The Day The Earth Stood Still. 78 Years Ago, The U.S. Dropped an Atomic Bomb on Hiroshima
The bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki would end WW2 and start the Nuclear Age
Atomic bomb test, photo credit: KREMLL
Like Cherry blossoms are the minds
That think there is a tomorrow
But who can tell, there may be
A tempest in the night
Poem by Shinran Shonin, written when he was 9 years old.
This is how it happened.
On August 6, 1945, at 8:15 a.m., an American B-29 bomber passed over the Japanese city of Hiroshima, opened its bomb bay and dropped a single atomic bomb, nicknamed "Little Boy."
A year later, John Hersey would write about it for the New Yorker. It would be published later as a book simply entitled Hiroshima. It tells the stories of six people who survived.
Reverend Kiyoshi Tanimoto, pastor of the Hiroshima Methodist Church, and his friend were unloading a cart of clothes at a wealthy man's suburban house.
Then a tremendous flash of light cut across the sky. Mr. Tanimoto has a distinct recollection that it traveled from east to west, from the city toward the hills. It seemed a sheet of sun.... Mr. Tanimoto took four or five steps and threw himself between two big rocks in the garden. As his face was against the stone, he did not see what happened. He felt a sudden pressure and then splinters and pieces of board and fragments of tile fell on him. He heard no roar... Under what seemed to be a local dust cloud, the day grew darker and darker.
Hatsuyo Nakamura, widow of a Japanese soldier killed in Singapore in 1942. After hearing a radio report of an American bombing raid heading their way, she and her three children spent the pre-dawn hours at one of the safe areas designated by the military to protect civilians. But there was no bombing and they went home.
Around 7 a.m., air raid sirens blared. Again, there was no attack. Around 8 a.m., the all-clear sounded. Nakamura began cooking rice. From her kitchen, she watched a neighbor, a man, noisily taking down his house. It was part of a citywide effort to create wide fire lanes in case the Ameicans dropped incendiary bombs.
As Mrs. Nakamura stood watching her neighbor, everything flashed whiter than any white she had ever seen. She did not notice what happened to the man next door; the reflex of a mother set her in motion toward her children. She had taken a single step (the house was 1,350 yards, or three-quarters of a mile, from the center of the explosion) when something picked her up and she seemed to fly into the next room over the raised sleeping platform, pursued by parts of her house.
A doctor named Masakazu Fujii was reading a newspaper on the porch of his private hospital.
Dr. Fuji sat cross-legged in his underwear on the spotless matting of the porch, put on his glasses ... He saw the flash. To him -- faced away from the center and looking at his paper -- it seemed a brilliant yellow. Startled, he began to rise to his feet (he was 1,550 yards from the center), the hospital leaned behind his rising and, with a terrible ripping noise, toppled into the river. The Doctor, still in the act of getting to his feet, was thrown forward and around and over; he was buffeted and gripped; he lost track of everything, because things were so speeded up; he felt the water.
Dr. Fuji hardly had time to think that he was dying before he realized he was alive, squeezed tightly by two long timbers in a V across his chest, like a morsel suspended between two huge chopsticks -- held up right, so that he could not move, with his head miraculously above water and his torso and legs in it. The remains of the hospital were all around him in a mad assortment of splintered lumber and materials for the relief of pain. His left shoulder hurt terribly. His glasses were gone.
In an instant, the city of 245,000 inhabitants was leveled. Hershey wrote, "Nearly one hundred thousand people had been killed or doomed at one blow; a hundred thousand more were hurt."
"The temperature near the blast site reached 5,400 degrees Fahrenheit," reads the account on the National Park Service website. "The sky seemed to explode. Birds ignited in midair; asphalt boiled. People over two miles away burst into crumbling cinders. Others with raw skin hanging in flaps around their hips leaped shrieking into waterways to escape the heat. Men without feet stumbled about on the charred stumps of their ankles. Women without jaws screamed incoherently. Bodies described as 'boiled octopuses' littered the destroyed streets. Children, tongues swollen with thirst, pushed floating corpses aside to soothe their scalded throats with bloody river water."
