National Geographic: Hiroshima

Title

The program is told from both sides, the American and the Japanese.

The bomb is put into the plane and the B-29 gets ready for flight.

Some scenes are CGI.

The explosives needed to start the chain reaction were not put into the bomb until the plane had taken off.

Another part had to be added before the bomb was ready to be used.

Hiroshima was the main target. 85% of the people in the city were civilians.

The bomb is ready to be dropped. The weather was perfect, but no one knew for sure that the bomb would actually work. One of the major factors in the deaths was that, at the time of dropping of the bomb, people were going to work, going to school, etc, which meant a lot of people were outside.

The bomb exploded

The aftermath.

An atomic bomb was then dropped on Nagasaki three days later.

The aftermath. A few weeks later Truman ordered that reports be made about the damages caused by the bomb, both on buildings and on people. These became the Strategic Bombing Survey series.

The first thing the bomb did was explode and light up the sky. Then it sent out radiation.

Then there was the actual blast wave of energy.

The explosion disintegrated people nearby, leaving just a black mark on the concrete.

This is what war leaves behind.

Those who survived being relatively close to the point of explosion suffered horrible burns, some simply turned totally into carbon. This doesn't count the radiation damage that they suffered and began to die from.

A survivor from the bombing who saw the people who were bloody and dying, even by the riverbanks and in the rivers themselves.

90% of the doctors and nurses were killed in the bombing. There was almost no one left who could help any of the survivors. 42 of the 45 hospitals were either totally destroyed or badly damaged and thus unusable.

The film then goes into what the radiation did to those who had survived.

Then, showing just how inhumane science can be, there was a group set up to study the effects of the radiation on survivors. They would not help them, though. They did not treat them. They just studied them like one would examine something under a magnifying glass. They got lots of data but it was at the cost of their humanity.

This is a photo taken in Hiroshima on the day of the bombing. It was not released until 1952. Everything had been marked top secret and no 'regular' people were informed of just what had happened there.

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