Making of the Atomic Bomb

by Richard Rhodes

  A man with his eyes sticking out about two inches called me by name and I felt sick. . . . People’s bodies were tremendously swollen—you can’t imagine how big a human body can swell up.2643

  A businessman whose son was killed:

  In front of the First Middle School there were . . . many young boys the same age as my son . . . and what moved me most to pity was that there was one dead child lying there and another who seemed to be crawling over him in order to run away, both of them burned to blackness.2644

  A thirty-year-old woman:

  The corpse lying on its back on the road had been killed immediately. . . . Its hand was lifted to the sky and the fingers were burning with blue flames.2645 The fingers were shortened to one-third and distorted. A dark liquid was running to the ground along the hand.

  A third-grade girl:

  There was also a person who had a big splinter of wood stuck in his eye—I suppose maybe he couldn’t see—and he was running around blindly.2646

  A nineteen-year-old Ujina girl:

  I saw for the first time a pile of burned bodies in a water tank by the entrance to the broadcasting station.2647 Then I was suddenly frightened by a terrible sight on the street 40 to 50 meters from Shukkeien Garden. There was a charred body of a woman standing frozen in a running posture with one leg lifted and her baby tightly clutched in her arms. Who on earth could she be?

  A first-grade girl:

  A streetcar was all burned and just the skeleton of it was left, and inside it all the passengers were burned to a cinder. When I saw that I shuddered all over and started to tremble.2648

  “The more you hear the sadder the stories get,” writes a girl who was five years old at Hiroshima.2649 “Since just in my family there is so much sadness from it,” deduces a boy who was also five, “I wonder how much sadness other people must also be having.”2650

  Eyes watched as well from the other side. A history professor Lifton interviewed:

  I went to look for my family. Somehow I became a pitiless person, because if I had pity, I would not have been able to walk through the city, to walk over those dead bodies. The most impressive thing was the expression in people’s eyes—bodies badly injured which had turned black—their eyes looking for someone to come and help them.2651 They looked at me and knew that I was stronger than they. . . . I saw disappointment in their eyes. They looked at me with great expectation, staring right through me. It was very hard to be stared at by those eyes.

  Massive pain and suffering and horror everywhere the survivors turned was their common lot. A fifth-grade boy:

  I and Mother crawled out from under the house. There we found a world such as I had never seen before, a world I’d never even heard of before. I saw human bodies in such a state that you couldn’t tell whether they were humans or what. . . . There is already a pile of bodies in the road and people are writhing in death agonies.2652

  A junior-college girl:

  At the base of the bridge, inside a big cistern that had been dug out there, was a mother weeping and holding above her head a naked baby that was burned bright red all over its body, and another mother was crying and sobbing as she gave her burned breast to her baby. In the cistern the students stood with only their heads above the water and their two hands, which they clasped as they imploringly cried and screamed, calling their parents. But every single person who passed was wounded, all of them, and there was no one to turn to for help.2653

  A six-year-old boy:

  Near the bridge there were a whole lot of dead people.2654 There were some who were burned black and died, and there were others with huge burns who died with their skins bursting, and some others who died all stuck full of broken glass. There were all kinds. Sometimes there were ones who came to us asking for a drink of water. They were bleeding from their faces and from their mouths and they had glass sticking in their bodies. And the bridge itself was burning furiously. . . . The details and the scenes were just like Hell.

  Two first-grade girls:

  We came out to the Miyuki Bridge. Both sides of the street were piled with burned and injured people. And when we looked back it was a sea of bright red flame.2655

  *

  The fire was spreading furiously from one place to the next and the sky was dark with smoke. . . .2656

  The [emergency aid station] was jammed with people who had terrible wounds, some whose whole body was one big burn. . . . The flames were spreading in all directions and finally the whole city was one sea of fire and sparks came flying over our heads.

