World slow to realise the terrifying legacy of Hiroshima

Despite being one of America’s closest allies in the Pacific, Australia was not told of plans to drop an atomic bomb on Japan

AUGUST 6, 1945 : The mushroom cloud over Hiroshima after atom bomb dropped by the US from |Enola Gay| 06/08/45 during World War Two (II). Photo taken from US reconnaisance plane. Japan / Bomb Damage / Nuclear Australia's First Century Historical

With the 8900-pound Little Boy bomb safely loaded onto stripped- back B-29 bomber Enola Gay, pilot Paul Tibbets and his crew spent the night of August 5, 1945, playing poker. Still, they hit the tarmac on the small Pacific island of Tinian before dawn, finding it lit with camera flashbulbs and klieg lights as officers and scientists thronged around.

Six hours later, at 8.15am Japanese time on August 6, 1945, they made the world’s first nuclear attack.

Col. Paul W. Tibbets stands beside the B-29 Superfortress bomber the Enola Gay in 1945. He piloted the flight which dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima. Picture: AP Photo

The Japanese city of Hiroshima, home to 250,000 people, exploded under a 12,000m mushroom cloud. The bomb missed its target by 250m to land over a surgical clinic, leaving more than 90 per cent of the city’s doctors and nurses killed or injured.

That evening, 580 Marianas-based Superfortress aircraft also “dropped 3850 tons of incendiary and high-explosive bombs on four Japanese cities”.

FIRE FROM THE HEAVENS

With thousands of troops still fighting Japanese forces across the Pacific, Australia supported its US and British allies in wanting a rapid end to war. US bombing raids across Japan’s 66 biggest cities had already killed 500,000 people and left 20 million homeless. A doctor described countless “floating, clothed bodies, naked bodies, all black as charcoal” floating in the Sumida River outside Tokyo after the first three-hour bombing raid.

This photo of the mushroom cloud over Hiroshima after the atomic bomb was dropped was taken from a US reconnaisance plane.

America had dropped 2000 tons of incendiary bombs, similar to napalm, from 325 B-29s over Tokyo on March 9 and 10. Firebombs dumped on Shitamachi, home to 750,000 people living in cramped wooden-framed buildings, incinerated between 80,000 and 130,000 civilians “in the worst single firestorm in recorded history”.

With the war in Europe over, Allied forces demanded Japan’s unconditional surrender. Instead it was feared Japanese military heads planned to recruit male and female civilians to fight off an Allied invasion, under a policy of Ketsu Go. Allies predicted up to a million casualties if they invaded the island of Kyushu in November, 1945, and Honshu in March of 1946, proposed under Operation Downfall.

US president Harry S. Truman reads reports of the first atomic bomb raid on Japan, while en route home from the Potsdam conference. Picture: AP

AUSTRALIA IN THE DARK

Despite Australia’s major contribution to the Pacific war theatre, it first learned of America’s use of atomic weapons at a White House briefing after the bomb dropped. “Hitherto on the secret list, the existence of this terrifically destructive bomb was revealed by the White House,” Sydney newspapers reported on August 7.

Bombardier Hugh Clarke was a prisoner of war working in a naval dockyard in Fukuoka when the bomb dropped. He noted “the behaviour of our guards changed . . . They stopped bashing us, for a start, and they were preoccupied among themselves”.

Clarke was convinced Japan had no intention of surrendering, and that his Japanese captors would have killed him when Allied forces invaded.

“There was a directive by the Japanese high command that all prisoners were to be eliminated at a certain date (if Japan was invaded),” Clarke explained, suggesting US bombing seemed only to strengthen the military’s resolve to keep fighting.

“They were training women and children to fight with sharpened bamboo sticks and I am quite convinced they would have fought to the last man if there was an invasion,” Clarke said. “Suddenly a whole bloody city was obliterated, they were absolutely stunned. In the circumstances, it had to be something incomprehensible to the Japs to make them stop. They could not comprehend it; well, we couldn’t either.”

Survivors of the first atomic bomb ever used in warfare await emergency medical treatment in Hiroshima on August 6, 1945. Picture: AP

TERRIBLE TOLL

Initial reports from Hiroshima focused on the extensive physical damage. New Yorker magazine reporter John Hersey, arriving in May of 1946, noted “little exact and reliable news about the details of the destruction . . . reached Western readers”.

Hersey published 30,000 words based on the experiences of six survivors who “still wonder why they lived when so many others died”.

He recounted descriptions of survivors with melted eyeballs, others with “skin hung from their faces and hands . . . Some vomiting as they walked. Many were naked or in shreds of clothing . . . the burns made patterns . . . on the skin of some women (white repelled the bomb’s heat, dark clothes conducted it to the skin) in the shapes of flowers” from their kimonos.

DEADLY LEGACY

At the end of August, a Nagasaki university surgeon described an apparently healthy woman who suffered only a minor bruise in the Hiroshima raid, but 10 days later complained of weakness. Tests revealed her bloodstream had one-10th the normal number of white corpuscles and two-thirds the normal number of red corpuscles. Over the next four days her hair began to fall out, the bruise worsened and, despite blood transfusions, she died 19 days after the bombing.

“A post-mortem examination showed striking changes in the blood-making organs,” Radio Tokyo reported.

Originally published as World slow to realise the terrifying legacy of Hiroshima