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In the wake of the nuclear attacks on Japan, the official Allied line was that radiation sickness was not a danger. Yet, as Steve O’Hagan reveals, the first western journalist to witness the effects on the people of Hiroshima told a very different story
At 6am on 2 September 1945, Australian journalist Wilfred Burchett boarded a crowded train heading south-west from the wreckage of war-ravaged Tokyo. He was disobeying strict orders that no westerners should venture outside the Japanese capital – and, though he did not yet realise it, he was undertaking the most momentous journey of his life. The Second World War had ended. However, Japan had not formally surrendered, and American occupation was still to come. Japan’s cities lay in ruins, and Burchett couldn’t even be sure that the train line to his destination, over 400 miles away, was intact. He was also alone and in great danger – hence the Colt .45 pistol in his suitcase. Resentment towards the Allies ran high. Crammed around Burchett in his carriage were Japanese Army officers bearing samurai swords. Although he spoke almost no Japanese, Burchett could feel the animosity in the soldiers’ venomous stares. Also among the passengers was an American priest, who nervously warned Burchett that one wrong move could cost them their lives. Should they smile or shake hands, it could be taken by the Japanese officers as a sign of gloating over the Japanese surrender to the Allies that was being formalised later that day. Burchett later recalled glancing nervously at the soldiers: their hands seemed to toy with the hilts of their swords. As the train plunged in and out of long, dark tunnels, he was convinced that he could hear the sound of steel being unsheathed from scabbards. Thankfully, the assault he feared never came. But even as the train reached its destination some 20 hours after setting out, his tension did not abate. He was arriving in Hiroshima – the city that, four weeks earlier, had been nigh obliterated by the world’s first ever nuclear bomb attack. In one of the 20th century’s most remarkable feats of investigative reporting, Burchett was about to become the first western journalist to bear witness to the aftermath of a nuclear explosion. A scramble to control the narrative about the reality of the deadly nature of nuclear fallout had begun. Reputational risk Dropping the atomic bomb on Hiroshima presented the US with a public relations dilemma. What story should the country tell the world about unleashing this terrifyingly powerful experimental weapon on a densely populated city? The ‘leaders of the free world’ did not want to be seen as having become monsters while defeating the evils of fascism. As Henry Stimson, US secretary of war between 1940 and 1945, put it, the authorities didn’t want to “get the reputation of outdoing Hitler in atrocities”. Read more | How Nazi secrets triggered the ultimate moral dilemma – and led to Oppenheimer’s atomic bomb No one is sure exactly how many were killed in the attack. The city of Hiroshima initially estimated that 42,000 people died, from a population of around 350,000. A year later this number was revised up to 100,000. More recent estimates suggest that, by the end of 1945, up to 140,000 may have died from the immediate and long-term effects of the bomb. The vast majority were civilians. So when President Harry S Truman made radio addresses announcing the dropping of the bomb, he sought to establish the official narrative. First, he referred to Hiroshima not as a city full of civilians but as a “military base”. Second, the weapon was portrayed solely in terms of its explosive potential, with “more power than 20,000 tons of TNT”. Crucially, there was no mention of the potential dangers of radiation, which the Americans expected – or, perhaps more accurately, hoped – would not be an issue. Three days later, a New York Times article quoted Manhattan Project scientist Robert Oppenheimer saying: “There is every reason to believe that there was no appreciable radioactivity on the ground at Hiroshima and what little there was decayed very rapidly.” In the weeks that followed the bombing, this was the accepted narrative – until, that is, the previously little-known journalist Wilfred Burchett intervened. Born in 1911, Burchett grew up in the Australian Outback in Victoria, and left school at the age of 15 after his father’s business failed. He spent much of the late 1920s and early 1930s as an itinerant labourer. A self-taught linguist with a burning interest in the outside world, he travelled to London in 1937, where he married a Jewish refugee from Germany and worked for a travel agency arranging for German Jews to emigrate to destinations such as Palestine. Front-line reporting Returning to Australia, Burchett forged a career as a journalist. After Japan entered the Second World War in 1941, he filed stories from the Burmese and Chinese fronts. He then joined the US Marines on their island-hopping campaign across the Pacific in 1944, reporting for the UK’s Daily Express. When Japan accepted defeat following the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Burchett was due to be part of the official press corps covering the final act of the Second World War: the signing of ceremonial surrender documents aboard the US battleship Missouri in Tokyo Bay on 2 September 1945. However, as some 600 correspondents gathered for the event, Burchett was not among them. Feigning illness to slip away from his US military chaperone, he set out on his illicit and perilous journey to Hiroshima. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2025/09/British-Newspaper-Archives-AtomicPlagueDailyExpresswebready-ba8b67e.jpg" width="1500" height="1189" alt="A picture of a newspaper article from the Daily Express newspaper, with the headline THE ATOMIC PLAGUE" title="Burchett’s report on the impacts of radiation sickness in Hiroshima appeared in the Daily Express in 1945. It contradicted the official US narrative about the bomb (Image by British Newspaper Archives)" /> Upon arrival, Burchett was astonished by the sheer physical destruction wreaked upon the city: almost 70 per cent of its buildings had been wrecked. “There was nothing but awful devastation and desolation,” he wrote later, likening what he saw to “some death-stricken other planet”. He was guided by a local journalist to a hospital. “If the evidence of the material destruction of the city had been horrifying,” Burchett wrote, “the effects on humans as I saw them inside the hospital wards was a thousand times more so.” Patients – often whole families – were laid out on filthy tatami mats among the rubble of the damaged facility. Burchett saw how, four weeks after the attack, people were being treated not only for the horrendous effects of the blast but also for something else more mysterious, more sinister. Victims suffered a raft of perplexing symptoms: fever, diarrhoea, hair loss, hideous marks on the skin, bleeding from the mouth and other orifices. We now recognise these as markers of the advanced stages of radiation sickness, but the local doctors at the time had no idea what they were seeing. Many believed that the bomb had released poisonous gases from the ground. Burchett immediately understood that what he was witnessing was not just a visual manifestation of the end of the Second World War but the fate of inhabitants of hundreds of cities worldwide should there be another global conflict. “If that does not make a journalist want to shape history in the right direction, what does?” he wrote. In a state of near shock, Burchett sat on a concrete block among the ruins outside the hospital and tapped out his story on his battered typewriter. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2025/09/GettyImages-92425109webready-9744727.jpg" width="3888" height="2592" alt="A black and white photograph of lots of people laying on the floor. One man is standing up, watching over the sick people laying down" title="Tens of thousands who survived the blast over Hiroshima suffered symptoms that mystified doctors who’d never seen the effects of radiation (Image by Getty Images)" /> Three days later, on Wednesday 5 September, Britain awoke to an apocalyptic front cover on the Daily Express. “The Atomic Plague” was the main splash, then: “Doctors fall as they work.” (In the haste to get the story published, authorship was wrongly attributed to “Peter” Burchett.) Read more | Kavita Puri on VJ Day: "We don't talk about the war in Asia – which was a messy, complicated conflict" Burchett’s searing reportage painted a terrifyingly vivid picture: “Hiroshima… looks as if a monster steamroller had passed over it and squashed it out of existence… It gives you an empty feeling in the stomach to see such man-made devastation.” The focus of his piece was, though, on the “uncanny after-effects” from which “people are still dying, mysteriously and horribly” weeks after the attack. The words he chose to describe this sinister malaise – “Atomic Plague” – suggested that the bomb dropped by the US was on a par with a chemical or biological weapon, both outlawed under the 1925 Geneva Protocol. Initiating global opposition Also striking was the polemical strap-line to Burchett’s article: “I write this as a warning to the world.” With these words, he arguably initiated the global opposition to nuclear weapons that persists to this day. His article travelled rapidly around the globe after the Express released the text free to the international press – but this was not the story that the US military wanted the world to read. US authorities immediately moved to shut down Burchett’s narrative. Press conferences were held at which his claims of “atomic plague” were refuted, and military officials accused Burchett of having “fallen victim to Japanese propaganda”. Hiroshima was declared out of bounds to the media, and any reports of radiation sickness were censored. Burchett’s press accreditation was rescinded and he was encouraged to leave Japan. In the American press, stories sympathetic to the official line quoted Manhattan Project officials minimising the reports of radiation sickness. “No Radioactivity in Hiroshima Ruin,” ran one piece in the New York Times on 13 September. General Groves, head of the Manhattan Project, testified to the Senate in November 1945 that scientists believed radiation sickness “is a very pleasant way to die”. In this way, Burchett’s warning to the world was to a large extent successfully suppressed in the months following its publication. But nobody could stop the truth radiating out from Ground Zero forever. In the years that followed, more information about the effects of radiation exposure emerged. In August 1946, the New Yorker ran its now famous John Hersey-penned Hiroshima issue (published as a book later that year), which opened millions of eyes to the horrors of what had happened. In 1954, the crew of a Japanese fishing trawler were poisoned by radioactivity from a US thermonuclear bomb test, with one man dying. And victims in Hiroshima continued to die young as the years ticked by. Nonetheless, it would take decades for the US to accept the full reality of radiation sickness – even after it afflicted American citizens: it wasn’t until the 1980s that US veterans of atomic tests received any compensation. No such compensation has ever come the way of the survivors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Wilfred Burchett died in 1983, at the age of 72. By then, his scoop from the ruins of Hiroshima was largely forgotten in the west. But not in the city itself. Over the course of his life, Burchett returned several times to Hiroshima, where he was welcomed and feted by the Hibakusha – the survivors of the world’s first nuclear attacks. For them, there could be no forgetting. Steve O’Hagan is a documentary film and radio producer. His Archive on 4: Exposing Hiroshima programme about Wilfred Burchett’s reporting is available now on BBC Sounds This article was first published in the September 2025 issue of BBC History Magazine
Kavita Puri on VJ Day: "We don't talk about the war in Asia – which was a messy, complicated conflict"
On the 80th anniversary of VJ Day, broadcaster Kavita Puri – presenter of a new BBC Radio 4 series on the Second World War in Asia – considers why this was the conflict’s forgotten theatre
Matt Elton: Your new series, exploring fighting on the Asian front during the Second World War, is called The History Podcast: The Second Map. Why did you choose that name? Kavita Puri: It came to me after I met a man called Peter Knight, who is now 98. At the time of the Japanese attack on the US fleet at Pearl Harbor [on 7 December 1941], he was a 14-year-old boy living in a terraced house in Bromley, a south-eastern London suburb. He had been following the war in Europe using a map posted on the wall alongside his dresser. After Pearl Harbor, he put up another map on the other side of the dresser – a map of Asia and the Pacific. He would sit down every evening with his mum and grandparents to listen to the BBC bulletin, hearing about places for the first time, and about this other war on the Asian front, in British colonies. And he would trace what was happening on that second map. So he was now updating two maps in tandem: one covering the war in Europe against the Nazis, and the second encompassing the war against Japan in Asia. Why has the war against Nazi Germany come to dominate how we view this conflict, at least partly to the exclusion of the conflict in Asia? I think it’s understandable: that war was close by and involved places whose names were more familiar to people in Britain. And it affected people here more directly: Peter Knight had experienced the Blitz, for example. So the European war was close to home, whereas this other war was far away. It was also a messy, complicated war – and not just because it was fought in jungle terrain, and soldiers were dying of malaria and other diseases as well as in combat. It wasn’t a neat good-v-bad situation, like the war against the Nazis. The war with Japan was essentially about two empires competing with each other, so it’s a much harder story to explain. It also involved a lot of troops from the colonies, as well as from Australia. So again, it’s a story about our empire. Historians such as Rana Mitter, who helped me with the making of this series, argue that actually we should see the origins of the Second World War not in the German invasion of Poland in 1939, but much earlier in the early 1930s, with Japanese activities in China. Another aspect of that war on the ‘second map’ that we still don’t talk about much was the fact that the Chinese also fought with the Allies against Japan in some of the major battles. So do you think we struggle to see the Asian war as also being a story about the British empire? Yes – and I do think that part of the reason we don’t talk about the war in Asia is because many places that were attacked had been part of the British empire for more than a century, and the losses were humiliating. Winston Churchill said as much when Singapore fell in February 1942, describing it as one of the worst military defeats in British history. A lot of the soldiers who fought and won back places such as Burma [now Myanmar] were soldiers from the empire – and sentiments are complicated by the fact that India then won its independence in 1947. In the series, you make the point that the evacuation of Burma isn’t well known. Could you talk us through what happened there? Many people think of the war in Asia and the Pacific in terms of two incidents involving the US: Pearl Harbor, and the atomic bombing of Hiroshima on 6 August 1945 and Nagasaki three days later. They don’t really know much about what happened in between. Particularly, one element that’s not often discussed is that British colonies, including Malaya and Singapore, were attacked at almost exactly the same time as Pearl Harbor. Read more | VJ Day: turning the tide in the east Again and again in the oral testimonies, I heard how the British saw themselves as racially superior. I think it was hard for them to understand how their colonies could be overrun by people that they considered inferior. Yet as well as possessing superior tanks and aircraft, the Japanese also used bicycles: they were nimble and they moved very, very quickly. Not only was the loss of Malaya and Singapore humiliating, but it resulted in the capture of around 130,000 British and Indian troops and other colonial and Commonwealth soldiers as prisoners of war. Then Japan set its sights on Burma. Rangoon [now Yangon] fell in March 1942, and the rest of the country was lost as early as May. The result was that soldiers had to trek across vast stretches of terrain in a devastating retreat. General William Slim, who later commanded the Fourteenth Army in Burma, described men who were just completely exhausted. