“Look at that! Look at that! Look at that!” Tom Ferebee wondered about whether radioactivity would make us all sterile. Lewis said he could taste atomic fission. He said it tasted like lead.
“Fellows,” Tibbets announced on the interphone, “you have just dropped the first atomic bomb in history.”
Van Kirk remembers the two shock waves — one direct, one reflected from the ground — vividly:
[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.
The apparent proximity of the explosion would be one of its trademarks, much as its heat had seemed intimate to Philip Morrison and his colleagues at Trinity.
Turning, diving, circling back to watch, the crew of the
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.
Van Kirk:
If you want to describe it as something you are familiar with, a pot of boiling black oil… I thought: Thank God the war is over and I don't have to get shot at any more. I can go home.
It was a sentiment hundreds of thousands of American soldiers and sailors would soon express, and it was hard-earned.
Leaving the scene the tail gunner, Robert Caron, had a long view:
I kept shooting pictures and trying to get the mess down over the city. All the while I was describing this on the intercom… 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 was trying to describe the mushroom, this turbulent mass. I saw fires springing up in different places, like flames shooting up on a bed of coals. I was asked to count them. I said, “Count them?” Hell, I gave up when there were about fifteen, they were coming too fast to count. I can still see it — that mushroom and that turbulent mass — it looked like lava or molasses covering the whole city, and it seemed to flow outward up into the foothills where the little valleys would come into the plain, with fires starting up all over, so pretty soon it was hard to see anything because of the smoke.
Jacob Beser, the electronic countermeasures officer, an engineering student at Johns Hopkins before he enlisted, found an image from the seashore for the turmoil he saw:
That city was burning for all she was worth. It looked like… well, did you ever go to the beach and stir up the sand in shallow water and see it all billow up? That's what it looked like to me.
Little Boy exploded at 8:16:02 Hiroshima time, 43 seconds after it left the
“It was all impersonal,” Paul Tibbets would come to say. It was not impersonal for Robert Lewis. “If I live a hundred years,” he wrote in his journal, “I'll never quite get these few minutes out of my mind.” Nor would the people of Hiroshima.
The settlement on the delta islands of the Ota River in southwestern Honshu was named Ashihara, “reed field,” or Gokaura, “five villages,” before the feudal lord Terumoto Mori built a fortress there between 1589 and 1591 to secure an outlet for his family holdings on the Inland Sea. Mori called his fortress Hiro-shima-jo, “broad-island castle,” and gradually the town of merchants and artisans that grew up around it acquired its name. It was an 800- foot rectangle of massive stone walls protected within a wide rectangular moat, one corner graced by a high white pagoda-like tower with five progressively inset roofs. The Mori family soon lost its holdings to the stronger Fukushima family, which lost them in turn to the Asano family in 1619. The Asanos had the good sense to have allied themselves closely with the Tokugawa Shogunate and ruled Hiroshima fief within that alliance for the next two and a half centuries. Across those centuries the town prospered. The Asanos saw to its progressive enlargement by filling in the estuarial shallows to connect its islands. Divided then into long, narrow districts by the Ota's seven distributaries, Hiroshima assumed the form of an open, extended hand.
The restoration of the Meiji emperor in 1868 and the abolition of the feudal clan system transformed Hiroshima fief into Hiroshima Prefecture and the town, like the country, began vigorously to modernize. A physician was appointed its first mayor in 1889 when it officially became a city; the population that celebrated the change numbered 83,387. Five years of expensive landfill and construction culminated that year in the opening of Ujina harbor, a reclamation project that established Hiroshima as a major commercial port. Railroads came through at the turn of the century.
By then Hiroshima and its castle had found further service as an army base and the Imperial Army Fifth Division was quartered in barracks within and around the castle grounds. The Fifth Division was the first to be shipped to battle when Japan and China initiated hostilities in 1894; Ujina harbor served as a major point of embarkation and would continue in that role for the next fifty years. The Meiji emperor moved his headquarters to the castle in Hiroshima in September, the better to direct the war, and the Diet met in extraordinary session in a provisional Diet building there. Until the following April, when the limited mainland war ended with a Japanese victory that included the acquisition of Formosa and the southern part of Manchuria, Hiroshima was
It acquired further military and industrial investments in the first three decades of the twentieth century as Japan turned to increasing international adventure. By the Second World War, an American study noted in the autumn of 1945, “Hiroshima was a city of considerable military importance. It contained the 2nd Army headquarters, which commanded the defense of all of southern Japan. The city was a communication center, a storage point, and an assembly area for troops. To quote a Japanese report, ‘Probably more than a thousand times since the beginning of the war did the Hiroshima citizens see off with cries of “Banzai” the troops leaving from the harbor.’” From Hiroshima in 1945 the Japanese Army general staff prepared to direct the defense of Kyushu against the impending American invasion.
Earlier in the war the city's population had approached 400,000, but the threat of strategic bombing, so ominously delayed, had led the authorities to order a series of evacuations; on August 6 the resident population numbered some 280,000 to 290,000 civilians plus about 43,000 soldiers. Given that proportion of civilian to military — more than six to one — Hiroshima was not, as Truman had promised in his Potsdam diary, a “purely military” target. It was not without responsibility, however, in serving the ends of war.
“The hour was early, the morning still, warm, and beautiful,” a Hiroshima physician, Michihiko Hachiya, the
