for a couple of hours before being rescued. The younger one had huge, raw flash burns on her body; the salt water must have been excruciatingly painful to her. She began to shiver heavily, and again said it was cold. Father Kleinsorge borrowed a blanket from someone nearby and wrapped her up, but she shook more and more, and said again, “I am so cold,” and then she suddenly stopped shivering and was dead.

Mr. Tanimoto found about twenty men and women on the sandspit. He drove the boat onto the bank and urged them to get aboard. They did not move and he realized that they were too weak to lift themselves. He reached down and took a woman by the hands, but her skin slipped off in huge, glove-like pieces. He was so sickened by this that he had to sit down for a moment. Then he got out into the water and, though a small man, lifted several of the men and women, who were naked, into his boat. Their backs and breasts were clammy, and he remembered uneasily what the great burns he had seen during the day had been like: yellow at first, then red and swollen, with the skin sloughed off, and finally, in the evening, suppurated and smelly. With the tide risen, his bamboo pole was now too short and he had to paddle most of the way across with it. On the other side, at a higher spit, he lifted the slimy living bodies out and carried them up the slope away from the tide. He had to keep consciously repeating to himself, “These are human beings.” It took him three trips to get them all across the river. When he had finished, he decided he had to have a rest, and he went back to the park.

As Mr. Tanimoto stepped up the dark bank, he tripped over someone, and someone else said angrily, “Look out! That’s my hand.” Mr. Tanimoto, ashamed of hurting wounded people, embarrassed at being able to walk upright, suddenly thought of the naval hospital ship, which had not come (it never did), and he had for a moment a feeling of blind, murderous rage at the crew of the ship, and then at all doctors. Why didn’t they come to help these people?

Dr. Fujii lay in dreadful pain throughout the night on the floor of his family’s roofless house on the edge of the city. By the light of a lantern, he had examined himself and found: left clavicle fractured; multiple abrasions and lacerations of face and body, including deep cuts on the chin, back, and legs; extensive contusions on chest and trunk; a couple of ribs possibly fractured. Had he not been so badly hurt, he might have been at Asano Park, assisting the wounded.

By nightfall, ten thousand victims of the explosion had invaded the Red Cross Hospital, and Dr. Sasaki, worn out, was moving aimlessly and dully up and down the stinking corridors with wads of bandage and bottles of mercurochrome, still wearing the glasses he had taken from the wounded nurse, binding up the worst cuts as he came to them. Other doctors were putting compresses of saline solution on the worst burns. That was all they could do. After dark, they worked by the light of the city’s fires and by candles the ten remaining nurses held for them. Dr. Sasaki had not looked outside the hospital all day; the scene inside was so terrible and so compelling that it had not occurred to him to ask any questions about what had happened beyond the windows and doors. Ceilings and partitions had fallen; plaster, dust, blood, and vomit were everywhere. Patients were dying by the hundreds, but there was nobody to carry away the corpses. Some of the hospital staff distributed biscuits and rice balls, but the charnel-house smell was so strong that few were hungry. By three o’clock the next morning, after nineteen straight hours of his gruesome work, Dr. Sasaki was incapable of dressing another wound. He and some other survivors of the hospital staff got straw mats and went outdoors—thousands of patients and hundreds of dead were in the yard and on the driveway—and hurried around behind the hospital and lay down in hiding to snatch some sleep. But within an hour wounded people had found them; a complaining circle formed around them: “Doctors! Help us! How can you sleep?” Dr. Sasaki got up again and went back to work. Early in the day, he thought for the first time of his mother at their country home in Mukaihara, thirty miles from town. He usually went home every night. He was afraid she would think he was dead.

Near the spot upriver to which Mr. Tanimoto had transported the priests, there sat a large case of rice cakes which a rescue party had evidently brought for the wounded lying thereabouts but hadn’t distributed. Before evacuating the wounded priests, the others passed the cakes around and helped themselves. A few minutes later, a band of soldiers came up, and an officer, hearing the priests speaking a foreign language, drew his sword and hysterically asked who they were. One of the priests calmed him down and explained that they were Germans—allies. The officer apologized and said that there were reports going around that American parachutists had landed.

The priests decided that they should take Father Schiffer first. As they prepared to leave, Father Superior LaSalle said he felt awfully cold. One of the Jesuits gave up his coat, another his shirt; they were glad to wear less in the muggy night. The stretcher bearers started out. The theological student led the way and tried to warn the others of obstacles, but one of the priests got a foot tangled in some telephone wire and tripped and dropped his corner of the litter. Father Schiffer rolled off, lost consciousness, came to, and then vomited. The bearers picked him up and went on with him to the edge of the city, where they had arranged to meet a relay of other priests, left him with them, and turned back and got the Father Superior.

The wooden litter must have been terribly painful for Father LaSalle, in whose back scores of tiny particles of window glass were embedded. Near the edge of town, the group had to walk around an automobile burned and squatting on the narrow road, and the bearers on one side, unable to see their way in the darkness, fell into a deep ditch. Father LaSalle was thrown onto the ground and the litter broke in two. One priest went ahead to get a handcart from the Novitiate, but he soon found one beside an empty house and wheeled it back. The priests lifted Father LaSalle into the cart and pushed him over the bumpy road the rest of the way. The rector of the Novitiate, who had been a doctor before he entered the religious order, cleaned the wounds of the two priests and put them to bed between clean sheets, and they thanked God for the care they had received.

Thousands of people had nobody to help them. Miss Sasaki was one of them. Abandoned and helpless, under the crude lean-to in the courtyard of the tin factory, beside the woman who had lost a breast and the man whose burned face was scarcely a face any more, she suffered awfully that night from the pain in her broken leg. She did not sleep at all; neither did she converse with her sleepless companions.

In the park, Mrs. Murata kept Father Kleinsorge awake all night by talking to him. None of the Nakamura family were able to sleep, either; the children, in spite of being very sick, were interested in everything that happened. They were delighted when one of the city’s gas-storage tanks went up in a tremendous burst of flame. Toshio, the boy, shouted to the others to look at the reflection in the river. Mr. Tanimoto, after his long run and his many hours of rescue work, dozed uneasily. When he awoke, in the first light of dawn, he looked across the river and saw that he had not carried the festered, limp bodies high enough on the sandspit the night before. The tide had risen above where he had put them; they had not had the strength to move; they must have drowned. He saw a number of bodies floating in the river.

Early that day, August 7th, the Japanese radio broadcast for the first time a succinct announcement that very few, if any, of the people most concerned with its content, the survivors in Hiroshima, happened to hear: “Hiroshima suffered considerable damage as the result of an attack by a few B-29s. It is believed that a new type of bomb was used. The details are being investigated.” Nor is it probable that any of the survivors happened to be tuned in on a short-wave rebroadcast of an extraordinary announcement by the President of the United States, which identified the new bomb as atomic: “That bomb had more power than twenty thousand tons of TNT. It had more than two thousand times the blast power of the British Grand Slam, which is the largest bomb ever yet used in the history of warfare.” Those victims who were able to worry at all about what had happened thought of it and discussed it in more primitive, childish terms—gasoline sprinkled from an airplane, maybe, or some combustible gas, or a big cluster of incendiaries, or the work of parachutists; but, even if they had known the truth, most of them were too busy or too weary or too badly hurt to care that they were the objects of the first great experiment in the use of atomic power, which (as the voices on the short wave shouted) no country except the United States, with its industrial know-how, its willingness to throw two billion gold dollars into an important wartime gamble, could possibly have developed.

Mr. Tanimoto was still angry at doctors. He decided that he would personally bring one to Asano Park—by the scruff of the neck, if necessary. He crossed the river, went past the Shinto shrine where he had met his wife for a brief moment the day before, and walked to the East Parade Ground. Since this had long before been designated as an evacuation area, he thought he would find an aid station there. He did find one, operated by an Army medical unit, but he also saw that its doctors were hopelessly overburdened, with thousands of patients sprawled among corpses across the field in front of it. Nevertheless, he went up to one of the Army doctors and said, as reproachfully as he could, “Why have you not come to Asano Park? You are badly needed there.”

Without even looking up from his work, the doctor said in a tired voice, “This is my station.”

“But there are many dying on the riverbank over there.”

“The first duty,” the doctor said, “is to take care of the slightly wounded.”

“Why—when there are many who are heavily wounded on the riverbank?”

The doctor moved to another patient. “In an emergency like this,” he said, as if he were reciting from a manual, “the first task is to help as many as possible—to save as many lives as possible. There is no hope for the heavily wounded. They will die. We can’t bother with them.”

“That may be right from a medical standpoint—” Mr. Tanimoto began, but then he looked out across the field, where the many dead lay close and intimate with those who were still living, and he turned away without finishing his sentence, angry now with himself. He didn’t know what to do; he had promised some of the dying people in the park that he would bring them medical aid. They might die feeling cheated. He saw a ration stand at one side of the field, and he went to it and begged some rice cakes and biscuits, and he took them back, in lieu of doctors, to the people in the park.

The morning, again, was hot. Father Kleinsorge went to fetch water for the wounded in a bottle and a teapot he had borrowed. He had heard that it was possible to get fresh tap water outside Asano Park. Going through the rock gardens, he had to climb over and crawl under the trunks of fallen pine trees; he found he was weak. There were many dead in the gardens. At a beautiful moon bridge, he passed a naked, living woman who seemed to have been burned from head to toe and was red all over. Near the entrance to the park, an Army doctor was working, but the only medicine he had was iodine, which he painted over cuts, bruises, slimy burns, everything—and by now everything that he painted had pus on it. Outside the gate of the park, Father Kleinsorge found a faucet that still worked—part of the plumbing of a vanished house—and he filled his vessels and returned. When he had given the wounded the water, he made a second trip. This time, the woman by the bridge was dead. On his way back with the water, he got lost on a detour around a fallen tree, and as he looked for his way through the woods, he heard a voice ask from the underbrush, “Have you anything to drink?” He saw a uniform. Thinking there was just one soldier, he approached with the water. When he had penetrated the bushes, he saw there were about twenty men, and they were all in exactly the same nightmarish state: their faces were wholly burned, their eyesockets were hollow, the fluid from their melted eyes had run down their cheeks. (They must have had their faces upturned when the bomb went off; perhaps they were anti-aircraft personnel.) Their mouths were mere swollen, pus-covered wounds, which they could not bear to stretch enough to admit the spout of the teapot. So Father Kleinsorge got a large piece of grass and drew out the stem so as to make a straw, and gave them all water to drink that way. One of them said, “I can’t see anything.” Father Kleinsorge answered, as cheerfully as he could, “There’s a doctor at the entrance to the park. He’s busy now, but he’ll come soon and fix your eyes, I hope.”

Since that day, Father Kleinsorge has thought back to how queasy he had once been at the sight of pain, how someone else’s cut finger used to make him turn faint. Yet there in the park he was so benumbed that immediately after leaving this horrible sight he stopped on a path by one of the pools and discussed with a lightly wounded man whether it would be safe to eat the fat, two-foot carp that floated dead on the surface of the water. They decided, after some consideration, that it would be unwise.

