Emiko Okada was 8 and playing in the yard with her two little brothers
when she saw the blinding light. Then came a boom and and a blast that
knocked her unconscious. When she came to, she recalls, "I felt like the
sun was falling toward me." Her brothers wailed beside her, their bodies
swollen with burns.
The greatest and most terrible
of wars ended, this week, in the echoes of an enormous event—an
event so much more enormous that, relative to it, the war itself shrank
to minor significance. The knowledge of victory was charged with sorrow
and doubt as with joy and gratitude.
—Aug. 20, 1945
Neighbors stumbled by, naked, skin hanging off them in shreds. Corpses
littered the road. It was Aug. 6, 1945, in Hiroshima. No one in the
southern Japanese city had paid much attention to the distant buzz of
three American B-29 bombers overhead. But one of them was the Enola Gay,
and at 8:15 a.m. it dropped a single bomb that unleashed the "rain of
ruin" President Truman had promised if Japan did not surrender.
An
estimated one-third of the city's 350,000 residents—including
Korean conscripts and imperial army units—were killed instantly.
Many thousands more would die from its radioactive poison in the coming
years. The bomb turned glass to liquid, buildings to dust, and people to
mere shadows etched on the ruins.
A black rain fell. It looked like
oil to Seiko Komatsu, then 9. He saw the rain soak his wounded
grandparents. He had been having breakfast in their house when the bomb
fell and gutted it. Three days later, the city of Nagasaki was destroyed
by another atom bomb. Japan announced its unconditional surrender on
Aug. 14.
TIME Cover
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