49 Fun Facts About Hiroshima and Nagasaki

Which city did B-29s firebomb on 9–10 March 1945, burning out sixteen square miles overnight?

Tokyo: General Curtis LeMay sent the bombers in low at night with incendiaries because so much of Japan's war production was scattered through small workshops and homes. The raid left a million people homeless.

What was the code name of the gun-type bomb dropped on Hiroshima?

Little Boy's gun design, which fired one piece of its nuclear fuel into another, was thought so sure to work that it was never fully tested before it was dropped on Hiroshima.

Announcing Hiroshima, Truman said the US had spent how much on 'the greatest scientific gamble in history'?

$2 billion, Truman said, 'and won'. He added that few of the workers knew what they had been producing: they saw great quantities of material going into the plants and nothing coming out.

Which US Army Air Forces unit under Colonel Paul Tibbets was created to deliver the bombs?

The 509th Composite Group was 'composite' because it had its own transports and support units, which kept outsiders away from its secret. Most of its own airmen were never told what they were training to drop.

From which island in the Marianas did the atomic missions take off?

Tinian had been turned by Navy Seabees into the biggest air base in the world within months of its capture. Each atomic bomb was loaded from a pit, with the B-29 manoeuvred over the top of it.

Which city did Secretary of War Henry Stimson remove from the target list for its cultural significance?

Kyoto stayed off the list because Stimson, who had visited it in the 1920s, took his fight with General Groves to Truman, who backed him. The tale that he honeymooned there is probably a myth.

At which Allied conference did Truman tell Stalin of 'a new weapon of unusual destructive force'?

Potsdam: Stalin showed little interest, saying only that he hoped it would be put to good use against the Japanese. He could afford to stay calm, because his spies had told him about the bomb project long before.

Which test on 16 July 1945 proved the implosion bomb design in the New Mexico desert?

Trinity was held up by rain, and while the scientists waited Enrico Fermi offered bets on whether the blast would set the atmosphere alight and, if so, whether it would destroy only New Mexico or the whole world.

What is the literal meaning of 'mokusatsu', Prime Minister Suzuki's reply to the Allied ultimatum of July 1945?

Kill by silence is the literal sense of its two characters. In use the word runs from 'ignore' to 'treat with silent contempt', and the Allies took Suzuki's remark as a rejection.

Leo Szilard helped draft a 1939 letter warning Roosevelt of a German atomic bomb; which famous physicist signed it?

Albert Einstein signed it, yet he played no part in building the bomb: the Army denied him a security clearance in 1940 because of his pacifism. He later said he regretted signing.

The B-29 Enola Gay was named after whom?

The pilot's mother, Enola Gay Tibbets, got her name on the bomber only hours before the mission: her son Paul took the plane over and had a maintenance man paint it beneath his window.

Why did William Parsons arm the Hiroshima bomb in mid-air?

Fear of an accidental detonation on takeoff was well founded: Parsons had watched heavily loaded B-29s crash and burn on the runway. So he and an assistant finished assembling the bomb in the bomb bay once the plane was in the air.

Survivors called the Hiroshima bomb 'pikadon' after which two sensations?

Flash and boom: 'pika' is the flash and 'don' the blast that followed. Sunao Tsuboi, who survived as a student and became a teacher, earned the nickname 'Mr. Pikadon' by telling his classes about the bombing.

What landmark was the aiming point for the Hiroshima bomb?

The Aioi Bridge, an unusual T-shaped crossing where two rivers meet, was the mark the bombardier lined up on. The bomb drifted wide of it and burst in the air above a surgical hospital instead.

The Hiroshima bomb equalled about four times the tonnage dropped on which German city in February 1945?

Dresden's centre was burned out by Allied air raids. One atomic bomb matched their whole bomb load roughly four times over in an instant, though less than two percent of its nuclear fuel actually fissioned.

Who became the first sitting US president to visit Hiroshima?

Barack Obama laid a wreath in the Peace Park in 2016 and embraced an elderly survivor. As expected, he offered no apology for the bombing, which he described as the morning 'death fell from the sky'.

