director of the Hiroshima Communications Hospital, begins a diary of the events Little Boy entrained on August 6. “Shimmering leaves, reflecting sunlight from a cloudless sky, made a pleasant contrast with shadows in my garden.” The temperature at eight o'clock was 80 degrees, the humidity 80 percent, the wind calm. The seven branches of the Ota flowed past crowds of citizens walking and bicycling to work. The streetcars that clanged outside Fukuya department store two blocks north of Aioi Bridge were packed. Thousands of soldiers, bare to the waist, exercised at morning calesthenics on the east and west parade grounds that flanked Hiroshima Castle a long block west of the T-shaped bridge. More than eight thousand schoolgirls, ordered to duty the day before, worked outdoors in the central city helping to raze houses to clear firebreaks against the possibility of an incendiary attack. An air raid alert at 7:09 — the 509th weather plane — had been called off at 7:31 when the B-29 left the area. Three more
“Just as I looked up at the sky,” remembers a girl who was five years old at the time and safely at home in the suburbs, “there was a flash of white light and the green in the plants looked in that Ught like the color of dry leaves.”
Closer was more brutal illumination. A young woman helping to clear firebreaks, a junior-college student at the time, recalls: “Shortly after the voice of our teacher, saying ‘Oh, there's a B!’ made us look up at the sky, we felt a tremendous flash of lightning. In an instant we were blinded and everything was just a frenzy of delirium.”
Closer still, in the heart of the city, no one survived to report the coming of the light; the constrained witness of investigative groups must serve instead for testimony. A Yale Medical School pathologist working with a joint American-Japanese study commission a few months after the war, Averill A. Liebow, observes:
Accompanying the flash of light was an instantaneous flash of heat… Its duration was probably less than one tenth of a second and its intensity was sufficient to cause nearby flammable objects… to burst into flame and to char poles as far as 4,000 yards away from the hypocenter [i.e., the point on the ground directly below the fireball]… At 600–700 yards it was sufficient to chip and roughen granite… The heat also produced bubbling of tile to about 1,300 yards. It has been found by experiment that to produce this effect a temperature of [3,000° F] acting for four seconds is necessary, but under these conditions the effect is deeper, which indicates that the temperature was higher and the duration less during the Hiroshima explosion.
“Because the heat in [the] flash comes in such a short time,” adds a Manhattan Project study, “there is no time for any cooling to take place, and the temperature of a person's skin can be raised [120°F]… in the first millisecond at a distance of [2.3 miles].”
The most authoritative study of the Hiroshima bombing, begun in 1976 in consultation with thirty-four Japanese scientists and physicians, reviews the consequences of this infernal insolation, which at half a mile from the hypocenter was more than three thousand times as energetic as the sunlight that had shimmered on Dr. Hachiya's leaves:
The temperature at the site of the explosion… reached [5,400° F]… and primary atomic bomb thermal injury… was found in those exposed within [2 miles] of the hypocenter… Primary burns are injuries of a special nature and not ordinarily experienced in everyday life.
This Japanese study distinguishes five grades of primary thermal burns ranging from grade one, red burn, through grade three, white burn, to grade five, carbonized skin with charring. It finds that “severe thermal burns of over grade 5 occurred within [0.6 to 1 mile] of the hypocenter… and those of grades 1 to 4 [occurred as far as 2 to 2.5 miles] from the hypocenter… Extremely intense thermal energy leads not only to carbonization but also to evaporation of the viscerae.” People exposed within half a mile of the Little Boy fireball, that is, were seared to bundles of smoking black char in a fraction of a second as their internal organs boiled away. “Doctor,” a patient commented to Michihiko Hachiya a few days later, “a human being who has been roasted becomes quite small, doesn't he?” The small black bundles now stuck to the streets and bridges and sidewalks of Hiroshima numbered in the thousands.
At the same instant birds ignited in midair. Mosquitoes and flies, squirrels, family pets crackled and were gone. The fireball flashed an enormous photograph of the city at the instant of its immolation fixed on the mineral, vegetable and animal surfaces of the city itself. A spiral ladder left its shadow in unburned paint on the surface of a steel storage tank. Leaves shielded reverse silhouettes on charred telephone poles. The black-brushed calligraphy burned out of a rice-paper name card posted on a school building door; the dark flowers burned out of a schoolgirl's light blouse. A human being left the memorial of his outline in unspalled granite on the steps of a bank. Another, pulling a handcart, protected a handcart- and human-shaped surface of asphalt from boiling. Farther away, in the suburbs, the flash induced dark, sunburn-like pigmentation sharply shadowed deep in human skin, streaking the shape of an exposed nose or ear or hand raised in gesture onto the faces and bodies of startled citizens: the mask of Hiroshima, Liebow and his colleagues came to call that pigmentation. They found it persisting unfaded five months after the event.
The world of the dead is a different place from the world of the living and it is hardly possible to visit there. That day in Hiroshima the two worlds nearly converged. “The inundation with death of the area closest to the hypocenter,” writes the American psychiatrist Robert Jay Lifton, who interviewed survivors at length, “was such that if a man survived within a thousand meters (.6 miles) and was out of doors… more than nine tenths of the people around him were fatalities.” Only the living, however inundated, can describe the dead; but where death claimed nine out of ten or, closer to the hypocenter, ten out often, a living voice describing necessarily distorts. Survivors are like us; but the dead are radically changed, without voice or civil rights or recourse. Along with their lives they have been deprived of participation in the human world. “There was a fearful silence which made one feel that all people and all trees and vegetation were dead,” remembers Yoko Ota, a Hiroshima writer who survived. The silence was the only sound the dead could make. In what follows among the living, remember them. They were nearer the center of the event; they died because they were members of a different polity and their killing did not therefore count officially as murder; their experience most accurately models the worst case of our common future. They numbered in the majority in Hiroshima that day.
Still only light, not yet blast: Hachiya:
I asked Dr. Koyama what his findings had been in patients with eye injuries.
“Those who watched the plane had their eye grounds burned,” he replied. “The flash of light apparently went through the pupils and left them with a blind area in the central portion of their visual fields.
“Most of the eye-ground burns are third degree, so cure is impossible.”
And a German Jesuit priest reporting on one of his brothers in Christ:
Father Kopp… was standing in front of the nunnery ready to go home. All of a sudden he became aware of the light, felt that wave of heat, and a large blister formed on his hand.
A white burn with the formation of a bleb is a grade-four burn.
Now light and blast together; they seemed simultaneous to those close in. A junior-college girl:
Ah, that instant! I felt as though I had been struck on the back with something like a big hammer, and thrown into boiling oil… I seem to have been blown a good way to the north, and I felt as though the directions were all changed around.
The first junior-college girl, the one whose teacher called everyone to look up:
The vicinity was in pitch darkness; from the depths of the gloom, bright red flames rise crackling, and spread moment by moment. The faces of my friends who just before were working energetically are now burned and blistered, their clothes torn to rags; to what shall I liken their trembling appearance as they stagger about? Our teacher is holding her students close to her like a mother hen protecting her chicks, and like baby chicks paralyzed
