Hiroshima_ The World's Bomb - Andrew J. Rotter [121]
President Harry S. Truman was then in the North Atlantic, aboard the cruiser USS Augusta on his way back to the United States from Potsdam. He had already let slip to the ship’s officers and crew that their country had tested a powerful new weapon—like those briefing the crews on Tinian, Truman had not used the word ‘atomic’—calling it ‘the biggest gamble in history’ but one that might by itself end the war. The President got news of the Hiroshima bombing in the form of a twenty-six-word message, soon supplemented by one somewhat longer. He was at lunch with six enlisted men when an aide handed him the bulletins. Grinning broadly, Truman gripped the captain’s hand, and declared: ‘This is the greatest thing in history!’ He announced to the crew that ‘an atomic bomb’ had been dropped on a Japanese city, then strode off to the officers’ mess to repeat the news. ‘It was an overwhelming success,’ he told the men. ‘We won the gamble!’ In the meantime Leslie Groves, who had waited anxiously for word of the attack (he eventually received Parsons’s message to Farrell, delayed by a communications’ glitch), had released an official presidential announcement about the bombing. Unsure yet about the impact of Little Boy on its target city, Groves described instead its power, slightly overestimated, on the basis of the Trinity shot, at 20,000 tons of TNT. ‘It is an atomic bomb,’ the announcement went on. ‘It is a harnessing of the power of the universe.’ Groves described Hiroshima as ‘an important Japanese Army base’.21
5. The bombed city
That was true, as far as it went. Hiroshima was headquarters to the Japanese Second Army and Chugoka Regional Army and had been a transit point for soldiers and supplies bound for war. Hiroshimans had hailed the Fifth Army as it left their docks to attack Singapore in early 1942. The city’s ammunition depot was one of the country’s largest, and several thousand nearsighted local men over the age of 40 had recently been recruited into the Eleventh Infantry Regiment by the increasingly desperate military; their families had bid them farewell as the sun rose on 6 August. There were between 24,000 and 40,000 soldiers in Hiroshima that day, and they were going nowhere, for the Americans had mined the Inland Sea so thoroughly that shipping of men and goods had reached a standstill. Their mission was to defend the area against invaders they felt sure were coming. There was some manufacturing in Hiroshima, but most of the factories were newly built and on the outskirts of the city, and thus would survive the atomic bomb.22
‘Hold out your left hand, palm down, fingers spread, and you have a rough outline of the shape of Hiroshima,’ write Fletcher Knebel and Charles Bailey II. ‘The sea is beyond the fingertips. The back of the hand is where the Ota River comes down from the hills to the north. The spot where the bomb exploded is about where a wedding ring would be worn, just south of the main military headquarters and in the center of the residential-commercial districts of the city.’ There were approximately a quarter of a million people in Hiroshima on 6 August; it is hard to be more precise than that because the city had undergone five large-scale evacuations and a sixth was under way, scattering Hiroshimans throughout the surrounding countryside. Not all residents were Japanese. Indeed, some 20 percent—50,000 people—of Hiroshima’s population was Korean, most of them men and women brought involuntarily to the city as conscripted laborers and prostitutes. There were hundreds of Chinese there and 3,200 Japanese-Americans, some of them trapped in Japan by the sudden outbreak of war in 1941, and over a thousand of whom would become casualties of the atomic bomb. There were smaller numbers of workers, students, and missionaries. Some two dozen US prisoners of war were locked away