In early August 1945, Japan received two "super gifts" from the U.S. Two atomic bombs, code-named "Little Boy" and "Fat Man," exploded on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in Japan. Japan's Hiroshima and Nagasaki, two cities were instantly destroyed, the surface of the building disappeared, the civilian and military deaths and injuries, the explosion generated by the smoke and dust flying into the sky condensed into black rain stained the earth, as the tears of death.
At the time, the United States spent nearly two billion dollars on research and development of the atomic bomb, employing more than 130,000 staff, and why why was it so eager to drop the bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki?
World War II broke out in September 1939, and the war then expanded from Europe to Asia, with dozens of countries drawn into the largest war in human history. In this war, Japan, as one of the countries in the fascist camp, soon dominated the Asian battlefield and invaded China on a large scale. The short-lived victory gave rise to a strong sense of national pride and militarism in this narrow island nation of Japan, which not only wanted to dominate Asia, but also wanted to control the whole world. on December 7, 1941, in order to temporarily eliminate the main force of the United States Navy in the Pacific Ocean, Japan attacked the United States battleships and military bases, and created the shocking Pearl Harbor Incident. The planner of the incident, Yamamoto Isoroku, never dreamed of what a huge blow this incident would bring to the future of Japan.
After the outbreak of the Pearl Harbor incident, the United States can no longer as before for Japan to sit back and watch, when their own national interests were violated, the United States decided to declare war on Japan, the outbreak of the war in the Pacific. 1942, in June, the Battle of Midway broke out, the U.S. Navy victory over the Japanese Navy, won the initiative of the Pacific Theater of Operations, the defeat of the Japanese lost the original maritime advantage, but also to the Japanese military high command caused irreparable wounds. Japan lost its naval superiority in the war, and the Japanese military was traumatized by the defeat. However, the militaristic sentiments that had previously pervaded the Japanese army did not decline, and this, coupled with the blind self-confidence that prevailed among Japanese soldiers and civilians, led the Japanese high command to make the wrong decision to continue the war. They would not have thought of the price their country would have to pay.
From June 1944, the United States began to use the B-29 Superfortress bomber carrying a large number of incendiary bombs on Japan's Tokyo and other major cities to carry out large-scale indiscriminate bombing of Japan, resulting in a large number of casualties and economic losses. The worst of these bombing raids was the bombing of Tokyo on March 9-10, 1945, when 334 B-29 *** dropped more than 2,000 tons of incendiary bombs. The fires were hot enough to burn everything on the ground, and the tongues of fire chased and wrapped around fleeing people, burning their bodies and souls to the ground. A survivor, who was a student at the time, recalled that the water in the creek near the school had evaporated and was filled with corpses. The whole of Tokyo became a huge morgue, and it took the Japanese government 25 days just to clean up the bodies from the bombing. Until the "final" bombing on May 26, 1945, Tokyo had become a dead city. After such a scale of bombing, there was already a kind of war-weariness in the soldiers and civilians, but determined to hold on to the end of the Japanese military state senior such as Tojo Hideki, Umezumi Jiro and so on still intend to resist.
As early as 1942, the U.S. began secretly working on the Manhattan Project, which was led by General Leslie Richard Groves of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, and headed by the renowned American physicist Robert Oppenheimer, with the ultimate goal of developing the atomic bomb. On July 15, 1945, after spending a conservative estimate of nearly $2 billion at the time, the first test bomb of the Manhattan Project was successfully detonated in a Mexican desert. This successful explosion allowed the U.S. to take the lead in using weapons of mass destruction to bomb other countries in a destructive manner. After hearing Truman say that "the United States has succeeded in testing a very powerful bomb," Stalin said, "I hope it will be used properly against Japan."
On August 6, 1945, a B-29 bomber over Hiroshima triggered an air-raid siren, and some of the busy people on the streets took refuge in shelters, as they had done countless times before. The many previous sirens had caused the people of this nation to react instinctively to this. Others had become numb to the air raid sirens and continued to do what they were doing. After a while, the plane that triggered the alert flew away from Hiroshima without making any attacks on the ground, and it seemed that all was quiet again. But what the citizens of Hiroshima didn't realize was that this was just the beginning of something that would make the name Hiroshima famous.
