4 - Hiroshima, Chūgoku Region, Japan, 6 August 1945, 8:15 a.m.

Summary

A thirty-year-old pilot from Quincy, Illinois, departs from an airfield on Tinian in the Mariana Islands and reaches his target after several hours. There he drops a bomb which creates a tall mushroom cloud. His name is Paul Tibbets and this happens on the morning of 6 August 1945 in Hiroshima.

The scene portrays a street in the city of Hiroshima where wounded soldiers are wearing bandages wrapped around their limbs, hands or heads. A small group of local women provide assistance while the national flag of Japan, the Nisshōki or Hinomaru, is flying in the background from a traditional wooden building (Figure 4.1). This street scene was illustrated in 1904 by Melton Prior, a renowned English artist and war correspondent for The Illustrated London News who was reporting on Japan's victory in the Russo-Japanese War (1904–5). The drawing, titled ‘Back from the Wars: A Street Scene in Hiroshima’, is described in Prior's handwriting on the sketch published on The Illustrated London News as the ‘arrival home of sick and wounded fighting the battle over again’.1 The image depicts a familiar view of the home front of a war including severely injured soldiers returning to their homes and receiving care and support from their people. Forty-one years later, on the day when Paul Tibbets flew to Hiroshima in the Boeing B-29 Superfortress bomber Enola Gay, a noiseless flash followed by a firestorm and by black rain erased most of the city and signalled the beginning of the atomic age in warfare. The bombing of Hiroshima and, one week later, Nagasaki were, as Michael J. Hogan suggests, ‘the final acts in an Asian war that had its origins in the 1930s, specifically in Japan's effort to forge an empire in East Asia and the Western Pacific.’ This was a point of no return in the application of advanced science and technology to armaments; it was the event which captured with the greatest clarity the process which I have discussed in the introduction of this book and which saw that technological advancement which had first promised a century of peace and progress applied to the annihilation of an entire city.