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2025/09/TOPFOTO-0035936webready-3a6fee8.jpg" width="1500" height="1151" alt="A black and white photograph showing a small group of people walking across a barren landscape, carrying their belongings on their heads" title="Refugees – many of whom had to flee barefoot carrying anything they could – cross into British lines during the Japanese invasion of Burma (Image by TopFoto)" /> It wasn’t just soldiers retreating, but also colonial civilians – Europeans and Indians, about a million of whom had been working in Burma. Along with some Burmese who were afraid of Japanese reprisals, they headed for India. But the evacuation was quite racialised. White British and European people were given priority and assistance. If you were Indian or Burmese, particularly if you didn’t have means, you were on your own. And that journey was so difficult: it involved walking barefoot with whatever you could carry across very challenging terrain, much of it jungle. You had very little food. You might encounter crocodiles or elephants. An estimated 600,000 refugees were on the move but, though it was such a major event, there was so much going on – not only in that region but in the wider war – that this story has often been obscured in popular memory. It was really quite difficult for me to find testimonies of people who had made that journey. Why have stories of this event not been told before? Partly because most refugees arrived in Bengal, where a terrible famine was developing. If you were an Indian or Burmese person, you were just one of many trying to survive. In addition, that was a tumultuous time in India. There was the famine, the Quit India movement, and the Great Calcutta Killings [deadly riots in 1946], then the violence in the run-up to partition – when, again, millions were on the move, a million people died and two new countries were created. So the story has been obscured in India, even though many Indian nationalists were infuriated at the racialised nature of the evacuation from Burma. It became one of the causes underpinning the Quit India campaign. In Britain, too, it’s a very difficult part of our war story to recall: not just the retreat and defeat, but also the racialised aspect undermining the moral underpinnings of empire. In the series, you speak to relatives of people held in prisoner-of-war camps, including civilians. Can you tell us about the experiences of Shelagh Brown? Shelagh was 25 when the Japanese took Singapore, where she’d been born and had lived all her life. And hers had been a grand life, like lots of colonial families. Before the invasion, Singapore had been largely untouched by the war, unlike Britain. But it was bombed just a couple of hours after Pearl Harbor, and life changed very quickly for her. Even at that point, though, she didn’t think she would have to leave. It was only when British soldiers began to cross the causeway, retreating from Malaya, that her family realised things were really serious and tried to evacuate Shelagh and her mother. They got on a small boat, hoping to get to Australia, but were bombed from the air. Shelagh was adrift at sea for 19 hours before Japanese forces caught her and she was interned for the rest of the war. In fact, it wasn’t until six weeks after the war had ended that news reached the internment camp. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2025/09/TOPFOTO-0917695webready-2c046ed.jpg" width="1500" height="1091" alt="A black and white photograph of women sitting around a table, picking" title="Smiles belie the cruel reality of the Kampong Makassar internment camp in the Dutch East Indies. Survivors who experienced trauma often didn’t talk about it after the war. But also, says Kavita Puri, “people didn’t ask” (Image by TopFoto)" /> She died some time ago, but her daughter shared some cassette tapes (never broadcast before) on which Shelagh told her story of survival while being moved from camp to camp. It’s difficult to listen to, particularly because Shelagh’s mother died in the camps, but it’s also remarkable – particularly in how the women kept up their spirits. Shelagh had been in a choir, and her father had been the choir master. So the women formed a vocal orchestra, which was really moving: she said that the notes they were singing were the only free things they had. The Japanese guards would stand outside and listen, and were moved by what they heard. Another way that she dealt with the situation was that she somehow got hold of little bits of paper on which she wrote lavish recipes in minute detail, like cakes with 12 eggs. The funny thing is that her daughter said Shelagh had never cooked before in her life, because she had servants in Singapore. But because they were really malnourished, it was just a way to deal with their hunger. So it’s an emotionally complicated story. And the stories of women like her haven’t really been well remembered. Can you tell us about the experiences of Ursula Graham Bower? Ursula’s incredible story is told in an interview with her that we found in the archives. A young woman from north London, at the start of the war she was in her mid-twenties, working as an anthropologist in the tribal regions of north-east India near the border with Burma. She was living with a group called the Nagas when Pearl Harbor was bombed, after which she was recruited to work with Naga people gathering intelligence, monitoring what was happening across the border. Read more | Kavita Puri's hidden histories: "Many south Asian diasporic families don’t know of their First World War links" When the Japanese tried to invade India at Imphal and Kohima in 1944, she found herself on the front line. She cabled headquarters to request weapons – and a box arrived containing grenades and guns – and she used them fearlessly. She was a remarkably brave woman – but so were the Naga people who fought alongside her. Military historian Peter Johnston says that the Fourteenth Army was possibly the greatest that Britain ever put into the field. Why don’t we hear more about the story of this ‘Forgotten Army’? The Fourteenth Army was formed after the defeats of Singapore and Malaya. It mostly comprised colonial soldiers – predominantly Indians, but also soldiers from west and east Africa as well. By the end of the conflict, it numbered around a million troops. By then, the British had learned lessons about how to lead these soldiers, who were treated much better than colonial troops had been previously. The extraordinary battles that they fought in such challenging terrain, and the conditions that they endured, are remarkable. Even at the time, people such as Lord Mountbatten and even the army’s commander, General Slim, joked that it was a forgotten army, fighting a far-away war. Partly, that’s because the Burma campaign and the battles at Imphal and Kohima were fought around the time of the Normandy landings, which of course dominated the headlines. I think there is probably a racialised aspect to it, too. The majority of soldiers in the Fourteenth Army were colonial subjects. Equally, I spoke to children of some of the soldiers in the Fourteenth Army, and they didn’t talk about it much, either. After independence, people in India and Pakistan found it hard to remember their soldiers who had fought with the British – that was not the story they wanted to tell about the Second World War. Another factor is that the collection of oral histories hasn’t been done much in India or Pakistan. The Imperial War Museum has been trying to gather oral testimonies, but it’s very late now – most of the people involved have died. There are some really important stories that we will never capture now. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2025/09/TOPFOTO-1060579webready-f742b9a.jpg" width="1500" height="1931" alt="A photo of a man dressed in a khaki military uniform and hat, with a pair of binoculars hanging around his neck. In the background, the sky is blue and a blurry group of people" title="General Slim joked that he was leading “a forgotten army fighting a far-away war” (Image by TopFoto)" /> Was there a turning point when people in Britain started to find out about these wartime experiences? I’m not sure that ever happened. When I tell people that I’m working on a series about VJ Day, most people ask: what’s that? Or: is that the American War? Yet there are thousands of homes in Britain where a family member was part of this story but didn’t talk about it. I was interviewing one 98-year-old veteran, when he said to me: “I’ve got a suitcase in my study. Why don’t you go and have a look?” His daughter said: “I didn’t know about this suitcase.” I don’t know if that generation didn’t talk about it because they saw difficult things, or if they just thought, well, everyone has a war story, what’s the point of talking about mine? Or perhaps because people wanted to hear about the war in Europe. Shelagh Brown’s daughter told me that she was the only one she knew in Chichester who put out a flag for the 75th anniversary of VJ Day – no one else knew why. I think broadly people don’t know about the war in Asia, what it was about, why it was a British war, and how our country was connected to it. Yet many south Asians in postwar Britain had their own connections to that war, too, as well as British families. One thing I’ve realised making these programmes is that each generation asks different questions about the Second World War. But it’s a race against time to capture these memories – and, it pains me to say, it’s almost too late now. How is the war remembered in Japan? Are these kinds of conversations happening there at all? It was very important for me to include Japanese voices in the series. I found recorded testimony from a young kamikaze pilot in his early twenties. He was just a kid who was told that he had to undertake this mission. He wanted to do good things for his country, but he also wanted to live. He wanted to get married, have a normal life. But, interestingly, Japan doesn’t really remember the Asian war, focusing instead on the war in the Pacific. They see the conflict particularly through the prism of America, because the US rehabilitated Japan very, very quickly after the war. During the Tokyo War Crimes Trials [1946–48], Emperor Hirohito was not part of proceedings, and he built the pacifist constitution in the postwar years. An expert I spoke to for the series observed that it took decades for the Japanese people to talk about the atrocities that their forces committed, and that talking about war memory has become very politicised. But he does say that the new generation is looking at it in a different way. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2025/09/Bridgeman244259webready-47b2ee0.jpg" width="1500" height="1154" alt="A black and white photograph shows a group of British Indian Army soldiers huddled together, preparing weapons" title="British Indian Army soldiers during the battle of Kohima, 1944. This was one of the great Allied victories of the war, but it is not widely known today (Image by Bridgeman Images)" /> Now that few from the generation who lived through those events are still alive, maybe the Japanese today are freer to talk about things they weren’t able to before. For example, when their soldiers came back, they were traumatised and humiliated. They were told not to talk about it. And the children of those families are now opening up about the levels of domestic violence inflicted by some of those men. It can free you up to talk and ask some really difficult questions about your country and the people who led it at the time. So many of those who took part in the war in Asia found it difficult to talk about these events – as you say in the series, it’s almost like a confession for them. Is that one reason why it remains obscure in the countries involved? It was hard to talk about for lots of reasons, not least the traumatic nature of the events. Whether you were a PoW or a civilian, or witnessed action in battle, it was difficult. So people who came back home didn’t talk – but, also, people didn’t ask. I’ve spoken to family members who were explicitly told not to ask. Read more | "The war without an end": what happened in Europe after VE Day? When one PoW, Maurice Naylor, returned home to Manchester, his family were advised not to talk to him about his experiences – that it would be too much for him. His daughter found some sketches that he’d made. She asked her mother: what is this? And her mother said: don’t ask your father – he was in a PoW camp, and he has nightmares. She thought it had been a Nazi concentration camp, because that was the only kind she knew about. She didn’t even know that there were Japanese PoW camps. So one generation was told not to ask. But I would also say that not only do you need a public space for people to speak, but people also have to know what to ask. If your children are not learning about it in school, and if collectively we don’t know about that history, we won’t know the questions to pose. And now, because people didn’t ask, there is often a sense of regret. That’s what I meant by confession. They know something happened. They know a relative saw something, and it was probably not a good thing. I think there is a guilt in not having asked – and now not being able to ask. Were there other factors that added to the complications of remembering this story? Perhaps one reason is the simplified narrative we tell ourselves about our war: we fought the Nazis, and they were bad; we were good, and we were heroic. And that’s not wrong – but there was also this other war that we fought, and we need to understand that – not least because it touched many thousands of families in Britain. This article was first published in the September 2025 issue of BBC History Magazine
Was the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki by the US in WW2 justified?