  A fifth-grade boy:

  I had the feeling that all the human beings on the face of the earth had been killed off, and only the five of us [i.e., his family] were left behind in an uncanny world of the dead. . . . I saw several people plunging their heads into a half-broken water tank and drinking the water. . . . When I was close enough to see inside the tank I said “Oh!” out loud and instinctively drew back. What I had seen in the tank were the faces of monsters reflected from the water dyed red with blood.2657 They had clung to the side of the tank and plunged their heads in to drink and there in that position they had died. From their burned and tattered middy blouses I could tell that they were high school girls, but there was not a hair left on their heads; the broken skin of their burned faces was stained bright red with blood. I could hardly believe that these were human faces.

  A physician sharing his horror with Hachiya:

  Between the [heavily damaged] Red Cross Hospital and the center of the city I saw nothing that wasn’t burned to a crisp. Streetcars were standing at Kawaya-cho and Kamiya-cho and inside were dozens of bodies, blackened beyond recognition. I saw fire reservoirs filled to the brim with dead people who looked as though they had been boiled alive. In one reservoir I saw a man, horribly burned, crouching beside another man who was dead. He was drinking blood-stained water out of the reservoir. . . .2658 In one reservoir there were so many dead people there wasn’t enough room for them to fall over. They must have died sitting in the water.

  A husband helping his wife escape the city:

  While taking my severely-wounded wife out to the riverbank by the side of the hill of Nakahiro-machi, I was horrified, indeed, at the sight of a stark naked man standing in the rain with his eyeball in his palm. He looked to be in great pain but there was nothing that I could do for him.2659

  The naked man may have been the same victim one of Hachiya’s later visitors remembered noticing, or he may have been another:

  There were so many burned [at a first-aid station] that the odor was like drying squid. They looked like boiled octopuses. . . . I saw a man whose eye had been torn out by an injury, and there he stood with his eye resting in the palm of his hand. What made my blood run cold was that it looked like the eye was staring at me.2660

  The people ran to the rivers to escape the firestorm; in the testimony of the survivors there is an entire subliterature of the rivers. A third-grade boy:

  Men whose whole bodies were covered with blood, and women whose skin hung from them like a kimono, plunged shrieking into the river. All these become corpses and their bodies are carried by the current toward the sea.2661

  A first-grade girl:

  We were still in the river by evening and it got cold. No matter where you looked there was nothing but burned people all around.2662

  A sixth-grade girl:

  Bloated corpses were drifting in those seven formerly beautiful rivers; smashing cruelly into bits the childish pleasure of the little girl, the peculiar odor of burning human flesh rose everywhere in the Delta City, which had changed to a waste of scorched earth.2663

  A young ship designer whose response to the bombing was to rush home immediately to Nagasaki:

  I had to cross the river to reach the station.2664 As I came to the river and went down the bank to the water, I found that the stream was filled with dead bodies. I started to cross by crawling over the corpses, on my hands and knees. As I got about a third of the way across, a dead body
began to sink under my weight and I went into the water, wetting my burned skin. It pained severely. I could go no further, as there was a break in the bridge of corpses, so I turned back to the shore.

  A third-grade boy:

  I got terribly thirsty so I went to the river to drink. From upstream a great many black and burned corpses came floating down the river. I pushed them away and drank the water. At the margin of the river there were corpses lying all over the place.2665

  A fifth-grade boy:

  The river became not a stream of flowing water but rather a stream of drifting dead bodies. No matter how much I might exaggerate the stories of the burned people who died shrieking and of how the city of Hiroshima was burned to the ground, the facts would still be clearly more terrible.2666

  Terrible was what a Hachiya patient found beyond the river:

  There was a man, stone dead, sitting on his bicycle as it leaned against a bridge railing. . . . You could tell that many had gone down to the river to get a drink of water and had died where they lay.2667 I saw a few live people still in the water, knocking against the dead as they floated down the river. There must have been hundreds and thousands who fled to the river to escape the fire and then drowned.2668

  The sight of the soldiers, though, was more dreadful than the dead people floating down the river. I came onto I don’t know how many, burned from the hips up; and where the skin had peeled, their flesh was wet and mushy. . . .

