Hiroshima: 75th anniversary of the atomic bomb
It is likely that when those sirens rang out on the morning of Aug. 6, 1945, the residents of Hiroshima continued on with their daily routines. Imperial radars had only picked up a small number of planes at high altitude, so they believed no major threat was expected.
But one of those planes was the Enola Gay, an American B-29 bomber that had been rigorously outfitted to transport and drop Little Boy.
"I saw a black dot in the sky," recalled survivor Fujio Torikoshi. "Suddenly, it 'burst' into a ball of blinding light that filled my surroundings. A gust of hot wind hit my face; I instantly closed my eyes and knelt down to the ground."
Just after 8:15 a.m., a flash of blinding light erupted over the city. Within a matter of seconds, Hiroshima transformed into an inferno as Little Boy detonated 1,900 feet above the city center.
"Where we had seen a clear city two minutes before, we could now no longer see the city," recalled Enola Gay's navigator, Theodore Van Kirk. "We could see smoke and fires creeping up the sides of the mountains."
When Little Boy collided with Hiroshima, its surface temperature reached 10,000 degrees Fahrenheit. Nearly everything within 1,600 feet of the bomb's blast zone was cremated. According to UCLA, anything and anyone within a mile was destroyed. Fires raged up to four miles from the crash site. Around 70 percent of the city's buildings collapsed.
Almost instantly, some 80,000 people, about 30 percent of Hiroshima's population, had been killed. Among them were non-natives, including foreign laborers and American prisoners of war.
The bomb also missed its precise target, the Aioi Bridge, and instead detonated directly over the Shima Surgical Clinic.
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