Luis Guarana

Mr. Hayes

Perid 4A

February 7, 2008

HIROSHIMA

Hiroshima is a city in Japan that it was bombed by the United States during World

War II it was an order of the U.S. President Harry S. Truman. August 6, 1945 an airplane

B-29 bomber named Enola Gay took off from Tinian and headed north toward Japan. The

main target was the city of Hiroshima that faces the Island Sea. Hiroshima had a

population of almost 300,000 people, and it was a very important military center, it

contained about 43,000 soldiers.

The bomber piloted by Colonel Paul Tibbets. They flew in low altitude on AP

(Automatic Pilot) before climbing to 31,000 ft when they were near the target, which it

was the city of Hiroshima in Japan. Around 8:15 am Hiroshima time, the Enola Gay, a B-

29 Bomber, released “Little Boy” a very powerful bomb over the city of Hiroshima, it

was a 9,700 pounds uranium bomb. The airplane quickly flew it away to avoid the

anticipated shock wave. Exactly forty-three seconds later, little boy strikes, detonating

1,900 feet above the city of Hiroshima; it was hit directly into a parade field where

soldiers of the Japanese Second Army were doing.

Eleven and a half miles away, the bomber Enola Gay was hit by the blast. After

the second shock wave that it was reflected from the ground, hit the plane, the crew

looked back at Hiroshima. They saw how bad the city looked. “The city was hidden by

that awful cloud…boiling up mushrooming, terrible and incredibly tall,” Tibbets said.
The yield of this explosion was estimated at 15 kilotons equivalent to 15,000 tons of

TNT.

On the ground before the explosion, it was a calm and sunny Monday morning.

An alert from earlier that morning was called off after only a solitary aircraft was seen, by

8:15am the city was alive with activity. People closest to the explosion died instantly, the

bodies turned into black char. Birds that was close, burst into flames in the air,

combustible materials such as paper instantly got into flames as far as 6,400 feet from the

explosion. It burned people’s clothe to their skin, when the explosion happened you could

see people’s shadow in the wall, it was like a huge flashbulb. Survivors outside described

the explosion as almost a blinding light combined with a overwhelming wave of heat.

With minutes 9 out of 10 people half a mile or less the explosion were dead.

People farther from the explosion experienced first the flash and heat, seconds

later came the boom and the blast wave. Nearly every structure within one mile from the

explosion was destroyed and almost all buildings within three miles were almost

completely damaged, less than 10% of the buildings in the city had no damage. The blast

wave shattered glass in suburbs twelve miles away from the explosion. The first reaction

from indoor people at their home was that they had a direct hit of a bomb or something to

their building, even buildings that were miles away from ground zero had that

impression.

Small rescue teams began to operate but the problem was that half of the city’s

population was dead or injured. In closest areas most injured people didn’t make it. Small

fires in the city all merged into a one large firestorm, creating very strong winds that blew
towards the center of the fire, killing people that had not escaped in the first minutes after

the attack.

For hours after the attack the Japanese government did not even know for sure

what happened. The first confirmation of exactly what had happened came only sixteen

hours later with the announcement of the bombing by the United States of America.

Several days after the blast, medical staff began to recognize the first symptoms of

radiation sickness among the survivors. Soon the death rate began to climb more as

patients who had appeared to be recovering came back suffering from this strange new

illness. Deaths from radiation sickness did not appear until three to four weeks after the

attacks and did not stop until seven to eight weeks after the attack. Long health dangers

associated with radiation exposure, like it increased danger of cancer, would linger for the

rest of the victims’ life.

No one will ever know how many people really died as a result of the attack on

Hiroshima. Some 70,000 people probably died as a result of the blast, heat and radiation

effects. It includes twenty American airmen being held as prisoners in Hiroshima. By the

end of 1945 because of the radioactive effects and other effects, the Hiroshima death toll

was probably over 100,000 people. In five years it probably had a total of more than

200,000 deaths as cancer and other long-term effects took hold.

At 11:00AM on August 6 (Washington DC Time), radio stations began playing a

prepared statement from President Truman saying that the US dropped a entirely new

type of bomb on the Japanese city of Hiroshima. President Truman warned that Japan

refused to surrender, the US would attack additional targets with equal devastating

results.