Seventy years ago, a nuclear bomb killed , people and razed two-thirds of their city. Here is an extract from John Hersey's shocking field-report.
At exactly fifteen minutes past eight in the morning, on 6 August , Japanese time, at the moment when the atomic bomb flashed above Hiroshima, Miss Toshiko Sasaki, a clerk in the personnel department of the East Asia Tin Works, had just sat down at her place in the plant office and was turning her head to speak to the girl at the next desk.
Some , people were killed by the atomic bomb, and these six were among the survivors. They still wonder why they lived when so many others died. Each of them counts many small items of chance or volition β a step taken in time, a decision to go indoors, catching one street car instead of the next β that spared him. And now each knows that in the act of survival he lived a dozen lives and saw more death than he ever thought he would see.
At the time, none of them knew anything. Reverend Tanimoto got up at five o'clock that morning. The frequency of the warnings and the continued abstinence of Mr B with respect to Hiroshima had made its citizens jittery; a rumour was going around that the Americans were saving something special for the city. Mr Tanimoto had been carrying all the portable things from his church, in the close-packed residential district called Nagaragawa, to a house that belonged to a rayon manufacturer in Koi, two miles from the centre of town.
Mr Tanimoto had had no difficulty in moving chairs, hymnals, Bibles, altar gear and church records by pushcart himself, but the organ console and an upright piano required some aid. A friend of his named Matsuo had, the day before, helped him get the piano out to Koi; in return, he had promised this day to assist Mr Matsuo in hauling out a daughter's belongings. The two men set out. The morning was perfectly clear and so warm that the day promised to be uncomfortable.
