Hiroshima

The Day War Became Unthinkable

The siren sounded at seven, and no one was unduly disturbed. There had been warnings during the night, but these were a commonplace: the American B29 bombers,, contemptuous of the shattered air-defences, had been using the same rendezvous point, Lake Biwa, for many weeks, using it irrespective of which city they were attacking. It was easily distinguished for miles, a large bright sheet of water to the north-east of Hiroshima. Night after night the citizens, hearing the siren, would listen for a minute to hear whether it was their turn (so far there had been no visit in strength from “Mr B”, as the Japanese called the B29) and, hearing no sound of aircraft, would turn over, go to sleep.

Now, though, it was a daylight alarm. Even these were becoming routine: often the Americans sent over a weather plane in the early morning, with or without an escort, an aircraft which circled high above Japan for a few minutes, then returned to its Pacific island base. It was getting too much of a good thing, the Japanese would joke, when the Americans not only knew which city was going to be bombed, but what its weather was going to be.

Today, 6 August, 1945, three high-flying aircraft appeared on the radar screen. Hardly a bombing formation. The All-Clear was sounded.

The citizens of Hiroshima went on with their day’s work: depressing work for many, for it entailed the tearing down of their own houses, under Government edict, to clear fire-breaks for the massive air-raids which were believed on the way. With the excep­tion of Kyoto, and their own city, every major centre of popula­tion had been bombed, and heavily, by “Mr B”. What men feared, far more than a high-explosive air-raid, was an attack with in­cendiaries, which could wipe out, in a night, half the buildings in a town, as had happened in so many Japanese towns and cities during that terrible fortnight in March. Now, with time stretching on and still the bombers failing to notice Hiroshima, the civil authorities doubled, redoubled, their efforts.  Schools were closed and the pupils, boys and girls, were set to clearing fire-breaks, removing rubble from wrecked homes, setting fire to it, making wide avenues of nothing, to stop the spread of the fire they knew was coming How were they to know that the sort: of fire which was coming would leap across fire-breaks, across a mile of space and more, reduce everything in its way to charcoal and dust?

But one thing which the authorities were doing would repay their efforts. At long last they had persuaded as many of the in­habitants as felt themselves able to move into the country to do so. Thousands had left, many more were packing. As the clock hand crept from eight to five past eight, to ten past and on, men and women were assembling their belongings, tying them up with string.

Ten miles off and thirty thousand feet above them the “Enola Gay” was coming in on target, and her two escorts were altering course. The morning sun, not far from the horizon behind them, flung their silhouette down on a white bed of cloud, a layer of stratus, a roll of cotton-wool from the operating theatre, stretched, held flat. One moment the shadow would be hundreds of feet below them, a midget aeroplane skating like a water-beetle over the surface of the cloud; then, as they reached a higher formation, the silhouette jumped up at them, cruised just underneath, with bow and rear-cannons, clearly visible, engine nacelles jutting out in front of the huge wing.

There was a break, and the sea, six miles below, came into view. A second later it had vanished and there was only their reflection on the cloud. Then, without warning, the cloud ended, nipped with a pair of scissors, and there was nothing but sea, and away in front the light-brown fringe of coastline. A minute later, the sea was behind them.

The navigator ordered a turn to starboard and they flew a minute along the new bearing. Then, crackling over the intercom, they heard his order. The town was in front, a squat huddle, flat little matchboxes with, in the very centre, a huddle of taller, concrete ones. The pilot dragged “Enola Gay” into a steep climbing turn to port, threw open the throttles, headed south-east.

Suddenly, the sky exploded.

For the inhabitants of Hiroshima, thirty thousand feet below, there was the same huge flash of light, and for those of them in the street immediately below the airburst bomb, nothing else. They were incinerated, turned in an instant to ashes and dust, dust which was blasted away a moment later by the huge, rushing wind which followed. But for those a mile and more from the centre of the explosion there came first the tremendous flash of light, then the feeling of sudden, intense heat, then the blast, a blast which picked up houses, threw them across the street, across the pitiful fire-breaks, picked up an entire hospital, a cinema and a hotel, flung them into the river. For those in the city itself there was little recollection of noise. To those outside, like the fisherman twenty miles away in his sampan on the Inland Sea, there was a “terrible, terrible noise”, quite drowning his recollection of the thunder which had accompanied the bombing of Iwakuni. And Iwakuni had been only five miles away.