For years debate has raged over whether the US was right to drop two atomic bombs on Japan during the final weeks of the Second World War. The first bomb, dropped on the city of Hiroshima on 6 August 1945, resulted in a total death toll of around 140,000. The second, which hit Nagasaki on 9 August, killed around 50,000 people. But was the US justified? We put the question to a panel of expert historians...
The atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki by the United States in August 1945 brought the Second World War to a sudden and devastating close, and sparked a moral and historical debate that has continued since. Well over 100,000 people, most of them civilians, were killed instantly or in the immediate aftermath, with many more suffering from long-term effects of radiation exposure. The decision by US president Truman to authorise the use of nuclear weapons against Japan was unprecedented. It marked the first (and so far only) time that atomic bombs have been used in warfare. The justification offered at the time was that the bombings would force Japan’s surrender and avoid a prolonged and bloody invasion of the Japanese mainland. Yet the question remains: was the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki justified? Historians continue to debate the military necessity, political motivations and moral implications of the bombings. Was it a strategic decision to end the war quickly and save lives? Or a demonstration of power aimed as much at the Soviet Union as at Japan? Here, a panel of historians offers their perspectives on one of the most controversial chapters of the Second World War, and considers whether the US was right to bomb Japan in 1945. Was the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki justified? “Yes. Truman had little choice” – Antony Beevor Few actions in war are morally justifiable. All a commander or political leader can hope to assess is whether a particular course of action is likely to reduce the loss of life. Faced with the Japanese refusal to surrender, President Truman had little choice. His decision was mainly based on the estimate of half a million Allied casualties likely to be caused by invading the home islands of Japan. There was also the likely death rate from starvation for Allied PoWs and civilians as the war dragged on well into 1946. Read more | The Manhattan Project: your guide to the building of the first atomic bomb What Truman did not know, and which has only been established quite recently, is that the Imperial Japanese Army could never contemplate surrender, having forced all their men to fight to the death since the start of the war. All civilians were to be mobilised and forced to fight with bamboo spears and satchel charges to act as suicide bombers against Allied tanks. Japanese documents apparently indicate their army was prepared to accept up to 28 million civilian deaths. Antony Beevor is a bestselling military historian, specialising in the Second World War. His most recent book is Ardennes 1944: Hitler’s Last Gamble (Viking, 2015) “No. It was immoral, and unnecessary” – Richard Overy The dropping of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima was justified at the time as being moral – in order to bring about a more rapid victory and prevent the deaths of more Americans. However, it was clearly not moral to use this weapon knowing that it would kill civilians and destroy the urban milieu. And it wasn’t necessary either. WW2 | The Big Questions Member exclusive | Historian and broadcaster Laurence Rees explains major moments of the global conflict in this five-part series. Listen to all episodes now Militarily Japan was finished (as the Soviet invasion of Manchuria that August showed). Further blockade and urban destruction would have produced a surrender in August or September at the latest, without the need for the costly anticipated invasion or the atomic bomb. As for the second bomb on Nagasaki, that was just as unnecessary as the first one. It was deemed to be needed, partly because it was a different design, and the military (and many civilian scientists) were keen to see if they both worked the same way. There was, in other words, a cynical scientific imperative at work as well. I should also add that there was a fine line between the atomic bomb and conventional bombing – indeed descriptions of Hamburg or Tokyo after conventional bombing echo the aftermath of Hiroshima. To regard Hiroshima as a moral violation is also to condemn the firebombing campaign, which was deliberately aimed at city centres and completely indiscriminate. Of course it is easy to say that if I had been in Truman’s shoes, I would not have ordered the two bombings. But it is possible to imagine greater restraint. The British and Americans had planned in detail the gas-bombing of a list of 17 major German cities, but in the end did not carry it out because the moral case seemed to depend on Germany using gas first. Restraint was possible, and, at the very end of the war, perhaps more politically acceptable. Richard Overy is a professor of history at the University of Exeter and editor of The Oxford Illustrated History of World War Two (OUP, 2015) More from us HistoryExtra members can explore this topic further with exclusive content from our archives WW2 the big questions: final stages of the conflict What if...The Enigma code had not been cracked by Alan Turing and Bletchley Park? Oppenheimer | Is Christopher Nolan perpetuating a historical myth? The PoWs who survived Nagasaki "We’ve come to think that peace is normal, but that's not the reality": Margaret MacMillan on humanity's compulsion to go to war Not a HistoryExtra member? Explore our latest membership offers “Yes. It was the least bad option” – Robert James Maddox The atomic bombs were horrible, but I agree with US secretary of war Henry L Stimson that using them was the “least abhorrent choice”. A bloody invasion and round-the-clock conventional bombing would have led to a far higher death toll and so the atomic weapons actually saved thousands of American and millions of Japanese lives. The bombs were the best means to bring about unconditional surrender, which is what the US leaders wanted. Only this would enable the Allies to occupy Japan and root out the institutions that led to war in the first place. Timeline | The countdown to the bombing of Hiroshima The experience with Germany after the First World War had persuaded them that a mere armistice would constitute a betrayal of future generations if an even larger war occurred 20 years down the line. It is true that the radiation effects of the atomic bomb provided a grisly dividend, which the US leaders did not anticipate. However, even if they had known, I don’t think it would have changed their decision. Robert James Maddox is author of Hiroshima in History: The Myths of Revisionism (University of Missouri Press, 2007) Video: Could the Nazis have built the first atomic bomb? View Green Video on the source website “No. Japan would have surrendered anyway” – Martin J Sherwin I believe that it was a mistake and a tragedy that the atomic bombs were used. Those bombings had little to do with the Japanese decision to surrender. The evidence has become overwhelming that it was the entry of the Soviet Union on 8 August into the war against Japan that forced surrender but, understandably, this view is very difficult for Americans to accept. Of the Japanese leaders, it was the military ones who held out against the civilian leaders who were closest to the emperor, and who wanted to surrender provided the emperor’s safety would be guaranteed. The military’s argument was that Japan could convince the Soviet Union to mediate on its behalf for better surrender terms than unconditional surrender and therefore should continue the war until that was achieved. Read more | How and when did the Second World War end? Once the USSR entered the war, the Japanese military not only had no arguments for continuation left, but it also feared the Soviet Union would occupy significant parts of northern Japan. Truman could have simply waited for the Soviet Union to enter the war but he did not want the USSR to have a claim to participate in the occupation of Japan. Another option (which could have ended the war before August) was to clarify that the emperor would not be held accountable for the war under the policy of unconditional surrender. US secretary of war Stimson recommended this, but secretary of state James Byrnes, who was much closer to Truman, vetoed it. By dropping the atomic bombs instead, the United States signalled to the world that it considered nuclear weapons to be legitimate weapons of war. Those bombings precipitated the nuclear arms race and they are the source of all nuclear proliferation. The late Martin J Sherwin was co-author of American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J Robert Oppenheimer (Atlantic, 2008) Read more | 6 terrible choices people had to make during the Second World War “Yes. It saved millions of lives in Japan and Asia” – Richard Frank Dropping the bombs was morally preferable to any other choices available. One of the biggest problems we have is that we can talk about Dresden and the bombing of Hamburg and we all know what the context is: Nazi Germany and what Nazi Germany did. There’s been a great amnesia in the west with respect to what sort of war Japan conducted across Asia-Pacific. Bear in mind that for every Japanese non-combatant who died during the war, 17 or 18 died across Asia-Pacific. Yet you very seldom find references to this and virtually nothing that vivifies it in the way that the suffering at Hiroshima and Nagasaki has been. Read more | What was the Truman doctrine? With the original invasion strategy negated by radio intelligence revealing the massive Japanese build-up on the planned Kyushu landing areas, Truman’s alternative was a campaign of blockade and bombardment, which would have killed millions of Japanese, mostly non-combatants. For example, in 1946 the food situation would have become catastrophic and there would have been stupendous civilian deaths. It was only because Japan surrendered when it still had a serviceable administrative system – plus American food aid – that saved the country from famine. Read more | Stalin’s famine: a brief history of the Holodomor in Soviet Ukraine Another thing to bear in mind is that while just over 200,000 people were killed in total by the atomic bombs, it is estimated that 300,000–500,000 Japanese people (many of whom were civilians) died or disappeared in Soviet captivity. Had the war continued, that number would have been much higher. Critics talk about changing the demand for unconditional surrender, but the Japanese government had never put forth a set of terms on which they were prepared to end the war prior to Hiroshima. The inner cabinet ruling the country never devised such terms. When foreign minister Shigenori Togo was told that the best terms Japan could obtain were unconditional surrender with the exception of maintaining the imperial system, Togo flatly rejected them in the name of the cabinet. The fact is that there was no historical record over the past 2,600 years of Japan ever surrendering, nor any examples of a Japanese unit surrendering during the war. This was where the great American fear lay. Richard B Frank is a military historian whose books include Downfall: The End of the Imperial Japanese Empire (Random House, 1999) “No. Better options were discarded for political reasons” – Tsuyoshi Hasegawa Once sympathetic to the argument that the atomic bomb was necessary, the more research I do, the more I am convinced it was one of the gravest war crimes the US has ever committed. I’ve been to Japan and discovered what happened on the ground in 1945 and it was really horrifying. The radiation has affected people who survived the blast for many years and still today thousands of people suffer the effects. Read more | “My God, what have we done?” The moral dilemma of Hiroshima There were possible alternatives that might have ended the war. Truman could have invited Stalin to sign the Potsdam declaration [in which the USA, Britain and Nationalist China demanded Japanese surrender in July 1945]. The authors of the draft of the declaration believed that if the Soviets joined the war at this time it might lead to Japanese surrender but Truman consciously avoided that option, because he and some of his advisors were apprehensive about Soviet entry. I don’t agree with revisionists who say Truman used the bomb to intimidate the Soviet Union but I believe he used it to force Japan to surrender before they were able to enter the war. The second option was to alter the demand for unconditional surrender. Some influential advisors