It turns out that the B-29 bomber that had just triggered the air-raid warning was just on a reconnaissance mission to check on the weather conditions in Hiroshima, and that the real bomber crew flew to Hiroshima shortly after receiving the weather message and dropped an atomic bomb, code-named "Little Boy," over the Aioi Bridge in the center of the city.
Forty-three seconds after the drop, the ignition sequence was initiated, and a huge mushroom cloud rose into the sky, releasing enormous energy from the explosion of the nearly 4-ton bomb, with the temperature at the base instantly reaching 4,000 degrees Celsius. At such high temperatures human flesh and bones would be directly liquefied and vaporized, and for those who died directly there was no pain because their lives disappeared off the face of the earth before they could feel the pain. From the photographs left behind at the time, Hiroshima, Japan, after the bombing has been turned into a flat land, within a mile from the epicenter of the bombing, almost all the life and buildings have disappeared. A mile away from the blast site, some people survived, but for these unfortunate "survivors" the suffering has just begun. The destructive power of the atomic bomb was primarily caused by nuclear fission. Nuclear explosions generate huge air waves, causing buildings to collapse and many people to be buried in them, while the air waves are accompanied by high-intensity thermal radiation and radioactive dust, which cause burns to the skin and internal organs of the human body and at the same time cause chemical changes in human cells, resulting in the loss of cell regeneration, so that those who have been exposed to the nuclear radiation can only watch as they die. Those who survived the Hiroshima bombing are now known in Japan as the "hibakusha," and they will suffer from a variety of life-long illnesses that will affect even their descendants. One of the "Bombed", Akiko Takakura, recalled, "In the playground, there were traces of dead soldiers scattered all over the place."
After receiving the gift of death from the "little boy", the Japanese top brass did not immediately declare surrender, even though they knew the end of the war was lost, believing that the US would not have a second atomic bomb, and so they could stop the war instead of being forced to surrender, as long as they were resolute in not surrendering unconditionally.
But just three days later, the United States dropped another atomic bomb, code-named Fat Man, on Nagasaki.
On August 15, 1945, the Emperor of Japan announced the unconditional surrender of Japan.
In October 1944, the madness of the last resistance of Japan by Takijiro Oshii organized a kamikaze death squad, suicide attacks on the U.S. fleet, causing huge losses to the U.S. military, in order to end the war as soon as possible to reduce the losses in the development of the atomic bomb after the U.S. military set up a special targeting committee decided to Tokyo, Kyoto, Hiroshima, Ogura, Nagasaki, Niigata, which selected two places to drop the atomic bomb. The A-bomb was dropped on two of these locations.
There were three requirements for the selection of the sites to drop the bomb: First, the bombing of these sites would make the Japanese give up their resistance and surrender completely, which was the most important goal. Second, there should be military-related organizations and facilities, such as important command headquarters or military factories. Thirdly, the area should not have been bombed or the impact of the bombing should be small in order to accurately estimate the consequences of the A-bombing. While Hiroshima and Nagasaki a large number of Japanese Second Army soldiers stationed, one is an important military port, and both cities have a population of more than 200,000 people, industrial facilities are relatively complete, coupled with the previous bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki's impact on the slight. After a comprehensive evaluation, the U.S. military chose these two cities as targets for atomic bombing. Thus, the names of Hiroshima and Nagasaki replaced Tokyo, which had been bombed to the ground, after August 1945, and the news of Japan's unconditional surrender spread around the world at that time.
Today, Hiroshima and Nagasaki have been revitalized, and the traces of the atomic bombings have largely disappeared, making it hard to tell that they were in ruins more than seventy years ago, if not for some of the historical information that exists.
We are fortunate to have been born in a time of peace and to have grown up in a stable country. We are fortunate and happy to have been born in a time of peace and to have grown up in a stable country. Peace is not easy to come by, and we have to go farther and farther down the road that countless human beings, revolutionary martyrs, and international friends have trodden with their lives and blood.