  And they had no faces! Their eyes, noses and mouths had been burned away, and it looked like their ears had melted off. It was hard to tell front from back.

  The suffering in the crowded private park of the Asano family was doubled when survivors faced death a second time, another Hachiya confidant saw:

  Hundreds of people sought refuge in the Asano Sentei Park. They had refuge from the approaching flames for a little while, but gradually, the fire forced them nearer and nearer the river, until at length everyone was crowded onto the steep bank overlooking the river. . . .

  Even though the river is more than one hundred meters wide along the border of the park, balls of fire were being carried through the air from the opposite shore and soon the pine trees in the park were afire. The poor people faced a fiery death if they stayed in the park and a watery grave if they jumped in the river. I could hear shouting and crying, and in a few minutes they began to fall like toppling dominoes into the river. Hundreds upon hundreds jumped or were pushed in the river at this deep, treacherous point and most were drowned.

  “Along the streetcar line circling the western border of the park,” adds Hachiya, “they found so many dead and wounded they could hardly walk.”2669

  The setting of the sun brought no relief. A fourteen-year-old boy:

  Night came and I could hear many voices crying and groaning with pain and begging for water.2670 Someone cried, “Damn it! War tortures so many people who are innocent!” Another said, “I hurt! Give me water!” This person was so burned that we couldn’t tell if it was a man or a woman.

  The sky was red with flames. It was burning as if scorching heaven.

  A fifth-grade girl:

  Everybody in the shelter was crying out loud.2671 Those voices. . . . They aren’t cries, they are moans that penetrate to the marrow of your bones and make your hair stand on end. . . .

  I do not know how many times I called begging that they would cut off my burned arms and legs.

  A six-year-old boy:

  If you think of Brother’s body divided into left and right halves, he was burned on the right side, and on the inside of the left side. . . .2672

  That night Brother’s body swelled up terribly badly. He looked just like a bronze Buddha. . . .

  [At Danbara High School field hospital] every classroom . . . was full of dreadfully burned people who were lying about or getting up restlessly. They were all painted with mercurochrome and white salve and they looked like red devils and they were waving their arms around like ghosts and groaning and shrieking. Soldiers were dressing their burns.

  The next morning, remembers a boy who was five years old at the time, “Hiroshima was all a wasted land.”2673 The Jesuit, coming in from a suburb to aid his brothers, testifies to the extent of the destruction:

  The bright day now reveals the frightful picture which last night’s darkness had partly concealed. Where the city stood, everything as far as the eye could reach is a waste of ashes and ruin. Only several skeletons of buildings completely burned out in the interior remain. The banks of the rivers are covered with dead and wounded, and the rising waters have here and there covered some of the corpses.2674 On the broad street in the Hakushima district, naked, burned cadavers are particularly numerous. Among them are the wounded who are still alive. A few have crawled under the burned-out autos and trams. Frightfully injured forms beckon to us and then collapse.

  Hachiya corroborates the priest’s report:

  The streets were deserted except for the dead. Some looked as if they had been frozen by death while still in the full action of flight; others lay sprawled as though some giant had flung them to their death from a great height. . . .2675

  Nothing remained except a few buildings of reinforced concrete. . . . For acres and acres the city was like a desert except for scattered piles of brick and roof tile. I had to revise my meaning of the word destruction or choose some other word to describe what I saw. Devastation may be a better word, but really, I know of no word or words to describe the view.2676

  The history professor Lifton interviewed is similarly at a loss:

  I climbed Hikiyama Hill and looked down. I saw that Hiroshima had disappeared. . . . I was shocked by the sight. . . . What I felt then and still feel now I just can’t explain with words. Of course I saw many dreadful scenes after that—but that experience, looking down and finding nothing left of Hiroshima—was so shocking that I simply can’t express what I felt. . . . Hiroshima didn’t exist—that was mainly what I saw—Hiroshima just didn’t exist.2677

  Without familiar landmarks, the streets filled with rubble, many had difficulty finding their way. For Yōko ta the city’s history itself had been demolished:

  I reached a bridge and saw that the Hiroshima Castle had been completely leveled to the ground, and my heart shook like a great wave. . . .2678 The city of Hiroshima, entirely on flat land, was made three-dimensional by the existence of the white castle, and because of this it could retain a classical flavor. Hiroshima had a history of its own. And when I thought about these things, the grief of stepping over the corpses of history pressed upon my heart.

