BBC ON THIS DAY | 6 | 1945: US drops atomic bomb on Hiroshima Search ON THIS DAY by date About This Site | Text Only 1945: US drops atomic bomb on Hiroshima The first atomic bomb has been dropped by a United States aircraft on the Japanese city of Hiroshima. President Harry S Truman, announcing the news from the cruiser, USS Augusta, in the mid-Atlantic, said the device was more than 2,000 times more powerful than the largest bomb used to date. An accurate assessment of the damage caused has so far been impossible due to a huge cloud of impenetrable dust covering the target. Hiroshima is one of the chief supply depots for the Japanese army. The bomb was dropped from an American B-29 Superfortress, known as Enola Gay, at 0815 local time. The plane's crew say they saw a column of smoke rising and intense fires springing up.

We found the Japanese in our locality were not eager to befriend us - after all, they had not long ago had the most fearful weapon of all time dropped on their doorstep People's War memories » The President said the atomic bomb heralded the "harnessing of the basic power of the universe". It also marked a victory over the Germans in the race to be first to develop a weapon using atomic energy. President Truman went on to warn the Japanese the Allies would completely destroy their capacity to make war. The Potsdam declaration issued 10 days ago, which called for the unconditional surrender of Japan, was a last chance for the country to avoid utter destruction, the President said. "If they do not now accept our terms they may expect a rain of ruin from the air the like of which has never been seen on Earth. Behind this air attack will follow by sea and land forces in such number and power as they have not yet seen, but with fighting skill of which they are already aware." The British Prime Minister Clement Attlee, who has replaced Winston Churchill at Number 10, read out a statement prepared by his predecessor to MPs in the Commons.

It said the atomic project had such great potential the government felt it was right to pursue the research and to pool information with atomic scientists in the US. As Britain was considered within easy reach of Germany and its bombers, the decision was made to set up the bomb-making plants in the US. The statement continued: "By God's mercy, Britain and American science outpaced all German efforts. These were on a considerable scale, but far behind. The possession of these powers by the Germans at any time might have altered the result of the war." Mr Churchill's statement said considerable efforts had been made to disrupt German progress - including attacks on plants making constituent parts of the bomb.

He ended: "We must indeed pray that these awful agencies will be made to conduce peace among the nations and that instead of wreaking measureless havoc upon the entire globe they become a perennial fountain of world prosperity." Bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki - World War II - HISTORY.com Bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki Bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki Author Bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki URL A+E Networks Introduction 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 wiped out 90 percent of the city and immediately killed 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.” Google 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). Did You Know? After World War II, most of Hiroshima would be rebuilt, though one destroyed section was set aside as a reminder of the effects of the atomic bomb. Each August 6, thousands of people gather at Peace Memorial Park to join in interfaith religious services commemorating the anniversary of the bombing.

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. “Little Boy” and “Fat Man” 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. 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. Tags BBC ON THIS DAY | 9 | 1945: Atom bomb hits Nagasaki Search ON THIS DAY by date About This Site | Text Only 1945: Atom bomb hits Nagasaki American forces have dropped an atomic bomb on Nagasaki - the second such attack on Japan in three days. The bomb was dropped by parachute from an American B29 Bomber at 1102 local time. It exploded about 1,625 ft (500m) above the ground and is believed to have completely destroyed the city, which is situated on the western side of the Japanese island of Kyushu.

Ignorant of the contamination risks they were taking, they were bussed to Nagasaki for transfer to Okinawa In a statement issued from Guam, General Carl A Spaatz, Commander of the US Strategic Air Forces in the Pacific, said: "The second use of the atomic bomb occurred at noon, August 9, at Nagasaki. "Crew members report good results. No further details will be available until the mission returns." Important port American airmen flying many miles from Nagasaki have said smoke from fires in the city was rising 50,000ft (15,240m). Nagasaki is one of Japan's most important ports providing vital access to and from Shanghai. Three days ago a similar device was dropped on the city of Hiroshima on Japan's largest island, Honshu. The extent of the damage caused to Hiroshima is not yet known but Japanese broadcasts indicate that "enormous devastation" has been done. No reaction to the Nagasaki attack has yet been given by Japan but pressure is growing on the country to surrender. Yesterday the USSR joined forces with the allies and declared war on Japan.

The Americans have also warned the Japanese people that further attacks of a similar nature will be made unless they petition their emperor to surrender. More than three million leaflets were dropped over the country today from American aeroplanes warning the Japanese people that more atomic weapons would be used "again and again" to destroy the country unless they ended the war forthwith. Bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki - 1945 | Atomic Heritage Foundation Bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki - 1945 Bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki - 1945 History Page Type: Date: Thursday, June 5, 2014 After the Interim Committee decided to drop the bomb, the Target Committee determined the locations to be hit, and President Truman issued the Potsdam Proclamation as Japan’s final warning, the world soon learned the meaning of “complete and utter destruction.” The first two atomic bombs ever used were dropped on Japan in early August, 1945. For a detailed timeline of the bombings, please see Hiroshima and Nagasaki Bombing Timeline . Hiroshima On August 6, 1945, the United States dropped its first atomic bomb on the city of Hiroshima.

