Sixty years later, Andrew Kenny says that the atomic bomb
saved millions of lives ‘A dragonfly flitted in front of me
and stopped on a fence. I stood up, took my cap in my hands, and was about to catch the dragonfly when... ’ ... when there was a flash of white light in the blue sky above Hiroshima. This was at 8.15 a.m. on 6 August 1945. Then followed a new kind of thunder and a new kind of hellfire. A minute later those who were still alive, those whose flesh was not falling off their bodies, blinked into a changed world, like a traveller waking and finding himself on a different planet. Through the glare of flames and the darkness of smoke, they saw that their city had vanished and been replaced by a blackened desert, empty of everything except fire, charcoal, corpses and the concrete skeletons of buildings. Some of the dead had become small: shrivelled lumps of charred meat sticking to pavements and bridges. Some of the living had become big: swollen red monsters with pits in their faces where their eyes and mouths had been. A man without feet walked on his ankles; a woman without a jaw stood with her tongue hanging out of her head; a naked man sat holding his eyeball in his hand. One of the crew of the bomber, describing what he had seen below, said, ‘Did you ever go to the beach and stir up the sand in shallow water and see it all billow up? That’s what it looked like to me.’ Sixty-six thousand people died instantly, 120 thousand by the end of the year.
I visited Hiroshima last month. I was in Kyoto to attend an energy conference where, somewhat ironically I suppose, I gave a talk on South Africa’s new nuclear power reactor, the Pebble Bed Modular Reactor. (It was well received.) After the conference I took the train to Hiroshima, swishing through the Japanese countryside at 180mph in a spotlessly clean and comfortable carriage. A conductor in a demure uniform bowed to us upon entering and leaving it. I looked out at the low hills of Japan with their feathery covering of light green trees and at the neat grey towns with factories and paddy fields in their midst. At Hiroshima station I took the tram to the most haunting ruin in the world and then walked through a graceful park to the ‘Peace Museum’ (the war museum).
The museum is sombre, informative and horrifying. Models and large mural photographs show the city before and after the bomb. There are statistics of death, heat, pressure and radiation, eye-witness accounts of children watching their mothers die in front of them, anecdotes, such as the man about to catch the dragonfly, and little household relics, such as molten spoons and a wristwatch stopped at 08.15. But the most evocative remnant stands outside the museum on a riverbank. It is the ruin of the ‘Hiroshima Prefectural Industrial Promotion Hall’, usually known as the ‘Atomic Dome’.
Hiroshima is built on a large delta consisting of seven rivers. At its centre is the Tshaped Aioi Bridge, which provides a threeway crossing where one river divides into two. This T was the target for the atomic bombardier. He was slightly out and the bomb exploded about 200 yards to the south, 600 yards above the ground. The Promotion Hall is close to the bridge. It was built in 1915, designed by a Czech architect, and consisted of cylindrical shapes joined together into a four-storey block with a small green dome on the top. It looked like half an apple on top of a jukebox. The atomic bomb vastly improved it as an aesthetic object, changing it from a mundanely ugly building into a masterpiece of stricken form. I gazed at it for a long time from every angle and then paced out the distance south to where the bomb had gone off. In an act of compulsive foolishness I stared upward to look for the spot in the air.
Was Truman right to drop it? I have no doubt he was. However I look at it, I cannot see other than that the bomb saved millions of lives, Allied and Japanese. All British combatants in the second world war that I have ever spoken to, including my parents, described the same reaction when they heard of the Hiroshima bomb: tremendous relief. A foreman, Tommy, at a factory I worked at in Lancashire in 1980, told me that in July 1945 he was in the Pacific doing exercises for the invasion of Japan. He expected to die. He thanked the bomb that he became a grandfather.
The most effective soldiers in the war were the Germans. The only way the Allies could beat them was to outnumber and outgun them. They seemed to have a limitless supply of officers with quick, flexible minds who could read a battle and make a swift and intelligent assessment of the best tactics required.
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