Father Kleinsorge filled the containers a third time and went back to the riverbank. There, amid the dead and dying, he saw a young woman with a needle and thread mending her kimono, which had been slightly torn. Father Kleinsorge joshed her. “My, but you’re a dandy!” he said. She laughed.

He felt tired and lay down. He began to talk with two engaging children whose acquaintance he had made the afternoon before. He learned that their name was Kataoka; the girl was thirteen, the boy five. The girl had been just about to set out for a barbershop when the bomb fell. As the family started for Asano Park, their mother decided to turn back for some food and extra clothing; they became separated from her in the crowd of fleeing people, and they had not seen her since. Occasionally they stopped suddenly in their perfectly cheerful playing and began to cry for their mother.

It was difficult for all the children in the park to sustain the sense of tragedy. Toshio Nakamura got quite excited when he saw his friend Seichi Sato riding up the river in a boat with his family, and he ran to the bank and waved and shouted, “Sato! Sato!”

The boy turned his head and shouted, “Who’s that?”

“Nakamura.”

“Hello, Toshio!”

“Are you all safe?”

“Yes. What about you?”

“Yes, we’re all right. My sisters are vomiting, but I’m fine.”

Father Kleinsorge began to be thirsty in the dreadful heat, and he did not feel strong enough to go for water again. A little before noon, he saw a Japanese woman handing something out. Soon she came to him and said in a kindly voice, “These are tea leaves. Chew them, young man, and you won’t feel thirsty.” The woman’s gentleness made Father Kleinsorge suddenly want to cry. For weeks, he had been feeling oppressed by the hatred of foreigners that the Japanese seemed increasingly to show, and he had been uneasy even with his Japanese friends. This stranger’s gesture made him a little hysterical.

Around noon, the priests arrived from the Novitiate with the handcart. They had been to the site of the mission house in the city and had retrieved some suitcases that had been stored in the air-raid shelter and had also picked up the remains of melted holy vessels in the ashes of the chapel. They now packed Father Kleinsorge’s papier-mâché suitcase and the things belonging to Mrs. Murata and the Nakamuras into the cart, put the two Nakamura girls aboard, and prepared to start out. Then one of the Jesuits who had a practical turn of mind remembered that they had been notified some time before that if they suffered property damage at the hands of the enemy, they could enter a claim for compensation with the prefectural police. The holy men discussed this matter there in the park, with the wounded as silent as the dead around them, and decided that Father Kleinsorge, as a former resident of the destroyed mission, was the one to enter the claim. So, as the others went off with the handcart, Father Kleinsorge said goodbye to the Kataoka children and trudged to a police station. Fresh, clean-uniformed policemen from another town were in charge, and a crowd of dirty and disarrayed citizens crowded around them, mostly asking after lost relatives. Father Kleinsorge filled out a claim form and started walking through the center of town on his way to Nagatsuka. It was then that he first realized the extent of the damage; he passed block after block of ruins, and even after all he had seen in the park, his breath was taken away. By the time he reached the Novitiate, he was sick with exhaustion. The last thing he did as he fell into bed was request that someone go back for the motherless Kataoka children.

Altogether Miss Sasaki was left two days and two nights under the piece of propped-up roofing with her crushed leg and her two unpleasant comrades. Her only diversion was when men came to the factory air-raid shelters, which she could see from under one corner of her shelter, and hauled corpses up out of them with ropes. Her leg became discolored, swollen, and putrid. All that time, she went without food and water. On the third day, August 8th, some friends who supposed she was dead came to look for her body and found her. They told her that her mother, father, and baby brother, who at the time of the explosion were in the Tamura Pediatric Hospital, where the baby was a patient, had all been given up as certainly dead, since the hospital was totally destroyed. Her friends then left her to think that piece of news over. Later, some men picked her up by the arms and legs and carried her quite a distance to a truck. For about an hour, the truck moved over a bumpy road, and Miss Sasaki, who had become convinced that she was dulled to pain, discovered that she was not. The men lifted her out at a relief station in the section of Inokuchi, where two Army doctors looked at her. The moment one of them touched her wound, she fainted. She came to in time to hear them discuss whether or not to cut off her leg; one said there was gas gangrene in the lips of the wound and predicted she would die unless they amputated, and the other said that was too bad, because they had no equipment with which to do the job. She fainted again. When she recovered consciousness, she was being carried somewhere on a stretcher. She was put aboard a launch, which went to the nearby island of Ninoshima, and she was taken to a military hospital there. Another doctor examined her and said that she did not have gas gangrene, though she did have a fairly ugly compound fracture. He said quite coldly that he was sorry, but this was a hospital for operative surgical cases only, and because she had no gangrene, she would have to return to Hiroshima that night. But then the doctor took her temperature, and what he saw on the thermometer made him decide to let her stay.

That day, August 8th, Father Cieslik went into the city to look for Mr. Fukai, the Japanese secretary of the diocese, who had ridden unwillingly out of the flaming city on Father Kleinsorge’s back and then had run back crazily into it. Father Cieslik started hunting in the neighborhood of Sakai Bridge, where the Jesuits had last seen Mr. Fukai; he went to the East Parade Ground, the evacuation area to which the secretary might have gone, and looked for him among the wounded and dead there; he went to the prefectural police and made inquiries. He could not find any trace of the man. Back at the Novitiate that evening, the theological student, who had been rooming with Mr. Fukai at the mission house, told the priests that the secretary had remarked to him, during an air-raid alarm one day not long before the bombing, “Japan is dying. If there is a real air raid here in Hiroshima, I want to die with our country.” The priests concluded that Mr. Fukai had run back to immolate himself in the flames. They never saw him again.

At the Red Cross Hospital, Dr. Sasaki worked for three straight days with only one hour’s sleep. On the second day, he began to sew up the worst cuts, and right through the following night and all the next day he stitched. Many of the wounds were festered. Fortunately, someone had found intact a supply of narucopon , a Japanese sedative, and he gave it to many who were in pain. Word went around among the staff that there must have been something peculiar about the great bomb, because on the second day the vice-chief of the hospital went down in the basement to the vault where the X-ray plates were stored and found the whole stock exposed as they lay. That day, a fresh doctor and ten nurses came in from the city of Yamaguchi with extra bandages and antiseptics, and the third day another physician and a dozen more nurses arrived from Matsue—yet there were still only eight doctors for ten thousand patients. In the afternoon of the third day, exhausted from his foul tailoring, Dr. Sasaki became obsessed with the idea that his mother thought he was dead. He got permission to go to Mukaihara. He walked out to the first suburbs, beyond which the electric train service was still functioning, and reached home late in the evening. His mother said she had known he was all right all along; a wounded nurse had stopped by to tell her. He went to bed and slept for seventeen hours.

Before dawn on August 8th, someone entered the room at the Novitiate where Father Kleinsorge was in bed, reached up to the hanging light bulb, and switched it on. The sudden flood of light, pouring in on Father Kleinsorge’s half sleep, brought him leaping out of bed, braced for a new concussion. When he realized what had happened, he laughed confusedly and went back to bed. He stayed there all day.

On August 9th, Father Kleinsorge was still tired. The rector looked at his cuts and said they were not even worth dressing, and if Father Kleinsorge kept them clean, they would heal in three or four days. Father Kleinsorge felt uneasy; he could not yet comprehend what he had been through; as if he were guilty of something awful, he felt he had to go back to the scene of the violence he had experienced. He got up out of bed and walked into the city. He scratched for a while in the ruins of the mission house, but he found nothing. He went to the sites of a couple of schools and asked after people he knew. He looked for some of the city’s Japanese Catholics, but he found only fallen houses. He walked back to the Novitiate, stupefied and without any new understanding.

At two minutes after eleven o’clock on the morning of August 9th, the second atomic bomb was dropped, on Nagasaki. It was several days before the survivors of Hiroshima knew they had company, because the Japanese radio and newspapers were being extremely cautious on the subject of the strange weapon.

On August 9th, Mr. Tanimoto was still working in the park. He went to the suburb of Ushida, where his wife was staying with friends, and got a tent which he had stored there before the bombing. He now took it to the park and set it up as a shelter for some of the wounded who could not move or be moved. Whatever he did in the park, he felt he was being watched by the twenty-year-old girl, Mrs. Kamai, his former neighbor, whom he had seen on the day the bomb exploded, with her dead baby daughter in her arms. She kept the small corpse in her arms for four days, even though it began smelling bad on the second day. Once, Mr. Tanimoto sat with her for a while, and she told him that the bomb had buried her under their house with the baby strapped to her back, and that when she had dug herself free, she had discovered that the baby was choking, its mouth full of dirt. With her little finger, she had carefully cleaned out the infant’s mouth, and for a time the child had breathed normally and seemed all right; then suddenly it had died. Mrs. Kamai also talked about what a fine man her husband was, and again urged Mr. Tanimoto to search for him. Since Mr. Tanimoto had been all through the city the first day and had seen terribly burned soldiers from Kamai’s post, the Chugoku Regional Army Headquarters, everywhere, he knew it would be impossible to find Kamai, even if he were living, but of course he didn’t tell her that. Every time she saw Mr. Tanimoto, she asked whether he had found her husband. Once, he tried to suggest that perhaps it was time to cremate the baby, but Mrs. Kamai only held it tighter. He began to keep away from her, but whenever he looked at her, she was staring at him and her eyes asked the same question. He tried to escape her glance by keeping his back turned to her as much as possible.

The Jesuits took about fifty refugees into the exquisite chapel of the Novitiate. The rector gave them what medical care he could—mostly just the cleaning away of pus. Each of the Nakamuras was provided with a blanket and a mosquito net. Mrs. Nakamura and her younger daughter had no appetite and ate nothing; her son and other daughter ate, and lost, each meal they were offered. On August 10th, a friend, Mrs. Osaki, came to see them and told them that her son Hideo had been burned alive in the factory where he worked. This Hideo had been a kind of hero to Toshio, who had often gone to the plant to watch him run his machine. That night, Toshio woke up screaming. He had dreamed that he had seen Mrs. Osaki coming out of an opening in the ground with her family, and then he saw Hideo at his machine, a big one with a revolving belt, and he himself was standing beside Hideo, and for some reason this was terrifying.

