‘Even children had to carry the bodies’: Hiroshima survivors speak 80 years after 'the bomb'

America's incinerating of civilians in the atom bombs of 1945. Was that war, or war crime? asks Rosita Sweetman

The devastation after the atom bomb was dropped in Hiroshima, Japan, in 1945. File photo: AP

“It was an unimaginably beautiful day,” said one of the Hibakusha, the dwindling number of Japanese women, and men, who survived ‘the bomb’.

A blue sky. A bustling city of 350,000 people. Trams packed with workers and schoolchildren. Restaurants busy with early breakfasters. Mothers at home with little ones, and babies. Nurses and doctors readying their hospitals for the day’s work. Factories getting busy.

An entire city is unaware that the glinting silver B29 flying overhead carries a bomb, weighing 10 tons and costing $2bn, which took 140,000 of America’s most ‘brilliant’ minds to make and has been wittily named ‘Little Boy’ by the military elite. 

In spotless buff uniforms, they josh each other on the tarmac as their baby is loaded onto the even more wittily named ‘Enola Gay’, for the mother of the pilot. Little Boy is the world’s first atomic bomb, and the Americans are about to drop it on Hiroshima.

At 8.15am, city residents experienced a blinding light, “as if a million magnesium lights went off together”, then a loud boom.

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Little Boy was detonated at 2,000 feet above the city. All living beings — women, schoolgirls, mums, dads, school boys, babies, grandparents — within a two-mile radius of the blast, were instantly vapourised. Over 70,000 human beings, 95% civilians, mostly women and children. Everything burnt, smashed, annihilated. 

Too late, the American co-pilot cries out: “My God, what have we done?”

That’s the beginning.

A granddaughter of one of the Hibakusha says: “Everything was burned in the city that day. People, birds, dragonflies, grass, trees — everything.”

Her grandmother, Teruko Ueno, at the Red Cross hospital, saw dozens of fellow student nurses burned alive in the fireball that engulfed the city, temperatures rising to 4,000C.

“It felt like the sun had fallen,” said another Hibakusha, Chieko Iriake.

Mitsuko Koushi, a 13-year-old school girl working at the Postal Savings Bank, with flesh slashed and burns when the bomb blew in all the windows, ran with six friends to the bridge leading away from the city — spotless, gleaming teenagers transformed in seconds into dazed ragged tramps, hair burnt, clothes in tatters, bleeding profusely.

“Everyone looked like monsters,” said Mitsuko. 

Smoke rises above Hiroshima after the first atomic bomb was dropped on August 6, 1945. File photo: AP

Their shocked misery captured by a young soldier as a mushroom cloud rose seven-and-a-half miles into the sky — the pretty bustling city below now churned into a waste ground, piled with twisted blackened corpses, the dying, people crying out, people with “their skin hanging behind them like old clothes”, human limbs snapping like twigs from the heat. 

To this day, Mitsuko prays for the young mother screaming in agony and disbelief at the blackened charred corpse of her baby in her hands.

Nobody knew what had happened. The shock so terrible, “nobody spoke. Everyone just looked at the ground”. It wasn’t until 16 hours later that US president Harry Truman informed the world that the US had conducted “the greatest scientific gamble in history” — Americanese for dropping a nuclear bomb on thousands of civilians. 

“It was tremendous and awe inspiring,” said the Americans. They had done it for the world! For peace! Hiroshima was a military target! The Japanese had it coming!

Not that the Japanese army was saintly, far from it. Brutality and dehumanisation of non-nationals was celebrated. But America incinerating civilians? Was that war, or war crime?

On the ground fires and 1,000 miles per hour winds followed the blast — gobbling up people, houses, hospitals, factories, and shops. The force of the winds blew bodies apart, 60,000 buildings were flattened — 90% of Hiroshima’s doctors, nurses, and medical staff were killed or injured. 

'Everything was burned in the city that day. People, birds, dragonflies, grass, trees — everything.' File photo: AP

Some 45 hospitals were destroyed or damaged. Medical aid for victims was poor to non-existent. On the bridge where Mitsuko was, a single soldier arrived with a can of rapeseed oil. When that ran out, sump oil from the nearby railway was substituted.

Chieko Irieka remembers rubbing “oil, found in the home economics classroom, onto classmates wounds. They died one after the next. Us older students were instructed by our teachers to dig a hole in the playground. I cremated [my classmates] with my own hands”.

Kieko Oguro remembers her father cremating 700 bodies in front of their house, “even children like me had to carry the bodies”. She was eight years old.

The ‘Hiroshima Plague’

After the fires, the sky turned black and rain “heavy as mud” fell. No one warned the rain would be lethal and radioactive.

Wilfred Birchett, an intrepid Australian journalist, slipped his American handlers in Tokyo, and took a 22-hour train journey to Hiroshima “unarmed, carrying rations for seven meals, a black umbrella and a Baby Hermes typewriter”.

He was the first outsider. As The New York Times assured: “No radioactivity in Hiroshima ruin.”

He saw women die in impossibly overcrowded hospitals, with hair fallen out in a halo around their heads, and blood pouring from their mouths. ‘The Hiroshima Plague’, or radiation sickness, had taken hold.

The building on the right was preserved as the Hiroshima Peace Memorial. File photo: Keystone/Getty Images

Hundreds died. Women miscarried still born babies, white as candles. People who were well one minute, were dead the next. Burchett’s reports for the Daily Express: “Hiroshima does not look like a bombed city. It looks as if a monster steamroller had passed over it and squashed it out of existence.” It shocked the world. Maybe nuclear war wasn’t such a brilliant idea after all?

The Americans, still busy patting themselves on the back, saying “our bomb did the job!”, bustled in with their dollars and their scientists. Every record, photo, and lab test carried out by Japanese doctors since August 6 was confiscated.

America would take over. There was no such thing as radiation sickness. There was no such thing as the ‘Hiroshima Plague’. Stuff and nonsense. These were ‘surface burns’, nothing more.

By 1945’s end, 140,000 people were dead — Almost half of Hiroshima’s population.

The atom bomb’s lethal kiss didn’t stop there. 

Generations of women, mothers and grandmothers exposed in Hiroshima — or Nagasaki, where the Americans dropped a second bomb titled ‘Fat Boy’, because the Japanese weren’t surrendering fast enough, three days after Hiroshima — suffered from leukemia, cancerous cataracts, cancerous tumours, kidney failure, and skin cancers. Not to mention nightmares.

A Japanese man pushes his loaded bicycle down a path that had been cleared of rubble after the atomic bombing of Nagasaki on August 9, 1945. File photo: AP

Shamefully, the Hibakushas weren’t treated brilliantly. Even by their own.

“People ostracised us. They said we women gave birth to monsters. And the men were sterile.”

Many hid their history for fear of social isolation. The government, a bit like our own miserable lot, granted them a pension and free medical care.

In 1982, the Hibakushas were invited to the UN to meet the scientists who’d devised the monstrosity that had obliterated their reality. One recalled being asked if she “held a grudge against America”, against the people who’d created the bomb?

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Somewhat wryly, she told the questioner at first she felt ”a tremendous grudge”, but now she is simply determined to keep telling her story. She wants no one else in the world to have to go through what she and the people of Hiroshima did.

“Many Hibakusha died without being able to talk about these things, or their bitterness over the bombing. They couldn’t speak, so I speak,” says Emiko Okada.

All say the same: They must keep living to tell the horror of what happened. To see that it never happens again. To anyone, ever.