The bomb was known as "Little Boy", a uranium gun-type bomb that exploded with about thirteen kilotons of force. At the time of the bombing, Hiroshima was home to 280,000-290,000 civilians as well as 43,000 soldiers. Between 90,000 and 166,000 people are believed to have died from the bomb in the four-month period following the explosion. The U.S. Department of Energy has estimated that after five years there were perhaps 200,000 or more fatalities as a result of the bombing, while the city of Hiroshima has estimated that 237,000 people were killed directly or indirectly by the bomb's effects, including burns, radiation sickness, and cancer. The bombing of Hiroshima, codenamed Operation Centerboard, was approved by Curtis LeMay on August 4, 1945. The B-29 plane that carried Little Boy from Tinian Island in the western Pacific to Hiroshima was known as the Enola Gay, after pilot Paul Tibbets' mother.

Along with Tibbets, copilot Robert Lewis, bombardier Tom Ferebee, navigator Theodore Van Kirk, and tail gunner Robert Caron were among the others on board the Enola Gay. Below are their eyewitness accounts of the first atomic bomb dropped on Japan. Pilot Paul Tibbets: "We turned back to look at Hiroshima. The city was hidden by that awful cloud... boiling up, mushrooming, terrible and incredibly tall. No one spoke for a moment; then everyone was talking. I remember (copilot Robert) Lewis pounding my shoulder, saying 'Look at that! Look at that! Look at that!' (Bombardier) Tom Ferebee wondered about whether radioactivity would make us all sterile. Lewis said he could taste atomic fission. He said it tasted like lead." Navigator Theodore Van Kirk recalls the shockwaves from the explosion: "(It was) very much as if you've ever sat on an ash can and had somebody hit it with a baseball bat... The plane bounced, it jumped and there was a noise like a piece of sheet metal snapping.

Those of us who had flown quite a bit over Europe thought that it was anti-aircraft fire that had exploded very close to the plane." On viewing the atomic fireball: "I don't believe anyone ever expected to look at a sight quite like that. Where we had seen a clear city two minutes before, we could now no longer see the city. We could see smoke and fires creeping up the sides of the mountains." Tail gunner Robert Caron: "The mushroom itself was a spectacular sight, a bubbling mass of purple-gray smoke and you could see it had a red core in it and everything was burning inside. As we got farther away, we could see the base of the mushroom and below we could see what looked like a few-hundred-foot layer of debris and smoke and what have you... I saw fires springing up in different places, like flames shooting up on a bed of coals." Six miles below the crew of the Enola Gay, the people of Hiroshima were waking up and preparing for their daily routines. It was 8:16 A.M. Up to that point, the city had been largely spared by the rain of conventional air bombing that had ravaged many other Japanese cities.

Rumors abounded as to why this was so, from the fact that many Hiroshima residents had emigrated to the U.S. to the supposed presence of President Truman's mother in the area. Still, many citizens, including schoolchildren, were recruited to prepare for future bombings by tearing down houses to create fire lanes, and it was at this task that many were laboring or preparing to labor on the morning of August 6. Just an hour before, air raid sirens had sounded as a single B-29, the weather plane for the Little Boy mission, approached Hiroshima. A radio broadcast announced the sighting of the Enola Gay soon after 8 A.M. The city of Hiroshima was annihilated by the explosion. 70,000 of 76,000 buildings were damaged or destroyed, and 48,000 of those were entirely razed. Survivors recalled the indescribable and incredible experience of seeing that the city had ceased to exist. A college history professor: "I climbed Hikiyama Hill and looked down. I saw that Hiroshima had disappeared... I was shocked by the sight... What I felt then and still feel now I just can't explain with words.

Of course I saw many dreadful scenes after that—but that experience, looking down and finding nothing left of Hiroshima—was so shocking that I simply can't express what I felt... Hiroshima didn't exist—that was mainly what I saw—Hiroshima just didn't exist." Medical doctor Michihiko Hachiya: "Nothing remained except a few buildings of reinforced concrete... For acres and acres the city was like a desert except for scattered piles of brick and roof tile. I had to revise my meaning of the word destruction or choose some other word to describe what I saw. Devastation may be a better word, but really, I know of no word or words to describe the view." Writer Yoko Ota: "I reached a bridge and saw that the Hiroshima Castle had been completely leveled to the ground, and my heart shook like a great wave... the grief of stepping over the corpses of history pressed upon my heart." Those who were close to the epicenter of the explosion were simply vaporized by the intensity of the heat. One man left only a dark shadow on the steps of a bank as he sat.

The mother of Miyoko Osugi, a 13-year-old schoolgirl working on the fire lanes, never found her body, but she did find her geta sandal. The area covered by Miyoko's foot remained light, while the rest of it was darkened by the blast. Many others in Hiroshima, farther from the Little Boy epicenter, survived the initial explosion but were severely wounded, including injuries from and burns across much of their body. Among these people, panic and chaos were rampant as they struggled to find food and water, medical assistance, friends and relatives and to flee the firestorms that engulfed many residential areas. Having no point of reference for the bomb's absolute devastation, some survivors believed themselves to have been transported to a hellish version of the afterlife. The worlds of the living and the dead seemed to converge. A Protestant minister: "The feeling I had was that everyone was dead. The whole city was destroyed... I thought this was the end of Hiroshima—of Japan—of humankind... This was God's judgment on man." A six-year-old boy: "Near the bridge there were a whole lot of dead people... Sometimes there were ones who came to us asking for a drink of water.

