Atomic Bombing of Hiroshima

Hiroshima was the largest city of the Chugoku region and a major military centre, home to the headquarters of the Second General Army responsible for the defence of western Japan, the Chugoku Military District headquarters and the army port of Ujina; by the summer of 1945 it had not yet suffered a large-scale air raid. The population in the city at the time is estimated at about 340,000 to 350,000, including soldiers, commuters, secondary-school pupils mobilised to demolish buildings for firebreaks, and people from the Korean peninsula.

At 1:45 AM on August 6, 1945, a B-29 bomber named 'Enola Gay', flown by Colonel Paul Tibbets, took off from Tinian. At 8:15 AM, aiming at the Aioi Bridge in the city centre, it dropped the uranium-235 bomb 'Little Boy' on Hiroshima. The bomb detonated approximately 600 meters above Shima Hospital in the city center with a yield of roughly 15 kilotons of TNT, instantly killing an estimated 70,000-80,000 people and levelling almost everything within about one kilometre of the hypocentre. The bombing destroyed approximately 69% of Hiroshima's buildings. Military losses were heavy as well; Lieutenant General Fujii Yoji, commander of the Chugoku Military District, was killed. According to Japanese sources, about 6,000 of the roughly 8,000 pupils mobilised for building demolition died, and about a dozen American prisoners of war held in the city were also killed.

By the end of 1945, the death toll had risen to approximately 140,000 due to injuries, burns, and radiation sickness; because records were destroyed, estimates range from about 90,000 to 166,000. Radioactive 'black rain' fell over a wide area north-west of the city after the explosion, and survivors (hibakusha) suffered long-term after-effects. Nagasaki was struck by a second atomic bomb three days later, on 9 August, and Japan announced its acceptance of the Potsdam Declaration on 15 August.

After the war Hiroshima was rebuilt as a peace memorial city. The area near the hypocentre became Peace Memorial Park; the Cenotaph for the A-bomb Victims was completed in 1952 and the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum opened in 1955. The ruin of the former Prefectural Industrial Promotion Hall, the A-Bomb Dome, was inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage List in 1996. A Peace Memorial Ceremony is held in the park every year on the morning of 6 August, with a silent prayer at 8:15, and the names of hibakusha confirmed to have died during the preceding year are added to the register kept beneath the cenotaph.