Although Hiroshima was a communications and logistics base for the Japanese army, its main attractiveness was that it had been deliberately untouched by previous bombing campaigns in order to allow Air Corps analysts to measure the damage caused by an atomic explosion. At the time of the attack the population was approximately 250,000, down from nearly 400,000 earlier in the war.
A small flight of three B-29s left Tinian early in the morning of August 6th, 1945. One ("Enola Gay") carried the bomb, another ("The Great Artiste") carried instrumentation, and the third ("Necessary Evil") carried photographic equipment. The flight was observed by Japanese radar and air raid warnings were sounded. At 8:00 AM, Japanese officials lifted the warning, assuming from the small number of aircraft that it was simply a reconnaissance sortie. 15 minutes later, the bomb was released.
When the bomb exploded, it did so with the equivalent of 13 kilotons of TNT, creating a circle of total destruction with a one-mile radius. Soon fires were consuming nearly four-and-a-half square miles of the city. Within hours, 90% of the cities buildings were damaged or destroyed.
The cost in human lives was just as high. Some 70,000 people are believed to have died on the day of the explosion, with another 70,000 dying by the end of the year. Victims continued to die of their injuries or radiation poisoning or cancer for decades to come.
The bombing of Hiroshima, and the bombing of Nagasaki three days later, remain controversial to this day. Proponents claim that the bombings demonstrated the hopelessness of continuing the war and strengthened the hands of the peace faction within the Japanese government, allowing them to overcome the previous dominance of the war faction. Hundreds of thousands of Allied casualties (mainly Americans) were thereby saved, along with the lives of countless Japanese soldiers and sailors and perhaps tens of millions of civilians throughout Asia.
Opponents of the bombings argue they were not only unethical -- they were also militarily unnecessary because the Japanese were already defeated. Surprisingly, the latter view was held by a number of senior American officers incluging Generals Eisenhower, MacArthur, and Spaatz and Admirals Leahy, King, and Nimitz.
Today is not a day for thinking about what could have been or what should have been. It is a day to remember the dead and to commit ourselves to ensuring that 62 years from now we are not remembering another horrific bombing.
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