Understanding Hiroshima

Understanding Hiroshima

Over 200,000 people, dying in one small period of time is quite a large number considering it would grow for many years to come. The number this is referring to is the amount of people died during the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and the radiation effects from them. Not everyone completely understood what happened that early August 6th morning in 1945 when the United States attempted to force Japan to surrender by heavy force, but an editor by the name of Michael Hogan decided to put together a book consisting of nine essays to explain different angles of the situation which is titled “Hiroshima in History and Memory”. The topics ranged from the American decision to the drop of the first atomic bomb to the recent controversy over the Enola Gay exhibit in Washington, D.C.

The book opens when Hogan writes his first essay which surveys the literature on the atomic bombing of Japan and introduces the historical context of the bomb and the Pacific Theater of World War II. It all started on the day that the American B-29 bomber Enola Gay lifted off from a small Tinian island runway to drop the “little boy” which would soon destroy more than half of Hiroshima and would be the first of two atomic bombs to devastate Japan. Before all of the bombings had happened both the Americans and the Japanese were both in the process of upgrading their military. Japan was increasing their aircraft, expanded conscription, and amassed a formidable force to meet allied armies at the home front . The Americans were busy finishing off the rest of the japans navy force, expanded their bombing operations, blocked the Japanese islands, and hastened to finish the atomic bomb that could end the war with small costly action; they thought. When President Harry S. Truman took over office, he did not really know of what the Manhattan project was all about except that some engineers and scientist were in the process of bomb making and he never looked at it to see if all of it was even true that it could end the war quickly. Hogan explains that the plane got its name from the pilot Colonel Paul W. Tibbets’ mothers name and that the bomb itself name came from its appearance of being a skinny thousand-pound boy.

In the second part of Hogan’s book, he focused the essays around what the decisions that were made that led up to the event of the bombings. When the fiftieth