  Of 76,000 buildings in Hiroshima 70,000 were damaged or destroyed, 48,000 totally. “It is no exaggeration to say,” reports the Japanese study, “that the whole city was ruined instantaneously.”2679 Material losses alone equaled the annual incomes of more than 1.1 million people. “In Hiroshima many major facilities—prefectural office, city hall, fire departments, police stations, national railroad stations, post offices, telegram and telephone offices, broadcasting station, and schools—were totally demolished or burned. Streetcars, roads, and electricity, gas, water, and sewage facilities were ruined beyond use. Eighteen emergency hospitals and thirty-two first-aid clinics were destroyed.”2680 Ninety percent of all medical personnel in the city were killed or disabled.

  Not many of the survivors worried about buildings; they had all they could do to deal with their injuries and find and cremate their dead, an obligation of particular importance to the Japanese. A man remembers seeing a woman bloody in torn wartime mompei pantaloons, naked above the waist, her child strapped to her back, carrying a soldier’s helmet:

  [She was] in search of a place to cremate her dead child. The burned face of the child on her back was infested with maggots. I guess she was thinking of putting her child’s bones in a battle helmet she had picked up. I feared she would have to go far to find burnable material to cremate her child.2681

  A young woman who had been in charge of a firebreak group and who was b
adly burned on one shoulder recalls the mass cremations:

  We gathered the dead bodies and made big mountains of the dead and put oil on them and burned them. And people who were unconscious woke up in the piles of the dead when they found themselves burning and came running out.2682

  Another Hachiya visitor:

  After a couple of days, there were so many bodies stacked up no one knew who was who, and decomposition was so extensive the smell was unbearable. During those days, wherever you went, there were so many dead lying around it was impossible to walk without encountering them—swollen, discolored bodies with froth oozing from their noses and mouths.2683

  A first-grade girl:

  On the morning of the 9th, what the soldiers on the clearance team lifted out of the ruins was the very much changed shape of Father. The Civil Defense post [where he worked] was at Yasuda near Kyobashi, in front of the tall chimney that was demolished last year. He must have died there at the foot of it; his head was already just a white skull. . . . Mother and my little sister and I, without thinking, clutched that dead body and wailed. After that Mother went with it to the crematory at Matsukawa where she found corpses piled up like a mountain.2684

  Having moved his hospital sickbed to a second-floor room with blown-out windows that fire had sterilized, Hachiya himself could view and smell the ruins:

  Towards evening, a light southerly wind blowing across the city wafted to us an odor suggestive of burning sardines. . . . Towards Nigitsu was an especially large fire where the dead were being burned by the hundreds. . . . These glowing ruins and the blazing funeral pyres set me to wondering if Pompeii had not looked like this during its last days. But I think there were not so many dead in Pompeii as there were in Hiroshima.2685

  Those who did not die seemed for a time to improve. But then, explains Lifton, they sickened:

  Survivors began to notice in themselves and others a strange form of illness. It consisted of nausea, vomiting, and loss of appetite; diarrhea with large amounts of blood in the stools; fever and weakness; purple spots on various parts of the body from bleeding into the skin . . . inflammation and ulceration of the mouth, throat and gums . . . bleeding from the mouth, gums, throat, rectum, and urinary tract . . . loss of hair from the scalp and other parts of the body . . . extremely low white blood cell counts when those were taken . . . and in many cases a progressive course until death.2686