Hiroshima Peace Memorial, the only structure that left standing in the area after the atomic bombing, photo credit: Vincent_AF
After Germany's surrender in May 1945, President Truman had been faced with four options for how to proceed in the Pacific Theater, where the Americans were advancing toward Japan island by island at a heavy cost in casualties. One, to continue conventional bombing of Japan, which had already exacted a heavy casualty toll. Two, to invade Japan, which would have begun that fall and was feared would result in hundreds of thousands of American casualties, plus Japanese soldiers and civilians. Three, to detonate an atomic bomb in an unpopulated location to demonstrate its power and convince Japan to surrender (one of the reasons this option was rejected was concern that the bomb would be a dud). Four, to drop the bomb on a populated city.
Sixteen hours after the bombing of Hiroshima, Truman said in a press release, "An American airplane dropped one bomb on Hiroshima and destroyed its usefulness to the enemy ... if they do not now accept our terms they may expect a rain of ruin from the air, the like of which has never been seen on this earth."
What had already happened had never been seen on earth.
It would happen again, three days later, August 9, at Nagasaki. The day before, Russia officially joined the war in the Pacific. Late on the night of the 9th, Japanese Emperor Hirohito met with his cabinet and said he did not think Japan could continue to wage war. The next day, Japan informed the Allies that it would surrender.
Robert Oppenheimer, the father of the atomic bomb, photo credit: x-ray delta one
Two days ago, I went to see the new movie, Oppenheimer. I have a few quibbles but overall I thought it was a masterpiece and more. It is important as both history and a warning. Hopefully without spoiling it for those who haven’t seen it, I will just cite two scenes that stood out and especially resonated with me long after the closing credits. The first was the test detonation of the first bomb (which happened in July 1944). It is gripping, exciting and terrifying all at once. The second was when J. Robert Oppenheimer, “the father of the atomic bomb,” visits Truman at the White House in the aftermath of the twin atomic bombings of Japan. Oppenheimer confides that he feels like he has blood on his hands. Truman - as played by the great Gary Oldman - stares at him with barely concealed contempt, slowly pulls the white handkerchief from his breast pocket and offers it to him. The film, wisely in my view, does not depict the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
On the upper West Side of Manhattan, near my home, there’s a Buddhist temple in a non-descript building on Riverside Drive. It would be easy to miss, save for an imposing bronze statue perched on a ledge.
Statue of Shinran Shonin, New York City, photo credit: Hobo Matt
It is a statue of Shinran Shonin, a 13th century Japanese Buddhist monk. He is dressed in a robe and dons a traditional hat. Shonin’s mother and father died when he was 9 and, as the legend goes, that led him to turn to Buddhism. He would go on to found Jodo Shinshu, or Shin Buddhism, the most widely practiced form in Japan.
In the 1930s, a man named Hozen Seki emigrated from Japan to California and on to New York City where he founded a Shin Buddhist Church.
During the Second World War, he was one of 127,000 Japanese immigrants and Japanese-Americans sent to internment camps.
When he was released, Seki returned to New York and re-located the church to a townhouse on Riverside Drive.
In 1955, the church received an unusual gift. The bronze statue of Shinran Shonin. It was sent by a Japanese businessman in the metal industry. Before the war, he had turned to Jodo Shin Buddhism after his son died. He had his factory forge six bronze statues of Shonin, which were placed at various locations in Japan.
During the war, three of them were seized by the military to be turned into ammunition. They intended to do the same with the one perched atop a hill overlooking the city of Hiroshima, but that provoked a large protest, so the military left it alone. When the atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima, the statue somehow was unscathed.
The inscription on a plaque near the statue says it is meant to be “a testimonial to the atomic bomb devastation and a symbol of last hope for world peace.”
The movie Oppenheimer, which is based on the biography, American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer, by Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin, begins with an on-screen epigram that is a condensed version of something Apollodorus, the Ancient Greek historian wrote about the myth of Prometheus, the God of Fire.
“Prometheus stole fire from the gods and gave it to man. For this, he was chained to a rock and tortured for eternity.”
Seventy-eight years ago today, nuclear fire rained down on Hiroshima - "a tempest in the night" - and the world changed forever. Oppenheimer had hoped that it would end the war and just maybe all wars. Today, there are 12,000 nuclear warheads in existence, of which the United States and Russia have more than 5,000 each.
Thanks for demystifying that statue. What an important gift. History.
I don't believe nukes are real.
We were always taught nobody could live where a nuke was dropped, yet Hiroshima seems to be an exception.
It was firebombed.