They were bleeding from their faces and from their mouths and they had glass sticking in their bodies. And the bridge itself was burning furiously... The details and the scenes were just like Hell." A sociologist: "My immediate thought was that this was like the hell I had always read about... I had never seen anything which resembled it before, but I thought that should there be a hell, this was it—the Buddhist hell, where we were thought that people who could not attain salvation always went... And I imagined that all of these people I was seeing were in the hell I had read about." A boy in fifth grade: "I had the feeling that all the human beings on the face of the earth had been killed off, and only the five of us (his family) were left behind in an uncanny world of the dead." A grocer: "The appearance of people was... well, they all had skin blackened by burns... They had no hair because their hair was burned, and at a glance you couldn't tell whether you were looking at them from in front or in back... Many of them died along the road—I can still picture them in my mind—like walking ghosts...

They didn't look like people of this world." Many people traveled to central places such as hospitals, parks, and riverbeds in an attempt to find relief from their pain and misery. However, these locations soon became scenes of agony and despair as many injured and dying people arrived and were unable to receive proper care. A sixth-grade girl: "Bloated corpses were drifting in those seven formerly beautiful rivers; smashing cruelly into bits the childish pleasure of the little girl, the peculiar odor of burning human flesh rose everywhere in the Delta City, which had changed to a waste of scorched earth." A fourteen-year-old boy: "Night came and I could hear many voices crying and groaning with pain and begging for water. Someone cried, 'Damn it! War tortures so many people who are innocent!' Another said, 'I hurt! Give me water!' This person was so burned that we couldn't tell if it was a man or a woman. The sky was red with flames.

It was burning as if scorching heaven." Nagasaki Three days after the United States dropped an atomic bomb on Hiroshima, a second atomic bomb was dropped on Nagasaki on August 9 – a 21-kiloton plutonium device known as "Fat Man.” On the day of the bombing, an estimated 263,000 were in Nagasaki, including 240,000 Japanese residents, 9,000 Japanese soldiers, and 400 prisoners of war. Prior to August 9, Nagasaki had been the target of small scale bombing by the United States. Though the damage from these bombings was relatively small, it created considerable concern in Nagasaki and many people were evacuated to rural areas for safety, thus reducing the population in the city at the time of the nuclear attack. It is estimated that between 40,000 and 75,000 people died immediately following the atomic explosion, while another 60,000 people suffered severe injuries. Total deaths by the end of 1945 may have reached 80,000.

The decision to use the second bomb was made on August 7, 1945 on Guam. Its use was calculated to indicate that the United States had an endless supply of the new weapon for use against Japan and that the United States would continue to drop atomic bombs on Japan until the country surrendered unconditionally. The city of Nagasaki, however, was not the primary target for the second atomic bomb. Instead, officials had selected the city of Kokura, where Japan had one of its largest munitions plants. The B-29 "Bockscar", piloted Major Charles Sweeney, was assigned to deliver the "Fat Man" to the city of Kokura on the morning of August 9, 1945. Accompanying Sweeney on the mission were copilots Charles Donald Albury and Fred J. Olivi, weaponeer Frederick Ashworth, and bombadier Kermit Beahan. At 3:49am, "Bockscar" and five other B-29s departed the island of Tinian and headed towards Kokura.

When the plane arrived over the city nearly seven hours later, thick clouds and drifting smoke from fires started by a major firebombing raid on nearby Yawata the previous day covered most of the area over Kokura, obscuring the aiming point. Pilot Charles Sweeney made three bomb runs over the next fifty minutes, but bombardier Beahan was unable to drop the bomb because he could not see the target visually. By the time of the third bomb run, Japanese antiaircraft fire was getting close, and Second Lieutenant Jacob Beser, who was monitoring Japanese communications, reported activity on the Japanese fighter direction radio bands. Running low on fuel, the crew aboard Bockscar decided to head for the secondary target, Nagasaki. When the B-29 arrived over the city twenty minutes later, the downtown area was also covered by dense clouds. Frederick Ashworth, the plane's weaponeer proposed bombing Nagasaki using radar. At that moment, a small opening in the clouds at the end of the three-minute bomb run permitted bombardier Kermit Beahan to identify target features. At 10:58 AM local time, Bockscar visually dropped Fat Man.

It exploded 43 seconds later with a blast yield equivalent to 21 kilotons of TNT at an altitude of 1,650 feet, about 1.5 miles northwest of the intended aiming point. The radius of total destruction from the atomic blast was about one mile, followed by fires across the northern portion of the city to two miles south of where the bomb had been dropped. In contrast to many modern aspects of Hiroshima, almost all of the buildings in Nagasaki were of old-fashioned Japanese construction, consisting of wood or wood-frame buildings with wood walls and tile roofs. Many of the smaller industries and business establishments were also situated in buildings of wood or other materials not designed to withstand explosions. As a result, the atomic explosion over Nagasaki leveled nearly every structure in the blast radius. The failure to drop Fat Man at the precise bomb aim point caused the atomic blast to be confined to the Urakami Valley. As a consequence, a major portion of the city was protected from the explosion. The Fat Man was dropped over the city's industrial valley midway between the Mitsubishi Steel and Arms Works in the south and the Mitsubishi-Urakami Ordnance Works in the north.