On August 10th, Father Kleinsorge, having heard from someone that Dr. Fujii had been injured and that he had eventually gone to the summer house of a friend of his named Okuma, in the village of Fukawa, asked Father Cieslik if he would go and see how Dr. Fujii was. Father Cieslik went to Misasa station, outside Hiroshima, rode for twenty minutes on an electric train, and then walked for an hour and a half in a terribly hot sun to Mr. Okuma’s house, which was beside the Ota River at the foot of a mountain. He found Dr. Fujii sitting in a chair in a kimono, applying compresses to his broken collarbone. The Doctor told Father Cieslik about having lost his glasses and said that his eyes bothered him. He showed the priest huge blue and green stripes where beams had bruised him. He offered the Jesuit first a cigarette and then whiskey, though it was only eleven in the morning. Father Cieslik thought it would please Dr. Fujii if he took a little, so he said yes. A servant brought some Suntory whiskey, and the Jesuit, the Doctor, and the host had a very pleasant chat. Mr. Okuma had lived in Hawaii, and he told some things about Americans. Dr. Fujii talked a bit about the disaster. He said that Mr. Okuma and a nurse had gone into the ruins of his hospital and brought back a small safe which he had moved into his air-raid shelter. This contained some surgical instruments, and Dr. Fujii gave Father Cieslik a few pairs of scissors and tweezers for the rector at the Novitiate. Father Cieslik was bursting with some inside dope he had, but he waited until the conversation turned naturally to the mystery of the bomb. Then he said he knew what kind of bomb it was; he had the secret on the best authority—that of a Japanese newspaperman who had dropped in at the Novitiate. The bomb was not a bomb at all; it was a kind of fine magnesium powder sprayed over the whole city by a single plane, and it exploded when it came into contact with the live wires of the city power system. “That means,” said Dr. Fujii, perfectly satisfied, since after all the information came from a newspaperman, “that it can only be dropped on big cities and only in the daytime, when the tram lines and so forth are in operation.”

After five days of ministering to the wounded in the park, Mr. Tanimoto returned, on August 11th, to his parsonage and dug around in the ruins. He retrieved some diaries and church records that had been kept in books and were only charred around the edges, as well as some cooking utensils and pottery. While he was at work, a Miss Tanaka came and said that her father had been asking for him. Mr. Tanimoto had reason to hate her father, the retired shipping-company official who, though he made a great show of his charity, was notoriously selfish and cruel, and who, just a few days before the bombing, had said openly to several people that Mr. Tanimoto was a spy for the Americans. Several times he had derided Christianity and called it un-Japanese. At the moment of the bombing, Mr. Tanaka had been walking in the street in front of the city’s radio station. He received serious flash burns, but he was able to walk home. He took refuge in his Neighborhood Association shelter and from there tried hard to get medical aid. He expected all the doctors of Hiroshima to come to him, because he was so rich and so famous for giving his money away. When none of them came, he angrily set out to look for them; leaning on his daughter’s arm, he walked from private hospital to private hospital, but all were in ruins, and he went back and lay down in the shelter again. Now he was very weak and knew he was going to die. He was willing to be comforted by any religion.

Mr. Tanimoto went to help him. He descended into the tomblike shelter and, when his eyes were adjusted to the darkness, saw Mr. Tanaka, his face and arms puffed up and covered with pus and blood, and his eyes swollen shut. The old man smelled very bad, and he moaned constantly. He seemed to recognize Mr. Tanimoto’s voice. Standing at the shelter stairway to get light, Mr. Tanimoto read loudly from a Japanese-language pocket Bible: “For a thousand years in Thy sight are but as yesterday when it is past, and as a watch in the night. Thou carriest the children of men away as with a flood; they are as a sleep; in the morning they are like grass which groweth up. In the morning it flourisheth and groweth up; in the evening it is cut down, and withereth. For we are consumed by Thine anger and by Thy wrath are we troubled. Thou has set our iniquities before Thee, our secret sins in the light of Thy countenance. For all our days are passed away in Thy wrath: we spend our years as a tale that is told. . . .”

Mr. Tanaka died as Mr. Tanimoto read the psalm.

On August 11th, word came to the Ninoshima Military Hospital that a large number of military casualties from the Chugoku Regional Army Headquarters were to arrive on the island that day, and it was deemed necessary to evacuate all civilian patients. Miss Sasaki, still running an alarmingly high fever, was put on a large ship. She lay out on deck, with a pillow under her leg. There were awnings over the deck, but the vessel’s course put her in the sunlight. She felt as if she were under a magnifying glass in the sun. Pus oozed out of her wound, and soon the whole pillow was covered with it. She was taken ashore at Hatsukaichi, a town several miles to the southwest of Hiroshima, and put in the Goddess of Mercy Primary School, which had been turned into a hospital. She lay there for several days before a specialist on fractures came from Kobe. By then her leg was red and swollen up to her hip. The doctor decided he could not set the breaks. He made an incision and put in a rubber pipe to drain off the putrescence.

At the Novitiate, the motherless Kataoka children were inconsolable. Father Cieslik worked hard to keep them distracted. He put riddles to them. He asked, “What is the cleverest animal in the world?,” and after the thirteen-year-old girl had guessed the ape, the elephant, the horse, he said, “No, it must be the hippopotamus,” because in Japanese that animal is kaba , the reverse of baka , stupid. He told Bible stories, beginning, in the order of things, with the Creation. He showed them a scrapbook of snapshots taken in Europe. Nevertheless, they cried most of the time for their mother.

Several days later, Father Cieslik started hunting for the children’s family. First, he learned through the police that an uncle had been to the authorities in Kure, a city not far away, to inquire for the children. After that, he heard that an older brother had been trying to trace them through the post office in Ujina, a suburb of Hiroshima. Still later, he heard that the mother was alive and was on Goto Island, off Nagasaki. And at last, by keeping a check on the Ujina post office, he got in touch with the brother and returned the children to their mother.

About a week after the bomb dropped, a vague, incomprehensible rumor reached Hiroshima—that the city had been destroyed by the energy released when atoms were somehow split in two. The weapon was referred to in this word-of-mouth report as genshi bakudan —the root characters of which can be translated as “original child bomb.” No one understood the idea or put any more credence in it than in the powdered magnesium and such things. Newspapers were being brought in from other cities, but they were still confining themselves to extremely general statements, such as Domei’s assertion on August 12th: “There is nothing to do but admit the tremendous power of this inhuman bomb.” Already, Japanese physicists had entered the city with Lauritsen electroscopes and Neher electrometers; they understood the idea all too well.

On August 12th, the Nakamuras, all of them still rather sick, went to the nearby town of Kabe and moved in with Mrs. Nakamura’s sister-in-law. The next day, Mrs. Nakamura, although she was too ill to walk much, returned to Hiroshima alone, by electric car to the outskirts, by foot from there. All week, at the Novitiate, she had worried about her mother, brother, and older sister, who had lived in the part of town called Fukuro, and besides, she felt drawn by some fascination, just as Father Kleinsorge had been. She discovered that her family were all dead. She went back to Kabe so amazed and depressed by what she had seen and learned in the city that she could not speak that evening.

A comparative orderliness, at least, began to be established at the Red Cross Hospital. Dr. Sasaki, back from his rest, undertook to classify his patients (who were still scattered everywhere, even on the stairways). The staff gradually swept up the debris. Best of all, the nurses and attendants started to remove the corpses. Disposal of the dead, by decent cremation and enshrinement, is a greater moral responsibility to the Japanese than adequate care of the living. Relatives identified most of the first day’s dead in and around the hospital. Beginning on the second day, whenever a patient appeared to be moribund, a piece of paper with his name on it was fastened to his clothing. The corpse detail carried the bodies to a clearing outside, placed them on pyres of wood from ruined houses, burned them, put some of the ashes in envelopes intended for exposed X-ray plates, marked the envelopes with the names of the deceased, and piled them, neatly and respectfully, in stacks in the main office. In a few days, the envelopes filled one whole side of the impromptu shrine.

In Kabe, on the morning of August 15th, ten-year-old Toshio Nakamura heard an airplane overhead. He ran outdoor and identified it with a professional eye as a B29. “There goes Mr. B!” he shouted.

One of his relatives called out to him, “Haven’t you had enough of Mr. B?”

The question had a kind of symbolism. At almost that very moment, the dull, dispirited voice of Hirohito, the Emperor Tenno, was speaking for the first time in history over the radio: “After pondering deeply the general trends of the world and the actual conditions obtaining in Our Empire today, We have decided to effect a settlement of the present situation by resorting to an extraordinary measure. . . .”

Mrs. Nakamura had gone to the city again, to dig up some rice she had buried in her Neighborhood Association air-raid shelter. She got it and started back for Kabe. On the electric car, quite by chance, she ran into her younger sister, who had not been in Hiroshima the day of the bombing. “Have you heard the news?” her sister asked.

“What news?”

“The war is over.”

“Don’t say such a foolish thing, sister.”

“But I heard it over the radio myself.” And then, in a whisper, “It was the Emperor’s voice.”

“Oh,” Mrs. Nakamura said (she needed nothing more to make her give up thinking, in spite of the atomic bomb, that Japan still had a chance to win the war), “in that case . . .”

Some time later, in a letter to an American, Mr. Tanimoto described the events of that morning. “At the time of the Post-War, the marvelous thing in our history happened. Our Emperor broadcasted his own voice through radio directly to us, common people of Japan. Aug. 15th we were told that some news of great importance could he heard & all of us should hear it. So I went to Hiroshima railway station. There set a loud-speaker in the ruins of the station. Many civilians, all of them were in boundage, some being helped by shoulder of their daughters, some sustaining their injured feet by sticks, they listened to the broadcast and when they came to realize the fact that it was the Emperor, they cried with full tears in their eyes, ‘What a wonderful blessing it is that Tenno himself call on us and we can hear his own voice in person. We are thoroughly satisfied in such a great sacrifice.’ When they came to know the war was ended—that is, Japan was defeated, they, of course, were deeply disappointed, but followed after their Emperor’s commandment in calm spirit, making whole-hearted sacrifice for the everlasting peace of the world—and Japan started her new way.”

