It is indeed an anniversary to remember, or to learn and reflect upon for the increasing majority of people alive in the world who have not such memory at hand, since they were born well after 1945. I myself was only six years old on August 6, 1945, so my own learning was later, second hand. But I grew up in the years when the memory of the devastation of Hiroshima and Nagasaki was still vivid, when we learned to crouch under our desks at school (as if that would make a difference), when people built bomb shelters in their backyards, or at least did not regard such construction as unnatural.
The three paragraphs below are drawn from Garrison Keillor's "Writer's Almanac." It occurs to me that John Hersey's Hiroshima should be in required high school curricula today as it may once have been decades ago. (The New Yorker has put on its website the full text of Hersey's book, which first appeared in the magazine.) Although "Little Boy" - what a name for an atomic bomb that crushed a city and over 100,000 of its people - was puny compared to the thermonuclear weapons that became commonplace, the dangers of nuclear proliferation and of another use of such weapons in wartime remains a danger too often unrecognized or disbelieved. Witness the current unlikelihood of Congressional approval of the deal negotiated to prevent development of an Iranian nuclear weapons program.
Seventy years ago today, in 1945, the United States dropped an atomic bomb on the Japanese city of Hiroshima. The American B-29 bomber Enola Gay released the bomb, which was nicknamed "Little Boy," at 8:16 in the morning, local time. Sixty-two thousand buildings were destroyed by the blast, which was equivalent to more than 12,000 tons of TNT. Eighty thousand people were killed on impact, and 35,000 died over the next week of their injuries or radiation poisoning. Sixty thousand more died over the next year. The bomb exploded over a hospital, and 90 percent of the city's doctors were killed in the blast. It was the beginning of the end of World War II; Germany had already surrendered and Japan would follow after the U.S. dropped a second bomb on Nagasaki three days later.
A year later, The New Yorker devoted an entire issue to the publication of an article by John Hersey. The article, called simply "Hiroshima," followed the lives of six survivors of the blast. The magazine's founder and editor Harold Ross wrote to E.B. White: "Hersey has written thirty thousand words on the bombing of Hiroshima [...] one hell of a story, and we are wondering what to do about it [...] [William Shawn, managing editor] wants to wake people up, and says we are the people with a chance to do it, and probably the only people that will do it, if it is done."
Hiroshima begins: "At exactly fifteen minutes past eight in the morning, on August 6th, 1945, Japanese time, at the moment when the atomic bomb flashed above Hiroshima, Miss Toshiko Sasaki, a clerk in the personnel department at the East Asia Tin Works, had just sat down at her place in the plant office and was turning her head to speak to the girl at the next desk."
And from an article in today's New York Times:
HIROSHIMA, Japan — Hiromi Hasai was being trained to make machine gun bullets when the flash from the atomic bomb that destroyed his city lit up the already bright morning sky. Just 14, he had been pulled from school a week before to help Japan’s failing war effort.
Mr. Hasai, now 84, has often talked publicly of his experiences that day, 70 years ago Thursday, when the first of the only two nuclear weapons ever used in war ultimately killed more than 100,000 people. The victims included hundreds of his classmates, who were still at their school near the blast’s epicenter. The bullet factory, 10 miles out of town, was paradoxically a haven.
Yet the things that Mr. Hasai saw and felt that day are not recounted by him alone. The person who knows his story best, after Mr. Hasai himself, is Ritsuko Kinoshita, a woman 25 years his junior who is serving as his “denshosha” — the designated transmitter of his memories. It is part of an unusual and highly personal project to preserve and pass on the experiences of atomic bomb survivors, whose numbers are dwindling rapidly.
There was, of course, the second bomb, that dropped three days later, on August 9, upon the smaller city of Nagasaki. I suggest reading an article in The New Yorker, hopefully entitled "Nagasaki: The Last Bomb," by Alex Wellerstein.
Monument marking Ground Zero of the atomic bomb dropped over Nagasaki