The resulting explosion had a blast yield equivalent to 21 kilotons of TNT, roughly the same as the Trinity blast. Nearly half of the city was completely destroyed. Bockscar's copilot Fred J. Olivi published a detailed account of the effects of the atomic explosion over Nagasaki. Here are some of his reactions: Olivi: "Suddenly, the light of a thousand suns illuminated the cockpit. Even with my dark welder's goggles, I winced and shut my eyes for a couple of seconds. I guessed we were about seven miles from "ground zero" and headed directly away from the target, yet the light blinded me for an instant. I had never experienced such an intense bluish light, maybe three or four times brighter than the sun shining above us." "I've never seen anything like it! Biggest explosion I've ever seen...This plume of smoke I'm seeing is hard to explain. A great white mass of flame is seething within the white mushroom shaped cloud. It has a pinkish, salmon color. The base is black and is breaking a little way down from the mushroom." "The Mushroom cloud was coming right at us.

I immediately looked up and could see that he was right, the cloud was getting close to Bockscar. We had been told not to fly through the atomic cloud because it was extremely dangerous to the crew and aircraft. Knowing this, Sweeney put Bockscar into a steep dive to the right, away from the cloud, throttles wide open. For a few moments we could not tell if we were out-running the ominous cloud or if it was gaining on us, but gradually we pulled away from the dangerous radioactive cloud before it engulfed us, much to everyone's relief." Tatsuichiro Akizuki: "All the buildings I could see were on fire... Electricity poles were wrapped in flame like so many pieces of kindling... It seemed as if the earth itself emitted fire and smoke, flames that writhed up and erupted from underground. The sky was dark, the ground was scarlet, and in between hung clouds of yellowish smoke. Three kinds of color—black, yellow, and scarlet—loomed ominously over the people, who ran about like so many ants seeking to escape... It seemed like the end of the world." Aftermath On August 14, Japan surrendered.

Journalist George Weller was the "first into Nagasaki" and described the mysterious "atomic illness" (the onset of radiation sickness) that was killing patients who outwardly appeared to have escaped the bomb's impact. Controversial at the time and for years later, Weller's articles were not allowed to be released until 2006. Controversy The debate over the bomb – whether there should have been a test demonstration, whether the Nagasaki bomb was necessary, and more – continues to this day. The bombing of Hiroshima, from 10 km away Hiroshima after the bombing Hiroshima's financial district after the bombing Hiroshima after the bombing Manhattan Project: The Atomic Bombing of Hiroshima, August 6, 1945 THE ATOMIC BOMBING OF HIROSHIMA (Hiroshima, Japan, August 6, 1945) The Manhattan Project and the Second World War, 1939-1945 In the early morning hours of August 6, 1945, a B-29 bomber named Enola Gay took off from the island of Tinian and headed north by northwest toward Japan.

The bomber's primary target was the city of Hiroshima, located on the deltas of southwestern Honshu Island facing the Inland Sea. Hiroshima had a civilian population of almost 300,000 and was an important military center, containing about 43,000 soldiers. The bomber, piloted by the commander of the 509th Composite Group, Colonel Paul Tibbets, flew at low altitude on automatic pilot before climbing to 31,000 feet as it neared the target area. At approximately 8:15 a.m. Hiroshima time the Enola Gay released "Little Boy," its 9,700-pound uranium gun-type bomb, over the city. Tibbets immediately dove away to avoid the anticipated shock wave. Forty-three seconds later, a huge explosion lit the morning sky as Little Boy detonated 1,900 feet above the city, directly over a parade field where soldiers of the Japanese Second Army were doing calisthenics. Though already eleven and a half miles away, the Enola Gay was rocked by the blast. At first, Tibbets thought he was taking flak.

After a second shock wave (reflected from the ground) hit the plane, the crew looked back at Hiroshima. "The city was hidden by that awful cloud . . . boiling up, mushrooming, terrible and incredibly tall," Tibbets recalled. The yield of the explosion was later estimated at 15 kilotons (the equivalent of 15,000 tons of TNT). On the ground moments before the blast it was a calm and sunny Monday morning. An air raid alert from earlier that morning had been called off after only a solitary aircraft was seen (the weather plane), and by 8:15 the city was alive with activity -- soldiers doing their morning calisthenics, commuters on foot or on bicycles, groups of women and children working outside to clear firebreaks. Those closest to the explosion died instantly, their bodies turned to black char. Nearby birds burst into flames in mid-air, and dry, combustible materials such as paper instantly ignited as far away as 6,400 feet from ground zero. The white light acted as a giant flashbulb, burning the dark patterns of clothing onto skin (right) and the shadows of bodies onto walls.

Survivors outdoors close to the blast generally describe a literally blinding light combined with a sudden and overwhelming wave of heat. (The effects of radiation are usually not immediately apparent.) The blast wave followed almost instantly for those close-in, often knocking them from their feet. Those that were indoors were usually spared the flash burns, but flying glass from broken windows filled most rooms, and all but the very strongest structures collapsed. One boy was blown through the windows of his house and across the street as the house collapsed behind him. Within minutes 9 out of 10 people half a mile or less from ground zero were dead. People farther from the point of detonation experienced first the flash and heat, followed seconds later by a deafening boom and the blast wave. Nearly every structure within one mile of ground zero was destroyed, and almost every building within three miles was damaged. Less than 10 percent of the buildings in the city survived without any damage, and the blast wave shattered glass in suburbs twelve miles away. The most common first reaction of those that were indoors even miles from ground zero was that their building had just suffered a direct hit by a bomb. Small ad hoc rescue parties soon began to operate, but roughly half of the city's population was dead or injured.