IV—Panic Grass and Feverfew

On August 18th, twelve days after the bomb burst, Father Kleinsorge set out on foot for Hiroshima from the Novitiate with his papier-mâché suitcase in his hand. He had begun to think that this bag, in which he kept his valuables, had a talismanic quality, because of the way he had found it after the explosion, standing handle-side up in the doorway of his room, while the desk under which he had previously hidden it was in splinters all over the floor. Now he was using it to carry the yen belonging to the Society of Jesus to the Hiroshima branch of the Yokohama Specie Bank, already reopened in its half-ruined building. On the whole, he felt quite well that morning. It is true that the minor cuts he had received had not healed in three or four days, as the rector of the Novitiate, who had examined them, had positively promised they would, but Father Kleinsorge had rested well for a week and considered that he was again ready for hard work. By now he was accustomed to the terrible scene through which he walked on his way into the city: the large rice field near the Novitiate, streaked with brown; the houses on the outskirts of the city, standing but decrepit, with broken windows and dishevelled tiles; and then, quite suddenly, the beginning of the four square miles of reddish-brown scar, where nearly everything had been buffeted down and burned; range on range of collapsed city blocks, with here and there a crude sign erected on a pile of ashes and tiles (“Sister, where are you?” or “All safe and we live at Toyosaka”); naked trees and canted telephone poles; the few standing, gutted buildings only accentuating the horizontality of everything else (the Museum of Science and Industry, with its dome stripped to its steel frame, as if for an autopsy; the modern Chamber of Commerce Building, its tower as cold, rigid, and unassailable after the blow as before; the huge, low-lying, camouflaged city hall; the row of dowdy banks, caricaturing a shaken economic system); and in the streets a macabre traffic—hundreds of crumpled bicycles, shells of streetcars and automobiles, all halted in mid-motion. The whole way, Father Kleinsorge was oppressed by the thought that all the damage he saw had been done in one instant by one bomb. By the time he reached the center of town, the day had become very hot. He walked to the Yokohama Bank, which was doing business in a temporary wooden stall on the ground floor of its building, deposited the money, went by the mission compound just to have another look at the wreckage, and then started back to the Novitiate. About halfway there, he began to have peculiar sensations. The more or less magical suitcase, now empty, suddenly seemed terribly heavy. His knees grew weak. He felt excruciatingly tired. With a considerable expenditure of spirit, he managed to reach the Novitiate. He did not think his weakness was worth mentioning to the other Jesuits. But a couple of days later, while attempting to say Mass, he had an onset of faintness and even after three attempts was unable to go through with the service, and the next morning the rector, who had examined Father Kleinsorge’s apparently negligible but unhealed cuts daily, asked in surprise, “What have you done to your wounds?” They had suddenly opened wider and were swollen and inflamed.

As she dressed on the morning of August 20th, in the home of her sister-in-law in Kabe, not far from Nagatsuka, Mrs. Nakamura, who had suffered no cuts or burns at all, though she had been rather nauseated all through the week she and her children had spent as guests of Father Kleinsorge and the other Catholics at the Novitiate, began fixing her hair and noticed, after one stroke, that her comb carried with it a whole handful of hair; the second time, the same thing happened, so she stopped combing at once. But in the next three or four days, her hair kept falling out of its own accord, until she was quite bald. She began living indoors, practically in hiding. On August 26th, both she and her younger daughter, Myeko, woke up feeling extremely weak and tired, and they stayed on their bedrolls. Her son and other daughter, who had shared every experience with her during and after the bombing, felt fine.

At about the same time—he lost track of the days, so hard was he working to set up a temporary place of worship in a private house he had rented in the outskirts—Mr. Tanimoto fell suddenly ill with a general malaise, weariness, and feverishness, and he, too, took to his bedroll on the floor of the half-wrecked house of a friend in the suburb of Ushida.

These four did not realize it, but they were coming down with the strange, capricious disease which came later to be known as radiation sickness.

Miss Sasaki lay in steady pain in the Goddess of Mercy Primary School, at Hatsukaichi, the fourth station to the southwest of Hiroshima on the electric train. An internal infection still prevented the proper setting of the compound fracture of her lower left leg. A young man who was in the same hospital and who seemed to have grown fond of her in spite of her unremitting preoccupation with her suffering, or else just pitied her because of it, lent her a Japanese translation of de Maupassant, and she tried to read the stories, but she could concentrate for only four or five minutes at a time.

The hospitals and aid stations around Hiroshima were so crowded in the first weeks after the bombing, and their staffs were so variable, depending on their health and on the unpredictable arrival of outside help, that patients had to be constantly shifted from place to place. Miss Sasaki, who had already been moved three times, twice by ship, was taken at the end of August to an engineering school, also at Hatsukaichi. Because her leg did not improve but swelled more and more, the doctors at the school bound it with crude splints and took her by car, on September 9th, to the Red Cross Hospital in Hiroshima. This was the first chance she had had to look at the ruins of Hiroshima; the last time she had been carried through the city’s streets, she had been hovering on the edge of unconsciousness. Even though the wreckage had been described to her, and though she was still in pain, the sight horrified and amazed her, and there was something she noticed about it that particularly gave her the creeps. Over everything—up through the wreckage of the city, in gutters, along the riverbanks, tangled among tiles and tin roofing, climbing on charred tree trunks—was a blanket of fresh, vivid, lush, optimistic green; the verdancy rose even from the foundations of ruined houses. Weeds already hid the ashes, and wild flowers were in bloom among the city’s bones. The bomb had not only left the underground organs of plants intact; it had stimulated them. Everywhere were bluets and Spanish bayonets, goosefoot, morning glories and day lilies, the hairy-fruited bean, purslane and clotbur and sesame and panic grass and feverfew. Especially in a circle at the center, sickle senna grew in extraordinary regeneration, not only standing among the charred remnants of the same plant but pushing up in new places, among bricks and through cracks in the asphalt. It actually seemed as if a load of sickle-senna seed had been dropped along with the bomb.

At the Red Cross Hospital, Miss Sasaki was put under the care of Dr. Sasaki. Now, a month after the explosion, something like order had been reëstablished in the hospital; which is to say that the patients who still lay in the corridors at least had mats to sleep on and that the supply of medicines, which had given out in the first few days, had been replaced, though inadequately, by contributions from other cities. Dr. Sasaki, who had had one seventeen-hour sleep at his home on the third night, had ever since then rested only about six hours a night, on a mat at the hospital; he had lost twenty pounds from his very small body; he still wore the ill-fitting glasses he had borrowed from an injured nurse.

Since Miss Sasaki was a woman and was so sick (and perhaps, he afterward admitted, just a little bit because she was named Sasaki), Dr. Sasaki put her on a mat in a semi-private room, which at that time had only eight people in it. He questioned her and put down on her record card, in the correct, scrunched-up German in which he wrote all his records: “ Mittelgrosse Patientin in gutem Ernährungszustand. Fraktur am linken Unterschenkelknochen mit Wunde; Anschwellung in der linken Unterschenkelgegend. Haut und sichtbare Schleimhäute mässig durchblutet und kein Oedema, ” noting that she was a medium-sized female patient in good general health; that she had a compound fracture of the left tibia, with swelling of the left lower leg; that her skin and visible mucous membranes were heavily spotted with petechiae , which are hemorrhages about the size of grains of rice, or even as big as soybeans; and, in addition, that her head, eyes, throat, lungs, and heart were apparently normal; and that she had a fever. He wanted to set her fracture and put her leg in a cast, but he had run out of plaster of Paris long since, so he just stretched her out on a mat and prescribed aspirin for her fever, and glucose intravenously and diastase orally for her undernourishment (which he had not entered on her record because everyone suffered from it). She exhibited only one of the queer symptoms so many of his patients were just then beginning to show—the spot hemorrhages.

Dr. Fujii was still pursued by bad luck, which still was connected with rivers. Now he was living in the summer house of Mr. Okuma, in Fukawa. This house clung to the steep banks of the Ota River. Here his injuries seemed to make good progress, and he even began to treat refugees who came to him from the neighborhood, using medical supplies he had retrieved from a cache in the suburbs. He noticed in some of his patients a curious syndrome of symptoms that cropped out in the third and fourth weeks, but he was not able to do much more than swathe cuts and burns. Early in September, it began to rain, steadily and heavily. The river rose. On September 17th, there came a cloudburst and then a typhoon, and the water crept higher and higher up the bank. Mr. Okuma and Dr. Fujii became alarmed and scrambled up the mountain to a peasant’s house. (Down in Hiroshima, the flood took up where the bomb had left off—swept away bridges that had survived the blast, washed out streets, undermined foundations of buildings that still stood—and ten miles to the west, the Ono Army Hospital, where a team of experts from Kyoto Imperial University was studying the delayed affliction of the patients, suddenly slid down a beautiful, pine-dark mountainside into the Inland Sea and drowned most of the investigators and their mysteriously diseased patients alike.) After the storm, Dr. Fujii and Mr. Okuma went down to the river and found that the Okuma house had been washed altogether away.

Because so many people were suddenly feeling sick nearly a month after the atomic bomb was dropped, an unpleasant rumor began to move around, and eventually it made its way to the house in Kabe where Mrs. Nakamura lay bald and ill. It was that the atomic bomb had deposited some sort of poison on Hiroshima which would give off deadly emanations for seven years; nobody could go there all that time. This especially upset Mrs. Nakamura, who remembered that in a moment of confusion on the morning of the explosion she had literally sunk her entire means of livelihood, her Sankoku sewing machine, in the small cement water tank in front of what was left of her house; now no one would be able to go and fish it out. Up to this time, Mrs. Nakamura and her relatives had been quite resigned and passive about the moral issue of the atomic bomb, but this rumor suddenly aroused them to more hatred and resentment of America than they had felt all through the war.

Japanese physicists, who knew a great deal about atomic fission (one of them owned a cyclotron), worried about lingering radiation at Hiroshima, and in mid-August, not many days after President Truman’s disclosure of the type of bomb that had been dropped, they entered the city to make investigations. The first thing they did was roughly to determine a center by observing the side on which telephone poles all around the heart of the town were scorched; they settled on the torii gateway of the Gokoku Shrine, right next to the parade ground of the Chugoku Regional Army Headquarters. From there, they worked north and south with Lauritsen electroscopes, which are sensitive to both beta rays and gamma rays. These indicated that the highest intensity of radioactivity, near the torii, was 4.2 times the average natural “leak” of ultra-short waves for the earth of that area. The scientists noticed that the flash of the bomb had discolored concrete to a light reddish tint, had scaled off the surface of granite, and had scorched certain other types of building material, and that consequently the bomb had, in some places, left prints of the shadows that had been cast by its light. The experts found, for instance, a permanent shadow thrown on the roof of the Chamber of Commerce Building (220 yards from the rough center) by the structure’s rectangular tower; several others in the lookout post on top of the Hypothec Bank (2,050 yards); another in the tower of the Chugoku Electric Supply Building (800 yards); another projected by the handle of a gas pump (2,630 yards); and several on granite tombstones in the Gokoku Shrine (35 yards). By triangulating these and other such shadows with the objects that formed them, the scientists determined that the exact center was a spot a hundred and fifty yards south of the torii and a few yards southeast of the pile of ruins that had once been the Shima Hospital. (A few vague human silhouettes were found, and these gave rise to stories that eventually included fancy and precise details. One story told how a painter on a ladder was monumentalized in a kind of bas-relief on the stone façade of a bank building on which he was at work, in the act of dipping his brush into his paint can; another, how a man and his cart on the bridge near the Museum of Science and Industry, almost under the center of the explosion, were cast down in an embossed shadow which made it clear that the man was about to whip his horse.) Starting east and west from the actual center, the scientists, in early September, made new measurements, and the highest radiation they found this time was 3.9 times the natural “leak.” Since radiation of at least a thousand times the natural “leak” would be required to cause serious effects on the human body, the scientists announced that people could enter Hiroshima without any peril at all.

As soon as this reassurance reached the household in which Mrs. Nakamura was concealing herself—or, at any rate, within a short time after her hair had started growing back again—her whole family relaxed their extreme hatred of America, and Mrs. Nakamura sent her brother-in-law to look for the sewing machine. It was still submerged in the water tank, and when he brought it home, she saw, to her dismay, that it was all rusted and useless.