within the Truman administration were in favour of allowing the Japanese to keep the emperor system to induce so-called moderates within the Japanese government to work for the termination of the war. However, Truman was mindful of American public opinion, which wanted unconditional surrender as revenge against Pearl Harbor and the Japanese atrocities. Read more | The Nuremberg Trials: the real history behind the post-WW2 tribunal that brought Nazi leaders to justice Bearing in mind those atrocities, it’s clear that Japan doesn’t have a leg to stand on when it comes to immoral acts in the war. However, one atrocity does not make another one right. I believe this was the most righteous war the Americans have ever been involved in but you still can’t justify using any means to win a just war. Tsuyoshi Hasegawa is a professor of history at the University of California at Santa Barbara and the author of Racing the Enemy: Stalin, Truman, and the Surrender of Japan (Harvard University, Press 2005) “Yes. The moral failing was Japan’s” – Michael Kort Truman’s decision to use the atomic bomb was the best choice available under the circumstances and was therefore morally justifiable. It was clear Japan was unwilling to surrender on terms even remotely acceptable to the US and its allies, and the country was preparing a defence far more formidable than the US had anticipated. Read more | Who was Hermann Göring? The truth about Hitler’s drug-fuelled enforcer who met his downfall at Nuremberg The choice was not, as is frequently argued, between using an atomic bomb against Hiroshima and invading Japan. No one on the Allied side could say with confidence what would bring about a Japanese surrender, as Japan’s situation had been hopeless for a long time. It was hoped that the shock provided by the bombs would convince Tokyo to surrender, but how many would be needed was an open question. After Hiroshima, the Japanese government had three days to respond before Nagasaki but did not do so. Hirohito and some of his advisers knew Japan had to surrender but were not in a position to get the government to accept that conclusion. Key military members of the government argued that it was unlikely that the US could have a second bomb and, even if it did, public pressure would prevent its use. The bombing of Nagasaki demolished these arguments and led directly to the imperial conference that produced Japan’s offer to surrender. Read more | The science behind the bombing of Hiroshima The absolutist moral arguments (such as not harming civilians) made against the atomic bombs would have precluded many other actions essential to victory taken by the Allies during the most destructive war in history. There is no doubt that had the bomb been available sooner, it would have been used against Germany. There was, to be sure, a moral failing in August 1945, but it was on the part of the Japanese government when it refused to surrender after its long war of conquest had been lost. Michael Kort is professor of social science at Boston University and author of The Columbia Guide to Hiroshima and the Bomb (Columbia Press, 2007) HistoryExtra readers George Evans-Hulme and Roy Ceustermans debate... George Evans-Hulme: Yes, it was justified. The US was, like the rest of the world, soldiering on towards the end of a dark period of human history that had seen the single most costly conflict (in terms of life) in history, and they chose to adopt a stance that seemed to limit the amount of casualties in the war, by significantly shortening it with the use of atomic weapons. It was certainly a reasonable view for the USA to take, since they had suffered the loss of more than 418,000 lives, both military and civilian. To the top rank of the US military the 135,000 death toll was worth it to prevent the “many thousands of American troops [that] would be killed in invading Japan” – a view attributed to the president himself. This was a grave consequence taken seriously by the US. Ordering the deployment of the atomic bombs was an abhorrent act, but one they were certainly justified in doing. Roy Ceustermans: No, the US wasn’t justified. Even secretary of war Henry Lewis Stimson was not sure the bombs were needed to reduce the need of an invasion: “Japan had no allies; its navy was almost destroyed; its islands were under a naval blockade; and its cities were undergoing concentrated air attacks.” The United States still had many industrial resources to use against Japan, and thus it was essentially defeated. Rear Admiral Tocshitane Takata concurred that B-29s “were the greatest single factor in forcing Japan's surrender”, while Prince Konoye already thought Japan was defeated on 14 February 1945 when he met emperor Hirohito. A combination of thoroughly bombing blockading cities that were economically dependent on foreign sources for food and raw materials, and the threat of Soviet entry in the war, would have been enough. The recommendations for the use of the bomb show that the military was more interested in its devastating effect than in preparing the invasion. Therefore the destruction of hospitals and schools etc was acceptable to them. Read more | 7 of the best WW2 films GEH: The USA was more interested in a quick and easy end to the war than causing untold suffering. They had in their hands a weapon that was capable of bringing the war to a swift end, and so they used it. The atom bombs achieved their desired effects by causing maximum devastation. Just six days after the Nagasaki bombing, the Emperor’s Gyokuon-hōsō speech was broadcast to the nation, detailing the Japanese surrender. The devastation caused by the bombs sped up the Japanese surrender, which was the best solution for all parties. If the atomic bombs had not had the devastating effect they had, they would have been utterly pointless. They replaced thousands of US bombing missions that would have been required to achieve the same effect of the two bombs that, individually, had the explosive power of the payload of 2,000 B-29s. This freed up resources that could be utilised for the war effort elsewhere. RC: After the bloody battles of Iwo Jima and Okinawa, the death toll on both sides was high, and the countries’ negative view of one other became almost unbridgeable, says J Samuel Walker in Prompt and Utter Destruction: Truman and The Use of Atomic Bombs Against Japan. Therefore, the US created unconditional terms of surrender, knowingly going against the Japanese ethic of honour and against the institute of the emperor, whom most Americans probably wanted dead. Consequently, the use of the atomic bomb became a way to avenge America's fallen soldiers while also keeping the USSR in check in Europe. The Japanese civilian casualties did not matter in this strategy. Also, it did not prevent the Cold War, as the USSR was just a few years behind on a-bomb research. Read more | Before the atomic bombs, the USA hit Japan with one of the most overlooked (but deadly) campaigns in WW2 At the time, revenge, geopolitics and an expensive project that could not be allowed to simply rust away, meant the atomic bomb had to be hastily deployed “in the field” in order to see its power and aftermath – though little was known about radiation and its effects on humans. GEH: Admittedly, the US did use the atom bomb to keep the USSR in line, and for that it served its purpose. It may not have stopped the Soviets developing their own nuclear device, but that’s not what it was intended for. It was used as a deterrent to keep the (sometimes uneasy) peace between the US and the USSR, and it achieved that. There are no cases of a direct, all-out war between the US and the Soviets that can be attributed to the potentially devastating effects of atomic weaponry. The atomic bombs certainly established US dominance immediately after the Second World War – the destructive power it possessed meant that it remained uncontested as the world’s greatest power until the Soviets developed their own weapon, four years after the deployment at Nagasaki. It is certainly true that Stalin and the Soviets tried to test US dominance, but even into the 1960s the US generally came out on top. RC: The price to keep the USSR in check was steep: the use of a weapon of mass destruction that caused around 200,000 deaths (most of them civilians) and massive suffering through radiation. However, it did not stop the USSR from creating the same weapon within four years. It might be argued that, following the explosions, Japan virtually disappeared from the world stage while the USSR viewed the bombing as an incentive to acquire the same weaponry in order to retaliate in equal force if the atomic bomb was ever used again. Considering the tension between the two countries, a similar attack with tens of thousands of civilian casualties would have created a nuclear apocalypse. If the US had organised a demonstration, as they had briefly considered, the USSR would still have responded in the same manner, while Japan – which had made clear overtures for a (un)conditional surrender – could have been spared. Furthermore, by postponing the use of the bomb, scientists would have had time to understand the test results, meaning further anguish, like the Bikini Atoll [a huge US hydrogen bomb test in 1954 that had major consequences for the geology and natural environment, and on the health of those who were exposed to radiation] could have been avoided. GEH: The large civilian death toll that resulted from the bombings can be seen as a small price to pay by the United States in return for their assertion of dominance on the world stage. The USSR’s development of an atomic weapon had been underway since 1943, and so their quest for nuclear devices cannot be solely attributed to the events of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. It should also be considered that the Soviets’ rapid progress in creating an atom bomb was not exclusively down to their desire to compete with the United States, but from spies passing them US secrets. Postponing the use of the atom bomb would only have prolonged the war and potentially created an even worse fate for the people of Japan, with an estimated five to 10 million Japanese fatalities – a number higher than some estimates for the entire Soviet military in the Second World War. Ultimately, the atomic bombs did what they were designed to do. They created such a high level of devastation that the Japanese felt they had no option but to surrender unconditionally to the United States, hence resulting in US victory and the end of the Second World War. RC: Of course civilian casualties of another nation would have been acceptable to the USA. Japan had made clear overtures to peace, but cultural differences made this nearly impossible (the shame of unconditional surrender goes against their code of honour). The determination to use an expensive bomb instead of letting it rust away; the desire to find out how devastating it was and the opportunity to use the bomb as a strong showcase of US supremacy, made Japan the ideal target. Obviously, the USSR would eventually succeed in creating the a-bomb. Therefore, making Hiroshima & Nagasaki the example of the tremendous power of the bombs would make it clear to the USSR that they too needed such weapons to defend themselves. Moreover, other countries claimed the right of nuclear weapons to defend their citizens. Consequently, the tragic bombings became the example of an arm’s race instead of peace. Furthermore, since Japan was already on the brink of collapse the bombing was unnecessary, and peace talks would have taken place within a decent time frame (even after the cancelled Hawaii summit). The millions of deaths calculated by Operation Downfall [the codename for the Allied plan for the invasion of Japan near the end of the Second World War, which was abandoned when Japan surrendered following the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki] actually show that only desperation and honour stood between Japan and unconditional surrender. George Evans-Hulme has a passion for military and political history, and enjoys visiting historical sites across the UK. Roy Ceustermans has a master's degree in the history of the Catholic Church, an advanced master's degree on the historical expansion, exchange and globalisation of the world, and a master’s degree in management.
What happened to Hiroshima after it was bombed in 1945? How many people died?
Some 78,000 people were killed instantly when the US dropped an atomic bomb on the city of Hiroshima in Japan on 6 August 1945. Those who survived suffered radiation sickness and severe burns – and the city was utterly destroyed. Jason Goodyer of BBC Science Focus reveals the devastating aftermath of bombing and explains the science behind it...