In those areas most seriously affected virtually no one escaped serious injury. The numerous small fires that erupted simultaneously all around the city soon merged into one large firestorm, creating extremely strong winds that blew towards the center of the fire. The firestorm eventually engulfed 4.4 square miles of the city, killing anyone who had not escaped in the first minutes after the attack. One postwar study of the victims of Hiroshima found that less than 4.5 percent of survivors suffered leg fractures. Such injuries were not uncommon; it was just that most who could not walk were engulfed by the firestorm. Even after the flames had subsided, relief from the outside was slow in coming. For hours after the attack the Japanese government did not even know for sure what had happened. Radio and telegraph communications with Hiroshima had suddenly ended at 8:16 a.m., and vague reports of some sort of large explosion had begun to filter in, but the Japanese high command knew that no large-scale air raid had taken place over the city and that there were no large stores of explosives there.

Eventually a Japanese staff officer was dispatched by plane to survey the city from overhead, and while he was still nearly 100 miles away from the city he began to report on a huge cloud of smoke that hung over it. The first confirmation of exactly what had happened came only sixteen hours later with the announcement of the bombing by the United States. Relief workers from outside the city eventually began to arrive and the situation stabilized somewhat. Power in undamaged areas of the city was even restored on August 7th, with limited rail service resuming the following day. Several days after the blast, however, medical staff began to recognize the first symptoms of radiation sickness among the survivors. Soon the death rate actually began to climb again as patients who had appeared to be recovering began suffering from this strange new illness. Deaths from radiation sickness did not peak until three to four weeks after the attacks and did not taper off until seven to eight weeks after the attack. Long-range health dangers associated with radiation exposure, such as an increased danger of cancer, would linger for the rest of the victims' lives, as would the psychological effects of the attack. No one will ever know for certain how many died as a result of the attack on Hiroshima.

Some 70,000 people probably died as a result of initial blast, heat, and radiation effects. This included about twenty American airmen being held as prisoners in the city. By the end of 1945, because of the lingering effects of radioactive fallout and other after effects, the Hiroshima death toll was probably over 100,000. The five-year death total may have reached or even exceeded 200,000, as cancer and other long-term effects took hold. At 11:00 a.m., August 6 (Washington D.C. time), radio stations began playing a prepared statement from President Truman informing the American public that the United States had dropped an entirely new type of bomb on the Japanese city of Hiroshima -- an "atomic bomb." Truman warned that if Japan still refused to surrender unconditionally, as demanded by the Potsdam Declaration of July 26, the United States would attack additional targets with equally devastating results. Two days later, on August 8, the Soviet Union declared war on Japan and attacked Japanese forces in Manchuria, ending American hopes that the war would end before Russian entry into the Pacific theater.

By August 9th, American aircraft were showering leaflets all over Japan informing its people that "We are in possession of the most destructive explosive ever devised by man. A single one of our newly developed atomic bombs is actually the equivalent in explosive power to what 2,000 of our giant B-29s can carry on a single mission. This awful fact is one for you to ponder and we solemnly assure you it is grimly accurate. We have just begun to use this weapon against your homeland. If you still have any doubt, make inquiry as to what happened to Hiroshima when just one atomic bomb fell on that city." Meanwhile, Tibbets's bomber group was simply waiting for the weather to clear in order to drop its next bomb, the plutonium implosion weapon nicknamed "Fat Man" (left) that was destined for the city of Nagasaki. Sources and notes for this page . Portions of the text for this page were adapted from, and portions were taken directly from the Office of History and Heritage Resources publication: F. G.

Gosling, The Manhattan Project: Making the Atomic Bomb (DOE/MA-0001; Washington: History Division, Department of Energy, January 1999) , 51-53. Also used was the report on "The Atomic Bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki" in the official Manhattan District History, produced by the War Department in 1947 at the direction of Leslie Groves, especially pages 1-19; the "Atomic Bombings" document is available in the University Publications of America microfilm collection, Manhattan Project: Official History and Documents (Washington: 1977), reel #1/12; the report itself is a government document. Tibbets's description is from Paul W. Tibbets, "How to Drop an Atom Bomb," Saturday Evening Post 218 (June 8, 1946), 136.

The estimate of Little Boy's yield is from United States Nuclear Tests, July 1945 through September 1992 (DOE/NV-209-REV 15; Las Vegas, NV: Nevada Operations Office, Department of Energy, December 2000) , vii. Summaries of Hiroshima and Nagasaki casualty rates and damage estimates appear in Leslie R. Groves, Now It Can Be Told (New York: Harper & Row, 1962), 319, 329-330, 346, and Vincent C. Jones, Manhattan: The Army and the Atomic Bomb, United States Army in World War II (Washington: Center of Military History, United States Army, 1988), 545-548. A translation of the leaflets dropped on Japan in between Hiroshima and Nagasaki can be found in Dennis Merrill, ed., Documentary History of the Truman Volume 1, The Decision to Drop the Atomic Bomb on Japan (Bethesda, MD: University Publications of America, 1995), 194-195.

