Download
1 / 24
240 likes | 415 Views
THE ATOMIC BOMB Plymstock School history department. PART ONE: OPERATION OLYMPIC. By the early summer of 1945 Nazi Germany had been defeated.However, WWII was more than a European war. Japan had conquered an area much larger than Germany and still remained defiant, though on the retreat.
E N D
PART ONE: OPERATION OLYMPIC By the early summer of 1945 Nazi Germany had been defeated.However, WWII was more than a European war. Japan had conquered an area much larger than Germany and still remained defiant, though on the retreat. Battle fought across the Pacific and the introduction of Kamikaze pilots convinced the Allies than Japan would have to defeated to the last man. Millions of men who had fought in Europe were therefore shipped to the East in readiness to invade Japan.
Silence reigned on the desert. Observers not at S-10 lay down in assigned trenches dug in a dry abandoned reservoir, “faces and eyes directed toward the ground and with the head away from Zero.” They waited. A voice like the voice of the Creator spoke from above the black clouds: “Zero minus ten seconds!”. A green flare exploded in the darkness, illuminating the clouds before it vanished. “Zero minus three seconds!” The silence deepened. In the east was the first faint pink blush of dawn. And then out of the bowels of the earth there shot into the sky the herald of another dawn, the light not of this world but of many suns in one. Within a fraction of a second it flashed to a height of more than 8,000 feet, a great greenish glare rising ever higher until it pierced the clouds, lighting the desert with a pure brilliance never before witnessed by human being. It was a great ball of fire a mile in diameter.
Shooting upward, ever upward, growing wider as it rose, it kept changing colours like a giant chameleon, changing shape like a monster genie, first an enormous mushroom and then – fleetingly – a Stature of Liberty magnified many times. At last it reached its apex 41,000 feet above the earth, 12,000 feet higher than the highest mountain in the world, seeming to lean slightly to gaze down upon the pygmy peaks of the Sierra Oscuro Range. Having seen the flash, transfixed with awe and wonder, the men gathered on the desert that momentous morning next heard the sound. It came with a mighty roar like the simultaneous explosion of thousands of blockbusters. Its thunder reverberated among the Sierra Oscuros and made the desert floor shake as though convulsed in the grip of an earthquake.
Suddenly some of the scientists and science writers began to caper and dance, like primitive man celebrating the discovery of fire. They laughed and clapped their hands. “The sun can’t hold a candle to it,” someone said. Another felt it was as though the Creator had said: “Let there be light.” To Prof. George B. Kistiakowsky of Harvard it was: “the nearest thing to doomsday that one could possibly imagine. I am sure, that at the end of the world – in the last millisecond of the earth’s existence – the last man will see what we have seen.”
But perhaps the most intuitive and ominously prophetic remark came from Dr. Oppenheimer. A scientist of the West who had helped to produce this greatest and most fearful achievement of Western scientism, he retreated into the Eastern mysticism which had nourished another side of his extraordinary intellect. A student of Sanskrit, the ancient language of India, he quoted two passages from the Bhagavad-Gita, the sacred epic of Hinduism. The first: “If the radiance of a thousand suns were to burst into the sky, that would be the splendour of the Mighty One . . .” The second: ”I am become Death, the shatterer of worlds.”
August 6, 1945, dawned a cloudless blue day with a light breeze blowing from the south. Visibility was almost perfect for ten or twelve miles. At 7:07 in the morning an air-raid siren blared. Four B-29s were visible high in the sky. The air-raid shelters filled quickly. But then two of the Superforts flew away and the other pair seemed to vanish. At 7:31 the all-clear sounded. People quickly left the shelters, secure in the belief that this this was one of those strange but frequent appearances of three or four Superforts dropping but a single almost harmless bomb*.
Suddenly an unearthly light of a whitish-pinkish cast engulfed the city, followed by an awful blast like a hundred simultaneous thunderclaps. A horrible, howling wind arose, succeeded by a wave of suffocating heat. Within a few seconds the centre of the city vanished. Thousands of people on the streets or in the parks and gardens were instantly killed. Thousands more lay writhing in their death throes.
Everything standing in the path of the explosion – walls, houses, apartment building, temples, stores, everything – was swept away and annihilated. Trains loaded with commuters were hurled from the tracks. Trolley cars were flung from the streets like gigantic toys. For three quarters of a mile from the centre of the blast nothing was left erect or alive. What had been living beings – animals as well as humans – were frozen in attitudes of indescribable agony. Trees were uprooted and flung into the air like flaming spears. Green rice plants turned tan and the grass became straw.
Beyond the central circle of death even the most solidly built structures collapsed in simultaneous rows, and falling debris of beams and bricks, glass and girders, were seized by the wind and hurled about the city like missiles, killing and wounding many thousands more. Other homes built of wood and straw simply flamed and fell. Almost everyone inside these buildings died or was wounded. Those who escaped perished two or three weeks later from the delayed effects of deadly gamma rays.
Reservoirs and rivers were stuffed with corpses. People unable to bear that awful heat rushed into them hoping to cool their bodies, only to be boiled to death. Everywhere were dead and dying soldiers. They must have had their coats off before the explosion because they were burned from the hips up. Beneath the burned-off skin the flesh was wet and mushy. They also must have been wearing their military caps: the black hair on their heads was unsigned, making it appear as though they wore black-lacquered bowls. But their faces were hideous. Their features had been burned off and their ears melted off. It was not possible to tell which way some were facing.
Some were left with only their white teeth protruding, as though bared like those of a horse. Everywhere among those still living there arose a piteous crying for water. Chaos reigned at those hospitals that had survived the blast. The corridors were jammed with mothers seeking their children, husbands searching for wives, their anxious cries mingling with the screams of the afflicted. Some hospitals caught fire in the general conflagration that swept the city and had to be evacuated.
Half an hour after the explosion, beneath a still-cloudless sky, a gentle rain began to fall. Some Japanese believed that the gods had intervened. But the rain had been caused by the rise of overheated air to a great height, where it became condensed and fell back as water. The rainfall lasted but five minutes, after which the wind rose again and the fires spread with frightening speed. By nightfall, the flames began to subside. But there was really not much left to burn. 60% of Hiroshima had been destroyed and 150,000 people died or received their death wounds.
Thus the Atomic Age had dawned, not in the benign brilliance of a thousand radiant suns, but in the malignance of a black mushrooming cloud and a wrathful, spreading fireball. Death, the shatterer of worlds, had come upon the Earth.
1/3 Mile From GROUND ZEROWind Speed: 980mphTemperature: 7000 C
2/3 Mile From GROUND ZEROWind Speed: 620mphTemperature: 500C