The US produced the first nuclear weapons during the Second World War following extensive scientific research dubbed the Manhattan Project, led by J Robert Oppenheimer. When they dropped two bombs on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945, the world had never experienced anything like it before. The dropping of the device – codenamed 'Little Boy' – on Hiroshima on 6 August 1945, claimed the lives of an estimated 140,000 people. What happened when the bomb struck Hiroshima? One second after the bomb struck on the city of Hiroshima, a huge fireball 280m in diameter erupted with a core temperature of more than 1,000,000 degrees Celsius. Heat rays from the explosion raised surface temperatures of everything in their path to more than 3,000 degrees Celsius – more than twice the melting point of iron. Read more | Before the atomic bombs, the USA hit Japan with one of the most overlooked (but deadly) campaigns in WW2 This sudden and extreme rise in temperature rapidly expanded the air around it, generating a blast that travelled faster than the speed of sound. Then, a drop in air pressure in the space behind the blast caused a backdraft powerful enough to burst the eyeballs and internal organs of anyone in its path. Almost everyone within one kilometre of the hypocenter was killed instantly. Those further out were pelted with bits of the city’s buildings, and badly burnt by the extreme heat, giving rise to the characteristic keloid scars – large overgrown tissue produced when the body creates too much collagen. The scar becomes larger than the initial wound. Read more | The countdown to Hiroshima: the 24 hours before the world changed Most of the radiation generated by the blast took the form of gamma rays, but 10 per cent was made up of neutron waves. Both are types of ionizing radiation that are capable of causing alterations to DNA, though neutrons are much more dangerous. Around 10 per cent of Little Boy’s 64kg of uranium was eaten up by the initial fission reaction, leaving the remaining 90 per cent of the radioactive material to be strewn all over the city by the blast. As a result, many of the survivors suffered the symptoms of radiation sickness, which include vomiting, fever, fatigue, bleeding from the gums, thinning hair, diarrhea and, in the worst cases, death. Those that did survive had an increased risk of cancer, though there has been no evidence of abnormalities in their offspring. Read more | Was the US justified in dropping atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki during the Second World War? Two days after the bombing, Harold Jacobsen, the Manhattan Project physician, stated that nothing would grow in Hiroshima for 70 years. However, just one month later, red canna flowers began to sprout less than 1km from the hypocentre. Then, on 17 September, the Makurazki typhoon hit, claiming more than 2,000 lives and flooding great swathes of the city. It did, however, bring in a layer of fresh, radiation-free topsoil that would help the city’s flora to return. The following spring, the city’s iconic cherry trees were blooming. Through further years of slow rebuilding, residents began to grow fruit and vegetables and were gradually able to return to some form of normalcy. Read next | How have nuclear weapons shaped global politics? Jason Goodyer is commissioning editor of BBC Science Focus magazine This article was first published on HistoryExtra in 2016
On 6 August 1945, the crew of the Enola Gay dropped ‘Little Boy’ on Hiroshima. Diana Preston traces the leaps in scientific thought and twists of political circumstance that made the atomic bomb a terrifying reality
Listen to this article: In Hiroshima on 6 August 1945 – the day of the Christian Feast of the Transfiguration – a young mother, Futaba Kitayama, looked up to see “an airplane as pretty as a silver treasure flying from east to west in the cloudless pure blue sky”. Someone standing by her remarked: “A parachute is falling.” Then the parachute exploded into “an indescribable light”. The American B-29 bomber Enola Gay had just dropped ‘Little Boy’, a four-tonne bomb which detonated with the power of 15,000 tonnes of TNT. Pilot Paul Tibbets, who had named his plane after his own mother, struggled to hold it steady as the first shock waves hit. Bathed in bright light, he looked back and saw “a giant purple mushroom boiling upward”. Over the intercom he announced to his shaken crew: “Fellows, you have just dropped the first atomic bomb in history.” The destructive flash that seared Hiroshima into history was the culmination of 50 years of scientific creativity and innovation, and over 50 years of political and military turmoil. Generations of scientists had contributed to that moment. Yet, as they began uncovering the minute building blocks forming the world around them, few could have predicted how their compulsive curiosity would combine with political events to produce a devastating new weapon. The journey began at the end of the 19th century, often called the chemists’ century (as opposed to the 20th, which physicists would dominate). The first step to the bomb arguably arrived in the mid-1890s, when Henri Becquerel found that uranium emitted energy rays. Subsequently, Marie Curie experimented with uranium as well as other elements. She discovered that thorium also emitted these enigmatic rays, which she later called ‘radioactivity’. New Zealand physicist Ernest Rutherford found that uranium actually emitted two types of radiation – alpha and beta – and probably a third. He was correct about the latter; this third type would be called gamma. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2020/09/GettyImages-463918735-2de9787.jpg" width="3770" height="2666" alt="Survivors of the atomic bombing lie in hospital beds in Hiroshima, suffering from the effects of radiation. As well as the 80,000 who died in the blast, 60,000 had succumbed to radiation sickness and related diseases by December 1945. (Photo by Ann Ronan Pictures/Print Collector/Getty Images)" title="Survivors of the atomic bombing lie in hospital beds in Hiroshima, suffering from the effects of radiation. As well as the 80,000 who died in the blast, 60,000 had succumbed to radiation sickness and related diseases by December 1945. (Photo by Ann Ronan Pictures/Print Collector/Getty Images)" /> In 1919, Rutherford made history again. He became the first person to chip a piece off an atomic nucleus, in the process identifying a sub-atomic particle – the positively charged proton (his mentor JJ Thomson had discovered electrons some years before). Rutherford already suspected the presence of another particle within the nucleus: the neutron. One of his former pupils, James Chadwick, discovered the sub-atomic particle at Cambridge University’s Cavendish Laboratory in 1932. The neutron contained no charge – hence its name – and, if used to bombard elements, it could penetrate atomic nuclei without being deflected. Thus, it was an ideal tool for the investigation of atoms. The year 1932 was a scientific annus mirabilis. Also at the Cavendish, John Cockcroft and Ernest Walton built the first machine – using plasticine to seal its joints; the Cavendish did not encourage extravagance – to disintegrate an atomic nucleus with accelerated particles. Their device, dubbed a linear accelerator, provided the first experimental confirmation of Albert Einstein’s theory of E = mc2 (energy is equal to mass times the speed of light squared), implying that enormous amounts of energy could be squeezed from a tiny mass. A community torn apart But in 1933 – the year when Rutherford dismissed the idea of harnessing energy from atoms as “moonshine”, and when Adolf Hitler came to power – the scientists’ world changed. Previously a small, close-knit community, they had met frequently at international conferences – disparagingly termed “witches’ sabbaths” by Einstein – and published their results openly. Now, friendships and professional partnerships were sundered, as many were compelled to flee Nazi Germany and other countries gripped by totalitarian regimes because of their race or political views. Einstein crossed the Channel to England, protected by the British Naval Commander Oliver Locker-Lampson. However, finding England too formal (he preferred “No butlers. No evening dress”), he accepted a post at Princeton University. Against this increasingly tense backdrop, the final pieces of the atomic jigsaw were dropping into place. In France, Marie Curie’s daughter, Irene, and her husband, Frederic Joliot-Curie, discovered how to force nuclei to disintegrate to form new, unstable elements that released radioactive energy as they decayed – so-called ‘artificial radioactivity’. In Rome, physicist Enrico Fermi found that firing neutrons at a target substance through a filter of water – his assistants carried it in buckets from the goldfish pond in the garden behind his laboratory – dramatically slowed the neutrons’ speed, enhancing their chances of hitting and penetrating the target nuclei. However, in Mussolini’s Italy, Fermi’s Jewish wife was in danger. Awarded the Nobel Prize, he used the ceremony in Stockholm as a pretext to leave Italy with his family and travel to the US. Like other scientists, Fermi had friends in Germany, two of whom – the chemist Otto Hahn and Vienna-born Jewish physicist, Lise Meitner – were renowned for their experimental work. In 1938, with Hahn’s help, Meitner fled to Sweden, where Hahn sent her results from experiments on uranium that he had conducted but could not interpret. During a cold, snowy walk with her nephew, physicist Otto Frisch, Meitner pondered the results and realised that Hahn had succeeded in splitting the uranium nucleus, releasing energy. Back in Copenhagen, where he was working with Danish scientist Niels Bohr, Frisch asked American biologist William A Arnold what he called the process by which single cells divided. Arnold replied: “fission.” Soon after, while in the United States, Bohr announced the discovery of fission. However, his own studies showed that of the two isotopes present in uranium – U-238 and U-235 – only the much rarer U-235, constituting less than 0.7 per cent of natural uranium, actually fissioned. This reassured him that an atomic bomb was not viable, since it would take a gigantic effort to separate enough U-235 fuel from natural uranium; “you would need to turn the entire country into a factory,” Bohr believed. Exposing nature’s secrets Hungarian scientist Leo Szilard, now in the US, was less certain that an atomic bomb was impossible, and he lobbied fellow scientists to keep ‘nature’s secrets’ secret. However, the Joliot-Curies were not swayed by Szilard’s pleas, and in March 1939 they published a paper suggesting a chain reaction – a self-sustaining nuclear reaction triggered when a neutron induces a nucleus to fission, releasing energy and causing further fissions – in uranium may be possible. In August 1939, an alarmed Szilard persuaded Einstein to write to US president Franklin Roosevelt, alerting him to the dangers of nuclear weapons. One of his advisors convinced an initially sceptical Roosevelt to act, and the Uranium Committee was established. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2020/09/GettyImages-1187382529-7d00427.jpg" width="1981" height="2048" alt="Dr Leo Szilard and his wife, Gertrud Weiss Szilard, receive news that he has won the 1959 Atoms for Peace Award. Along with Einstein, Szilard wrote a letter to Roosevelt warning him of the dangers of atomic weapons. (Photo by John Loengard/The LIFE Images Collection via Getty Images.)" title="Dr Leo Szilard and his wife, Gertrud Weiss Szilard, receive news that he has won the 1959 Atoms for Peace Award. Along with Einstein, Szilard wrote a letter to Roosevelt warning him of the dangers of atomic weapons. (Photo by John Loengard/The LIFE Images Collection via Getty Images.)" /> The outbreak of the Second World War meant many British physicists turned to war work, in particular radar. Excluded from classified projects, refugee scientists in Britain continued to ponder an atomic weapon. They included Otto Frisch, now in England, and German-born Rudolf Peierls. Hunched over a small gas fire at Birmingham University in the bitterly cold winter of 1940, they calculated the amount, or ‘critical mass’, of fissionable U-235 needed to release suffi-cient neutrons to spark a self-sustaining chain reaction to create an atomic bomb. The Joliot-Curies had estimated 40 tonnes. Peierls and Frisch calculated about one pound. Scribbling on the back of an envelope, they calculated the energy released as equivalent to thousands of tonnes of ordinary explosive. Peierls recalled: “We were quite staggered… an atomic bomb was possible, after all, at least in principle!” They composed the Frisch-Peierls memorandum, a compelling three-page document which they presented to the British government in March 1940. It dealt with scientific, strategic and ethical issues, suggesting that the very high likely number of civilian casualties “may make it unsuitable as a weapon for use by this country”. But, as Germany might have been working on a bomb, they suggested Britain could develop one as a deterrent, “even if it is not intended to use the bomb as a means of attack”. The high-powered Maud Committee reviewed the memorandum, and in summer 1941 they recommended that Britain should institute an atomic bomb project. Churchill agreed: “Although personally I am quite content with the existing explosives… we must not stand in the path of improvement.” British scientists sent copies of the report to colleagues in the still-neutral US, which they used to convince Roosevelt to increase fission research. After Pearl Harbor and America’s entry into the war, that relatively modest work expanded into the vast scientific and engineering effort codenamed the ‘Manhattan Project’, which cost $2bn, ballooned to the size of the US car industry and employed 130,000 people. Under the overall supervision of General Leslie Groves, the project’s scientific core, led by physicist J Robert Oppenheimer, was based at Los Alamos in New Mexico, where a small British team under James Chadwick joined it. On 2 December 1942, in a nuclear pile (reactor) under the west stands of Chicago University’s disused football stadium, Enrico Fermi achieved the world’s first self-sustaining chain reaction. This convinced Roosevelt to fund industrial-scale plants to produce U-235 and also plutonium – an alternative fissionable element created at Berkeley. