CounterPunch Exclusives

CounterPunch Exclusives

Three Events That Changed the World in Early August 1945

Leslie Groves, Manhattan Project director, with a map of the Far East – Public Domain

In quick succession, three things happened in early August 81 years ago that fundamentally changed the world and the course of human history:

We start with 8:00 a.m. on August 6, 1945, when three gleaming, silvery four-engine B-29 Superfortress bombers, larger than any other flying machine in the world, soared at 31,000 feet over Hiroshima, just shiny specks in a clear blue sky, high enough that their four throbbing engines were scarcely audible from the ground.

Many of the city’s residents, as WWII ground towards its violent inexorable end, had become inured to seeing waves of such American bombers pass overhead and for some reason, never targeting their city. So if they noticed the three planes at all, they might have assumed they were spotter or damage assessment aircraft and not what they really were: a single bomber, an observer plane to take photographs of what would be a dreadful historical event, and a weather monitoring plane. Few probably even noticed when one of the lead planes in the formation released a huge 10-foot bomb from its specially-enlarged bomb-bay doors and then veered sharply into a rapid dive to create as much distance as possible from the shockwave to come.

Sending a message to Moscow

The US plan for this and another atomic bombing to come soon was to maximize the damage done and the human death tolls. Accordingly, they gave no warning to residents of either targeted city to evacuate. The plan was also to strike each city around 8:00 in the morning to maximize the number of people out on the street without shelter.

The plan worked. The throngs of Japanese workers in Hiroshima heading to their job sites, the little chattering children in their “sailor suit” uniforms on the way to school, mothers and grandparents worrying about what they’d find to buy for the evening meal at the city’s war-strapped street markets and fretting about loved ones fighting a losing battle in foreign lands—all were too preoccupied that morning to watch the bomb’s 44.4-second plunge to the designated detonation altitude of 2000 feet above the city.

In a way, they were the lucky ones. The bomb’s silent flash instantly melted the eyes as well as the cerebral neurons of those who were watching and instantly killed those not looking too, vaporizing their bodies or turning them to ash. Some 80,000 Japanese, mostly civilians, women, children, and elders, died instantly. Or if they were among the 100,000 located farther away from Grand Zero, soon after the 15-16 kiloton air burst. Another 100,000 would die more painfully and slowly later over days, weeks, months and years from radiation or physical injuries from the blast. The world’s first nuclear bombing had also instantly leveled the city of 350,000.

Up above that nightmare holocaust, Captain Robert A. Lewis, co-pilot of the Enola Gay, the plane that dropped the uranium bomb dubbed “Little Boy,” after witnessing its catastrophic results: an angry, searing, roiling mushroom cloud rising 45,000 feet into the sky above an entirely flattened city- penned in his combat notebook, “My God, what have we done?”

Another A-Bomb, another message

Three days later, on the morning of August 9, the Japanese government, still reeling from the epic incendiary-bombing destruction of 17 square miles of the capital city of Tokyo in March 1945 (still the largest aerial mass destruction of a city in human history), and with communications and transport still not functioning well, was still trying to ascertain what had happened to Hiroshima. They didn’t know US Commander-in-Chief Harry Truman had days earlier already ordered the use of a second B-29, this time carrying the “Fat Man,” a second type of atomic bomb based upon plutonium.

The target selected for obliteration was Kokura, a city of 130,000. But heavy cloud cover spared it. Instead, Maj. Charles Sweeny, pilot of Bockscar, the B-29 carrying the “Fat Man,” opted, literally on the fly, to continue on for 100 miles to the alternate target of Nagasaki, a larger city of 263,000.

Arriving there and finding that alternate target to also be cloud-shrouded, and with his fuel getting low, thanks to the nearly five-ton “Fat Man” bomb he was carrying, Sweeny decided to fly to Okinawa, dropping the unused weapon in the ocean en route if necessary.

Then a break in the cloud over Nagasaki opened, and he changed his mind and headed back to the city, dropping the bomb at 11:02 a.m. in what to this day remains the last wartime use of an atomic bomb.

Because the plane had at first started to leave, relieved Nagasaki residents who had been huddling in bomb shelters because of the earlier air-raid sirens, had already heard the all-clear signal and had been emerging in relief, just as the bomber returned to drop its payload of death. An estimated 40,000 people—nearly all civilians—died instantly from the 21-kiloton blast, with another 100,000 dying over the next year. Mountains outside the city limited the area of total destruction to a single square mile, but also focused the blast’s power and searing 7000-degree heat within that constricted space.

A high school friend of mine, Public Health professional Charles Vidich, told me his late father, Arthur, a noted sociologist, had been an officer in the Marines in the Pacific during the war. A few weeks after Emperor Hirohito broadcast his stand-down order to the Japanese military and told the Japanese people that the war was lost and he was ending it by surrendering, Vidich and a detachment of Marine enlisted men were sent to land at the destroyed port city of Nagasaki to check for any defenders or caches of weapons. What Vidich discovered was a totally flattened city still in shock. He managed to locate a Japanese military pilot with access to a small spotter plane, which he commandeered to take him up over the city so he could take photos of the epic destruction. These images he kept as his personal property—a trove which his son discovered after his death and posted on a special website (see below image), the first unadulterated or uncensored aerial evidence of the nuclear war crime the US had committed.

The nuclear lying starts early

President Truman took to the airwaves the day of the leveling of the first city, Hiroshima, lying that it was “a military base.” But while there was indeed an Imperial Army base on the outskirts of the city (basically an administrative center), the target of the bomb was the city’s center, the goal being to cause the maximum number of deaths and the maximum physical destruction. In any case, most of the Japanese military was marooned in China, Manchuria, Korea, and Southeast Asia or stranded on islands spread across the Pacific with no way of returning to Japan to defend their country. That said, of the 80,000 people initially killed by the Hiroshima bomb, only 10,000 were in uniform. In the case of Nagasaki, of the 40,000 killed immediately by the plutonium bomb, only 150 were soldiers.

Before Japan even knew about the new US super weapon, and that the first of those two bombs was already en route from Tinian Island, with plans for using them both in quick succession on two Japanese cities, the country was already desperately suing for peace and was getting a deaf ear from Washington. As I report in my book Spy for No Country: The Story of Ted Hall, the Teenage Atomic Spy Who May Have Saved the World (Prometheus Books, 2024), Dwight D. Eisenhower, at the time Supreme Allied Commander of the Allied Amies in Europe, was briefed on the plan to use the two bombs on Japan by........

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