Today in history

[Ashkir]

Japanese realization of the bombing

 

The burns on this victim look like the kimono patterns; the lighter areas of the cloth reflected the intense light from the bomb, causing less damage.The Tokyo control operator of the Japanese Broadcasting Corporation noticed that the Hiroshima station had gone off the air. He tried to re-establish his program by using another telephone line, but it too had failed. About twenty minutes later the Tokyo railroad telegraph center realized that the main line telegraph had stopped working just north of Hiroshima. From some small railway stops within ten miles (16 km) of the city came unofficial and confused reports of a terrible explosion in Hiroshima. All these reports were transmitted to the Headquarters of the Japanese General Staff.

 

Military headquarters repeatedly tried to call the Army Control Station in Hiroshima. The complete silence from that city puzzled the men at Headquarters; they knew that no large enemy raid could have occurred, and they knew that no sizeable store of explosives was in Hiroshima at that time. A young officer of the Japanese General Staff was instructed to fly immediately to Hiroshima, to land, survey the damage, and return to Tokyo with reliable information for the staff. It was generally felt at Headquarters that nothing serious had taken place, that it was all a terrible rumor starting from a few sparks of truth.

 

The staff officer went to the airport and took off for the southwest. After flying for about three hours, while still nearly 100 miles (160 km) from Hiroshima, he and his pilot saw a great cloud of smoke from the bomb. In the bright afternoon, the remains of Hiroshima were burning.

 

Their plane soon reached the city, around which they circled in disbelief. A great scar on the land, still burning, and covered by a heavy cloud of smoke, was all that was left. They landed south of the city, and the staff officer, after reporting to Tokyo, immediately began to organize relief measures.

 

Tokyo's first knowledge of what had really caused the disaster came from the White House public announcement in Washington, sixteen hours after the nuclear attack on Hiroshima [7].

 

Radiation poisoning and/or necrosis caused illness and death after the bombing in about 1% of those who survived the initial explosion. By the end of 1945, it is estimated that 60,000 more people died due to radiation poisoning, bringing the total killed in Hiroshima in 1945 to 140,000. Since then several thousand more people have died of radiation-related causes.[8]

 

According to the city of Hiroshima, as of August 6, 2004, the cumulative death toll of atomic-bomb victims was 237,062, [9] but it remains uncertain how many of them exactly died of the effects of the bombing. There are about 270,000 hibakusha, "bomb affected people," still living in Japan.

 

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Survival of some structures

Some of the reinforced concrete buildings in Hiroshima were very strongly constructed because of the earthquake danger in Japan, and their framework did not collapse even though they were fairly close to the center of damage in the city. As the bomb detonated in the air, the blast was more downward than sideways, which was largely responsible for the survival of the Prefectural Industrial Promotional Hall, designed and built by the Czech architect Jan Letzel, which was only a few meters from ground zero. (The ruin was named Hiroshima Peace Memorial and made a UNESCO World Heritage site in 1996 over the objections of the US and China.[10])