To each survivor, and perhaps two hundred thousand had died instantly, it seemed that the bomb had been a personal bomb, demolishing his own house, or office or factory, but sparing the rest of the city. There was a thick choking cloud of dust over everything, and at half past eight in the morning it seemed as though the sun had set. One of the survivors, quoted in John Hersey’s remarkable account, Hiroshima, saw the house he was about to enter collapse in front of him, and assumed that it had received a direct hit on the roof. Then he noticed that the walls had fallen inwards, not outwards. He also noticed, and was too shocked and dazed to feel surprise, that a squad of soldiers who had been underground in the hillside opposite, digging a deep and complex shelter, were staggering out into the dust-filled air, blood pouring from their wounds.

The bomb had been exploded in the air above a level expanse of wooden houses, and of these, four square miles of habitation had been absolutely and totally destroyed, knocked down, smashed to pieces by the blast, burnt to ashes. The ferro-concrete buildings— most of them were specially reinforced against earthquake, had withstood the blast but were gutted by fire. Their contents, including the people inside them, vanished within seconds. People like Mr Tanimoto, sheltered by the building he had hoped to enter, and two miles from the explosion, stood a chance of survival: yet many of these, who considered themselves safe, were dead within a year from the poisonous effects of radio-activity. These brought the total casualties from one bomb within the year to over a quarter of a million. These would have been far more serious had not the large-scale evacuation of Hiroshima begun, as we have seen, in earnest, so that the, 1940 census figure had been reduced by almost a third.

On the other hand, the scale of the disaster was vastly increased by the panic-stricken exodus, after the bomb had fallen, of almost all the rest, so that thousands trapped among fallen masonry were left to die. Almost all fire and rescue services werr abandoned; it was a month before any clearing away could be started, before the bodies of those who had been left to die could be cremated.

The effects of the bomb over Hiroshima, the first atomic bomb to be dropped on an enemy target: of the three which had been constructed by the end of the Second World War, the first was tested successfully in New Mexico in July, 1945, the second destroyed Hiroshima a few weeks later, and the third, three days after that, did the same to the Japanese port of Nagasaki, the effects are still being studied, in the second and third generation of survivors, for genetic changes, of which many have been noted. The immediate effects were soon and easily catalogued: destruction by blast and intense heat; darkening of asphalt road surfaces which, like photographic plates, retained the shadows of passers-by at the moment of explosion; the printing of designs from women’s clothes to the surface of their skin; the surprising survival of concrete structures (albeit gutted) with perhaps a saucer-like depression in their flat roofs; the roughening of polished stone; bubbling of roof tiles; miscarriages of pregnant women…

And, most important of all to those who dropped it, the end of the war. Japan sued immediately for peace, and the war ended, officially, on 15 August.

One of the many phenomena interesting to the scientists was the fact that so many concrete buildings with shuttered windows escaped fire, even though the shutters had been blown in, destroyed, by the blast. Those without shutters had been completely gutted, The reason proved to be that heat, travelling at the speed of light, had preceded the blast, been kept out by the shutters and then died away before those shutters were ripped off by the blast.

It was weeks before all, or indeed any, of the survivors bad a clear idea of what had happened to them. Many became ill, vomiting almost incessantly, and this led them to blame a “gas attack”, because of the strong smell of ionization (the familiar “electric smell”) given off by the bomb’s fission. Some without visible wounds or burns died within a few hours, for no apparent reason, and this, too, heightened false rumours of a gas attack, Hiroshima, the world’s biggest guinea-pig, is now a thriving city with a population of roughly 500,000, rich from its tinned-food products, its cotton, paper, chemical and motor industries. Many of its inhabitants bear the scars of their ordeal, but the Americans have made many amends, with generous, lavish, aid of all sorts, so that Japan is now a sounder place economically than ever before, with a higher standard of living.

The two bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki ended the war. How long had they been coming? Was It necessary to wait until nearly six years of bloody war had been completed before the Allies ended it with these two short, sharp, cruel blows? The answers are given in greater detail in the article on Rutherford’s discovery, but the answers to these questions, very briefly, are that the bombs and their component parts took three and a half years to produce, from 1942 to 1945, at a cost of two thousand million dollars. Until July, 1945, when the first of the three, and three was all it had been possible, in the time, to make, was exploded over Alamagordo, New Mexico, there had been no atomic bomb to drop.

The big question, whether it was right, under the circumstances, to drop it, will continue for ever. Was it right, under the circum­stances, to kill so many innocent people, to kill or maim so many others yet unborn? The Japanese had waged their war with great ferocity; they were digging in, as Mr Tanimoto had observed, to defend their homeland yard by yard, with no quarter given, none expected, and the casualties, however well or badly the final battle went, would be enormous on both sides. The argument still rages, will always rage. But to the Allied soldiers, sailors and airmen in August, 1945, there was one issue and one only.

The war was over.