How soon after the atomic bomb were some of Hiroshima's streetcars running again?

Three days: the streetcars restarted on 9 August, even though the tram company had lost 185 employees and seen 108 of its 123 cars wrecked or damaged.

The Hiroshima Carp, founded four years after the bombing and rescued by fans' donations, play which sport?

Baseball: when the cash-strapped Carp faced being disbanded or merged in 1951, people in the recovering city dropped money into donation barrels to keep their team alive.

Airmen of which nationality, held prisoner near the hypocenter, were among those killed by the Hiroshima bomb?

American airmen held at a military police headquarters died with the city. A Hiroshima survivor, Shigeaki Mori, later spent decades tracing their families and getting their deaths officially recognised.

Why did Hiroshima make the oleander its official flower?

It was among the first to bloom: it had been feared that nothing would grow in Hiroshima for decades, so the sight of oleanders in flower gave the survivors heart.

Which aircraft dropped the Fat Man bomb on Nagasaki?

Bockscar puns on the name of its usual commander, Frederick Bock, who was not aboard. Charles Sweeney's crew borrowed the bomber because their own was still fitted with scientific instruments from the Hiroshima mission.

Which city was the primary target on 9 August, escaping when it was obscured by cloud and smoke?

Kokura lay under haze and smoke drifting from a fire raid on neighbouring Yahata the day before. The bomber made three runs over the city without once sighting its aiming point, then turned away.

Why did the Nagasaki bomber's crew fear having to ditch in the sea?

It was nearly out of fuel: a failed transfer pump had trapped 640 gallons in a reserve tank, and long waits at the rendezvous and over the first target burned much of the rest. One engine died of fuel starvation as it landed.

Why was the Nagasaki raid moved from 11 to 9 August?

To avoid five days of forecast bad weather, the crews on the island had the bomb ready two days early. Nobody in Washington had to approve: the July order already allowed further bombs as soon as they were ready.

Which element, bred in nuclear reactors, formed the core of the Fat Man bomb dropped on Nagasaki?

Plutonium made in reactors could not be used in the simple gun-type design, so the scientists had to invent the far trickier implosion bomb to make it work.

Which Nobel Prize-winning novelist was born in Nagasaki nine years after the atomic bomb fell?

Kazuo Ishiguro left Nagasaki for England at five, yet when he began writing fiction he found himself drawn back to the city of his birth. His first novel is set there in the years of recovery after the bomb.

Fat Man was more powerful, yet which feature of Nagasaki kept its damage below Hiroshima's?

Its hills walled in the blast. The bomb burst over an industrial valley north of the downtown it was meant for, and the ridges between shielded much of the rest of Nagasaki.

Which manga series follows a boy through the Hiroshima bombing, as its author Keiji Nakazawa lived it at six?

Barefoot Gen came from anger: Nakazawa avoided the subject for years, until his mother's cremation in 1966 left only ash and almost no bones. He resolved then to put the bombing into his manga.

Where did the Nagasaki bomber make an emergency landing after the mission?

Okinawa had been fully in Allied hands for only a few weeks, and nobody there knew the bomber was coming. With the control tower silent, the crew fired flares to clear a way through the traffic.

Which organisation of Hiroshima and Nagasaki survivors won the 2024 Nobel Peace Prize?

Nihon Hidankyo was formed in 1956, after a decade in which the survivors' suffering was largely hidden. The Nobel committee credited their testimony with helping to make any use of nuclear weapons a taboo.

The bomb caught worshippers in Nagasaki's Urakami Cathedral preparing for which feast?

The Assumption falls on 15 August, and parishioners had gathered in the cathedral ahead of the feast. Everyone inside was killed when the building, close to the hypocenter, was destroyed.

By the end of 1945, roughly how many had died from the Hiroshima bomb, by Japan's later estimate?

About 140,000 comes from a Japanese estimate made in the 1970s, roughly double the first US counts. No figure can be exact: wartime records were incomplete, and nobody is sure how many people were in the city that morning.

Japan's surrender was formally signed on 2 September 1945 aboard which US battleship?

USS Missouri was named for President Truman's home state and had been launched the year before by his daughter Margaret. The signing on its deck formally ended the war.

