I made him crawl using his arms and knees. Even though I myself was terribly burned, I could not ignore him. The soles of his feet were badly burned, peeling, with red muscle exposed. On the way to my house, I ran into an another friend, Tokujiro Hatta. For my burning body, the cold water of the river was as precious as treasure. And I felt like my body was burning all over. On the other side, I plunged myself into the water three times. I went over to the other side of the river using that bridge. There was a small wooden bridge left, which had not been destroyed by the blast. If we had been slower by even one second, we would have been killed by the fire.
We reached the riverbank at the same moment a fire broke out.
A mother and her baby were lying with skin completely peeled off. I saw a man whose skin was completely peeled off the upper half of his body and a woman whose eyeballs were sticking out. We walked toward the river, and on the way we saw many victims. I looked around and found a friend who lived in my town and was studying at the same school. After a while, I noticed someone calling my name. My skin was peeling and hanging.Īutomatically I began to walk, heading west because that was the direction of my home. I was burned at the back of the head, on my back, on both arms and both legs. Then I looked at myself and found my clothes had turned into rags because of the heat. I felt the city of Hiroshima had disappeared all of a sudden. Everything collapsed for as far as I could see. My friends were all knocked down on the ground. Then the teachers came out from the school building, and the class leaders gave the command to fall in. Ī junior high school student of 14, Akihiro Takahashi was lined up waiting for the morning meeting to begin at his school, less than a mile away from where the bomb fell. Other witness reports of the bombing can be found at. The following oral histories, gathered in 1995 as part of a project for the Hiroshima Peace Culture Foundation and translated by Mitsuru Ohba of Hiroshima City University, have been condensed and edited for clarity. On this anniversary of the bombing of Nagasaki, we are publishing firsthand testimony from the nuclear era’s first victims. Nine countries are known or are widely believed to have nuclear weapons capability, with Iran working to develop it.
Today, the world is still struggling with how to control the weapons unleashed 64 years ago.
dropped a second nuclear bomb on Nagasaki. Hours later, they dropped Little Boy, the first atomic bomb used in warfare, on the Japanese city of Hiroshima. 6, 1945, pilot Paul Tibbets and his crew took off from the Pacific island of Tinian in a B-29 bomber named the Enola Gay.