1945
American Bomber Drops Atomic Bomb On Hiroshima
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 the Enola 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.”