On August 6, 1945, at 8:15 a.m., the United States Army Air Forces dropped a uranium-core atomic bomb named “Little Boy” on the city of Hiroshima. The B-29 bomber, named the Enola Gay, released the weapon from an altitude of 31,000 feet. The bomb exploded 1,900 feet above the city center with a force equal to 15,000 tons of TNT. This explosion created a fireball that reached temperatures of 6,000 degrees Celsius at its core. Within one second, the heat vaporized human beings and animals located near the hypocenter. The blast wave followed the heat, traveling at 440 meters per second, which is faster than the speed of sound. This pressure wave flattened 4.7 square miles of the city instantly.
Hiroshima was a city of 90,000 buildings before the attack. The blast and the resulting fires destroyed 60,000 of these structures completely. Only the strongest reinforced concrete buildings remained standing, though their interiors were gutted by fire and their windows were blown out. One famous ruin is the Hiroshima Prefectural Industrial Promotion Hall, now known as the A-Bomb Dome. This building stood almost directly under the explosion. While its dome was stripped of its copper covering, the steel frame and brick walls survived because the blast pressure came from directly above. Most other buildings within a one-mile radius were reduced to piles of broken timber and roof tiles.
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The human toll in Hiroshima was immediate and massive. Between 70,000 and 80,000 people died in the first seconds of the explosion. By the end of 1944, the death toll reached 140,000 as people succumbed to burns and radiation. The city’s medical infrastructure was almost entirely wiped out. Of the 150 doctors in the city, 65 died instantly and most of the rest were injured. Out of 1,780 nurses, 1,654 were dead or too injured to work. The Red Cross Hospital, located one mile from the hypocenter, survived but its equipment was destroyed and its staff was decimated. Survivors wandered through the ruins with skin hanging from their bodies, searching for water in a city where every water main had burst.
Homelessness in Hiroshima reached a scale never seen before in a single day. Approximately 176,987 people lost their homes in the attack. These survivors had nowhere to go as the city burned for three days. The fires were so intense they created a “firestorm” that sucked oxygen out of the air and trapped people in the rubble. Those who escaped the flames faced a new danger known as “black rain.” This was highly radioactive soot and dust that mixed with water vapor in the atmosphere and fell back to earth as thick, oily droplets. People drank this water because of their intense thirst, unknowingly ingesting lethal amounts of radiation.
Three days later, on August 9, 1945, at 11:02 a.m., a second atomic bomb was dropped on the city of Nagasaki. This bomb, named “Fat Man,” used a plutonium core and was more powerful than the first, with a force of 21,000 tons of TNT. The primary target was the city of Kokura, but heavy cloud cover forced the bomber, Bockscar, to move to its secondary target. The bomb exploded over the Urakami Valley, an industrial area of Nagasaki. The surrounding hills acted as a shield for some parts of the city, but they also concentrated the blast within the valley. This led to total destruction within a 2.6-square-mile area.
Nagasaki’s ruins were dominated by the wreckage of large industrial plants. The Mitsubishi Steel and Arms Works and the Mitsubishi-Urakami Torpedo Works were flattened. These were massive steel-framed buildings that were twisted and crushed by the pressure wave. The Urakami Cathedral, which was the largest Christian church in East Asia at the time, was also located near the hypocenter. The stone walls of the cathedral collapsed, leaving only a few pillars standing among the rubble. The heat from the plutonium bomb was so intense that it melted stone and caused the surface of granite to bubble.
The immediate death toll in Nagasaki was approximately 40,000 people. By the end of the year, this number rose to over 70,000. In the Urakami district, 65 percent of the population died. The blast destroyed 14,000 homes and damaged another 5,400. This left roughly 95,000 people homeless in Nagasaki. Because the city is built on hilly terrain, many survivors lived in caves or makeshift shacks made from the corrugated metal sheets found in the ruins of the factories. The smell of death hung over the valley for weeks because there were not enough survivors to bury the bodies of the victims.
The cost of this destruction was total for the local governments. Communication lines, including telegraphs and telephones, were severed. All power plants in the affected areas were destroyed, leaving the ruins in total darkness at night. The railway lines were twisted and lifted off the ground, making it impossible to bring in relief supplies by train. Bridges over the Ota River in Hiroshima and the Urakami River in Nagasaki were either collapsed or made unsafe for vehicles. Survivors were forced to clear paths through the debris by hand to find food and search for missing family members.
Radiation sickness became a horrifying reality in the ruins. People who had no visible injuries began to lose their hair, develop purple spots on their skin, and suffer from uncontrolled bleeding. This was caused by the gamma rays released at the moment of the explosion. The ruins themselves remained radioactive, though the levels dropped over time. Anyone who entered the city centers to look for loved ones in the days following the attack also became exposed to this invisible danger. The lack of clean food and water led to widespread dysentery, further increasing the death rate among the homeless population.
The landscape of Hiroshima and Nagasaki remained a wasteland for months. In Hiroshima, the ground was covered in a layer of fine, gray ash. In Nagasaki, the valley was filled with the skeletons of industrial machines and charred timber. The intensity of the heat left “shadows” on bridges and walls. These were silhouettes of people or objects that had blocked the thermal radiation, leaving a mark on the surface behind them while the surrounding area was bleached or scorched. These shadows served as a grim map of where people had been standing at the exact moment of the blast.
Efforts to rebuild were slow because of the lack of materials and workers. Most survivors were too weak or sick to engage in heavy labor. The Japanese government was also in a state of collapse as the war ended shortly after the second bombing. For the first few months, life in the ruins was a daily struggle for fuel, food, and shelter. People lived in “barracks” built from scorched wood and rusted metal. It took years for the debris to be fully cleared and for permanent housing to be provided for the hundreds of thousands of people who had lost everything in the span of two mornings.
