with terror, the students were thrusting their heads under her arms.
The light did not burn those who were protected inside buildings, but the blast found them out:
That boy had been in a room at the edge of the river, looking out at the river when the explosion came, and in that instant as the house fell apart he was blown from the end room across the road on the river embankment and landed on the street below it. In that distance he passed through a couple of windows inside the house and his body was stuck full of all the glass it could hold. That is why he was completely covered with blood like that.
The blast wave, rocketing several hundred yards from the hypocenter at 2 miles per second and then slowing to the speed of sound, 1,100 feet per second, threw up a vast cloud of smoke and dust. “My body seemed all black,” a Hiroshima physicist told Lifton, “everything seemed dark, dark all over… Then I thought, ‘The world is ending.’” Yoko Ota, the writer, felt the same chill:
I just could not understand why our surroundings had changed so greatly in one instant… I thought it might have been something which had nothing to do with the war, the collapse of the earth which it was said would take place at the end of the world.
“Within the city,” notes Hachiya, who was severely injured, “the sky looked as though it had been painted with light
The houses fell as if they had been scythed. A fourth-grade boy:
When I opened my eyes after being blown at least eight yards, it was as dark as though I had come up against a black-painted fence. After that, as if thin paper was being peeled off one piece at a time, it gradually began to grow brighter. The first thing that my eyes lighted upon then was the flat stretch of land with only dust clouds rising from it. Everything had crumbled away in that one moment, and changed into streets of rubble, street after street of ruins.
Hachiya and his wife ran from their house just before it collapsed and terror opened out into horror:
The shortest path to the street lay through the house next door so through the house we went — running, stumbling, falling, and then running again until in headlong flight we tripped over something and fell sprawling into the street. Getting to my feet, I discovered that I had tripped over a man's head.
“Excuse me! Excuse me, please!” I cried hysterically.
A grocer escaped into the street:
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… They held their arms [in front of them]… and their skin — not only on their hands, but on their faces and bodies too — hung down… If there had been only one or two such people… perhaps I would not have had such a strong impression. But wherever I walked I met these people… 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… They had a very special way of walking — very slowly… I myself was One of them.
The peeled skin that hung from the faces and bodies of these severely injured survivors was skin that the thermal flash had instantly blistered and the blast wave had torn loose. A young woman:
I heard a girl's voice clearly from behind a tree. “Help me, please.” Her back was completely burned and the skin peeled off and was hanging down from her hips…
The rescue party… brought [my mother] home. Her face was larger than usual, her lips were badly swollen, and her eyes remained closed. The skin of both her hands was hanging loose as if it were rubber gloves. The upper part of her body was badly burned.
A junior-college girl:
On both sides of the road, bedding and pieces of cloth had been carried out and on these were lying people who had been burned to a reddish-black color and whose entire bodies were frightfully swollen. Making their way among them are three high school girls who looked as though they were from our school; their faces and everything were completely burned and they held their arms out in front of their chests like kangaroos with only their hands pointed downward; from their whole bodies something like thin paper is dangling — it is their peeled-off skin which hangs there, and trailing behind them the un-burned remnants of their puttees, they stagger exactly like sleepwalkers.
A young sociologist:
Everything I saw made a deep impression — a park nearby covered with dead bodies waiting to be cremated… very badly injured people evacuated in my direction… The most impressive thing I saw was some girls, very young girls, not only with their clothes torn off but with their skin peeled off as well… My immediate thought was that this was like the hell I had always read about.
A five-year-old boy:
That day after we escaped and came to Hijiyama Bridge, there were lots of naked people who were so badly burned that the skin of their whole body was hanging from them like rags.
A fourth-grade girl:
The people passing along the street are covered with blood and trailing the rags of their torn clothes after them. The skin of their arms is peeled off and dangling from their finger tips, and they go walking silently, hanging their arms before them.
A five-year-old girl:
People came fleeing from the nearby streets. One after another they were almost unrecognizable. The skin was burned off some of them and was hanging from their hands and from their chins; their faces were red and so swollen that you could hardly tell where their eyes and mouths were. From the houses smoke black enough to scorch the heavens was covering the sky. It was a horrible sight.
A fifth-grade boy compiling a list:
The flames which blaze up here and there from the collapsed houses as though to illuminate the darkness. The child making a suffering, groaning sound, his burned face swollen up balloon-like and jerking as he wanders among the fires. The old man, the skin of his face and body peeling off like a potato skin, mumbling prayers while he flees with faltering steps. Another man pressing with both hands the wound from which blood is steadily dripping, rushing around as though he has gone mad and calling the names of his wife and child — ah — my hair seems to
