IT was the day that changed the world for ever – when the first atomic bomb brought Armageddon to Japan.
Oscar-winning 2023 film Oppenheimer tells how the world’s most destructive weapon was created. But it does not show the A-bomb being used in action.
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Next week marks 80 years since scientist Robert Oppenheimer’s nuclear bombs obliterated two Japanese cities, ending World War Two.
Incredibly, the weapon that could destroy all life has since brought eight decades of peace, through fear of mutual destruction.
Here, minute by minute, we detail the story movie viewers did not see – of how US President Harry Truman approved the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945, before Japan’s Emperor Hirohito surrendered six days later.
MONDAY AUG 6, 1945
1.30am (Japan), 2.30am local time: Nine days after US President Harry Truman had warned Japan to surrender or face “prompt and utter destruction”, a US Boeing B-29 Superfortress bomber emerges from a top-secret compound at the world’s busiest airbase.
Lieut-Col Paul Tibbets, 29, is at the controls of the plane, named Enola Gay after his 57-year-old mother, on the Pacific island of Tinian, 1,500 miles from the Japanese mainland.
In the hold is only one warhead — a bomb so deadly that it could not be armed in advance in case the plane crashed on the runway, wiping the US base off the face of the Earth.
The device, nicknamed Little Boy, is 10ft long and 28inches in diameter and has the explosive force of 20,000 tonnes of TNT.
Physicist Harold Agnew, who would be flying alongside to monitor the explosion, confessed later: “That bomb was completely unsafe. If they’d crashed, anything could have happened.”
1.40am: Photographers and film crews surround the Enola Gay, which is lit up by spotlights as her ten-man crew pose for photos. Theodore “Dutch” Van Kirk, who was on his 59th mission, recalled: “There were all these people — photographers, newspapermen — everywhere. It looked like a Hollywood premiere.”
1.45am: Heavily overloaded with the five-tonne bomb on board, Enola Gay rumbles down the 1.6mile runway and takes off with 200ft to spare.
Behind are two more planes with nicknames — The Great Artiste, carrying scientific instruments to record the blast, and Necessary Evil, with a camera crew on board to film the explosion and damage. Ahead lies a six-hour flight in a moonless sky.
2.20am: Also on board Enola Gay is US Navy captain William “Deke” Parsons, 43, who had witnessed the horror of Oppenheimer’s atomic test in the New Mexico desert and described it as “the hottest and brightest thing since the creation”.
Parsons, along with electronics specialist Morris Jeppson, 23, wriggle into the crammed bomb bay to carry out the 11-step process of arming Little Boy.
Working by flashlight for 15 minutes, they insert a fuse and four bags of cordite gunpowder that will detonate the bomb, which contains 64kg of highly enriched uranium.
4.15am: Van Kirk would recall: “That morning, the sunrise was the most beautiful I’d ever seen.”
6.25am: Jeppson returns to the bay to make final adjustments. Little Boy is now fully armed.
7.09am: Straight Flush, one of three US weather reconnaissance bombers sent to check out three possible cities to attack, is seen over Hiroshima, home to 245,000 people.
On the ground, Hiroshima’s citizens have heard a rumour that the Americans were saving something for their city because, for the last two months, US planes had been dropping harmless orange bombs, the same size as Little Boy.
Oppenheimer had warned that the bomb’s shockwave could crush his plane like a giant hand swatting an ant.
7.30am: Over the intercom, Tibbets announces: “It’s Hiroshima.”
Co-pilot Captain Robert Lewis, 27, writes in his report: “There will be a short intermission while we bomb our target.”
8.10am: Flying at 285mph, Enola Gay reaches 31,000ft. Her crew, now wearing flak jackets and welder’s goggles, search for their aiming point, the T-shaped Aioi Bridge in Hiroshima city centre.
Akihiro Takahashi, 14, is in the playground of a high school, watching the bomber overhead.
8.15am +16seconds: An alarm sounds as Bombardier Major Thomas Ferebee releases Little Boy, which nosedives towards the earth. Engines screaming, Tibbets turns Enola Gay into a steep diving turn of exactly 159 degrees.
Oppenheimer had warned that the bomb’s shockwave could crush his plane like a giant hand swatting an ant.
8.16am +2seconds: Little Boy explodes at 1,890ft above the ground, creating a fireball of 10,000F — the same as the surface of the sun.
The explosion rips through Hiroshima’s Communications Hospital. Of 150 doctors in the city, 65 are already dead and most of the rest are wounded. Some 1,654 of 1,780 nurses are also killed or too hurt to work.
