The Making of the Atomic Bomb

naked, burned cadavers are particularly numerous. Among them are the wounded who are still alive. A few have crawled under the burned-out autos and trams. Frightfully injured forms beckon to us and then collapse.

Hachiya corroborates the priest's report:

The streets were deserted except for the dead. Some looked as if they had been frozen by death while still in the full action of flight; others lay sprawled as though some giant had flung them to their death from a great height…

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.

The history professor Lifton interviewed is similarly at a loss:

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.

Without familiar landmarks, the streets filled with rubble, many had difficulty finding their way. For Yoko Ota the city's history itself had been demolished:

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 city of Hiroshima, entirely on flat land, was made three-dimensional by the existence of the white castle, and because of this it could retain a classical flavor. Hiroshima had a history of its own. And when I thought about these things, the grief of stepping over the corpses of history pressed upon my heart.

Of 76,000 buildings in Hiroshima 70,000 were damaged or destroyed, 48,000 totally. “It is no exaggeration to say,” reports the Japanese study, “that the whole city was ruined instantaneously.” Material losses alone equaled the annual incomes of more than 1.1 million people. “In Hiroshima many major facilities — prefectural office, city hall, fire departments, police stations, national railroad stations, post offices, telegram and telephone offices, broadcasting station, and schools — were totally demolished or burned. Streetcars, roads, and electricity, gas, water, and sewage facilities were ruined beyond use. Eighteen emergency hospitals and thirty-two first-aid clinics were destroyed.” Ninety percent of all medical personnel in the city were killed or disabled.

Not many of the survivors worried about buildings; they had all they could do to deal with their injuries and find and cremate their dead, an obligation of particular importance to the Japanese. A man remembers seeing a woman bloody in torn wartime mompei pantaloons, naked above the waist, her child strapped to her back, carrying a soldier's helmet:

[She was] in search of a place to cremate her dead child. The burned face of the child on her back was infested with maggots. I guess she was thinking of putting her child's bones in a battle helmet she had picked up. I feared she would have to go far to find burnable material to cremate her child.

A young woman who had been in charge of a firebreak group and who was badly burned on one shoulder recalls the mass cremations:

We gathered the dead bodies and made big mountains of the dead and put oil on them and burned them. And people who were unconscious woke up in the piles of the dead when they found themselves burning and came running out.

Another Hachiya visitor:

After a couple of days, there were so many bodies stacked up no one knew who was who, and decomposition was so extensive the smell was unbearable. During those days, wherever you went, there were so many dead lying around it was impossible to walk without encountering them — swollen, discolored bodies with froth oozing from their noses and mouths.

A first-grade girl:

On the morning of the 9th, what the soldiers on the clearance team lifted out of the ruins was the very much changed shape of Father. The Civil Defense post [where he worked] was at Yasuda near Kyobashi, in front of the tall chimney that was demolished last year. He must have died there at the foot of it; his head was already just a white skull… Mother and my little sister and I, without thinking, clutched that dead body and wailed. After that Mother went with it to the crematory at Matsukawa where she found corpses piled up like a mountain.

Having moved his hospital sickbed to a second-floor room with blown-out windows that fire had sterilized, Hachiya himself could view and smell the ruins:

Towards evening, a light southerly wind blowing across the city wafted to us an odor suggestive of burning sardines… Towards Nigitsu was an especially large fire where the dead were being burned by the hundreds… These glowing ruins and the blazing funeral pyres set me to wondering if Pompeii had not looked like this during its last days. But I think there were not so many dead in Pompeii as there were in Hiroshima.

Those who did not die seemed for a time to improve. But then, explains Lifton, they sickened:

Survivors began to notice in themselves and others a strange form of illness. It consisted of nausea, vomiting, and loss of appetite; diarrhea with large amounts of blood in the stools; fever and weakness; purple spots on various parts of the body from bleeding into the skin… inflammation and ulceration of the mouth, throat and gums… bleeding from the mouth, gums, throat, rectum, and urinary tract… loss of hair from the scalp and other parts of the body… extremely low white blood cell counts when those were taken… and in many cases a progressive course until death.

Only gradually did the few surviving and overworked Japanese doctors realize that they were seeing radiation sickness; “atomic bomb illness,” explains the authoritative Japanese study, “is the first and only example of heavy lethal and momentary doses of whole body irradiation” in the history of medicine. A few human beings had been accidentally overexposed to X rays and laboratory animals had been exposed and sacrificed for study but no large population had ever experienced so extensive and deadly an assault of ionizing radiation before.

The radiation brought further suffering, Hachiya reports in his diary:

Following the pika, we thought that by giving treatment to those who were burned or injured recovery would follow. But now it was obvious that this was not true. People who appeared to be recovering developed other symptoms that caused them to die. So many patients died without our understanding the cause of death that we were all in despair…

Hundreds of patients died during the first few days; then the death rate declined. Now, it was increasing again… As time passed, anorexia [i.e., loss of appetite] and diarrhea proved to be the most persistent symptoms in