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2020/09/GettyImages-514882298-ccdf52e.jpg" width="1832" height="2871" alt="Two ‘Hiroshima maidens’ receive a visitor at New York’s Mount Sinai hospital, where they are receiving plastic surgery. Like many of the survivors, they were badly disfigured. (Photo by Getty Images)" title="Two ‘Hiroshima maidens’ receive a visitor at New York’s Mount Sinai hospital, where they are receiving plastic surgery. Like many of the survivors, they were badly disfigured. (Photo by Getty Images)" /> Nazi Germany had surrendered before the Manhattan Project team felt confident they were ready. The world’s first nuclear explosion – the Trinity test – took place on the morning of 16 July 1945 in the New Mexico desert, producing the equivalent of 20,000 tonnes of TNT. The brilliant blinding flash “told us… we had done our job”, Peierls recalled. As for Oppenheimer, he remembered that a line from the Hindu scripture Bhagavad Gita raced through his brain: “I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.” Locking onto the target The target now was Japan, where the military estimated the atomic bomb might save a million young American lives that would otherwise be lost in invading the Japanese home islands. A target committee, with British as well as American members, identified the key criterion for deciding where the bomb should fall: “Obtaining the greatest psychological effect against Japan”. They whittled suitable targets down to three: Hiroshima, Kyoto and Niigata. When US secretary of war Henry Stimson removed Kyoto because of its cultural significance, Nagasaki replaced it. Waiting with his crew on the Pacific island of Tinian, Paul Tibbets learned Hiroshima was his primary target, unless cloud cover was too thick. The final decision would depend on reports from weather planes flying ahead of him. At 2.45am, 6 August 1945, Tibbets opened the throttles, and the heavily laden Enola Gay accelerated slowly down the chopped coral runway. Little more than 100 feet from its end, he eased the B-29 safely and steadily into the northern sky. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2020/09/GettyImages-520833245-cf00720.jpg" width="5100" height="3946" alt="The atomic bombing of Nagasaki on 9 August 1945. This second attack came just three days after Hiroshima was bombed, and it also caused widespread death and destruction. (Photo by Universal History Archive/Universal Images Group via Getty Images)" title="The atomic bombing of Nagasaki on 9 August 1945. This second attack came just three days after Hiroshima was bombed, and it also caused widespread death and destruction. (Photo by Universal History Archive/Universal Images Group via Getty Images)" /> Just over five hours later, a weather plane assigned to Hiroshima radioed that cloud cover was relatively light. Tibbets told his crew: “It’s Hiroshima.” At 8.15am Hiroshima time, they were over the city, the Enola Gay’s bomb doors opened and, Tibbets later wrote, “out tumbled ‘Little Boy’”. It exploded with a temperature of 1 million degrees centigrade at its heart, generating a white-hot fireball. Seeing the boiling clouds, his co-pilot Robert Lewis scribbled on his notepad: “My God, what have we done?” Futaba Kitayama, who had watched it fall, ran for her life. She recalled that in the river, “corpses were floating like dead dogs their shreds of clothing dangling like rags”. She also recounted: “I saw a woman floating face up, her chest gouged out, and gushing blood. Could such terrifying sights be of this world?” On the banks, school children writhed, “crazed, crying, ‘mother, mother’”. As the fires grew in intensity, heavy rain began to fall. At first it came down in large, sticky black drops – “black rain” – as water intermingled with soot, dust and debris flung into the air by the explosion and radioactive material. Traumatised people instinctively opened their mouths to cool their parched throats. At his clinic two and a half miles from the epicentre, army doctor Hiroshi Sawachika struggled to cope as badly burned people arrived. “They held their hands aloft. They looked like they were ghosts,” he said. A heavily pregnant woman begged, “Please help my baby live,” but he could do nothing. A fractured nation Japan surrendered on 14 August 1945, five days after a second bomb – the plutonium-fuelled ‘Fat Man’ – devastated Nagasaki. Exact casualty figures are hard to calculate. In Hiroshima, the authorities estimated the number of deaths by December 1945 to be around 140,000; there were approximately 350,000 people in the city when the bomb fell. Since then, deaths from radiation-related diseases have added to the toll. Although Hiroshima is again a vibrant city with a population more than treble what it was in August 1945, it still remembers. The former Hiroshima Prefectural Industrial Promotion Hall, close to the epicentre of the blast, has – apart from work to stabilise it – been left untouched, a shattered icon. Every day at 8.15am, a bell by the dome rings out, and for a moment passers-by pause and reflect. However, not all Hiroshima survivors are comfortable with how they are perceived. One commented: “I don’t like this special view of us. I’d like to stand up as an individual.” The dropping of the atomic bomb cast a shadow over the lives of some of the Enola Gay’s crew. Tibbets, the plane’s pilot, repeatedly stated that he felt no personal guilt for doing what he saw as his military duty. However, he wrote in his memoirs: “I feel a sense of shame for the whole human race, which through all history has accepted the shedding of human blood as a means of settling disputes between nations.” His co-pilot, Lewis, raised money for medical treatment for the so-called ‘Hiroshima maidens’ – young girls disfigured by the blast. In 1971, he auctioned his log of the Enola Gay’s flight and used part of the proceeds to buy marble from which he sculpted statues with religious themes. They included ‘God’s Wind’, a mushroom-shaped statue that symbolically leaked blood. For their part, many atomic scientists agonised at the time and later about the morality of a nuclear weapon. Oppenheimer returned to academic life and refused to support US plans to build an even more powerful nuclear weapon: the world’s first hydrogen bomb. A variety of opponents, including fellow Manhattan scientist Edward Teller – devoted to what he called the “sweet technology” of the hydrogen bomb – used this, as well as Oppenheimer’s leftwing sympathies, to attack him during the anti-communist McCarthy era. Meanwhile, Joseph Rotblat – the only scientist to walk out of the Manhattan Project on conscience grounds – returned to England, his adopted homeland, and campaigned against nuclear proliferation. Working with other leading scholars, he founded the Pugwash Conferences: a means of bringing academics and public figures together to find peaceful solutions to global security threats. In 1995, he received the Nobel prize. Of course, many more scientists who had been involved in the race to build the atomic bomb grappled with the moral implications of their ruinous creation. Perhaps the last word should fall to Einstein, who famously regretted the role he played in the development of nuclear weapons. He said: “Had I known that the Germans would not succeed in producing an atomic bomb… I would have never lifted a finger.” Want to read more on this topic? Here are some of our most popular articles... Was the US justified in dropping atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki during the Second World War? How have nuclear weapons shaped global politics? 10 key moments in the post-war atomic world In pictures: the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki Diana Preston is the author of Before the Fallout: From Marie Curie to Hiroshima (Corgi, 2006) and Eight Days at Yalta (Picador, 2020) This article was first published in the September 2020 edition of BBC History Magazine
In pictures: the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki
On 6 August 1945, the US dropped an atomic bomb on the city of Hiroshima in Japan that instantly killed around 78,000 people. Many more would die in the years to come from the effects of nuclear radiation – by the end of 1945 the death toll had reached approximately 140,000. Three days later, on 9 August, a second bomb targeting Nagasaki killed around 35,000 people and the final death toll was calculated as at least 50,000
For years debate has raged over whether the US was right to drop the two atomic bombs on Japan during the final weeks of the Second World War. Here, we look back at some of the photos taken in the aftermath of the attack... <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2015/07/GettyImages-50698631-e535247.jpg" width="858" height="1024" alt="Aerial view of the mushroom cloud of smoke as it billows 20,000 ft. in the air, following the United States Air Force's detonation of an atomic bomb over the city of Hiroshima, Japan, August 6, 1945. (Photo by Time Life Pictures/US Army Air Force/The LIFE Picture Collection via Getty Images)" title="Mushroom Cloud Over Hiroshima" /> Read more about this topic The science behind the bombing of Hiroshima Should America have dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki? The countdown to Hiroshima <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2015/07/GettyImages-53313850-157442f.jpg" width="822" height="1024" alt="A mother and child, dressed in traditional clothing, sit on the ground amid rubble and brunt trees, Hiroshima, Japan, December 1945. On August 6, some four months previously, the United States had dropped an atomic bomb on the city--three days later a second one was dropped on Nagasaki. (Photo by Alfred Eisenstaedt/The LIFE Picture Collection via Getty Images)" title="Mother & Child In Wasteland" /> <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2015/07/GettyImages-52017175-27b290d.jpg" width="1024" height="775" alt="HIROSHIMA, JAPAN - JANUARY 1: Picture dated 1948 showing the devastated city of Hiroshima after the US nuclear bombing on the city 06 August 1946 during World War II. (Photo credit should read STF/AFP via Getty Images)" title="Picture dated 1948 showing the devastated city of" /> <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2015/07/GettyImages-107706853-2fceda0.jpg" width="1016" height="1024" alt="JAPAN - AUGUST 01: Some Victims Of The Catastrophe Who Took Refugee In The Rubbles Of A Bank, Transformed Into A Provisonal Haven. On August 01St 1945. (Photo by Keystone-France/Gamma-Keystone via Getty Images)" title="Victims Of The Atomic Bombing Of Hiroshima" /> <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2015/07/GettyImages-104405329-e2617f1.jpg" width="1024" height="733" alt="JAPAN - JULY 01: General view in July 1946 of the Nagasaki Medical School in Japan: it was located at about one kilometer from where the American atomic bomb was dropped. The structure of the buildings held but debris and fallen trees are everywhere. One year after the explosion, the ruins of the bombing are still in evidence: the city which is still radio-active has been deserted by the survivors. (Photo by Keystone-France/Gamma-Keystone via Getty Images)" title="Ruins Of The Medical School Courtyard, Nagasaki" /> <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2015/07/GettyImages-154421574-eebd22d.jpg" width="1024" height="900" alt="Ministry Of Home Defence (Scientific Advisers' Branch), A view of the devastation caused by the atomic bomb that was dropped on Hiroshima in Japan on 6 August 1945. (Photo by Imperial War Museums via Getty Images)" title="Ministry Of Home Defence (Scientific Advisers' Branch)" /> <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2015/07/GettyImages-113639017-bed652a.jpg" width="685" height="1024" alt="Portrait of an unidentified and injured mother and son as they pose with boiled rice balls provided by emergency services the day after the atomic bombing of Nagasaki, Japan, August 10, 1945. The pair stand one mile southeast of the hypocenter (or ground zero) of the detonation. Dropped by a B-29 Superfortress named 'Bockscar,' the bomb was codenamed 'Fat Man.' (Photo by PhotoQuest/Getty Images)" title="Nagasaki Survivors" /> Do you think the US was right to drop the two atomic bombs on Japan? Share your views by commenting below, by tweeting us @HistoryExtra, or by posting on our Facebook page
