HistoryExtra
type: channel
link: https://www.historyextra.com
description: Home of Britain’s bestselling history magazine and award-winning podcast
date: 2025-09-04T09:27:38.000Z
update period: hourly
update frequency: 1
update base: 2000-01-01T12:00+00:00
items: After Hiroshima: the atomic plague
items: Kavita Puri on VJ Day: "We don't talk about the war in Asia – which was a messy, complicated conflict"
items: Was the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki by the US in WW2 justified?
items: What happened to Hiroshima after it was bombed in 1945? How many people died?
items: Hiroshima: the race to the atomic bomb
items: In pictures: the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki
items: 11 shocking moments in history
items: Timeline: the countdown to the atomic bombing of Hiroshima

After Hiroshima: the atomic plague
type: item
date: 2025-09-08T08:00:06.000Z
subject: Membership
subject: Period
subject: Second World War
subject: A big day in history
subject: Death
subject: Hiroshima
description: 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
encoded: 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 contr…

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Kavita Puri on VJ Day: "We don't talk about the war in Asia – which was a messy, complicated conflict"
type: item
date: 2025-09-03T08:00:44.000Z
creator: Kavita Puri
subject: 20th Century
subject: Membership
subject: Period
subject: Second World War
subject: Fascism
subject: Hiroshima
subject: Second World War battles
description: 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
encoded: 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…

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Was the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki by the US in WW2 justified?
type: item
date: 2025-05-27T14:00:42.000Z
subject: 20th Century
subject: Period
subject: Second World War
subject: Debate
subject: Evergreen
subject: Hiroshima
description: 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...
encoded: 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 …

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What happened to Hiroshima after it was bombed in 1945? How many people died?
type: item
date: 2023-07-22T06:05:00.000Z
subject: 20th Century
subject: General Modern
subject: Period
subject: Second World War
subject: Hiroshima
description: 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...
encoded: 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 fiss…

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Hiroshima: the race to the atomic bomb
type: item
date: 2021-08-06T14:26:35.000Z
subject: Membership
subject: Second World War
subject: Period
subject: Hiroshima
description: 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
encoded: 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.im…

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In pictures: the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki
type: item
date: 2020-06-24T09:00:32.000Z
subject: General Modern
subject: Membership
subject: Period
subject: Second World War
subject: Hiroshima
description: 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
encoded: 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: So…

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11 shocking moments in history
type: item
date: 2018-05-08T09:12:49.000Z
subject: Ancient Egypt
subject: First World War
subject: General Modern
subject: Medieval
subject: Period
subject: Second World War
subject: Stuart
subject: Tudor
subject: Victorian
subject: Hiroshima
subject: Jane Seymour
subject: Witches
description: 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
encoded: 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 defecti…

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Timeline: the countdown to the atomic bombing of Hiroshima
type: item
date: 2015-08-04T08:03:37.000Z
subject: General Modern
subject: Membership
subject: Period
subject: Second World War
subject: Hiroshima
subject: The global war
description: 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
encoded: 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 l…

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