‘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.