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Monday, Aug. 6, dawned clear, hot and humid in Hiroshima, a city on the southwestern coast of the main Japanese island of Honshu. In 1942 it had had a population of 420,000, but wartime evacuations had reduced that number this summer morning to about 280,000 civilians, 43,000 military personnel and 20,000 Korean forced laborers and volunteer workers. Hiroshima housed the headquarters of the Japanese army's Second General Headquarters.
The city had so far been spared the incendiary-bomb raids that were raining fire on so many of its Japanese counterparts--perhaps, some of its citizens hoped, because it made a poor target for such an attack. Situated on a broad alluvial delta, surrounded on three sides by low mountains, Hiroshima was threaded by seven tributaries of the Ota River--watery obstacles to the spread of fires--emptying into Hiroshima Bay on the Inland Sea. On this Monday morning, some 8,900 schoolchildren had been ordered to increase Hiroshima's advantage by helping clean and widen streets.
An air-raid alert sounded at 7:09--radar had picked up the approach of the 509th Group's weather plane--and an all clear followed at 7:31, after the B-29 departed. Perhaps this apparently harmless sortie lulled the city's civil-defense monitors. In any case, just before 8:15 three more B-29s--the Enola Gay and two escorts--could be seen and then heard flying some 30,000 ft. over Hiroshima. No alarms sounded in time. The radio announcer on duty had received word that three enemy planes had been sighted, but he had momentarily paused to check his notes instead of grabbing the microphone at once. "Military command announces three enemy planes ..." He never finished. Outside, a teacher supervising a team of schoolgirl laborers said, "Oh, there's a B!" They looked up and saw the eye of death.
Little Boy, which had been dropped from the Enola Gay at 8:15:30, exploded 43 sec. later, at 1,900 ft. above Hiroshima, creating a blinding bluish-white flash and, for a fraction of a second, unearthly heat. Temperatures near the hypocenter, the ground point immediately below the explosion, surged to figures ranging from 5400 degrees F to 7200 degrees F; within a mile of the hypocenter, the surfaces of objects instantly rose to more than 1000 degrees F. Those caught in the middle of this maelstrom were the lucky ones. They died instantly, vaporized into puffs of smoke or carbonized into small, blackened, smoking corpses, mummified in their last living gesture.
People farther away from the source of the thermal wave were destined for longer agonies. The intense heat melted the eyeballs of some who had stared in wonder at the blast; it burned off facial features and seared skin all over the body into peeling, draping strips. The survivors who first emerged out of the roiling inferno that the center of Hiroshima had become walked like automatons, their arms held forward, hands dangling. In shock, they instinctively tried to keep their burned skin from touching anything, including themselves.