At the Red Cross Hospital, the city’s biggest, only six doctors out of 30 are fit to function.
One of them is surgeon Dr Terufumi Sasaki, who is trying to deal with at least 10,000 wounded who descend on the hospital, which has just 600 beds.
Van Kirk recalls: “Everybody was waiting for that bomb to go off because there was a real possibility it was going to be a dud.”
Despite wearing goggles, the explosion “was like a photographer’s flash going off in your face”. Tail gunner, George “Bob” Caron screams: “Here it comes!”
Moments later, the shockwave hits them, followed by a huge radioactive cloud that can be seen from 400 miles away.
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8.17am: As Enola Gay levels off, Tibbets tells his crew: “Fellows, you have just dropped the first atomic bomb in history.”
The B-29’s crew look for Hiroshima. Van Kirk says later: “You couldn’t see it. It was covered in smoke, dust, debris.
“And coming out of it was that mushroom cloud.”
Lewis writes in his log: “Just how many did we kill? My God, what have we done?”
More than 100,000 people in Hiroshima die in an instant.
Another 40,000 would succumb to their injuries, while thousands more would suffer death by radiation poisoning.
In the devastated city centre, 8,000 children aged 12 and 13, helping clear firebreaks to limit damage from air raids, are vapourised as the fireball engulfs the wooden buildings.
Eiko Taoka, 21, is on a tram clutching her year-old son as she hears a screaming noise and the sky goes black. Fragments of glass suddenly appear in the baby’s head. He looks up at his mother and smiles.
That smile will haunt Eiko for the rest of her life. Her little boy will live for three more weeks.
Akihiro Takahashi is blown across the playground, his skin on fire.
He staggers to the Ota River to cool his burns, jumping into the water just as the huge wall of flame engulfs the city.
10am: Faced with such devastation, Lewis believes the Japanese will have surrendered by the time Enola Gay lands back at Tinian. He signs off his log: “Everyone got a few catnaps.”
Akihiro climbs out of the Ota River and finds a school friend, Tokujiro Hatta, who has burnt feet and his muscles are exposed beneath peeled skin.
They head slowly home with Tokujiro crawling on his knees and elbows and leaning on Akihiro as he walks on his heels.
Thousands of naked, badly burnt people are also shuffling out of the city.
Setsuko Nakamura, 13, would recall: “Some had eyeballs hanging out of their sockets. Strips of flesh hung like ribbons from their bones.
“Often, these ghostly figures would collapse in heaps, never to rise again. With a few surviving classmates, I joined the procession, carefully stepping over the dead and dying.”
1.58pm: Enola Gay lands back on Tinian 12 hours and 13 minutes after take-off. In Hiroshima Akihiro spots his great-aunt and uncle walking towards them.
He said it was like “seeing the Buddha in the depths of hell”. Akihiro would survive after months in hospital, but his friend Tokujiro died. In 1980, Akihiro met Enola Gay’s pilot Paul Tibbets in Washington DC.
3.05pm: Tibbets is first out of Enola Gay. Waiting for him are 100 men, including General Carl Spaatz, commander of US Strategic Air Forces in the Pacific, who pins the Distinguished Service Cross on Tibbets’s chest.
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4.20pm: Enola Gay’s crew undergo radiation tests plus examinations to see if their eyes have been damaged. All pass.
10pm: A party is held on Tinian, while Captain Parsons, Enola Gay’s weapons expert, signs documents confirming Little Boy was deployed.
Meanwhile, at the Red Cross Hospital in Hiroshima, worn out and wearing glasses taken from a wounded nurse after his specs were lost in the explosion, Dr Sasaki wanders the corridors, binding up the worst wounds.
WHEN the Americans do not hear any sign of surrender from Japan, they decide a second, bigger, atomic bomb is needed. This explosive, ‘Fat Man’, is 40 per cent more powerful than Little Boy.
With no electricity, he works by the light of fires still burning outside and candles held by the ten remaining nurses.
Patients are dying in their hundreds. The stench of death is overwhelming.
11.55am Eastern War Time: President Truman is on USS Augusta, heading home from the Potsdam Conference in Germany where, with British PM Winston Churchill and Joseph Stalin, he had warned Japan of the consequences of failure to surrender.
He is handed an urgent War Department message: “Hiroshima was bombed at 7.15pm Washington time August 5 . . . results clear cut, successful in all respects.” Truman shouts: “This is the greatest thing in history!”
The crew cheer and bang their lunch tables. One sailor says: “Mr President, I guess that means I’ll get home sooner now.”
