And yet Japan was already on its knees. There was a US naval blockade stretching from the South China Sea near Hong Kong up to the northern Pacific Ocean. The nation was living off rations. And Russia had already secretly agreed to invade Japanese-held Manchuria, making the case for the defense of Japan, now hemmed in on all sides by the great powers of the United States and the Soviet Union, truly hopeless. Germany was defeated and Japan was on the ropes.
Furthermore, Japan had sent signals to Russia to enquire about negotiating a peace settlement.
Then, on 26 July, the Potsdam Proclamation was issued by the US, Britain and China. It had warned Japan to surrender unconditionally or face “prompt and utter destruction”.
Truman, drunk with newfound scientific and political power, saw that America had been given an opportunity to end World War 2 on its own terms, namely with an advantage over the only rival who could stop it becoming the next unquestioned superpower of the world: Russia.
“We’re the boss of the world now,” Truman thought to himself, “not Stalin, not Hitler, not the Emperor of Japan and not even Churchill himself!”
Having won the battle of the laboratories, America now wanted to win the world peace.
Truly, the tide of history had turned against Hiroshima.
Even though General MacArthur is Supreme Commander of the Southwest Pacific Area, he was informed a mere forty-eight hours before the flight of “Enola Gay”.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
“ENOLA GAY” hovers over Hiroshima. The bomb run has begun. The altitude is 31,600 feet. The crewmen don their goggles to protect their eyes from the incandescence expected from the coming explosion.
Yes, it’s Groves’s bomb. And, yes, it’s Truman’s bomb. But is the Dark Force a sin against Creation itself? The city of Hiroshima is about to find out.
Thomas Ferebee, the broad-shouldered bombardier, trains the sights on the T-shaped bridge far below. Perspiration forms on his brow. Adrenalin is pumping through his veins.
Sixty seconds to go. The atom bomb will detonate at its pre-set height above the city.
The hydraulic doors of the super-bomber fly open. Air rushes upwards into the bomb bay. The heavy, squat bomb, adorned with messages intended for the enemy, some of which are obscene, is released from its straps into the open air below.
Falling into the atmosphere, “Little Boy” tips downwards, its fins flipping up behind it as it finds its vertical position and then begins to plummet. The bomber surges and rocks as it re-balances itself in the sky after losing the huge weight of the bomb.
The bomb falls faster and faster towards the Aioi bridge two miles below.
Tibbets takes manual control and makes a sharp 150 degree turn in a getaway maneuver.
A woman looks up and watches a beautiful silver airplane sail calmly across the cloudless summer sky. She has seen something drop, shaped like a balloon. She can just make out that it’s dropping fast, so it must be a heavy object. She waits in suspense.
Twenty seconds before detonation. Still, peace reigns in Hiroshima, its waters placidly shimmering…
Then, forty-five seconds after being dropped, at a height of 1,900 feet above ground, the uranium bomb blows up. It creates a phenomenal air blast made up of super-high air pressure which immediately begins expanding.
It is 8.14 a.m. on 6 August, 1945.
Suddenly, the whole valley of Hiroshima is lit up by an unearthly blue flash. A man in his garden on the outskirts of the city sees the bones of his hands through his skin as in an x ray.
For a blinding second, the temperature at the burst point, hovering over downtown Hiroshima, is one million degrees Celsius.
Boom! There’s an ear-splitting bang as sound waves of the air-shock echo like thunder. The light flash turns into a garish yellow. Then an immense blast wave sweeps down. This downblast drives the tall, concrete columns flanking the entrance to the Shima Hospital, close to the ‘T’ bridge, straight into the ground.
As the booming roar rolls over the city, windows are blown out and buildings begin to topple over.
Bystanders looking up into sky when “Little Boy” burst open in a blaze of nuclear energy are being blinded, their eye nerves scorched. The explosive light, brighter than the brightest magnesium flash, burns the eye grounds of their visual fields with third-degree burns. The “mirrors” in their eyes are shattered and their eyesight is permanently damaged.
A man reading the morning newspaper on his porch after breakfast looks up and is burnt by the flash and then knocked over by the blast.
What on God’s earth is this fiery cloud?
Half of the energy released by “Little Boy” is the sheer blast power which has created the shock wave, whipping up a wind travelling at about 1,000 miles per hour. This pressure forces the eyes of some nearby victims to pop out of their sockets.
In the wake of this blast power comes unimaginable heat. The piercing rays of the fireball inside the cloud scald everything in their path. The burning sensation is like having a hot iron pressed against your skin. Then, in the upper strata of the bomb cloud, emissions of radiation begin to twist and barrel outwards and downwards.
The world’s first uranium bomb is a bundle of blast, heat and radiation.
Close to the mysterious pikadon, its intensity has seared heat shadows onto concrete, stone and metal surfaces. The heat rays have burnt any exposed skin to a crisp, which then peels off, uncovering tissue and even bone. The heat anywhere near the “T” bridge is so powerful it has even roasted some internal organs of victims. Some fetuses inside pregnant women in the vicinity will be damaged by its radiation.
A giant pillar of smoke and sparks, sucking in dust and debris with the shock waves, has pushed upwards in a vortex of turbulence by winds of inhuman force on either side. The raging plume is ignited in a chaos of colors: orange, red, blue, pink, purple, gray.
Swoooooosh… now the sky around goes dark. Within sixty seconds, the angry atomic cloud, spewing out lethal gamma rays, has risen to a height of 10,000 feet above its mid-air burst point. It’s shooting upwards at the rate of 10,000 feet per minute. Soon, the dark cloud bursts into the stratosphere.
Back on the ground, more windows crash inwards from the downward blast of the bomb as the superheated shock wave continues to expand outwards. The gale force wind tosses and hurls living humans like dolls. Falling buildings grind and crash, trapping and crushing people under the rubble, injuring those they haven’t killed.
Close to the hypocenter, a school building is lifted into the air and dumped. Some large pieces of a prison wall are flung thirty feet into the air before shattering on the ground.
“Wa-a-ah!” scream the people, running in all directions because there’s a fireball coming towards them in the wake of the shock waves which are still knocking buildings over like dominos.
Within moments, Hiroshima has been flattened: factories, offices, banks, schools, hospitals, homes. All wooden structures within two kilometers are ripped apart and crushed. Even concrete buildings implode, leaving just their shells. Through the fire, dust and smoke, there’s already a sea of debris.
At its point of maximum brightness, the cloud emits purple plumes of radiation, instantly scorching and destroying a square mile of territory from the center of the explosion, which is now burning hotter than the surface of the Sun. The incandescence is three times brighter than noon day sunlight. As the explosion continues to burst outwards across the city, its ultra-violet rays inflict mass flash burns on people caught outdoors.