Eyewitness Hiroshima: A detailed account of one of the most destructive attacks in human history by Weale Adrian

Author:Weale, Adrian [Weale, Adrian]
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw3
Publisher: Lume Books
Published: 2020-07-29T16:00:00+00:00

5

On the Ground

In 1945 Hiroshima was a city of approximately 320,000 inhabitants, built on the islands and shores of the delta where the river Ota flows into Japan’s inland sea. The river breaks up into six main channels which divide the city into islands, linked together by a total of 81 bridges. It is mostly low-lying ground, rarely more than a few feet above sea level, with the exception of a two-hundred-foot-tall hill in the eastern sector of the city; but it is bounded by a natural bowl of hills a little way inland.

The architecture of Hiroshima was varied. For the most part, the inhabitants lived in traditional Japanese wooden houses, and many of the industrial and institutional buildings in the town were made of the same material, but there were some western-style, reinforced-concrete framed constructions, particularly in the town centre, known locally as the ‘old town’ and housing the governmental and business district. The majority of the town’s industrial output was achieved in small, wooden-built workshops and factories set amidst clusters of workers’ houses, but Mitsubishi Industries’ shipyard was the largest non-military employer in the area.

The largest building in the town centre also lent justification to Hiroshima’s selection as the world’s first nuclear target. Hiroshima Castle was four hundred years old and built on a small, artificial mound, surrounded by a moat. Inside the keep were the local divisional and regional headquarters, responsible for the administration of approximately 40,000 soldiers in Hiroshima alone; the military district around it also housed a training depot, a hospital, an ammunition dump and a supply area. Underneath the castle was a civil defence headquarters, ready to direct anti-aircraft fire in the event of a raid.

Also in Hiroshima, positioned in a suburb of the town beneath Mount Futaba, was the headquarters of the Japanese 2nd Army, under the command of Field Marshal Shunruko Hata, who had been given responsibility for the ground defence of southern Japan against the forthcoming Allied invasion. Hata’s previous career had encompassed the Russo-Japanese war of 1905, a period as military attaché to Germany and delegate to the Paris peace conference of 1919, a stint as minister of war in 1939, and personal rule over Japanese-occupied China from 1941 to 1944. In April 1945, Hata had been a possible candidate to succeed as prime minister, but instead he had been nominated to mobilize the population of southern Japan in defence of their homeland. To this end, women and children were being taught to use pikes, spears and petrol bombs, and the sick, disabled and bedridden were set to work constructing booby traps for use against the invaders. Despite this, Hata was under no illusions that Japan was still capable of defeating America and the Allies; instead, he hoped that Japan might make better terms than the unconditional surrender that was then being demanded.

As the war had continued, so Japan had been forced more and more to involve the whole population in the war effort. Notwithstanding Field Marshal Hata’s rudimentary training

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