From the Salem witch trials to the bombing of Hiroshima, history is full of dates that shook the world and continue, decades and centuries later, to astound. Using eyewitness testimony – letters, diaries and archive interviews – the BBC oral history radio and TV programme Witness retells these watershed moments. Here, we round up 11 of the most shocking
The execution of Anne Boleyn On the morning of 19 May 1536, Henry VIII’s second wife, Anne Boleyn, became the first English queen to be publicly executed. Charged with adultery, incest and conspiring the king’s death, Anne was beheaded on a scaffold erected on Tower Green, within the walls of the Tower of London. Her death, says historian Suzannah Lipscomb, “is so familiar to us that it is hard to imagine how shocking it would have been”. Anne and Henry had been married for little more than three years at the time of her death. For her, Henry had left his wife of nearly 24 years and the mother of his child (the future Mary I), and broken with the Catholic Church. By the spring of 1536, however, Henry’s affection had waned and he was hotly pursuing Anne’s lady-in-waiting, Jane Seymour. Along with five courtiers, including Anne’s brother, George, Anne was arrested and imprisoned in the Tower of London in early May 1536. Mark Smeaton, William Brereton, Francis Weston and Henry Norris were tried and found guilty of adultery with the queen, and of conspiring the king’s death, while Anne and her brother were found guilty of high treason. By 19 May, all six convicted had been executed. Reporting on Anne’s execution in 1536, Eustace Chapuys, the Spanish ambassador to Henry’s court, wrote: “No one ever shewed more courage or greater readiness to meet death than she did”. Today, nearly 500 years after her execution, historians cannot agree why Anne had to die. This episode of Witness explores Anne’s final hours and considers why she was executed… To listen, click here. The building of the Berlin Wall For almost 30 years the Berlin Wall separated Germany's communist east from the US-friendly west. Constructed overnight on 12–13 August 1961 by the German Democratic Republic (East Germany), the wall’s official purpose was to stop western “fascists” from entering east Germany and undermining the building of a socialist state. In reality, however, it served to prevent mass defections from east to west. Berliners awoke on 13 August to find themselves cut off from family, friends, work and in some cases even their homes – it was now impossible to get from east to west. The makeshift wall was soon replaced by a 12ft-tall, 4ft-wide reinforced concrete barrier, heavily guarded and lined with booby traps. In total at least 171 people were killed trying to get over, under or around the Berlin Wall, which stood until 9 November 1989. To find out more, click here. The sinking of the Titanic On the night of 14 April 1912, the supposedly unsinkable RMS Titanic collided with an iceberg and sank on her maiden voyage. Of the 2,208 people aboard ship – the largest vessel in the world at the time – only 712 survived. It took just two-and-a-half hours for the huge vessel to sink, and amid freezing temperatures many people are likely to have died within minutes of entering the water. The extent of the devastation was not known until several days later – reporting on the disaster on 16 April, the Daily Mail’s headline read “Titanic sunk. No lives lost”. The tragedy, says Titanic expert Dr Aidan McMichael, was greeted at first “with shock and disbelief, and then immense sorrow at the scale of the loss of life. How could a ship dubbed unsinkable by the media have met its end so tragically?” The Great Fire of London September marks the 350th anniversary of the Great Fire of London, a blaze that destroyed more than 65,000 homes and 13,000 buildings including the Royal Exchange and the original St Paul’s Cathedral. The fire began in the early hours of Sunday 2 September 1666, at the house of Thomas Farynor (aka Farrinor), the king's baker, in Pudding Lane, near London Bridge. Helped by a strong easterly wind coupled with dry and dusty air, the fire raged for three days, by the end of which 100,000 people had been made homeless. Officially only a handful of people died in the fire but the true toll is likely to have been much higher. This Witness episode brings together the first-hand accounts of diarist Samuel Pepys and schoolboy William Taswell, who watched the fire devastate the city. We also hear from Meriel Jeater, an expert from the Museum of London. To listen, click here. The first man in space On 12 April 1961, Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin became the first human to journey into space, making a 108-minute orbital flight in his Vostok 1 spacecraft. Dressed in a bright orange spacesuit and a helmet inscribed with ‘CCCP’ painted in red (which marked him as a Soviet citizen so that he would be recognised after parachuting to safety following ejection from the spacecraft), the 27-year-old Gagarin set off with the word “Poyekhali!” (Let’s go!). Sergei Khrushchev, the son of Nikita Khrushchev, who was the Soviet premier at the time of Gagarin's flight, told BBC News in 2010: “When we look at the response of the Muscovites, where everyone was in the streets, on the roofs of buildings and in the windows, I would compare this celebration with the May 9 victory day (the end of the Second World War for the Soviet Union)”. In this episode, Witness explores how the young cosmonaut became an instant worldwide celebrity and a poster boy for Soviet technological achievement. To listen, click here. The Salem witches Between June and September 1692, some 19 men and women were found guilty of witchcraft and executed in the small religious community of Salem, Massachusetts, in northeastern America. A horror that shocked the world, the Salem witch trials have spawned hundreds of films, books, scholarly articles and plays, including Arthur Miller’s acclaimed 1953 work The Crucible. The executed men and women were convicted on the spurious evidence of a group of young village girls who claimed to have been bewitched. Paranoia, fed by ongoing family feuds and attacks by Native Americans, developed into a wave of hysteria that quickly spread throughout colonial Massachusetts. Another 150 men, women and children were accused in the spring of 1692, and were only spared the gallows by confessing. To find out more, click here. The outbreak of the First World War Fought by more than 30 nations on a geographical scale never seen before, the First World War was arguably the first truly global conflict. It claimed the lives of more than nine million soldiers and an unknown number of civilians, and, says the Imperial War Museum, “forever altered the world’s social and political landscape”. Britain declared war on Germany on 4 August 1914 after weeks of tension following the assassination of Franz Ferdinand, heir to the Austro-Hungarian throne, in Sarajevo on 28 June. Over the coming months, as Europe descended into war, it became clear the war would not be “won by Christmas”. Using archive recordings of eyewitnesses from Germany, France, Britain and Belgium, this episode of Witness tells the story of the start of a war that would devastate a generation. To listen, click here. Jack the Ripper Within just a few weeks in 1888, a serial killer dubbed ‘Jack the Ripper’ mutilated and killed five prostitutes in London’s East End. Panic gripped the city as police hunted for the killer and speculation was rife as to his – or her – identity. Was Jack a doctor, a Jew, a foreigner, a butcher? Was Jack in fact Jill? One theory even linked the murders to Queen Victoria's grandson, Prince Albert Victor. Yet despite interrogating dozens of suspects the police failed to convict anyone of the murders, and to this day the killer’s identity remains a mystery. Here, using contemporary accounts, Simon Watts describes how Jack the Ripper stalked the streets of Victorian London. To listen, click here. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2018/01/Jack20the20Ripper20newspaper20headlines-43427f6.jpg" width="1000" height="660" alt="D23FPW The London Post November 9th 1888 Clippings of the Fifth and final victim of the notorious serial killer Jack the Ripper. Image shot 01/2013. Exact date unknown." title="The London Post November 9th 1888 Clippings of the Fifth and final victim of the notorious serial killer Jack the Ripper. Image shot 01/2013. Exact date unknown." /> Tutankhamun’s tomb Perhaps the greatest archaeological discovery of all time, in 1922 British archaeologist Howard Carter and his team found the intact tomb of an Egyptian pharaoh of the 18th Dynasty: Tutankhamun. The only unplundered tomb of a pharaoh yet found in the Valley of the Kings, the tomb was filled with artefacts including statues and artwork – so many, in fact, that it took 10 years to catalogue them. The 1922 discovery, says art critic Alastair Sooke, sparked a global frenzy for ancient Egypt. “A craze for Egyptian exoticism convulsed the West, infiltrating both high and low culture across the fields of music, fine art, fashion, film and furniture design.” Carter became a worldwide celebrity, touring America in 1924 to deliver lectures about his finds. This Witness episode explores Carter’s detailed record of his discovery. To listen, click here. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2018/01/English20egyptologist20Howard20Carter20and20Mr20Mace20opening20the20wall20of20the20inner20chamber20of20Tutankhamuns20tomb2C201922-aaa1432.jpg" width="1890" height="2400" alt="English20egyptologist20Howard20Carter20and20Mr20Mace20opening20the20wall20of20the20inner20chamber20of20Tutankhamuns20tomb2C201922-aaa1432" title="English20egyptologist20Howard20Carter20and20Mr20Mace20opening20the20wall20of20the20inner20chamber20of20Tutankhamuns20tomb2C201922-aaa1432" /> The bombing of Hiroshima On 6 August 1945, America dropped a nuclear bomb on the Japanese city of Hiroshima, killing around 135,000 people. Within the first three seconds, says expert Stephen Walker, thousands were incinerated as the temperature at the burst-point reached 60 million degrees centigrade – 10,000 times hotter than the sun’s surface. The attack was followed three days later by a second atomic bomb dropped on the city of Nagasaki, which killed at least 50,000 people, although according to some estimates as many as 74,000 died. Many of the survivors suffered symptoms of radiation sickness, which include vomiting, fever, fatigue, bleeding from the gums, thinning hair, diarrhoea and, in the worst cases, death. Here, Witness presents a first-person account from the BBC archives, of a young Japanese schoolgirl who survived the Hiroshima attack. To listen, click here. The 'execution' of Oliver Cromwell Arguably one of the most remarkable moments in history, in 1661 the body of Oliver Cromwell was exhumed from Westminster Abbey to be ‘executed’ for treason. Just two-and-a-half years earlier, in November 1658, Cromwell had been given a state funeral at Westminster. An officer in the Roundheads (parliamentary army) at the outbreak of the Civil War in the summer of 1642, Cromwell went on to become one of the conflict’s key figures and played a leading role in Charles I’s trial and subsequent beheading. Following the king’s execution a republic was declared, known as the Commonwealth of England. How, then, did Cromwell's body come to be dug up and symbolically executed? Witness investigates.... To listen, click here. Witness from the BBC World Service is available on BBC iPlayer. To find out more, click here. This article was first published by History Extra in May 2016
Timeline: the countdown to the atomic bombing of Hiroshima
What happened when the US decided to bomb the Japanese city Hiroshima during World War Two? Stephen Walker, the author of Shockwave: Countdown to Hiroshima, describes the tense hours that led up to the explosion that became the defining event of the 20th century