The photograph of the mushroom cloud is courtesy the United States Air Force (USAF) (via the National Archives (NARA)). The photographs of Little Boy and Fat Man are courtesy the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers (via NARA). The photograph of the Enola Gay landing at Tinian Island is courtesy the USAF. The photograph of the woman with burns on her back is courtesy the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers (via NARA). The photographs of the mushroom cloud taken from the ground and of the debris (including the Hiroshima Peace Memorial (Genbaku "A-bomb" Dome) are courtesy the Federation of American Scientists . The photographs of the hospital and of the lone soldier walking through an almost-completely leveled portion of the city are courtesy the Department of the Navy (via NARA); the former was taken by Wayne Miller. BBC - History - World Wars: Nuclear Power: The End of the War Against Japan Print this page Postwar Germany and Japan Sixty years on, the end of the war against Japan is generally regarded by British historians very differently from the way they view the end of the war against Germany.

Despite the firestorms in German cities, despite the murder and rape of millions of German women and children by the advancing Soviets, the defeat of Nazi Germany is still seen in terms that are morally unambiguous. There is no such acceptance of war guilt in Japan. In 1945 Hitler’s regime was seen as the embodiment of human evil - and all the evidence that has emerged since that time has merely served to confirm that judgement. Any means that could bring Nazi rule to an end could be justified, which is why a statue of Air Chief Marshal Sir Arthur ‘Bomber’ Harris now stands in Whitehall. The vast majority of Germans today accept the guilt of the ‘Hitler time’, and are determined that nothing like it will ever occur again. Sometimes to non -Germans this national confessional even seems to go to an absurd extent - for example when the great furore erupted over the recent film depicting Hitler as an inadequate, demented human being, rather than the embodiment of Satanic evil. There is no such acceptance of war guilt in Japan.

It was only with the greatest difficulty that China managed to secure a grudging acknowledgement that ‘regrettable’ things may have happened in Nanking in December 1937, when Japanese troops went on the rampage - looting, raping and burning, and killing some 200,000 Chinese. Japanese school text-books still refer to the total war Japan waged against China between 1937 and 1945, in which some 20 million Chinese died, as the ‘China incident’. Similarly, the government of South Korea is making little progress in securing an apology from Japan for the enforced prostitution of tens of thousands of Korean girls as ‘comfort women’ for the Imperial armed forces. Most Japanese see themselves not as the perpetrators of a barbarous expansionist war in Asia and the Pacific, but as hapless victims of overwhelming and brutal American power. It is not, perhaps, surprising that collective denial should be the response of a defeated people; what is surprising is that the Japanese view is also widely held in the countries of the west that fought against Japan, namely the United States, and Britain and her Commonwealth.

Top Atomic bombs The city of Hiroshima after the nuclear blast © The key to understanding the difference between Japan and Germany, and attitudes towards Japan and Germany, is the way in which the war against Japan came to an end. On 6 August 1945 an American B-29 bomber dropped an atomic bomb on the city of Hiroshima. In a split second 100,000 people ceased to exist. Three days later another B-29 dropped a second bomb on Nagasaki, killing another 40,000. ... Americans and their allies could tell themselves that though the bombs had been terrible, they had obviated the need for an invasion of Japan. In vain would later apologists point out that the number killed -140,000 - was about the same as the number killed in the conventional B-29-created firestorm that devastated Tokyo-Yokohama on the night of 9 March 1945. There were two differences. First, the Tokyo-Yokohama raid required hundreds of aircraft delivering thousands of incendiary bombs in wave upon wave in very particular weather conditions.

Hiroshima-Nagasaki required just two aircraft and two bombs, a quantum leap in destructive capacity. Second, unlike those injured in conventional raids, about 100,000 of those people who had apparently survived in Hiroshima and Nagasaki in fact suffered radiation poisoning as a result of the bombs, and thus were condemned to a painful and lingering death. Japan surrendered on 15 August, obviously as a result of the bombs, it was generally believed, and for a few months Americans and their allies could tell themselves that though the bombs had been terrible, they had obviated the need for an invasion of Japan. This had been scheduled for December 1945, and in it many hundreds of thousands of Allied servicemen would have been killed and wounded. But very soon doubts arose in many quarters. Top First doubts General Douglas MacArthur at Japanese surrender ceremony on USS 'Missouri', 2 September 1945 © The first Americans to reach Hiroshima and Nagasaki - servicemen, scientists and journalists - described in great detail the apocalyptic scenes they encountered.

