6th August 1945
Just after eight o’clock on this Monday morning, a B29 Superfortress bomber of the United States Army Air Forces bearing the name Enola Gay released a single bomb over Hiroshima, a Japanese city of about 340,000 people. The bomb had been nicknamed “Little Boy”, to distinguish it from the much larger device, Fat Man, which was already prepared to drop on another city, Kokura. When the bomb exploded 2,000 feet above the ground, 66,000 of Hiroshima’s inhabitants died almost instantaneously, and a further 69,000 were injured. By the end of 1945, the death toll had reached 140,000. By a conservative estimate “Little Boy” ended 200,000 lives.
Will you ask the Japanese to surrender?