By the end of the first week in September, Father Kleinsorge was in bed at the Novitiate with a fever of 102.2, and since he seemed to be getting worse, his colleagues decided to send him to the Catholic International Hospital in Tokyo. Father Cieslik and the rector took him as far as Kobe and a Jesuit from that city took him the rest of the way, with a message from a Kobe doctor to the Mother Superior of the International Hospital: “Think twice before you give this man blood transfusions, because with atomic-bomb patients we aren’t at all sure that if you stick needles in them, they’ll stop bleeding.”

When Father Kleinsorge arrived at the hospital, he was terribly pale and very shaky. He complained that the bomb had upset his digestion and given him abdominal pains. His white blood count was three thousand (five to seven thousand is normal), he was seriously anemic, and his temperature was 104. A doctor who did not know much about these strange manifestations—Father Kleinsorge was one of a handful of atomic patients who had reached Tokyo—came to see him, and to the patient’s face he was most encouraging. “You’ll be out of here in two weeks,” he said. But when the doctor got out in the corridor, he said to the Mother Superior, “He’ll die. All these bomb people die—you’ll see. They go along for a couple of weeks and then they die.”

The doctor prescribed suralimentation for Father Kleinsorge. Every three hours, they forced some eggs or beef juice into him, and they fed him all the sugar he could stand. They gave him vitamins, and iron pills and arsenic (in Fowler’s solution) for his anemia. He confounded both the doctor’s predictions; he neither died nor got up in a fortnight. Despite the fact that the message from the Kobe doctor deprived him of transfusions, which would have been the most useful therapy of all, his fever and his digestive troubles cleared up fairly quickly. His white count went up for a while, but early in October it dropped again, to 3,600; then, in ten days, it suddenly climbed above normal, to 8,800; and it finally settled at 5,800. His ridiculous scratches puzzled everyone. For a few days, they would mend, and then, when he moved around, they would open up again. As soon as he began to feel well, he enjoyed himself tremendously. In Hiroshima he had been one of thousands of sufferers; in Tokyo he was a curiosity. Young American Army doctors came by the dozen to observe him. Japanese experts questioned him. A newspaper interviewed him. And once, the confused doctor came and shook his head and said, “Baffling cases, these atomic-bomb people.”

Mrs. Nakamura lay indoors with Myeko. They both continued sick, and though Mrs. Nakamura vaguely sensed that their trouble was caused by the bomb, she was too poor to see a doctor and so never knew exactly what the matter was. Without any treatment at all, but merely resting, they began gradually to feel better. Some of Myeko’s hair fell out, and she had a tiny burn on her arm which took months to heal. The boy, Toshio, and the older girl, Yaeko, seemed well enough, though they, too, lost some hair and occasionally had bad headaches. Toshio was still having nightmares, always about the nineteen-year-old mechanic, Hideo Osaki, his hero, who had been killed by the bomb.

On his back with a fever of 104, Mr. Tanimoto worried about all the funerals he ought to be conducting for the deceased of his church. He thought he was just overtired from the hard work he had done since the bombing, but after the fever had persisted for a few days, he sent for a doctor. The doctor was too busy to visit him in Ushida, but he dispatched a nurse, who recognized his symptoms as those of mild radiation disease and came back from time to time to give him injections of Vitamin B1. A Buddhist priest with whom Mr. Tanimoto was acquainted called on him and suggested that moxibustion might give him relief; the priest showed the pastor how to give himself the ancient Japanese treatment, by setting fire to a twist of the stimulant herb moxa placed on the wrist pulse. Mr. Tanimoto found that each moxa treatment temporarily reduced his fever one degree. The nurse had told him to eat as much as possible, and every few days his mother-in-law brought him vegetables and fish from Tsuzu, twenty miles away, where she lived. He spent a month in bed, and then went ten hours by train to his father’s home in Shikoku. There he rested another month.

Dr. Sasaki and his colleagues at the Red Cross Hospital watched the unprecedented disease unfold and at last evolved a theory about its nature. It had, they decided, three stages. The first stage had been all over before the doctors even knew they were dealing with a new sickness; it was the direct reaction to the bombardment of the body, at the moment when the bomb went off, by neutrons, beta particles, and gamma rays. The apparently uninjured people who had died so mysteriously in the first few hours or days had succumbed in this first stage. It killed ninety-five per cent of the people within a half mile of the center, and many thousands who were farther away. The doctors realized in retrospect that even though most of these dead had also suffered from burns and blast effects, they had absorbed enough radiation to kill them. The rays simply destroyed body cells—caused their nuclei to degenerate and broke their walls. Many people who did not die right away came down with nausea, headache, diarrhea, malaise, and fever, which lasted several days. Doctors could not be certain whether some of these symptoms were the result of radiation or nervous shock. The second stage set in ten or fifteen days after the bombing. The main symptom was falling hair. Diarrhea and fever, which in some cases went as high as 106, came next. Twenty-five to thirty days after the explosion, blood disorders appeared: gums bled, the white-blood-cell count dropped sharply, and petechiae appeared on the skin and mucous membranes. The drop in the number of white blood corpuscles reduced the patient’s capacity to resist infection, so open wounds were unusually slow in healing and many of the sick developed sore throats and mouths. The two key symptoms, on which the doctors came to base their prognosis, were fever and the lowered white-corpuscle count. If fever remained steady and high, the patient’s chances for survival were poor. The white count almost always dropped below four thousand; a patient whose count fell below one thousand had little hope of living. Toward the end of the second stage, if the patient survived, anemia, or a drop in the red blood count, also set in. The third stage was the reaction that came when the body struggled to compensate for its ills—when, for instance, the white count not only returned to normal but increased to much higher than normal levels. In this stage, many patients died of complications, such as infections in the chest cavity. Most burns healed with deep layers of pink, rubbery scar tissue, known as keloid tumors. The duration of the disease varied, depending on the patient’s constitution and the amount of radiation he had received. Some victims recovered in a week; with others the disease dragged on for months.

As the symptoms revealed themselves, it became clear that many of them resembled the effects of overdoses of X-ray, and the doctors based their therapy on that likeness. They gave victims liver extract, blood transfusions, and vitamins, especially B1. The shortage of supplies and instruments hampered them. Allied doctors who came in after the surrender found plasma and penicillin very effective. Since the blood disorders were, in the long run, the predominant factor in the disease, some of the Japanese doctors evolved a theory as to the seat of the delayed sickness. They thought that perhaps gamma rays, entering the body at the time of the explosion, made the phosphorus in the victims’ bones radioactive, and that they in turn emitted beta particles, which, though they could not penetrate far through flesh, could enter the bone marrow, where blood is manufactured, and gradually tear it down. Whatever its source, the disease had some baffling quirks. Not all the patients exhibited all the main symptoms. People who suffered flash burns were protected, to a considerable extent, from radiation sickness. Those who had lain quietly for days or even hours after the bombing were much less liable to get sick than those who had been active. Gray hair seldom fell out. And, as if nature were protecting man against his own ingenuity, the reproductive processes were affected for a time; men became sterile, women had miscarriages, menstruation stopped.

For ten days after the flood, Dr. Fujii lived in the peasant’s house on the mountain above the Ota. Then he heard about a vacant private clinic in Kaitaichi, a suburb to the east of Hiroshima. He bought it at once, moved there, and hung out a sign inscribed in English, in honor of the conquerors:

M. FUJII, M.D. MEDICAL & VENEREAL

Quite recovered from his wounds, he soon built up a strong practice, and he was delighted, in the evenings, to receive members of the occupying forces, on whom he lavished whiskey and practiced English.

Giving Miss Sasaki a local anaesthetic of procaine, Dr. Sasaki made an incision in her leg on October 23rd, to drain the infection, which still lingered on eleven weeks after the injury. In the following days, so much pus formed that he had to dress the opening each morning and evening. A week later, she complained of great pain, so he made another incision; he cut still a third, on November 9th, and enlarged it on the twenty-sixth. All this time, Miss Sasaki grew weaker and weaker, and her spirits fell low. One day, the young man who had lent her his translation of de Maupassant at Hatsukaichi came to visit her; he told her that he was going to Kyushu but that when he came back, he would like to see her again. She didn’t care. Her leg had been so swollen and painful all along that the doctor had not even tried to set the fractures, and though an X-ray taken in November showed that the bones were mending, she could see under the sheet that her left leg was nearly three inches shorter than her right and that her left foot was turning inward. She thought often of the man to whom she had been engaged. Someone told her he was back from overseas. She wondered what he had heard about her injuries that made him stay away.

Father Kleinsorge was discharged from the hospital in Tokyo on December 19th and took a train home. On the way, two days later, at Yokogawa, a stop just before Hiroshima, Dr. Fujii boarded the train. It was the first time the two men had met since before the bombing. They sat together. Dr. Fujii said he was going to the annual gathering of his family, on the anniversary of his father’s death. When they started talking about their experiences, the Doctor was quite entertaining as he told how his places of residence kept falling into rivers. Then he asked Father Kleinsorge how he was, and the Jesuit talked about his stay in the hospital. “The doctors told me to be cautious,” he said. “They ordered me to have a two-hour nap every afternoon.”

Dr. Fujii said, “It’s hard to be cautious in Hiroshima these days. Everyone seems to be so busy.”

A new municipal government, set up under Allied Military Government direction, had gone to work at last in the city hall. Citizens who had recovered from various degrees of radiation sickness were coming back by the thousand—by November 1st, the population, mostly crowded into the outskirts, was already 137,000, more than a third of the wartime peak—and the government set in motion all kinds of projects to put them to work rebuilding the city. It hired men to clear the streets, and others to gather scrap iron, which they sorted and piled in mountains opposite the city hall. Some returning residents were putting up their own shanties and huts, and planting small squares of winter wheat beside them, but the city also authorized and built four hundred one-family “barracks.” Utilities were repaired—electric lights shone again, trams started running, and employees of the waterworks fixed seventy thousand leaks in mains and plumbing. A Planning Conference, with an enthusiastic young Military Government officer, Lieutenant John D. Montgomery, of Kalamazoo, as its adviser, began to consider what sort of city the new Hiroshima should be. The ruined city had flourished—and had been an inviting target—mainly because it had been one of the most important military-command and communications centers in Japan, and would have become the Imperial headquarters had the islands been invaded and Tokyo been captured. Now there would be no huge military establishments to help revive the city. The Planning Conference, at a loss as to just what importance Hiroshima could have, fell back on rather vague cultural and paving projects. It drew maps with avenues a hundred yards wide and thought seriously of preserving the half-ruined Museum of Science and Industry more or less as it was, as a monument to the disaster, and naming it the Institute of International Amity. Statistical workers gathered what figures they could on the effects of the bomb. They reported that 78,150 people had been killed, 13,983 were missing, and 37,425 had been injured. No one in the city government pretended that these figures were accurate—though the Americans accepted them as official—and as the months went by and more and more hundreds of corpses were dug up from the ruins, and as the number of unclaimed urns of ashes at the Zempoji Temple in Koi rose into the thousands, the statisticians began to say that at least a hundred thousand people had lost their lives in the bombing. Since many people died of a combination of causes, it was impossible to figure exactly how many were killed by each cause, but the statisticians calculated that about twenty-five per cent had died of direct burns from the bomb, about fifty per cent from other injuries, and about twenty per cent as a result of radiation effects. The statistician’ figures on property damage were more reliable: sixty-two thousand out of ninety thousand buildings destroyed, and six thousand more damaged beyond repair. In the heart of the city, they found only five modern buildings that could be used again without major repairs. This small number was by no means the fault of flimsy Japanese construction. In fact, since the 1923 earthquake, Japanese building regulations had required that the roof of each large building be able to bear a minimum load of seventy pounds per square foot, whereas American regulations do not normally specify more than forty pounds per square foot.

