Twilight of the Gods: War in the Western Pacific, 1944-1945 (The Pacific War Trilogy Book 3)

by Ian W. Toll

When the Enola Gay and its two escorts droned in from the south, they could be seen clearly from the ground. Witnesses spotted a cluster of parachutes blossoming at high altitude. They were the instrument canisters dropped by The Great Artiste. Little Boy exploded at 8:16 a.m., 1,870 feet above the ground, only 550 feet wide of its aiming point. The nuclear chain reaction it triggered created a core temperature of about 1 million degrees Celsius, igniting the air around it to a diameter of nearly a kilometer. The fireball engulfed the center of the city, vaporizing about 20,000 people on the ground. Thermal and ionizing radiation killed virtually all people within a kilometer of the surface of the fireball, burning them to death or rupturing their internal organs. Farther out, in successive concentric circles around the epicenter, people were exposed to gamma rays, neutron radiation, flash burns, the blast wave, and firestorms. The initial shockwave raced away from the epicenter at greater than the speed of sound, some 984 miles per hour. Streetcars were lifted from their tracks and scattered like toys. Clothing was torn from bodies. Nearly all wooden buildings within 2.3 kilometers were completely leveled, and about half of all such buildings to a radius of 3.2 kilometers. Later, investigators found the shadows of people caught within the inner radius around the hypocenter. They had been vaporized, but their bodies had left faint silhouettes on the pavement or on nearby w...