80th anniversary of bombing of Hiroshima

[masraum]

On this day, 80 years ago, at 8:15 in the morning on August 6, 1945, the American B-29 bomber Enola Gay released an atomic bomb over the Japanese city of Hiroshima. The bomb, nicknamed “Little Boy,” contained about 64 kilograms of uranium-235. It exploded 580 meters above the center of the city, near the Shima Surgical Clinic, releasing energy equivalent to roughly 15,000 tons of TNT.
The temperature at the core of the blast reached more than one million degrees Celsius. On the ground, surface temperatures soared to 3,000 to 4,000 degrees. The initial fireball in an instant swept out a radius of over 200 meters, and a pressure wave and fierce winds incinerated everything within a 1.6 kilometer zone.
About 350,000 people lived in Hiroshima that day, including Japanese residents, conscripted laborers from Korea, Taiwan, and China, and a small number of American prisoners of war.
The blast and subsequent firestorm killed between 60,000 and 80,000 instantly. Entire neighborhoods vanished. Many victims were vaporized or left only as shadows scorched onto walls, roads, and bridges.
Buildings were flattened or turned to rubble as fires raged, consuming 70% of the city.
Some survivors, many of them schoolchildren mobilized to clear firebreaks, suffered massive burns, skin hung in strips from their bodies, and what clothing they had was fused to wounds. Bodies littered the streets, rivers, and parks. Survivors wandered, burned and blinded, searching for water and family members.
Within days, thousands more succumbed to radiation sickness. Symptoms included vomiting, hair loss, bleeding, and horrific infections. Hospitals and aid stations were overwhelmed. By December 1945, the death toll in Hiroshima reached about 140,000 people, nearly half the city’s population. In the years afterward, tens of thousands more died from leukemia and other cancers linked to radiation exposure.
Rescue and relief efforts were chaotic and under-equipped. Infrastructure was destroyed. Communication was severed. Some survivors, known as hibakusha, recalled the city as “hell on earth.” Yo****o Matsushige, a photojournalist and survivor, described seeing children with massive blisters, skin peeling off, and people living with endless pain and loss in the aftermath.
Hiroshima’s destruction marked the first use of nuclear weapons against humans. The city’s suffering continued long after the fireball faded, as radiation injuries, orphaned children, and ruined livelihoods defined its survivors’ lives for decades.

[Arizona_928]

I don’t think we would have won the pacific any other way.

Island hopping was extremely inefficient.

[3rd_gear_Ted]

In 1945 the CBI theater was winding down, my mom served two years in the Burma jungles as a field nurse. She thought they were heading home, soon it became apparent they were bound and then staged @ Iwo Jima for the invasion of Japan, no one there ever expected to survive that.

[masraum]

I have read that the Japanese were ready to surrender. There were supposedly meetings or requests for meetings happening, but we wanted to test our new technology and demonstrate it to the world.

But that's really a subject for another thread.

[masraum]

[IROC]

I'm sitting about a mile from the Graphite Reactor (Manhattan Project) as I type this...

[pwd72s]

A bit of Irony here....a long time PCA buddy, Mick Michelsen, was born on 6 August '45. He never met his father, who was killed aboard the USS Eagle, the last ship to be hit by a German torpedo.

I hope Steve's comment about "wanting to test" wasn't true. I prefer Trueman's version, saying the decision was easy, based on the estimated number of both side losses of an invasion.

[Tobra]

We tested them prior to using them.

If they were ready to surrender, we would not have had to drop two of them.

[Captain Ahab Jr]

I visited Hiroshima last year, museum was a very sobering experience

Black rain and Hiroshima being chosen partly to the geography around the city as the surrounding mountains would amplify the bombs force were both facts I'd not known about

[GH85Carrera]

Originally Posted by Tobra

We tested them prior to using them.

If they were ready to surrender, we would not have had to drop two of them.

This! They planned to fight to the last man woman and child on the island of Japan. They were training civilians to fight to the death.

Truman's decision to drop the bombs was about the only good decisions he ever made.

To this day, the Purple Heart medals handed to wounded military were all made to be presented to the injured when we invaded Japan. We have not had to make new Purple heart medals since WW2! They produced them just for that final push invasion. And they expected many millions of Japanese deaths. Think about that, we still have a stockpile of Purple Heart medals made for that invasion.

The first bomb should have ended the war, but the Japanese military refused to give up until the second bomb, and the emperor grew a spine and demanded the generals stop the fighting and surrender.

Those bombs saved untold many tens of thousands of American lives. And we dropped leaflets warning the people to leave, the Japanese sure never dropped any leaflets on Pearl Harbor before their attack.

[masraum]

Lots of interesting tidbits.

https://nsarchive.gwu.edu/briefing-book/nuclear-vault/2025-08-05/atomic-bombings-japan-and-end-world-war-ii-80-years-later

[turn9]

[masraum]

Originally Posted by Tobra

We tested them prior to using them.

Yes, I've heard that my whole life too. And I know that Japanese culture demanded full obedience and complete willingness to self sacrifice. But not all Japanese are as zealous as that.

If they were ready to surrender, we would not have had to drop two of them.

Nothing in any govt works fast.

Originally Posted by GH85Carrera

This! They planned to fight to the last man woman and child on the island of Japan. They were training civilians to fight to the death.

