To read more accounts from the survivors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, click here.
You can watch testimonials from survivors here. I know it sounds strange, but I felt absolutely no pain. Katsuji Yoshida, only a half mile from the explosion, recalled, “Blood was pouring out of my flesh. “The earth was shaking so hard that I hung on as hard as I could so I wouldn’t get blown away” (Southard 43). Koichi Wada, two miles away from ground zero, remembered, “The light was indescribable – an unbelievably massive light lit up the whole city.” Sumiteru Taniguchi, fourteen at the time, was blown completely off his bicycle by the force of the blast. Three days later, the United States dropped a second bomb, a plutonium implosion bomb called “Fat Man,” on Nagasaki, home to an estimated 250,000 at the time. White bones scattered over reddish rubble Sadako Kurihara also expressed the aftermath in her poem “Ruins” (226): As Doctor Michihiko Hachiya recalled, “Hiroshima was no longer a city, but a burnt-over prairie” (199). Hundreds threw themselves into the nearby river to escape the fires that burned throughout the city. Those at the epicenter of the blast were vaporized instantly. Others suffered horrific burns or were crushed by falling buildings. Then there was a big sound a second or two later and everything went dark” (Rotter 197). “Five or six seconds later, everything turned yellow. Kimura Yoshihiro, in third grade at the time, saw the bomb fall from the plane.
It exploded with approximately 15 kilotons of force above the city of 350,000, causing a shockwave of destruction and a fireball with temperatures as hot as the sun. On August 6, 1945, the United States dropped its first atomic bomb, a uranium gun-type bomb nicknamed “Little Boy,” on Hiroshima.
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