Hiroshima and the First Atom Bomb

by Read Listen Learn

Hiroshima is a small port and city on the Japanese coast. In 1945, at the end of the Second World War, the Americans bombed Japanese cities every day. Tokyo, the capital city, was gone; 90% of it by fire bombing. The Americans destroyed many other cities too. They didn't fire bomb Hiroshima because it was small and unimportant in the war. But, on 6th August, 1945, that changed. That day, the Americans dropped just one, special new bomb on the city. It was called the atom bomb.

It destroyed almost all the city in just a few seconds and killed, on that day and in the next weeks, more than 90,000 Japanese of all ages. Of course, many hundreds of thousands more were badly wounded. At first, the Japanese did not want to surrender so the Americans dropped another atom bomb on Nagasaki, another small port city, on 9th August. Now, the Japanese quickly gave in.

When the world learned about the atom bombs, there was great shock. Shock at the sudden deaths of so many normal people in a very abnormal way. And shock when they saw that, one day very soon, someone could end the world with enough of these new bombs or bigger ones. Some people said that what happened at Hiroshima, and even more at Nagasaki, was a war crime.

Why did the Americans do it? They made the new atom bomb with the help of scientists from around the world. At first, they thought that they would drop it on Germany but the Germans lost the war before they were ready to use the new bomb there. The Japanese were very brave, hard fighters who almost never surrendered. They thought it was much better to die fighting. It always cost the Allies a lot of soldiers’ lives to take even a small island away from the Japanese Army.

When Japan was losing and the Allies came close to their country, the experts told the Allied generals it would cost about two million dead Allied soldiers, and many millions more dead Japanese to take the country. Also, the Japanese soldiers were told to kill all Allied prisoners of war if the Allied armies came near. The Japanese held more than one million of them.

So, of course, Hiroshima was an ugly thing in human history. But, did the two hundred thousand Japanese who died when the bombs were dropped save the lives of millions?