Truman's decision to drop the bombs was about the only good decisions he ever made.

To this day, the Purple Heart medals handed to wounded military were all made to be presented to the injured when we invaded Japan. We have not had to make new Purple heart medals since WW2! They produced them just for that final push invasion. And they expected many millions of Japanese deaths. Think about that, we still have a stockpile of Purple Heart medals made for that invasion.

The first bomb should have ended the war, but the Japanese military refused to give up until the second bomb, and the emperor grew a spine and demanded the generals stop the fighting and surrender.

Those bombs saved untold many tens of thousands of American lives. And we dropped leaflets warning the people to leave, the Japanese sure never dropped any leaflets on Pearl Harbor before their attack.

I don't think it's as cut and dried as we (the winners) made it out to be.
https://www.osti.gov/opennet/manhattan-project-history/Events/1945/surrender.htm

Prior to the atomic attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, elements existed within the Japanese government that were trying to find a way to end the war. In June and July 1945, Japan attempted to enlist the help of the Soviet Union to serve as an intermediary in negotiations. No direct communication occurred with the United States about peace talks, but American leaders knew of these maneuvers because the United States for a long time had been intercepting and decoding many internal Japanese diplomatic communications. From these intercepts, the United States learned that some within the Japanese government advocated outright surrender. A few diplomats overseas cabled home to urge just that.

Following the bombing of Hiroshima on August 6, 1945 (left), the Japanese government met to consider what to do next. The emperor had been urging since June that Japan find some way to end the war, but the Japanese Minister of War and the heads of both the Army and the Navy held to their position that Japan should wait and see if arbitration via the Soviet Union might still produce something less than a surrender.

Next came the virtually simultaneous arrival of news of the Soviet declaration of war on Japan of August 8, 1945, and the atomic bombing of Nagasaki of the following day. Another Imperial Council was held the night of August 9-10, and this time the vote on surrender was a tie, 3-to-3. For the first time in a generation, the emperor (right) stepped forward from his normally ceremonial-only role and personally broke the tie, ordering Japan to surrender. On August 10, 1945, Japan offered to surrender to the Allies, the only condition being that the emperor be allowed to remain the nominal head of state.

On August 12, the United States announced that it would accept the Japanese surrender, making clear in its statement that the emperor could remain in a purely ceremonial capacity only. Debate raged within the Japanese government over whether to accept the American terms or fight on. Meanwhile, American leaders were growing impatient, and on August 13 conventional air raids resumed on Japan. Thousands more Japanese civilians died while their leaders delayed. The Japanese people learned of the surrender negotiations for the first time when, on August 14, B-29s showered Tokyo with thousands of leaflets containing translated copies of the American reply of August 12. Later that day, the emperor called another meeting of his cabinet and instructed them to accept the Allied terms immediately, explaining "I cannot endure the thought of letting my people suffer any longer"; if the war did not end "the whole nation would be reduced to ashes."

[Jolly Amaranto]

When my family lived on Guam when I was in high school, I had a summer job on the island of Tinian. I made this rubbing of the brass plaque mounted on a pedestal at the #1 Bomb Loading Pit at the old North Field on the island.

[john70t]

Teddy Roosevelt and the Rough Riders conquered Spanish Cuba territory.
(Manifest Destiny and such)
But the US Government never officially got Pancho Villa.


Bonus Spanish territory added was the Philippines. 'Spanish territory'


Later that Manifest Destiny on the other side of the world would include the realm of General MacArthur.
(Later during the Korean War he proposed a dozen nuke along the northern Yalu River to stop Chinese invasion)


So the Philippines was used as a US base to embargo the flow of Japanese war oil.
President Franklin Roosevelt. Four terms in office.
Moving the entire fleet west halfway was seen as provocation.
And thus the Hawaii military attack on the US Navy to remove our military involvement in total Asian-conquest warfare. (involving massacres etc etc)

And then luckily and with very resourceful events this led to the US defeating them conventionally, in the middle of the Pacific. Midway was the tipping point. And the US was the underdog.

And then we used nukes, twice.

And then conflicts within the Japanese Military and Society almost led to The Meiji Emperor being overthrown.


Supposedly the Purple Heart Medals given out, today, were once printed for expected casualties for invasion of the Japanese Islands.

[GH85Carrera]

The Soviets were told of our plan to drop an atomic bomb on Japan in advance. They knew the war was soon to be over, so the declared war knowing they would not have to do anything to win that war.

[masraum]

Originally Posted by Jolly Amaranto

When my family lived on Guam when I was in high school, I had a summer job on the island of Tinian. I made this rubbing of the brass plaque mounted on a pedestal at the #1 Bomb Loading Pit at the old North Field on the island.

That's VERY cool. I serious bit of history.

[pwd72s]

Originally Posted by Tobra

We tested them prior to using them.

If they were ready to surrender, we would not have had to drop two of them.

That's the way I see it as well...

[Danimal16]

If you want to know why we finally decided to use the atomic bomb, one must know the facts of the Battle of Okinawa.

[Arizona_928]

Originally Posted by Danimal16

If you want to know why we finally decided to use the atomic bomb, one must know the facts of the Battle of Okinawa.

Not pretty. Does not show anything glorious other than the well established offensive statistics.

The US didn’t do well in ww2…