Scientists swarmed into the city. Some of them measured the force that had been necessary to shift marble gravestones in the cemeteries, to knock over twenty-two of the forty-seven railroad cars in the yards at Hiroshima station, to lift and move the concrete roadway on one of the bridges, and to perform other noteworthy acts of strength, and concluded that the pressure exerted by the explosion varied from 5.3 to 8.0 tons per square yard. Others found that mica, of which the melting point is 900° C., had fused on granite gravestones three hundred and eighty yards from the center; that telephone poles of Cryptomeria japonica, whose carbonization temperature is 240° C., had been charred at forty-four hundred yards from the center; and that the surface of gray clay tiles of the type used in Hiroshima, whose melting point is 1,300° C., had dissolved at six hundred yards; and, after examining other significant ashes and melted bits, they concluded that the bomb’s heat on the ground at the center must have been 6,000° C. And from further measurements of radiation, which involved, among other things, the scraping up of fission fragments from roof troughs and drainpipes as far away as the suburb of Takasu, thirty-three hundred yards from the center, they learned some far more important facts about the nature of the bomb. General MacArthur’s headquarters systematically censored all mention of the bomb in Japanese scientific publications, but soon the fruit of the scientists’ calculations became common knowledge among Japanese physicists, doctors, chemists, journalists, professors, and, no doubt, those statesmen and military men who were still in circulation. Long before the American public had been told, most of the scientists and lots of non-scientists in Japan knew—from the calculations of Japanese nuclear physicists—that a uranium bomb had exploded at Hiroshima and a more powerful one, of plutonium, at Nagasaki. They also knew that theoretically one ten times as powerful—or twenty—could be developed. The Japanese scientists thought they knew the exact height at which the bomb at Hiroshima was exploded and the approximate weight of the uranium used. They estimated that, even with the primitive bomb used at Hiroshima, it would require a shelter of concrete fifty inches thick to protect a human being entirely from radiation sickness. The scientists had these and other details which remained subject to security in the United States printed and mimeographed and bound into little books. The Americans knew of the existence of these, but tracing them and seeing that they did not fall into the wrong hands would have obliged the occupying authorities to set up, for this one purpose alone, an enormous police system in Japan. Altogether, the Japanese scientists were somewhat amused at the efforts of their conquerors to keep security on atomic fission.

Late in February, 1946, a friend of Miss Sasaki’s called on Father Kleinsorge and asked him to visit her in the hospital. She had been growing more and more depressed and morbid; she seemed little interested in living. Father Kleinsorge went to see her several times. On his first visit, he kept the conversation general, formal, and yet vaguely sympathetic, and did not mention religion. Miss Sasaki herself brought it up the second time he dropped in on her. Evidently she had had some talks with a Catholic. She asked bluntly, “If your God is so good and kind, how can he let people suffer like this?” She made a gesture which took in her shrunken leg, the other patients in her room, and Hiroshima as a whole.

“My child,” Father Kleinsorge said, “man is not now in the condition God intended. He has fallen from grace through sin.” And he went on to explain all the reasons for everything.

It came to Mrs. Nakamura’s attention that a carpenter from Kabe was building a number of wooden shanties in Hiroshima which he rented for fifty yen a month—$3.33, at the fixed rate of exchange. Mrs. Nakamura had lost the certificates for her bonds and other wartime savings, but fortunately she had copied off all the numbers just a few days before the bombing and had taken the list to Kabe, and so, when her hair had grown in enough for her to be presentable, she went to her bank in Hiroshima, and a clerk there told her that after checking her numbers against the records the bank would give her her money. As soon as she got it, she rented one of the carpenter’s shacks. It was in Nobori-cho, near the site of her former house, and though its floor was dirt and it was dark inside, it was at least a home in Hiroshima, and she was no longer dependent on the charity of her in-laws. During the spring, she cleared away some nearby wreckage and planted a vegetable garden. She cooked with utensils and ate off plates she scavenged from the debris. She sent Myeko to the kindergarten which the Jesuits reopened, and the two older children attended Nobori-cho Primary School, which, for want of buildings, held classes out of doors. Toshio wanted to study to be a mechanic, like his hero, Hideo Osaki. Prices were high; by midsummer Mrs. Nakamura’s savings were gone. She sold some of her clothes to get food. She had once had several expensive kimonos, but during the war one had been stolen, she had given one to a sister who had been bombed out in Tokuyama, she had lost a couple in the Hiroshima bombing, and now she sold her last one. It brought only a hundred yen, which did not last long. In June, she went to Father Kleinsorge for advice about how to get along, and in early August, she was still considering the two alternatives he suggested—taking work as a domestic for some of the Allied occupation forces, or borrowing from her relatives enough money, about five hundred yen, or a bit more than thirty dollars, to repair her rusty sewing machine and resume the work of a seamstress.

When Mr. Tanimoto returned from Shikoku, he draped a tent he owned over the roof of the badly damaged house he had rented in Ushida. The roof still leaked, but he conducted services in the damp living room. He began thinking about raising money to restore his church in the city. He became quite friendly with Father Kleinsorge and saw the Jesuits often. He envied them their Church’s wealth; they seemed to be able to do anything they wanted. He had nothing to work with except his own energy, and that was not what it had been.

The Society of Jesus had been the first institution to build a relatively permanent shanty in the ruins of Hiroshima. That had been while Father Kleinsorge was in the hospital. As soon as he got back, he began living in the shack, and he and another priest, Father Laderman, who had joined him in the mission, arranged for the purchase of three of the standardized “barracks,” which the city was selling at seven thousand yen apiece. They put two together, end to end, and made a pretty chapel of them; they ate in the third. When materials were available, they commissioned a contractor to build a three-story mission house exactly like the one that had been destroyed in the fire. In the compound, carpenters cut timbers, gouged mortises, shaped tenons, whittled scores of wooden pegs and bored holes for them, until all the parts for the house were in a neat pile; then, in three days, they put the whole thing together, like an Oriental puzzle, without any nails at all. Father Kleinsorge was finding it hard, as Dr. Fujii had suggested he would, to be cautious and to take his naps. He went out every day on foot to call on Japanese Catholics and prospective converts. As the months went by, he grew more and more tired. In June, he read an article in the Hiroshima Chugoku warning survivors against working too hard—but what could he do? By July, he was worn out, and early in August, almost exactly on the anniversary of the bombing, he went back to the Catholic International Hospital, in Tokyo, for a month’s rest.

Whether or not Father Kleinsorge’s answers to Miss Sasaki’s questions about life were final and absolute truths, she seemed quickly to draw physical strength from them. Dr. Sasaki noticed it and congratulated Father Kleinsorge. By April 15th, her temperature and white count were normal and the infection in the wound was beginning to clear up. On the twentieth, there was almost no pus, and for the first time she jerked along a corridor on crutches. Five days later, the wound had begun to heal, and on the last day of the month she was discharged.

During the early summer, she prepared herself for conversion to Catholicism. In that period she had ups and downs. Her depressions were deep. She knew she would always be a cripple. Her fiancé never came to see her. There was nothing for her to do except read and look out, from her house on a hillside in Koi, across the ruins of the city where her parents and brother died. She was nervous, and any sudden noise made her put her hands quickly to her throat. Her leg still hurt; she rubbed it often and patted it, as if to console it.

It took six months for the Red Cross Hospital, and even longer for Dr. Sasaki, to get back to normal. Until the city restored electric power, the hospital had to limp along with the aid of a Japanese Army generator in its back yard. Operating tables, X-ray machines, dentist chairs, everything complicated and essential came in a trickle of charity from other cities. In Japan, face is important even to institutions, and long before the Red Cross Hospital was back to par on basic medical equipment, its directors put up a new yellow brick veneer façade, so the hospital became the handsomest building in Hiroshima—from the street. For the first four months, Dr. Sasaki was the only surgeon on the staff and he almost never left the building; then, gradually, he began to take an interest in his own life again. He got married in March. He gained back some of the weight he lost, but his appetite remained only fair; before the bombing, he used to eat four rice balls at every meal, but a year after it he could manage only two. He felt tired all the time. “But I have to realize,” he said, “that the whole community is tired.”

A year after the bomb was dropped, Miss Sasaki was a cripple; Mrs. Nakamura was destitute; Father Kleinsorge was back in the hospital; Dr. Sasaki was not capable of the work he once could do; Dr. Fujii had lost the thirty-room hospital it took him many years to acquire, and had no prospects of rebuilding it; Mr. Tanimoto’s church had been ruined and he no longer had his exceptional vitality. The lives of these six people, who were among the luckiest in Hiroshima, would never be the same. What they thought of their experiences and of the use of the atomic bomb was, of course, not unanimous. One feeling they did seem to share, however, was a curious kind of elated community spirit, something like that of the Londoners after their blitz—a pride in the way they and their fellow-survivors had stood up to a dreadful ordeal. Just before the anniversary, Mr. Tanimoto wrote in a letter to an American some words which expressed this feeling: “What a heartbreaking scene this was the first night! About midnight I landed on the riverbank. So many injured people lied on the ground that I made my way by striding over them. Repeating ‘Excuse me,’ I forwarded and carried a tub of water with me and gave a cup of water to each one of them. They raised their upper bodies slowly and accepted a cup of water with a bow and drunk quietly and, spilling any remnant, gave back a cup with hearty expression of their thankfulness, and said, ‘I couldn’t help my sister, who was buried under the house, because I had to take care of my mother who got a deep wound on her eye and our house soon set fire and we hardly escaped. Look, I lost my home, my family, and at last my-self bitterly injured. But now I have gotted my mind to dedicate what I have and to complete the war for our country’s sake.’ Thus they pledged to me, even women and children did the same. Being entirely tired I lied down on the ground among them, but couldn’t sleep at all. Next morning I found many men and women dead, whom I gave water last night. But, to my great surprise, I never heard anyone cried in disorder, even though they suffered in great agony. They died in silence, with no grudge, setting their teeth to bear it. All for the country!