In his surrender broadcast, how did Emperor Hirohito describe what had struck Hiroshima and Nagasaki?

'A new and most cruel bomb' came in the first broadcast most Japanese had ever heard from their emperor. The night before, rebel officers had tried to seize the recording to stop it going out.

What does the Japanese word 'hibakusha' mean?

Explosion-affected people is the literal sense. Many survivors kept the label secret for years, because admitting it could cost them a job or a marriage.

Why was double-bombing survivor Tsutomu Yamaguchi in Hiroshima?

On a business trip for Mitsubishi Heavy Industries, he was badly burned, spent the night in the city and went home to Nagasaki in time for the second bomb. He lived to 93 and told his story at the United Nations in 2006.

Sadako Sasaki, who died of leukaemia aged 12, is remembered for folding what?

More than a thousand paper cranes is the Peace Memorial Museum's count, from her family's testimony, though it is often said she died at 644. Her classmates then raised the money for the Children's Peace Monument.

Built to show off and sell local products, what was Hiroshima's Genbaku Dome called before the bombing?

The Prefectural Industrial Promotion Hall stood almost directly under the blast. Many citizens wanted the painful ruin pulled down, and only in 1966 did the city resolve to preserve it for good.

Which two countries objected when the Genbaku Dome was made a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1996?

The United States and China each put a statement on record. Washington dissociated itself, citing a lack of historical perspective on what led to the bombing; Beijing said other Asian peoples had suffered the greatest losses.

Where has the Nagasaki bomber stood since 1961?

The National Museum of the US Air Force in Dayton took it in after years when the bomber sat largely forgotten in desert storage in Arizona. The Hiroshima plane went to the Smithsonian instead.

Veterans' groups attacked the Smithsonian's planned 1995 Enola Gay exhibition for dwelling too much on what?

The bomb's Japanese victims, shown in graphic photographs, angered veterans, and the Senate called the script revisionist. The full exhibition was cancelled, only the plane's nose went on show, and the museum's director resigned.

Which heavy cruiser carried the Hiroshima bomb's components from California to the Marianas in July 1945?

USS Indianapolis raced its secret cargo across the Pacific in ten days. Four days after the delivery a Japanese submarine sank the cruiser, and because nobody reported it missing, only 316 of its 1,195 men were rescued.

In the Silverplate cover story, 'Thin Man' and 'Fat Man' were which two leaders touring America by Pullman car?

Roosevelt and Churchill fitted names the bombs already had, chosen for the weapons' shapes. Airmen then used the code names on the telephone as though they were arranging a rail tour for the two leaders.

Thousands of the dead at Hiroshima were forced labourers and other migrants from which Japanese-ruled country?

Korea was under Japanese rule, and many Koreans had been brought over as wartime labour. Survivors who went home were cut off for decades from the medical support given to survivors in Japan, until lawsuits forced a change.

What struck Hiroshima six weeks after the atomic bomb, bringing down bridges across the ruined city?

A typhoon hit on 17 September 1945, and its floods and landslides killed about 2,000 people across Hiroshima Prefecture, deepening the misery of a region still reeling from the bomb.

John Hersey's 'Hiroshima' filled an entire issue of which magazine?

The New Yorker gave the whole issue to the one article because, its editors wrote, few people had yet grasped the bomb's destructive power. The issue sold out almost at once.

Which physicist did General Groves pick to run the secret Los Alamos bomb laboratory?

Robert Oppenheimer got the job despite never having run a large project, having no Nobel Prize and having Communist friends. His laboratory took over an isolated boys' school on a New Mexico mesa.

What did the 1945 Franck Report urge before any city was bombed?

A demonstration on empty land first, urged James Franck's committee of Chicago scientists, or a nuclear arms race would be inevitable. The government's scientific panel replied that no demonstration was likely to end the war.

The Peace Flame in Hiroshima's Peace Memorial Park is meant to keep burning until what happens?

All nuclear weapons are abolished: only then is the flame to go out. At the 2010 memorial ceremony, UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon urged the world to reach that day within the survivors' lifetimes.