TUESDAY, AUGUST 7
WHEN the Americans do not hear any sign of surrender from Japan, they decide a second, bigger, atomic bomb is needed.
This explosive, “Fat Man”, is 40 per cent more powerful than Little Boy, with a core made of plutonium rather than uranium.
THURSDAY, AUGUST 9
2.47am (Japan time): US Air Force B-29 bomber Bockscar, piloted by Major Charles Sweeney, who had been on the Hiroshima mission, sets off from Tinian. The target is the city of Kokura in Japan’s west — with Nagasaki as a back-up in case of bad weather.
8.44am: Sweeney’s crew arrives above Kokura and finds the city covered in fog.
They attempt three bomb runs, but cancel each one at the last moment because they cannot see anything below.
10.32am: After “animated discussions”, the crew decides to fly on to the secondary target, Nagasaki, 95 miles south. Nagasaki was only added to the list because US Secretary of War, Henry Stimson, had happy memories of staying 19 years earlier in Kyoto, the original No1 target.
Nagasaki was added instead after Stimson insisted: “I don’t want Kyoto bombed.”
10.58am: Arriving at Nagasaki, Bockscar only has enough fuel for one pass over the bustling city, which is also covered in fog.
11am +50seconds: Bombardier Captain Kermit Beahan yells: “I see a hole!” But the gap in the cloud is above an area several miles away from the point they had planned to drop the bomb.
11.01am +13seconds: Beahan shouts: “Bombs away!” and releases the most powerful atomic bomb ever used in warfare.
11.02am: Fat Man detonates 1,650ft above the harbour city.
Sweeney later says this bomb seems “more intense, more angry” than the one he watched fall on Hiroshima.
Everyone within one mile of ground zero is vaporised — at least 40,000 people die instantly.
About 30,000 more will rapidly die from burns and injuries.
Despite Fat Man being more powerful than the Hiroshima weapon — with a core temperature of up to 1.8million F — the death toll is far less.
That is because this bomb falls in a valley, and the sides contain some of its spread. Just outside the vaporisation zone, British prisoner of war Geoffrey Sherring is trying to light a cigarette when “a very, very brilliant and powerful light” fills the sky, “completely eclipsing the sun”.
He will later recall: “It was the colour of a welding flash, a blue, mostly ultraviolet flash.”
Geoffrey then feels the “thundering, rolling, shaking” of the bomb’s shockwave.
This brings down a wall in the camp, which crushes fellow prisoner Corporal Ronald Shaw.
The 25-year-old, from Edmonton, North London, is the first British person to be killed in an atomic bombing.
11.06am: Bockscar’s crew decides to head to the US air base at Okinawa because they do not have enough fuel to reach Tinian.
11.30am: Japan’s Supreme War Council is in the middle of a meeting in Tokyo to discuss a possible conditional surrender when a messenger arrives with news of the Nagasaki blast.
Noon: Bockscar begins its descent into Okinawa, with less than one minute of fuel left.
Sweeney takes the mic and shouts: “I’m coming straight in!”
He lands and another crew member later recalls: “A bunch of very jittery people debarked.”
4.30pm: Bockscar takes off again and heads for Tinian.
The crew switches on Armed Forces Radio hoping to hear of a Japanese surrender, but are disappointed.
9.30pm (Japan time), 10.30pm Tinian time: Touchdown at Tinian, but there is no fanfare and photos for the arrival, unlike the scenes after the Hiroshima mission.
However, Tibbets, from the Enola Gay crew, comes out to meet them. Sweeney asks: “Now what about some beer?”
Tibbets says: “Chuck, I’m afraid I have some bad news. The beer ran out.”
FRIDAY, AUGUST 10
2am (Japan time): Japanese Emperor Hirohito tells an emergency meeting of Japanese war leaders in Tokyo: “I cannot bear to see my innocent people suffer any longer.”
He says his “sacred decision” is to surrender, on the condition that he is allowed to remain as head of state.
The news is cabled to the US, which rejects the terms and demands unconditional surrender.
WEDS, AUGUST 15
Noon (Japan time): Japanese radio broadcasts a pre-recorded speech by Emperor Hirohito, announcing unconditional surrender — the first broadcast by any Japanese emperor.
In the UK, this will for ever be known as VJ — Victory over Japan — Day.
SUNDAY, SEPT 2
9.04am (Japan time): World War Two formally ends when Japanese officials sign the surrender treaty aboard USS Missouri in Tokyo Bay.
- Additional reporting: Eleanor Sprawson
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