They saw a grey, blasted landscape, in which thousands of hideously burnt people were huddled in shanties, coughing up and urinating blood, with their hair falling out in clumps, waiting to die. The writer and journalist John Hersey, one of the first to get to Hiroshima, wrote a powerful study of the plight of six of these survivors, and this was published in the New Yorker in 1946. Suddenly the talk of New York’s literati, Hersey followed this up with a monograph, Hiroshima, published the following year, which was immediately a best-seller, and was translated into Japanese three years later. At the same time as Hersey’s article, the United States Army Air Force published a survey of the effects of strategic bombing on Japan. The Air Force argued that conventional B-29 attacks had all but brought Japan to its knees, and concluded, ' ...

it is the Survey’s opinion that certainly prior to 31 December 1945, and in all probability prior to 1 November 1945 (well before the date of the invasion) Japan would have surrendered even if the atomic bombs had not been dropped.’ Not to be outdone, the United States Navy produced its own assessment, stating that its submarine campaign had also brought Japan to its knees, that the Home Islands were on the verge of starvation, and that this alone would have produced surrender, thereby obviating the need for an atomic bomb, or an invasion. And then the State Department added its assessment. Joseph Grew - America’s last ambassador to Japan before the war started - claimed that Japanese diplomats had been trying to open surrender negotiations with the United States via the then still neutral Soviet Union. These were overtures that the Truman administration knew about, thanks to decrypts of Japanese diplomatic codes, but which they nevertheless chose to ignore. Grew added that if the United States had modified the demand for unconditional surrender, made on 26 July at Potsdam, if it had simply guaranteed the continuation of the imperial system in Japan, the Japanese would almost certainly have capitulated within days.

Top Growing criticism By early 1947 criticism of the decision to use the bomb had became so pervasive in the United States, that Secretary of War Henry L Stimson felt compelled to have an article published in Harper’s magazine, defending the administration. He reminded Americans that if an invasion had proved necessary, up to a million American servicemen would have died. The bombs, then, were a necessary evil. But very soon other figures were discovered. By the mid 1960s historians ... had drawn up ... a belated indictment for war crimes. General Douglas MacArthur’s army headquarters in the Philippines, for example, had calculated that the maximum number of dead in the event of an invasion would be around 47,000. Bad enough, but perhaps not bad enough to justify the immolation and irradiation of tens of thousands of Japanese women and children. Such figures led people to believe that Stimson might have lied, and to wonder, if so, how many other lies the administration had told. The emergence of the Cold War, the development of the hydrogen bomb, and American’s involvement in Vietnam, saw the development of a sustained critique in American academia of the decision to use the bomb.

By the mid 1960s historians such as Gar Alperovitz had drawn up what was virtually a charge sheet, a belated indictment for war crimes. It went like this. When the successful test firing of the first atomic bomb took place on 16 July 1945, Truman, negotiating with the Russians at Potsdam, decided to demonstrate America’s new power to the Soviets by bombing Japanese cities, even though he knew the Japanese were trying to surrender. To ensure the Japanese would not capitulate before the bombs could be used, he deliberately refused to guarantee the emperor’s safety, the only condition which, Alperovitz and others argued, was a sticking-point for the Japanese. In the event, it was not the bombs that produced Japan’s surrender - the Japanese military seemed willing to take them in their stride - but the Soviet invasion of Manchuria on 9 August. Truman and his administration, then, had been guilty of an act of callous, wanton brutality, the slaughter of hundreds of thousands of civilians, including innocent women and children, to no purpose other than to intimidate the Soviet Union and establish American hegemony.

Top Challenge to the critics Versions of this argument were widely believed in the last decades of the 20th century, and not just by those to the left of the political spectrum, who were incapable of believing that the United States could be anything other than evil. However, during the 1990s and after the collapse of the USSR, discoveries made upon the opening of hitherto restricted archives, and the work of British- and American-educated Japanese historians, have caused many to challenge the Alperovitz thesis. ... the Japanese were demanding ... a guarantee of no Allied occupation of Japan ... American scholars have shown that the Air Force’s Strategic Bombing Survey was a tendentious piece of special pleading, designed to secure a large independent air force, which many believed would have been in danger if it had been shown that the atomic bombs alone produced the surrender. Similarly, the navy’s assertions were exposed as over-exaggerations of the efficacy of the submarine blockade. Many Japanese were certainly starving, but it did not follow that the Japanese were therefore prepared to surrender. The most damning research exploded the very low estimates of invasion casualties prepared by the army.

These were shown to be the product of General MacArthur’s desire that an invasion should take place, one that he would command, which did not take into account the actual casualties (49,000) suffered by US forces in the two-month battle (April-June 1945) for Okinawa. The army’s real position was revealed in the discovery of a memorandum by Army Chief Of Staff General George C Marshall, advocating the use of atomic bombs to support an invasion. The work by American historians has been reinforced by the labours of their Japanese counterparts. The Japanese peace feelers directed at the Soviet Union have been exposed as belated attempts to delay a Soviet entry into the war, not genuine attempts at negotiation. It has also been shown that the Japanese were demanding very much more than a guarantee of the emperor’s safety, for example a guarantee of no Allied occupation of Japan, before they would consider serious negotiations. Also thanks to the work of Japanese historians, we now know much more about Japanese plans in the summer of 1945. Japan had no intention of surrendering.

It had husbanded over 8,000 aircraft, many of them Kamikazes, hundreds of explosive-packed suicide boats, and over two million well equipped regular soldiers, backed by a huge citizen’s militia. When the Americans landed, the Japanese intended to hit them with everything they had, to impose on them casualties that might break their will. If this did not do it, then the remnants of the army and the militias would fight on as guerrillas, protected by the mountains and by the civilian population. Japanese and American historians have also shown that at the centre of the military system was the Emperor Hirohito, not the hapless prisoner of militarist generals, the version promulgated by MacArthur in 1945 to save him from a war crimes trial, but an all-powerful warlord, who had guided Japan’s aggressive expansion at every turn. Hirohito’s will had not been broken by defeats at land or sea, it had not been broken by the firestorms or by the effects of the blockade, and it would certainly not have been broken by the Soviet invasion of Manchuria, something the Japanese had anticipated for months.

