patients who failed to recover.
Direct gamma radiation from the bomb had damaged tissue throughout the bodies of the exposed. The destruction required cell division to manifest itself, but radiation temporarily suppresses cell division; hence the delayed onset of symptoms. The blood-forming tissues were damaged worst, particularly those that produce the white blood cells that fight infection. Large doses of radiation also stimulate the production of an anti-clotting factor. The outcome of these assaults was massive tissue death, massive hemorrhage and massive infection. “Hemorrhage was the cause of death in all our cases,” writes Hachiya, but he also notes that the pathologist at his hospital “found changes in every organ of the body in the cases he… autopsied.” Liebow reports “evidence of generalization of infection with masses of bacteria in… organs as remote from the surface [of the body] as the brain, bone marrow and eye.” The operator of a crematorium in the Hiroshima suburbs, a connoisseur of mortality, told Lifton “the bodies were black in color… most of them had a peculiar smell, and everyone thought this was from the bomb… The smell when they burned was caused by the fact that these bodies were decayed, many of them even before being cremated — some of them having their internal organs decay even while the person was living.” Yoko Ota raged:
We were being killed against our will by something completely unknown to us… It is the misery of being thrown into a world of new terror and fear, a world more unknown than that of people sick with cancer.
In the depths of his loss a boy who was a fourth-grader at Hiroshima found words for the unspeakable:
Mother was completely bedridden. The hair of her head had almost all fallen out, her chest was festering, and from the two-inch hole in her back a lot of maggots were crawling in and out. The place was full of flies and mosquitoes and fleas, and an awfully bad smell hung over everything. Everywhere I looked there were many people like this who couldn't move. From the evening when we arrived Mother's condition got worse and we seemed to see her weakening before our eyes. Because all night long she was having trouble breathing, we did everything we could to relieve her. The next morning Grandmother and I fixed some gruel. As we took it to Mother, she breathed her last breath. When we thought she had stopped breathing altogether, she took one deep breath and did not breathe any more after that. This was nine o'clock in the morning of the 19th of August. At the site of the Japan Red Cross Hospital, the smell of the bodies being cremated is overpowering. Too much sorrow makes me like a stranger to myself, and yet despite my grief I cannot cry.
Not human beings alone died at Hiroshima. Something else was destroyed as well, the Japanese study explains — that shared life Hannah Arendt calls the common world:
In the case of an atomic bombing… a community does not merely receive an impact; the community itself is destroyed. Within 2 kilometers of the atomic bomb's hypocenter all life and property were shattered, burned, and buried under ashes. The visible forms of the city where people once carried on their daily lives vanished without a trace. The destruction was sudden and thorough; there was virtually no chance to escape… Citizens who had lost no family members in the holocaust were as rare as stars at sunrise…
The atomic bomb had blasted and burned hospitals, schools, city offices, police stations, and every other kind of human organization… Family, relatives, neighbors, and friends relied on a broad range of interdependent organizations for everything from birth, marriage, and funerals to firefighting, productive work, and daily living. These traditional communities were completely demolished in an instant.
Destroyed, that is, were not only men, women and thousands of children but also restaurants and inns, laundries, theater groups, sports clubs, sewing clubs, boys' clubs, girls' clubs, love affairs, trees and gardens, grass, gates, gravestones, temples and shrines, family heirlooms, radios, classmates, books, courts of law, clothes, pets, groceries and markets, telephones, personal letters, automobiles, bicycles, horses — 120 war-horses — musical instruments, medicines and medical equipment, life savings, eyeglasses, city records, sidewalks, family scrapbooks, monuments, engagements, marriages, employees, clocks and watches, public transportation, street signs, parents, works of art. “The whole of society,” concludes the Japanese study, “was laid waste to its very foundations.” Lifton's history professor saw not even foundations left. “Such a weapon,” he told the American psychiatrist, “has the power to make everything into nothing.”
There remains the question of how many died. The U.S. Army Medical Corps officer who proposed the joint American-Japanese study to Douglas MacArthur thought as late as August 28 that “the total number of casualties reported at Hiroshima is approximately 160,000 of which 8,000 are dead.” The Jesuit priest's contemporary reckoning approaches the appalling reality and illuminates further the destruction of the common world:
How many people were a sacrifice to this bomb? Those who had lived through the catastrophe placed the number of dead at at least 100,000. Hiroshima had a population of 400,000. Official statistics place the number who had died at 70,000 up to September 1st, not counting the missing — and 130,000 wounded, among them 43,500 severely wounded. Estimates made by ourselves on the basis of groups known to us show that the number of 100,000 dead is not too high. Near us there are two barracks, in each of which forty Korean workers lived. On the day of the explosion they were laboring on the streets of Hiroshima. Four returned alive to one barracks and sixteen to the other. Six hundred students of the Protestant girls' school worked in a factory, from which only thirty or forty returned. Most of the peasant families in the neighborhood lost one or more of their members who had worked at factories in the city. Our next door neighbor, Tamura, lost two children and himself suffered a large wound since, as it happened, he had been in the city on that day. The family of our reader suffered two dead, father and son; thus a family of five members suffered at least two losses, counting only the dead and severely wounded. There died the mayor, the president of the central Japan district, the commander of the city, a Korean prince who had been stationed in Hiroshima in the capacity of an officer, and many other high-ranking officers. Of the professors of the University thirty-two were killed or severely wounded. Especially hard-hit were the soldiers. The Pioneer Regiment was almost entirely wiped out. The barracks were near the center of the explosion.
More recent estimates place the number of deaths up to the end of 1945 at 140,000. The dying continued; five-year deaths related to the bombing reached 200,000. The death rate for deaths up to the end of 1945 was 54 percent, an extraordinary density of killing; by contrast, the death rate for the March 9 firebombing of Tokyo, 100,000 deaths among 1 million casualties, was only 10 percent. Back at the U.S. Army Institute of Pathology in Washington in early 1946 Liebow used a British invention, the Standardized Casualty Rate, to compute that Little Boy produced casualties, including dead, 6,500 times more efficiently than an ordinary HE bomb. “Those scientists who invented the… atomic bomb,” writes a young woman who was a fourth-grade student at Hiroshima — “what did they think would happen if they dropped it?”
Harry Truman learned of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima at lunch on board the
Groves called Oppenheimer from Washington on August 6 at two in the afternoon to pass along the news:
Gen. G: I'm very proud of you and all of your people.
Dr. O: It went all right?
Gen. G: Apparently it went with a tremendous bang.
Dr. O: When was this, was it after sundown?
Gen. G: No, unfortunately, it had to be in the daytime on account of security of the plane and that was left in the hands of the Commanding General over there…
Dr. O: Right. Everybody is feeling reasonably good about it and I extend my heartiest congratulations. It's been a long road.
Gen. G: Yes, it has been a long road and I think one of the wisest things I ever did was when I selected the director of Los Alamos.
