World at War: Hiroshima

The book starts out by discussing the fear that Germany would develop an atomic bomb and how Albert Einstein wrote FDR to convince him it was a good idea for the US to work on an atomic bomb itself.

It's interesting that the bomb project cost around $2 billion, but at no time did Congress actually approve money for the specific project, something which still happens today.

There's lots of good photos in the book, including one of a V-1 bomb falling over central London that I have not seen elsewhere.

Something I have not read anywhere else. There apparently was a large clock on a domed building in downtown Hiroshima that had stopped three days earlier. It stopped at 8:15, which turned out to be the same time the atomic bomb actually exploded.

The book includes personal accounts of young survivors of the bombing. The book also discusses the arguments given for using the bomb and how people felt about Japan and the Japanese at the time, and has a really good sentence:

“Inhumanity is the price all mankind pays for total war.”

What is really good about this book is that it's a children's book, yet done in a strong anti-war manner with good information and photographs. Just because a book might be labeled “juvenile” does not mean it is childish.

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Japanese-American Internment Camps index page
Japan and World War II index page