Report of the British Mission to Japan
Chapter II
THE TWO CITIES AFTER ATTACK
HIROSHIMA
9. Eye-witnesses in Hiroshima were agreed that they saw a blinding white flash in the sky, felt a rush of air and heard a loud rumble of noise, followed by the sound of rending and falling buildings. All also spoke of the settling darkness as they found themselves enveloped by a universal cloud of dust. Shortly afterwards they became aware of fires in many parts of the city.
10. The city had been virtually undamaged by air attack before the atomic bomb fell. The bomb exploded near its centre over a point approximately 300 yards from the T-shaped double bridge which is a conspicuous feature of Hiroshima; and thence spread its destruction with great uniformity. Directly or indirectly, it initiated innumerable fires among the wooden houses and workshops, which burned unchecked for days and gutted the Old Town and the industrial zone enclosing it. The more modem industrial buildings on the edge of the town, however, at 1½ miles and more from the centre, escaped with only minor damage. There are contradictory accounts of whether the fire service did or did not attempt to fight fires in the first twelve hours; but no civilian defence services in the world could have met a disaster on this scale and these services were in fact overwhelmed. On August 6th, the authorities in Hiroshima were making preparations to meet what they believed to be a threatened incendiary attack : they were not prepared for a holocaust.
11. As photographs 1 and 2 show, Hiroshima today has the appearance of a burnt city. The traveller who comes to it from the Japanese cities which have been razed by incendiary attack, Tokyo, Kobe, Osaka and others, sees the same unending stretches where wooden buildings have burned to the very ground, broken only by a few shacks newly built from salvaged iron sheeting, by tall chimneys which mark the sites of bumt-out public baths, and by concrete buildings, the shells of which alone have survived the fires.
NAGASAKI
12. A detailed description of the attack on Nagasaki was prepared by the Prefect for the Japanese government on September 1st. His report begins with an uncertain account of the state of alert : an Alert which had been sounded earlier had been " relaxed ", but probably there had been no final All Clear. This would conform with the Japanese practice of " relaxing " but not cancelling an Alert when only a few enemy planes were in the neighbourhood. The same conditions probably obtained during the attack on Hiroshima. The report goes on to describe the dropping of three parachutes which preceded the bomb, the bright flash of the explosion in the sky, followed by a haze of white smoke which darkened rapidly ; and the accompanying roaring sound, with some feeling of pressure and wind and of heat.
13. The Nagasaki Prefect's report describes the bomb as " aimed at the industrial plants in the northern part of the city ". The centre of damage is in fact in the industrial area between the two large Mitsubishi Ordnance Plants in the Urakami Valley. Hence the harbour and the commercial area, nearly two miles distant, escaped with only minor damage; and so did the housing in the smaller valley, screened by the intervening ridge of hills.
14. For these geographical reasons the area of damage and with it the death roll were naturally smaller than in Hiroshima. This caused the Japanese first to report the bomb as a smaller version of the Hiroshima model.
15. The few previous attacks on Nagasaki had been aimed at the shipyards, so that most of the damage from them is outside the area of atomic bomb damage. As in Hiroshima, the initial blast damage done by the atomic bomb was followed by extensive fires, which here spread somewhat more slowly. But where the area burnt out in Hiroshima was compact, in Nagasaki it is broken by long lines of factory sheds, leaning their steel skeletons eerily away from the explosion (see photographs 4 and 6). Within the factories, rows of machines stand in a sea of tiles, corrugated sheeting, and timber roof boards ; fuze-boxes, switchboards, and gear cases blown open and torn from their moorings hang, fantastically supported by the remnants of their fittings ; and the whole is festooned by the tangled service systems of wire, steam and gas piping. Furnace doors blown open show the cold mass of the last charge under the brickwork of the fallen furnace roof. Over a wide area such blast-resistant objects as telegraph poles and tram and electricity standards lean away from the bomb; on the surrounding hills, trees have been blown down at large distances. Thus Nagasaki presents the appearance of a city struck by a brief but tremendous hurricane.
EFFECT ON CITY LIFE
16. Both in Hiroshima and in Nagasaki, the scale of the disaster brought city life and industry virtually to a standstill. Even the most destructive conventional attacks, the incendiary raids on Hamburg in the summer of 1943 and on Tokyo in the spring of 1945, had no comparable effect in paralysing communal organization. Witnesses report a panic flight of population, in which officials and civil defence personnel joined, abandoning even the rescue services. All large-scale effort had to await the return of population, which was slow; there were still only 140,000 people in each city at the end of November. Even the clearance of debris and the cremation of the dead trapped in it do not seem to have been begun for more than a month, and members of the Mission still stumbled upon undiscovered skeletons. Allowance must no doubt be made for the moral effect of the end of the war, which had removed the backbone of communal incentive. And some tribute should be paid to isolated feats of restoration, such as that of electricity to Nagasaki and later that of the trams in Hiroshima. Nevertheless, the larger impression which both cities make is of having sunk, in an instant and without a struggle, to the most primitive existence. Among causes which are likely to operate outside Japan were the death of key personnel, the destruction of public services, and the destruction of housing. In Nagasaki alone the Prefect reported 60,000 homeless, and 25,000 living in damaged houses. As photograph 16 shows, the construction of some form of shelter is a major preoccupation of nearly all those who have returned. It is plain that local services are unequal to dealing with such disasters, either immediately or later, and that planned and energetic action by central government is essential.