The war in Europe has been over for three months. But the Japanese show no signs of giving up. Despite daily incendiary raids which have so far wiped out nearly 60 of their cities, their government vows to fight on. At the Potsdam Conference near Berlin, the Allied leaders broadcast their final warning to Japan, demanding her unconditional surrender. The alternative is “prompt and utter destruction”. The warning is rejected. Now the Allies will show the Japanese they are as good as their word. Prompt and utter destruction is no empty term. It is a reality, taking the shape of a bomb like no other in history. By 5 August 1945, the preparations are almost complete. Tomorrow, a Japanese city will fall victim to the world’s first weapon of mass destruction. The final countdown has begun. 19 hours, 16 minutes 5 August, 14:00. Bomb assembly building, Tinian Island. Since its capture in July 1944, Tinian Island in the western Pacific has been transformed into the biggest air base in the world. But the base also has a secret. In a remote corner, protected by several machine-gun emplacements, a dull-grey, oversized trash can is slowly wheeled from a hangar towards a waiting B-29 bomber. With infinite care, the trash can is winched into the bomb bay. It is a tight fit. Several guards stand by, their weapons ready. Security has never been tighter on this island. The trash can is too valuable. The product of three years research and $2 billion, it is America’s most secret weapon. In less than 12 hours, the bomb they call 'Little Boy' will be on its way to the doomed city of Hiroshima in Japan. 9 hours, 15 minutes 6 August, 00:01. Briefing room, Tinian. The man standing on the platform fixes his gaze on the men who will fly with him in a few hours. His name is Colonel Paul Warfield Tibbets, a tough, bullnecked 30-year-old with thick black eyebrows and a pugnacious chin. A veteran of the fierce air battles over Germany, he was handpicked 11 months ago to train this squadron and lead this mission. None of his men have been told the exact purpose of that training. They know only that their mission is expected to end the war. And tonight is the night they have all been waiting for. In the next few hours, declares Tibbets, one of three cities will be hit with a revolutionary weapon, whose destructive power is equivalent to a 2,000-bomber raid. He outlines the targets in order of priority: Hiroshima, Kokura, Nagasaki. Three B-29s will fly to these cities one hour ahead of the strike force to check the weather. The city with the best conditions will be selected for attack. Special tinted goggles are then handed out. Tibbets tells everybody to wear them over the target, otherwise they could be blinded. This bomb was going to be brighter than a super-sized sun. The tension in the room is electric. “A chill went through me,” writes Abe Spitzer, a radio man, in his diary. “The make-believe was over.” Meanwhile, 9,000 miles away, on board the USS Augusta in the mid-Atlantic, US President Truman emerges from Sunday service. He is half way home from Potsdam. Yesterday, he received word that the atomic mission was set to depart at 02:45 Tinian time. His decision to use the bomb is not made without misgivings, but President Truman sees no real alternative. Just a few weeks previously, his joint chiefs of staff had presented their timetable for the projected invasion of Japan. The invasion is planned in two phases. The first, Operation Olympic, is scheduled for 1 November; the second for March 1946. Estimates of casualties vary, but one thing is certain: the Japanese will fight to the bitter end. Still fresh is the memory of Okinawa, the island south of Japan, captured in June after three months of brutal fighting. At least 12,000 Americans and 107,000 Japanese soldiers were killed. To the president, the one solution to the even greater carnage of an invasion of the Japanese home islands is now hanging inside a B-29 bomb bay on the other side of the world. 6 hours, 49 minutes 02.27. Tinian. Before departure, the air crews are subjected to a battery of photographers. By tomorrow the news will be splashed across the world. The B-29 dazzles under floodlights like some Hollywood premiere. Finally the men climb aboard. A photographer snaps a last photo. Tibbets waves out of the window. Beneath him is the name of his plane, Enola Gay. It is also the name of his mother, immortalised in ways neither of them could possibly imagine. The runway is one and a half miles long. Fire trucks are parked along its edge. With its big bomb, Enola Gay is dangerously overloaded. In the past 24 hours, four B-29s carrying conventional bombs have crashed on take-off. If Enola Gay also crashes, it could set off a nuclear accident, wiping out the entire island. As he opens the throttles, Tibbets notices his hands are sweating. The plane races down the runway. Just before it runs into the sea, Tibbets hauls the wheels off the ground. A minute later, two other B-29s follow, one packed with cameras, the other with observers. All three aircraft disappear to the north, for the start of their 1,500-mile flight to Japan. But nobody yet knows on which of the three cities the bomb will drop. The lives of thousands of now-sleeping people depends on what the weather will be like tomorrow morning. 6 hours, 26 minutes 02.50. Hiroshima. Despite the blackout, Hiroshima is still relatively comfortable in this fifth year of the war. Even a few cinemas are still open. Earlier tonight, people streamed to the Kotobuki Theatre to see one of the season’s hit movies, Four Weddings. But food is scarce. A staple diet for the city’s 330,000 inhabitants is grass. The one consolation is that Hiroshima has so far escaped the bombing. Over the past few months teams of schoolchildren have pulled down houses to create firebreaks in case the bombers come. But they never do. A week ago, the mayor brought his baby granddaughter to stay because, he wrote, Hiroshima “is so safe”. A rumour is spreading that Truman’s own mother is a prisoner in the city – that is why it has never been, nor will be, bombed. The order to spare it has come from the president of the United States himself. Read more articles about WW2 WW2 podcasts: 9 top episodes about the Second World War The battle for Okinawa: one Marine’s story WW2: Why did the Allies win the Second World War? 6 hours, 16 minutes 03.00. Enola Gay. Within minutes of take-off, a balding naval captain on board Enola Gay opens a hatch at the rear of the flight deck and steps down into the dark bomb bay. His name is Deak Parsons and his job is one of the most dangerous of this mission. In the next few minutes he will arm the atomic bomb. With an assistant carrying a torch, he squeezes past Little Boy’s black bulk. Only the thin bomb-bay doors separate him from 5,000 feet of thin air. Squatting to work with a set of tools. Over the radio he relays each stage of the arming operation back to Tinian. There are 13 stages. Despite the vibration and the turbulence, his concentration is total. It has to be. A slight slip and the mission could end in disaster. Back on Tinian, General Farrell listens to the radio. By the time Parsons reaches stage eight – Connect Firing Line – his voice disappears into static. At this point, nobody on the ground is certain whether Parsons has succeeded, or blown himself and Enola Gay out of the sky. Listen | Historian Saul David revisits one of the bloodiest clashes of the Pacific War and explains how it played a crucial part in the United States’ decision to use atomic weapons against Japan 4 hours, 16 minutes 05.00. Tokyo. Within the sanctuary of his palace, Emperor Hirohito, Son of Heaven, watches the dawn after another sleepless night. These days, he does not look much like a god. Most of the time he wanders aimlessly through his palace in old clothes and slippers. His right cheek twitches uncontrollably. He knows the war is lost. Despite the army fanatics on his council, he is desperate to find a solution. All his hopes lie with the Russians, still at peace with Japan. Perhaps they will broker a deal with the Allies. His ambassador in Moscow, Naotake Sato, has opened negotiations but so far they have met with failure. Sato is a realist. In his mind, there is only one way to end the war: unconditional surrender. “If the government and military dilly-dally,” he cables Tokyo, “then all Japan will be reduced to ashes”. It is a typically prescient remark, more accurate than Sato could ever have imagined. 1 hour, 7 minutes 08.09. On board Straight Flush, 30,000 feet over Hiroshima. The moment he approaches Hiroshima, Buck Eatherly knows it will be today’s target. As captain of the weather plane assigned to the city, conditions look near-perfect. A huge hole has miraculously opened in the clouds, exposing its heart. Twice Eatherly sweeps over it – both times completely undisturbed – before his radio man sends the weather report back to the strike force, one hour behind. On board Enola Gay, Tibbets receives the message. “It’s Hiroshima,” he says. He adjusts his course towards the city. Co-pilot Bob Lewis jots a note in a private log: “Well folks, it won’t be long now”. 45 minutes 08.31. Hiroshima. Despite an alert, hardly anyone takes notice of Eatherly’s plane. After all, the Americans never drop bombs. Trams trundle over the city’s 49 bridges, packed with commuters. Some of the resident 43,000 soldiers perform their morning calisthenics in the sunshine. Schoolchildren stream to their places of work in factories and offices, for there is no school these days. Everybody is mobilised for the coming invasion. Even the nurses in Hiroshima’s hospitals practise thrusting bamboo spears against dummy enemies. Meanwhile, the city’s newspapers scream out the same bullish headlines. “The Fighting Spirit of the People Lives on,” reads one, adding that victory is just around the corner. Was the US justified in dropping atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki during the Second World War? 5 minutes 09.11. Aboard Enola Gay, 22 miles from the Aiming Point. To Major Tom Ferebee, the bombardier, the city glinting on the horizon is instantly recognisable from countless photos. The only difference is that it is in colour. A handsome Errol Flynn look-alike, Ferebee is a master of his craft, a veteran of 63 missions. Tibbets once described him as “the best bombardier in the whole damn air force”. His eyesight is legendary. He is not the sort of man to miss. 11 shocking moments in history With his left eye pressed to the bombsight, he searches the dense grid of streets for one feature. Then he sees it: a bridge where the Ota river branches in two, shaped like a T – the aiming-point for the bomb. His voice bursts over the intercom: “I’ve got the bridge”. Tibbets immediately warns everyone to put on their goggles. At 09:15 Ferebee flicks a switch. A warning tone howls over the airwaves. In exactly 15 seconds, Little Boy will drop into the clear blue skies over Hiroshima. “There will be a short intermission,” Lewis notes in his log, “while we bomb the target”. 3 minutes 09.13. Air defence bunker, Hiroshima. In Saijo, east of Hiroshima, an observer spots all three aircraft heading towards the city. He calls the air defence bunker. A schoolgirl takes the message: “Three large enemy planes heading west. Top alert”. In a radio station 1,000 metres from the T-shaped bridge, an announcer is finishing breakfast when the bell in the alert room starts clanging. Masanobu Furuta’s job is to broadcast air raid warnings to the citizens. Now he rushes to the studio as an engineer thrusts the latest warning into his hands. 44 seconds 09.15.17. Aboard Enola Gay. The warning tone cuts. The single shackle drops its dead weight into the freezing air. It wobbles before plunging towards the city. Tibbets immediately slams the big bomber into a tight diving turn. He has exactly 44 seconds to escape before the bomb explodes. As Enola Gay tears away, Little Boy continues its fall, accelerating almost to the speed of sound. From the observation aircraft, blast gauge canisters float down over the city, suspended from parachutes. Some of the inhabitants cheer. They think one of the bombers has just been shot down. In the radio studio, Furuta begins speaking into the microphone: “Three large enemy planes approaching…” He gets no further. The station suddenly tilts as he is hurled into the air. Before the sirens have a chance to sound, the sky falls in over Hiroshima. Why North Korea went nuclear Zero hour 09.16.01. Hiroshima. The impact on the city is immediate and catastrophic. In the first billionth of a second the temperature at the burst-point reaches 60 million degrees centigrade, 10,000 times hotter than the sun’s surface. A blinding flash lights up the sky. Within the first three seconds, thousands of people are incinerated, carbonised into charred smoking bundles. Birds ignite in mid-air. Steel-framed buildings liquefy like wax. How have nuclear weapons shaped global politics? Hard behind comes the shock wave, ripping out at the speed of sound, crushing every obstacle that lies in its path. The wall of high pressure leaves a near vacuum behind, sucking viscera out of bodies. Hundreds of radioactive isotopes spill out of the fireball, penetrating flesh and bone. Within 500 metres the effect is invariably lethal. American scientists later call this zone the “scare radius”. Perhaps 80,000 people die in those first seconds after the blast. Thousands more will die later from burns or radiation poisoning, among them the mayor and the baby granddaughter he brought to the city because it was so safe. Nine miles away, the shock wave strikes Enola Gay with a tremendous crash. “My God,” thinks Dutch Van Kirk, the navigator, “the bastards are shooting at us!” Tibbets fights to keep the plane under control. In the tail, rear-gunner Bob Caron watches in astonishment as the biggest cloud he has ever seen punches up into the sky. Beneath it Hiroshima has disappeared. Grabbing a camera, he takes seven photos of the mushroom-shaped cloud: iconic images of Hiroshima’s annihilation. The cloud surges into the stratosphere. Lewis stares in shock. “My God, what have we done?” he writes in his log. “If I live for a hundred years, I will never get these few minutes out of my mind.” Was the US justified in dropping atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki during the Second World War? We put the question to historians and two HistoryExtra readers. Share your views by commenting below, tweeting us @HistoryExtra or by posting on our Facebook page. This article was first published in the August 2005 issue of BBC History Magazine