An entirely false belief grew up that those who had been exposed to radiation carried illnesses they could pass on to others. Their lives in the decades following the bombing would not be easy. Those who survived the bombing would come to be known as ‘Hibakusha’, which translates as ‘explosion-affected people’. Read more about: WW2 What if Hiroshima and Nagasaki never happened? By the end of the year, the death toll stood at 130,000. Field hospitals were hastily set up and transportation of the injured to surrounding towns and cities was quickly arranged, but many more would die in the months after the bomb dropped. Help was quickly sent to care for the survivors, but there was little that could be done for so many, especially those suffering from severe radiation poisoning. Hideously wounded citizens, their eyeballs burned out of their skulls and their skin burned away, died in unimaginable agony. Of Hiroshima’s 28 hospitals, 26 had been destroyed and the vast majority of the city’s doctors and nurses had been killed in the blast. Radiation sickness and radiation poisoning began killing many who had survived the initial attack. The city’s rivers were clogged with the corpses of the wretched souls who had desperately sought relief from their horrendous burns. Those who survived the attack wandered the irradiated streets in a pitiful state, others lay buried under piles of rubble and others still lay stricken on the ground, too injured to walk. The occasional ruin of a concrete building, a few forlorn lines of telegraph poles and thousands of dead trees were all that remained standing in a vast wasteland of rubble. The city’s rivers were clogged with the corpses of the wretchedĪfter the fires burned themselves out, Hiroshima was unrecognizable. The Atomic Age had arrived with a vengeance, and the world would never be the same again. Three days later, a second bomb fell on the city of Nagasaki, killing a further 35-40,000 people. A single bomb dropped from a B-29 bomber on the morning of 6 August 1945 had killed a third of Hiroshima’s population and wiped 70% of the city off the face of the earth. Immense firestorms swept through wood and paper houses. Thirteen square kilometres of a city that had been a bustling commercial, military and transportation hub was reduced to rubble. An estimated 80,000 people were killed instantly by the intense heat of the explosion. Less than a minute later, a blinding flash was followed by a wave of destruction almost beyond human imagination. The bomb dropped at 8:15 am on a clear August morning.
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