“Dr. Y. Hiraiwa, professor of Hiroshima University of Literature and Science, and one of my church members, was buried by the bomb under the two storied house with his son, a student of Tokyo University. Both of them could not move an inch under tremendously heavy pressure. And the house already caught fire. His son said, ‘Father, we can do nothing except make our mind up to consecrate our lives for the country. Let us give Banzai to our Emperor.’ Then the father followed after his son, ‘ Tenno-heika, Banzai, Banzai, Banzai!’ In the result, Dr. Hiraiwa said, ‘Strange to say, I felt calm and bright and peaceful spirit in my heart, when I chanted Banzai to Tenno.’ Afterward his son got out and digged down and pulled out his father and thus they were saved. In thinking of their experience of that time Dr. Hiraiwa repeated, ‘What a fortunate that we are Japanese! It was my first time I ever tasted such a beautiful spirit when I decided to die for our Emperor.’

“Miss Kayoko Nobutoki, a student of girl’s high school, Hiroshima Jazabuin, and a daughter of my church member, was taking rest with her friends beside the heavy fence of the Buddhist Temple. At the moment the atomic bomb was dropped, the fence fell upon them. They could not move a bit under such a heavy fence and then smoke entered into even a crack and choked their breath. One of the girls begun to sing Kimi ga yo , national anthem, and others followed in chorus and died. Meanwhile one of them found a crack and struggled hard to get out. When she was taken in the Red Cross Hospital she told how her friends died, tracing back in her memory to singing in chorus our national anthem. They were just 13 years old.

“Yes, people of Hiroshima died manly in the atomic bombing, believing that it was for Emperor’s sake.”

A surprising number of the people of Hiroshima remained more or less indifferent about the ethics of using the bomb. Possibly they were too terrified by it to want to think about it at all. Not many of them even bothered to find out much about what it was like. Mrs. Nakamura’s conception of it—and awe of it—was typical. “The atom bomb,” she would say when asked about it, “is the size of a matchbox. The heat of it was six thousand times that of the sun. It exploded in the air. There is some radium in it. I don’t know just how it works, but when the radium is put together, it explodes.” As for the use of the bomb, she would say, “It was war and we had to expect it.” And then she would add, “ Shikata ga nai ,” a Japanese expression as common as, and corresponding to, the Russian word “ nichevo ”: “It can’t be helped. Oh, well. Too bad.” Dr. Fujii said approximately the same thing about the use of the bomb to Father Kleinsorge one evening, in German: “ Da ist nichts zu machen. There’s nothing to be done about it.”

Many citizens of Hiroshima, however, continued to feel a hatred for Americans which nothing could possibly erase. “I see,” Dr. Sasaki once said, “that they are holding a trial for war criminals in Tokyo just now. I think they ought to try the men who decided to use the bomb and they should hang them all.”

Father Kleinsorge and the other German Jesuit priests, who, as foreigners, could be expected to take a relatively detached view, often discussed the ethics of using the bomb. One of them, Father Siemes, who was out at Nagatsuka at the time of the attack, wrote in a report to the Holy See in Rome, “Some of us consider the bomb in the same category as poison gas and were against its use on a civilian population. Others were of the opinion that in total war, as carried on in Japan, there was no difference between civilians and soldiers, and that the bomb itself was an effective force tending to end the bloodshed, warning Japan to surrender and thus to avoid total destruction. It seems logical that he who supports total war in principle cannot complain of a war against civilians. The crux of the matter is whether total war in its present form is justifiable, even when it serves a just purpose. Does it not have material and spiritual evil as its consequences which far exceed whatever good might result? When will our moralists give us a clear answer to this question?”

It would be impossible to say what horrors were embedded in the minds of the children who lived through the day of the bombing in Hiroshima. On the surface their recollections, months after the disaster, were of an exhilarating adventure. Toshio Nakamura, who was ten at the time of the bombing, was soon able to talk freely, even gaily, about the experience, and a few weeks before the anniversary he wrote the following matter-of-fact essay for his teacher at Nobori-cho Primary School: “The day before the bomb, I went for a swim. In the morning, I was eating peanuts. I saw a light. I was knocked to little sister’s sleeping place. When we were saved, I could only see as far as the tram. My mother and I started to pack our things. The neighbors were walking around burned and bleeding. Hataya-san told me to run away with her. I said I wanted to wait for my mother. We went to the park. A whirlwind came. At night a gas tank burned and I saw the reflection in the river. We stayed in the park one night. Next day I went to Taiko Bridge and met my girl friends Kikuki and Murakami. They were looking for their mothers. But Kikuki’s mother was wounded and Murakami’s mother, alas, was dead.” ♦

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• History of China

The Bombing of Hiroshima

Updated 18 October 2023

Subject History of China ,  World War II ,  Asia

Downloads 49

Category History ,  War ,  World

Topic Hiroshima ,  Atomic Bomb ,  Japan

As World War II was drawing to a close

The US released two nuclear weapons upon the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. These bombings took place on August 6 and 9, 1945 respectively. It happened right after the states obtained the consent of the United Kingdom which was a requirement by the Quebec agreement. The bombs resulted in the deaths of approximately 226,000 people, majority of whom were civilians and in the following five months. The children flesh – who attended Honkawa elementary school - did not hold up within the concrete walls of the school. Nothing was left, absolutely nothing. No remnants of their parents to bury. No single human being who was within a 1.2-kilometer radius of the hypocenter survived within a few seconds of the 8:15 a.m. bombing. (Asada, 1988, 2007)

Why bomb Japan?

In his article, "Japan's Delayed Surrender," Herbert P. Bix's 1995 focused on Emperor Hirohito's conditions to delay Japan's surrender during the month’s preceding Japan's bombing. On the contrary, the emperor said that it was a "sacred decision" to delay the surrender in which the states took advantage of the divided government. Lawrence Freedman and Saki Dock rill (1994), proclaims that the States followed "a clear and coherent strategy of shock," which was a success. President Harry S. Truman had been issued with a warning by some of his advisers. They told him that any attempt to attack Japan would result in American casualties. But all advice fell into deaf ears as he later gave the order to allow the new weapon to be used on Japan. An American bomber, Enola Gay, was instructed to drop the bomb over Hiroshima. In just 72 hours later, the states dropped another bomb Nagasaki, and these actions prompted Japan to announce its surrender.

In recent years since the inhuman massacre of the Japanese

Some Japanese and other historians suggested that the main aim of the weapon was based on two primary objectives. One of the two was to bring the Japanese war with other nations to an offensive end and consequently additional American lives. Secondly, it was to demonstrate the new weapon's power to the Soviet Union. By August 1945, relations between the Soviet Union and the United States had poorly deteriorated hence the weapon would have proved its worth. The havoc bestowed upon Hiroshima was not enough to convince the Japanese War Council to accept defeat and call for an unconditional surrender. The States had already planned to deliver another blow by a bomber, nicknamed "Fat Man," on August 11. However, the meteorologists said that there was bad weather expected for that day and hence the states pushed the date to August 9th. Nagasaki was bombed at 11.02 pm, and the Japanese government had no alternative other than to surrender. (Asada, 1988, 2007)

The main reason why Hiroshima was targeted

And not any other city was because it had not been previously targeted by the United States air force conventional bombings on Japan. Therefore, it was regarded as the best place to experiment the effects of the nuclear weapon. The allies had a fear that any attempt to attack Japan would result in fatalities since Japan had a robust military base that coincidentally, has its support in Hiroshima. The bomb was seen as the only suitable way to bring the war to an end. (Asada, 1988, 2007)

Effects of the bomb on Japanese

The United States bombings on Japan resulted in horrific casualties and significant long-term effects. Some of the effects are the exposure to radiations which increased the rates of cancer among the survivors. Many scientists up to date are under the influence that the survivors faced health effects and are at high rates of getting cancer. (Roesch, 1987)

Over the next few years, the cities of Japan saw a spike in leukemia. It was the most deadly long-term side effect that occurred two years after the bombing. It was estimated that people caught up in the blast had a 46% chance being affected by leukemia. Later, there were increased cases of breast cancer. Young women were at a higher risk of getting breast cancer if and only if they were exposure of more than 100 rads. (Wanebo, et al., 1968) The exposers to radiation are three times as likely to develop breast cancer, than someone who wasn't exposed to radiation. Similar, there was an increase in patients with anemia, a disease relating to a situation where the blood fails to create enough red blood cells. To some individuals, the effect lasted for a long time lasting to even ten years. Increase in Cataract is when the lens of the eye becomes foggy. Cases cataracts came several years after the bombs. The first case was exactly three years after the bombing. (Folley et al., 1952)

Keloids. In 1946, keloids also developed. Keloid is a situation in which a scar is healing but heals too much, causing swelling and later abnormal growth. Radiations are believed to be the sole causes of keloids. The scar tissue grows and ends up looking like a crab. (Folley et al., 1952)

Birth Complications. A handful of surveys specifically completed in Nagasaki proved a high rate of infant deaths. The study demonstrated that 98 pregnant women exposed in the blast out of a possible 113 women gave birth to babies with some disabilities. The children suffered in the growth and the general development of their bodies and this resulted in some children being born with microcephaly, a condition where the head is smaller than required. Microcephaly cannot be cured. However, it can be treated. (Roesch, 1987)

When the bombs were dropped, they destroyed everything including the crops. People were worried that the waste fields could not support the growth of any plans and that the radiations were too much for them to live there. It was not safe. Only are some few years that the cities began to rebuild and the soil could inhabit some crops. As time passed by, the levels of radiation dropped significantly, and hence the places were considered safe for human inhabitation. (Roesch, 1987)

The effects of bombing Hiroshima and Nagasaki were more negative than positive. The bombs resulted in the death of many innocent civilians in the attempts to stop the war, which we might say was a positive effect of the bomb. However, we should not rest on the conclusion that nuclear bombing is the sole answer to surrendering. The United States should have sorted other ways to end the war without causing the devastating effects if the bombs in Japan. Eliminating nuclear weapons, no matter how worthy a project is, on its own cannot and will not put an end to "man's inhumanity to man." Therefore, the humanist position must always emphasize the importance of human life over political expediency.

Works Cited

Asada, Sadao. "The shock of the atomic bomb and Japan's decision to surrender: a reconsideration." Pacific Historical Review 67.4 (1998): 477-512.

Asada, Sadao. Culture shock and Japanese-American relations: Historical essays. University of Missouri Press, 2007.

Folley, Jarrett H., Wayne Borges, and Takuso Yamawaki. "Incidence of leukemia in survivors of the atomic bomb in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Japan." The American journal of medicine 13.3 (1952): 311-321

Freedman, Laurence and Saki Dockrill. “Hiroshima: a strategy of shock.” From Pearl Harbor to Hiroshima. Palgrave Macmillan, London 1994. 191-212.

Herbert P. Bix, "Japan's Delayed Surrender: A Reinterpretation," Diplomatic History, 19 (1995), 197-225.

