Hiroshima marks 70 years since atomic bomb
On this day in 1945, at 8:16 a.m. Japanese time, an American
B-29 bomber, the Enola Gay, drops the world’s first atom bomb,
over the city of Hiroshima. Approximately 80,000 people are killed as a direct
result of the blast, and another 35,000 are injured. At least another 60,000
would be dead by the end of the year from the effects of the fallout.
U.S. President Harry S. Truman, discouraged by the Japanese
response to the Potsdam Conference’s demand for unconditional surrender, made
the decision to use the atom bomb to end the war in order to prevent what he
predicted would be a much greater loss of life were the United States to invade
the Japanese mainland. And so on August 5, while a “conventional” bombing of
Japan was underway, “Little Boy,” (the nickname for one of two atom bombs
available for use against Japan), was loaded onto Lt. Col. Paul W. Tibbets’ plane
on Tinian Island in the Marianas. Tibbets’ B-29, named theEnola Gay after
his mother, left the island at 2:45 a.m. on August 6. Five and a half hours
later, “Little Boy” was dropped, exploding 1,900 feet over a hospital and
unleashing the equivalent of 12,500 tons of TNT. The bomb had
several inscriptions scribbled on its shell, one of which read “Greetings to
the Emperor from the men of the Indianapolis” (the ship that
transported the bomb to the Marianas).
There were 90,000 buildings in Hiroshima before the bomb was
dropped; only 28,000 remained after the bombing. Of the city’s 200 doctors
before the explosion; only 20 were left alive or capable of working. There were
1,780 nurses before—only 150 remained who were able to tend to the sick and
dying.
According to John Hersey’s classic work Hiroshima, the
Hiroshima city government had put hundreds of schoolgirls to work clearing fire
lanes in the event of incendiary bomb attacks. They were out in the open when
the Enola Gay dropped its load.
There were so many spontaneous fires set as a result of the
bomb that a crewman of the Enola Gay stopped trying to count
them. Another crewman remarked, “It’s pretty terrific. What a relief it
worked.”
Comments
Post a Comment
Like our page https://www.facebook.com/knowledgewallet1