Human shadows permanently etched into the sidewalk, the smell of rotting decay laying thick in the air. This is just the beginning.
After the atomic bomb “Little Boy” decimated almost all of Hiroshima, the people were faced with death and destruction. The 12 to 15,000 tons of TNT exploded into a fireball that rapidly consumed five square miles of the city. Out of the 280,000 to 290,000 civilians and 43,000 soldiers located in Hiroshima. 80,000 died instantly or were severely wounded, and between 90,0000 and 166,000 people died in the four-month period after the explosion as a result of health complications from the bombing. It's estimated that the bombings were responsible for 237,000 deaths total, both directly and indirectly.
Those closest to the blast point who survived represent a group that was "unparalled in human history." Statisticians who studied these individuals such as Seymour Jablon, were able to "find out what exactly radiation does to the human body."
The first set of research took place immediately after. Teams documented many "flash burns", severe injuries, miscarriages of pregnant women at the time and low sperm counts in men. Some individuals appeared to be physically untouched, but they suffered from a strange and unknown sickness named "Atom Bomb disease". Teams would continue to conduct further research, however a general conclusion of the aftereffects wouldn't be drawn for a long time.
Here are some of the voices of Hiroshima recounting the after events of the bombing:
A college history professor: "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."
Medical doctor Michihiko Hachiya: "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."
Writer Yoko Ota: "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... the grief of stepping over the corpses of history pressed upon my heart."
A Protestant minister: "The feeling I had was that everyone was dead. The whole city was destroyed... I thought this was the end of Hiroshima—of Japan—of humankind... This was God's judgment on man."
A six-year-old boy: "Near the bridge there were a whole lot of dead people... 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."
A sociologist: "My immediate thought was that this was like the hell I had always read about... I had never seen anything which resembled it before, but I thought that should there be a hell, this was it—the Buddhist hell, where we were thought that people who could not attain salvation always went... And I imagined that all of these people I was seeing were in the hell I had read about."
A boy in fifth grade: "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 (his family) were left behind in an uncanny world of the dead."
A grocer: "The appearance of people was... well, they all had skin blackened by burns... They had no hair because their hair was burned, and at a glance you couldn't tell whether you were looking at them from in front or in back... Many of them died along the road—I can still picture them in my mind—like walking ghosts... They didn't look like people of this world."
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."
A fourteen-year-old boy: "Night came and I could hear many voices crying and groaning with pain and begging for water. 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."
If you are interested in hearing more voices from the survivors of Japan check out Voices from Japan.
Footnotes:
“Bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki - 1945,” Atomic Heritage Foundation, 2014, https://www.atomicheritage.org/history/bombings-hiroshima-and-nagasaki-1945.
Brown, Hannah. “Hiroshima: How Much Have We Learned.” Lancet 366, no. 9484 (August 6, 2005): 442–44. doi:10.1016/S0140-6736(05)67042-0.1.