Hiroshima_ The World's Bomb - Andrew J. Rotter [122]
What the citizens of Hiroshima were doing early in the morning of 6 August 1945 was disturbingly ordinary. Some were still asleep. Some were cooking breakfast on household charcoal braziers. Others were dressing for work or school, reading newspapers—heavily censored, these exhorted people to valor and maximum effort on the home front—sitting on the toilet, puttering in the garden. Many were on their way to work or school, or had just arrived at these places. Thousands were involved in a program to create firebreaks and widen fire lanes in the city, which involved the dolorous destruction of wood and paper houses, sometimes their own. During the night people had twice been awakened by air-raid sirens, and at 7.10 that morning a third alert was sounded when air defense spotted the atomic mission’s weather plane heading for the city. When the plane passed harmlessly overhead, the authorities sounded the all clear. Perhaps wary of further false alarms, perhaps convinced that single or several B29s carried no danger, spotters who detected the trio of planes—the Enola Gay, Great Artiste, and No. 91—just after 8.00 decided not to restart the siren, though a radio station mentioned the planes and suggested they were doing reconnaissance. There seemed no reason to take shelter. Precaution fatigue had set in.24
So had a wishful conviction that Hiroshima would continue to be spared the bombing that had wracked Tokyo, Yokohama, and other Japanese cities. There was a rumor that President Truman had a close relative living in Hiroshima, possibly an aunt or even his mother. Others claimed that Hiroshima (and Kyoto, also as yet untouched) was so beautiful a city that the Americans wanted to turn it into a resort when the war was over. Hiroshima, it was said, was dearer to the United States than other Japanese cities because so many Hiroshimans had relatives in America, and because so many Japanese-Americans were living in Hiroshima. A few may have known about American prisoners held in the city—or felt that because there were so many foreigners generally in Hiroshima the Americans were reluctant to bomb it; a German priest who lived there recalled that local officials would tell him that their city was safe ‘thanks to you’. Some even went so far as to say, as to hope, ‘that perhaps the city of Hiroshima was not on the American maps’. (Deep down, most knew better: ‘Will it be tomorrow or the day after tomorrow?’ people asked themselves.)25
Pika-don, they called it later: ‘flash-boom’. ‘A blinding... flash cut sharply across the sky,’ recalled a history professor who was more than 3 miles away from ground zero, the spot on the ground over which Little Boy exploded. There came ‘a blank in time’, that ‘dead silence’ so many experienced, ‘then a... huge “boom” ... like the rumbling of distant thunder. At the same time a violent rush of air pressed down my entire bodyLying exhausted on his living-room floor after a night’s duty as an air warden at his hospital, Dr Michihiko Hachiya was ‘startled’ by two powerful flashes of light that starkly illuminated a stone lantern in his garden. If he heard the boom that followed he did not say so in his memoir. Toyofumi Ogura was out walking: ‘Just as I looked toward the sea and noticed the way the waves were sparkling, I saw, or rather felt, an enormous bluish white flash of light, as when a photographer lights a dish of magnesium’—a comparison made by more than one survivor. ‘Off to my right, the sky split open over the city of Hiroshima’; seconds later came ‘a dull but tremendous roar as a crushing blast of air pressure assailed me’. Children testified with unadorned directness. Kikuko Yamashiro, who was 5 years old: ‘In the morning, my big brother and I were playing upstairs. There was a blinding flash and our house fell down.’ Kimura Yoshihiro, a third grader, saw something fall