Word: hiroshimas
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Monday, Aug. 6, dawned clear, hot and humid in Hiroshima, a city on the southwestern coast of the main Japanese island of Honshu. In 1942 it had had a population of 420,000, but wartime evacuations had reduced that number this summer morning to about 280,000 civilians, 43,000 military personnel and 20,000 Korean forced laborers and volunteer workers. Hiroshima housed the headquarters of the Japanese army's Second General Headquarters...
...been spared the incendiary-bomb raids that were raining fire on so many of its Japanese counterparts--perhaps, some of its citizens hoped, because it made a poor target for such an attack. Situated on a broad alluvial delta, surrounded on three sides by low mountains, Hiroshima was threaded by seven tributaries of the Ota River--watery obstacles to the spread of fires--emptying into Hiroshima Bay on the Inland Sea. On this Monday morning, some 8,900 schoolchildren had been ordered to increase Hiroshima's advantage by helping clean and widen streets...
...after the B-29 departed. Perhaps this apparently harmless sortie lulled the city's civil-defense monitors. In any case, just before 8:15 three more B-29s--the Enola Gay and two escorts--could be seen and then heard flying some 30,000 ft. over Hiroshima. No alarms sounded in time. The radio announcer on duty had received word that three enemy planes had been sighted, but he had momentarily paused to check his notes instead of grabbing the microphone at once. "Military command announces three enemy planes ..." He never finished. Outside, a teacher supervising a team of schoolgirl...
Little Boy, which had been dropped from the Enola Gay at 8:15:30, exploded 43 sec. later, at 1,900 ft. above Hiroshima, creating a blinding bluish-white flash and, for a fraction of a second, unearthly heat. Temperatures near the hypocenter, the ground point immediately below the explosion, surged to figures ranging from 5400 degrees F to 7200 degrees F; within a mile of the hypocenter, the surfaces of objects instantly rose to more than 1000 degrees F. Those caught in the middle of this maelstrom were the lucky ones. They died instantly, vaporized into puffs of smoke...
...greatest and most terrible of wars ended this week in the echoes of an enormous event -- an event so much more enormous that, relative to it, the war itself shrank to minor significance." With those words fifty years ago, TIME Magazine reported theexplosion of a nuclear bomb in Hiroshima. On Sunday,Japan will solemnly commemorate the devastation. Hiroshima, then just a medium-sized city in southern Japan, wasdestroyed in seconds in one blinding flash. More than 100,000 people, nearly half of Hiroshima's population, perished immediately. Tens of thousands more died later of injuries sustained in the searing blast...