This Day in History: The WWII Bombing of Hiroshima
- tara
- Aug 6
- 2 min read
On this day in 1945, Americans drop an atomic bomb on the Japanese city of Hiroshima. The bombing came not too long after Japan had rejected a final opportunity to surrender.
The so-called Potsdam Declaration was issued through a combined statement of the United States, Great Britain, and China.
“The time has come,” these Allies declared, “for Japan to decide whether she will continue to be controlled by those self-willed militaristic advisers whose unintelligent calculations have brought the Empire of Japan to the threshold of annihilation, or whether she will follow the path of reason.”
Unconditional surrender was necessary. The alternative was “prompt and utter destruction.”
Japan rejected the ultimatum. Presumably, no one in Japan really knew what was coming. But you have to wonder whether anyone in America truly understood what was coming, either?
Captain William Parsons of the Manhattan Project briefed the crew of the Enola Gay (and others) before they departed on their historic mission: “The bomb you are going to drop,” he told them, “is something new in the history of warfare. It is the most destructive weapon ever produced. We think it will knock out everything within a three mile area.”
Well, yes, it did. But it also shattered glass in suburbs that were twelve miles away from the detonation site.
Later that day, President Harry S. Truman made a statement:
“The Japanese began the war from the air at Pearl Harbor. . . . We are now prepared to obliterate . . . every productive enterprise the Japanese have above ground in any city,” he stated. “We shall destroy their docks, their factories, and their communications. Let there be no mistake; we shall completely destroy Japan’s power to make war.”
Unfortunately, the Japanese did not surrender that day. A second bomb would be dropped on Nagasaki mere days later.
It was a hard day in world history, but it was also the beginning of the end of World War II.
Primary Sources:
Bruce Cameron Reed, The History and Science of the Manhattan Project (2013)
G. Gosling, The Manhattan Project: Making the Atomic Bomb (1999)
Harry S. Truman, Statement by the President Announcing the Use of the A-Bomb at Hiroshima (August 6, 1945)
Norman Polmar, The Enola Gay: The B-29 That Dropped the Atomic Bomb on Hiroshima (2004)
Proclamation Defining Terms for Japanese Surrender (July 26, 1945)
The day after the bomb was dropped, all Japanese officers in charge of the POW camp (Wake Island captives) where my father was held (an abandoned iron mine in the northern tip of Honchu), were replaced by Korean soldiers. They painted red crosses on the barracks rooftops. The Red Cross began to drop supplies. Shortly after the second bomb was dropped, all POWs were released to the US Navy.
As the son of a U.S. Marine who fought at Guadalcanal, Cape Gloucester/New Britain, Peleliu, and Okinawa, I have very mixed feelings about those days. Without the A-bomb, my father and hundreds of thousands of our fighting men most probably would have died in the invasion of Japan. Thus, I may never have been born. The use of the A-bomb cost thousands of Japanese lives and opened the door to the world of Mutually Assured Destruction
It was a difficult decision but, looked at in context, it was a time when the Japanese remained a major threat to world peace. Also, lest we forget, it was Japan that started the Pacific War that cost the lives of millions of people…