What broke Hirohito’s will was the terrible new weapon, a single bomb which could kill a hundred thousand at a time. Suddenly Japan was no longer fighting other men, but the very forces of the universe. The most important target the bombs hit was Hirohito’s mind - it shocked him into acknowledging that he could not win the final, climatic battle. Top Growing consensus There is a growing consensus among modern historians that the views as to the utility of the bomb held in August 1945 were correct. We now know that if the bomb had not been used, the invasion of Japan would have gone ahead. The best indication we have of the casualties that might have occurred are the actual figures for the eight-week campaign on Okinawa, in which 12,500 Americans died, and 39,000 were wounded. If we conduct the same calculation for an invasion of the Japanese Home Islands, we arrive at a figure of at least two million Japanese dead.

Fighting at the same intensity (it could not have been less) on Kyushu and Honshu, campaigns which would have lasted some 50 weeks, would have produced 80 to 100,000 American dead, and some 300 to 320,000 wounded. Are these casualties enough to justify Hiroshima and Nagasaki? If morality is based on numbers, and in this case it must be, then perhaps not. But what is usually overlooked in this numbers game, is the number of Japanese killed on Okinawa, which amounts to a staggering 250,000 military and civilian, about 20 Japanese killed for every dead American. If we conduct the same calculation for an invasion of the Japanese Home Islands, we arrive at a figure of at least two million Japanese dead. The losses in Hiroshima and Nagasaki were terrible, but not as terrible as the number of Japanese who would have died as the result of an invasion. The revisionist historians of the 1960s - and their disciples - are quite wrong to depict the decision to use the bombs as immoral. It would have been immoral if they had not been used.

Books Truman and the Hiroshima Cult by Robert P Newman (Michigan State University Press, 2004) Rain of Ruin: Photographic History of Hiroshima and Nagasaki by Donald M Goldstein, Katherine V Dillon, J Michael Wenger (Brassey's Inc, 1995) Hiroshima in History and Memory edited by Michael J Hogan (Cambridge University Press, 1995) Weapons for Victory: The Hiroshima Decision by Robert James Maddox (University of Missouri Press, 2004) Hiroshima by John Hersey (Alfred A Knopf, 1985) Hiroshima: Three Witnesses edited by Richard H Minear (Princeton University Press, 1990) Nagasaki, 1945 by Tatsuichiro Akizuki (Quartet Books, 1981) The Bells of Nagasaki by Takashi Nagai (Kodansha Europe, 1984) Top About the author Duncan Anderson joined the War Studies Department at Sandhurst as a senior lecturer in 1987, and has been Head of Department since 1997.

He has written several books on World War Two, and worked for the British Army and other NATO forces in Germany, both lecturing and conducting staff tours. Atomic bomb is dropped on Hiroshima - Aug 06, 1945 - HISTORY.com Atomic bomb is dropped on Hiroshima Share this: Atomic bomb is dropped on Hiroshima Author Atomic bomb is dropped on Hiroshima URL Publisher A+E Networks On this day in 1945, at 8:16 a.m. Japanese time, an American B-29 bomber, the Enola Gay, drops the world’s first atom bomb, over the city of Hiroshima. Approximately 80,000 people are killed as a direct result of the blast, and another 35,000 are injured. At least another 60,000 would be dead by the end of the year from the effects of the fallout. U.S. President Harry S. Truman, discouraged by the Japanese response to the Potsdam Conference’s demand for unconditional surrender, made the decision to use the atom bomb to end the war in order to prevent what he predicted would be a much greater loss of life were the United States to invade the Japanese mainland.

And so on August 5, while a “conventional” bombing of Japan was underway, “Little Boy,” (the nickname for one of two atom bombs available for use against Japan), was loaded onto Lt. Col. Paul W. Tibbets’ plane on Tinian Island in the Marianas. Tibbets’ B-29, named the Enola Gay after his mother, left the island at 2:45 a.m. on August 6. Five and a half hours later, “Little Boy” was dropped, exploding 1,900 feet over a hospital and unleashing the equivalent of 12,500 tons of TNT. The bomb had several inscriptions scribbled on its shell, one of which read “Greetings to the Emperor from the men of the Indianapolis” (the ship that transported the bomb to the Marianas). There were 90,000 buildings in Hiroshima before the bomb was dropped; only 28,000 remained after the bombing. Of the city’s 200 doctors before the explosion; only 20 were left alive or capable of working.

There were 1,780 nurses before—only 150 remained who were able to tend to the sick and dying. According to John Hersey’s classic work Hiroshima, the Hiroshima city government had put hundreds of schoolgirls to work clearing fire lanes in the event of incendiary bomb attacks. They were out in the open when the Enola Gay dropped its load. There were so many spontaneous fires set as a result of the bomb that a crewman of the Enola Gay stopped trying to count them. Another crewman remarked, “It’s pretty terrific. What a relief it worked.” Related Videos

Question: In which month of 1945 did the USA drop the atom bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki ?
Answer: AUGUST