Roesch, William C. "US-Japan joint reassessment of atomic bomb radiation dosimetry in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. DS86. Dosimetry System 1986. Vol. 1." (1987).

Wanebo, C. K., et al. "Breast cancer after exposure to the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki." New England Journal of Medicine 279.13 (1968): 667-671.

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How to Write a Synthesis Essay: Tips + Examples

By Eric Eng

A 2019 study found that over 70% of students struggle with academic writing, and synthesis essays are no exception. If you’re having trouble thinking of how to write a synthesis essay, think of it like making a pizza. You can have all the ingredients separately, but combining them creates something that’s even more awesome. A synthesis essay blends different sources to build a strong, unified argument or analysis. When done right, the result is cohesive and compelling.

In this blog, you’ll discover a step-by-step guide on how to write a synthesis essay, complete with tips and tricks to make the process easier. By the end, you’ll have the skills and confidence to tackle any synthesis essay confidently.

What Is a Synthesis Essay?

How to start a synthesis essay, how to write a synthesis paragraph, synthesis essay example, tips for writing a killer synthesis essay, frequently asked questions.

A synthesis essay is a type of writing where you take information from different sources and use it to support a central idea or argument. The goal is to combine facts, data, and viewpoints from these sources to show how they connect and build a stronger case for your own perspective. Instead of just summarizing what each source says, you analyze and pull everything together to form a clear, unified argument.

A successful synthesis essay will:

• Present a clear thesis that states your main argument or claim.
• Use information from multiple sources to support that argument.
• Show how these sources connect and relate to one another.

The biggest challenge for many students? Getting started. Once you know how to begin, the rest falls into place! Here’s a foolproof guide to nailing your intro.

1. Begin with a hook.

Your first sentence should grab attention. Think of something surprising, thought-provoking, or intriguing. This could be an interesting statistic, a bold claim, or even a rhetorical question. The idea is to pique the reader’s interest so they feel compelled to keep reading.

Example of a hook:

“ Did you know that 60% of today’s workforce prefers remote work over traditional office settings? That statistic may surprise you, but it reflects a major shift in how we think about work in the 21st century. “

2. Introduce the topic.

After your hook, you’ll want to ease into your topic. Give a bit of background information so your readers understand what the essay is going to be about. This is where you can introduce the main sources or themes you’ll be synthesizing.

3. End with a thesis.

Your thesis statement is the backbone of your essay. It should clearly tell the reader what your essay will argue. Think of it as the roadmap for your paper. Without it, your reader will be lost!

Example of a thesis:

“ While both traditional office work and remote work offer their own advantages, a hybrid model that blends both approaches is the most effective in promoting productivity and work-life balance. “

The hook grabs attention, the topic is introduced, and the thesis makes it clear what the essay will argue. Having a hook is important because it grabs the reader’s attention right away, making them want to keep reading. It sets the tone for your essay and gives the reader a reason to stay engaged.

The body of your essay is where you’ll really dig into your argument, using your sources to back up your points. Each paragraph should be well-structured so your essay doesn’t feel like a random collection of facts. Here’s a simple breakdown for writing a strong synthesis paragraph:

1. Start with a topic sentence.

This sentence should introduce the main point of the paragraph. It acts as a mini-thesis for that section.

2. Provide evidence from your sources.

Now, it’s time to bring in the sources you’ve found during your research. Ideally, you’ll want to use at least two sources per paragraph to show how different authors or experts agree (or disagree) on your point. Always remember to properly cite your sources!

3. Analyze and synthesize.

The key to a synthesis essay is not just throwing in a bunch of quotes but showing your readers how these sources connect. How does one source support the other? Are they offering different perspectives that, when combined, give a fuller picture of your argument?

4. Conclude the paragraph.

Wrap up the paragraph by linking back to your main thesis. This reinforces how this particular point supports your overall argument.

Now that you’ve got the basics of a synthesis essay down, jump into some examples to see them in action. Use these examples to help you nail a strong introduction and a killer conclusion, so you can ace your AP Lit class!

The benefits of joining a sorority in college

Topic sentence

“ One of the key benefits of joining a sorority is the strong sense of community and support it provides. “

Evidence from sources

“ A 2021 study by the National Association of Student Affairs Professionals found that students involved in Greek life , particularly sororities, reported higher levels of social support and belonging compared to their non-Greek peers (Johnson, 2021). Additionally, research from the University of Southern California showed that sorority members were 25% more likely to graduate on time, citing strong mentorship and academic support within the organization (Davis, 2020). “

“ These studies demonstrate that sororities offer a built-in network of friends and mentors, which helps members navigate the challenges of college life. From emotional support to academic guidance, the sense of community within sororities fosters personal growth and success. “

Concluding sentence

“ Thus, joining a sorority can provide valuable resources and a strong support system, contributing to both academic achievement and personal development. “

Why the example works

This is a good example since it follows the structure of a strong paragraph while effectively supporting the argument. The topic sentence about how sororities provide a strong sense of community and support introduces the main idea and sets up the discussion.

Evidence from sources strengthens the claim by citing credible research, such as the study from the National Association of Student Affairs Professionals and the University of Southern California. These studies provide concrete data demonstrating how sorority members benefit academically and socially. 

The analysis explains the connection between the evidence and the main argument and shows how the support system in sororities can help members succeed. The concluding sentence ties everything together and reinforces that joining a sorority can benefit academic and personal growth. This example flows well, uses reliable sources, and clearly supports the thesis.

Now that we’ve walked through the process, here are some tips to make sure your essay stands out :

1. Choose credible sources.

When you’re writing a synthesis essay, choosing reliable sources is crucial. Stick to reputable sources like academic articles, peer-reviewed studies, and books written by experts in the field. 

Suppose you’re writing about the effects of climate change,  in that case, an article from a scientific journal or a report from an organization like the EPA will carry much more weight than a random blog post or a website without proper credentials. 

Think of your sources as the foundation of your essay. If they’re shaky or unverified, your argument won’t be as convincing. Avoid websites that don’t provide the author’s credentials or have questionable information. Trustworthy sources help build your credibility and make sure your essay is based on facts, not opinions or unreliable data.

If you’re looking for credible sources for your research, there are a bunch of great online tools you can use. Google Scholar is a reliable source of tons of academic articles, and JSTOR gives you access to journals and primary sources. For access to free, peer-reviewed articles in all sorts of fields, check out the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ).

2. Stay organized.

Working with multiple sources can get messy fast, especially when you’re juggling facts, quotes, and different perspectives. A great way to stay on top of things is to organize your sources by the sections of your essay. 

For example, if you’re writing a paragraph about the benefits of online learning, make a note of which studies or articles you’ll pull from to support that point. You could use a digital tool like Google Docs or Evernote, or even just a notebook, to track your sources. 

Jot down key facts and which source they came from so you’re not scrambling later. Staying organized helps ensure you don’t accidentally misattribute information or lose track of key data, making your writing process smoother and your essay more cohesive.

3. Be clear and concise.

It’s easy to get excited about all the interesting facts you find during your research, but remember that less is more. Every piece of information you include should directly support your thesis. 

Let’s say you’re writing about the impact of technology on education. Instead of throwing in every statistic you come across, focus on the ones that strengthen your argument, like a study showing how virtual classrooms increase student engagement. 

Resist the urge to overload your readers with too much information or veer off-topic. Keep it simple, and only include facts that are directly relevant to the point you’re trying to make. Your readers will thank you for staying on track, and your essay will be much more focused and persuasive.

4. Don’t forget to synthesize.

The key to a great synthesis essay is smoothly blending your sources into one cohesive argument. You don’t want your essay to feel like a random list of summaries or unrelated ideas. Instead, treat it like your sources are having a conversation.

Think of it this way, if one source talks about how social media is great for networking and another points out its negative impact on mental health, don’t just list them separately. Show how they’re connected.

You can do this by discussing how social media has its perks while also presenting the downsides that people need to balance. This approach helps your essay feel more connected and shows that you really understand the different perspectives. In a synthesis essay, it’s all about making those connections, not just throwing out facts.

1. How do I choose sources for a synthesis essay?

Select sources that are credible and relevant to your topic. Look for a mix of perspectives, such as scholarly articles, books, and reliable websites. The key is to find sources that provide valuable information to support your argument.

2. What is the best way to structure a synthesis essay?

A synthesis essay typically follows a standard structure. It has an introduction with a thesis statement, body paragraphs that integrate and analyze your sources, and a conclusion that summarizes your main points and restates the thesis.

3. How do I write a strong thesis statement for a synthesis essay?

Your thesis should clearly present the main argument or point of view you’ve formed after analyzing your sources. It should reflect the central theme of your essay and guide the reader on what to expect from your synthesis.

4. How can I avoid summarizing sources instead of synthesizing them?

Instead of just restating what each source says, focus on finding connections between them. Compare and contrast the viewpoints, and discuss how they complement or contradict each other to build your own argument.

• A synthesis essay combines information from different sources to support a central argument or analysis. It’s not about summarizing sources but about connecting them to form a unified point of view.
• Start with a compelling hook to grab attention, introduce your topic clearly, and end with a solid thesis statement that outlines your main argument.
• Each paragraph should have a clear topic sentence, use evidence from multiple sources, and synthesize those sources by showing how they relate to and support your argument.
• Use reputable, relevant sources, and keep your essay well-organized and concise, always linking back to your thesis. The key is synthesizing, not just summarizing.
• Need help with writing your synthesis essay? You can seek the help of a private consultant to give you feedback on your work.

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I'm finding the AP Language synthesis essay a bit challenging. Can anyone share examples of high-scoring AP Language synthesis essays, or resources where I can find them?

Unfortunately, I can't provide actual examples in this forum due to copyright restrictions; however, what I'd suggest is taking a look at the College Board's AP Central website. College Board is the organization that creates and administers AP exams, and they often share sample responses from actual AP exams. Navigate to the AP Language and Composition section to find sample student responses, detailed scoring explanations, and comments from the exam creators which provide feedback on high-score responses. Specifically, you'd like to look for sample "Synthesis Essay" responses with high scores.

When reviewing these essays, be sure to not simply memorize the responses or the topic as AP exam questions change every year. Instead, focus on how the author structures their essay, integrates their sources, and forms their arguments. Note the balance of original ideas and source information, the logical flow of arguments, and how the student attributes elements from the sources.

Furthermore, closely read the scoring commentary that comes along with the samples. The commentary explains the reasons behind the scores, highlighting how the student’s essay meets the criteria in the rubric. This can be an enlightening guide that can help you understand what graders are looking for in high-scoring essays.

Practice is key to mastering the AP Language synthesis essay, so try to write a few practice essays using previous AP Exam prompts, then review the scoring commentary to see how your essay could be improved. This will be beneficial in giving you a feel of what exam graders are looking for, therefore enabling you to approach the synthesis essay section with preparedness and confidence. Good luck!

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