Unbroken: A World War II Story of Survival, Resilience, and Redemption

scout plane flying over it radioed back in code: The weather was clear. They wouldn’t have to bypass this city and pursue the alternate targets. Tibbets spoke over the interphone:
    “It’sHiroshima.”
    The plane passed the coastline and crossed over the city. Tibbets turned the plane west, then ordered his crew to don shaded goggles. Below, he saw a T-shaped bridge, the target. Tibbets surrendered control of the plane to the Norden bombsight, and the bombardier lined up on the bridge.
    At 8:15.17, the bomb slipped from the plane. Tibbets turned the plane as hard as he could and put it into a dive to gain speed. It would take forty-three seconds for the bomb to reach its detonation altitude, a little less than two thousand feet. No one knew for sure if, in that brief time, the bomber could get far enough away to survive what was coming.
    One of the crewmen counted seconds in his head. When he hit forty-three, nothing happened. He didn’t know that he had been counting too quickly. For an instant, he thought the mission had failed.
    Exactly as the thought crossed his mind, the sky over the city ripped open in a firestorm of color and sound and felling wind. A white light, ten times the intensity of the sun, enveloped the plane as the flash and sound and jolt of it skidded out in all directions. The tail gunner, looking out the back of the plane through his goggles, thought that the light had blinded him. Tibbets’s teeth began tingling, and his mouth filled with a taste of lead. He would later be told that it was the metal in his fillings resonating with the radioactivity of the bomb. He looked ahead and saw the entire sky swirling in pink and blue. Next to him, the copilot scribbled two words in his diary:
MY GOD!
    Behind him, the tail gunner’s vision cleared and he saw an eerie shimmering warp in the air over the city, ripping toward them at one thousand feet per second. “Here it comes!” he said. The shock wave slammed into the plane, pitching the men into the air and back down again. In confusion, someone yelled, “Flak!” Then a second wave, a consequence of the force of the explosion hitting the ground and then ricocheting upward, smacked them, and the plane heaved again.
    At POW Camp 10-D, on the far side of the mountains by Hiroshima, prisoner Ferron Cummins felt a concussion roll down from the hills, and the air warmed strangely. He looked up. A fantastically huge, roiling cloud, glowing bluish gray, swaggered over the city. It was more than three miles tall. Below it, Hiroshima was boiling.

Thirty-one
The Naked Stampede

    T HE NAOETSU POWS KNEW THAT SOMETHING BIG HAD happened. The guards paced around with stricken faces. Civilians walked past the camp, eyes dazed, hands in fists. A guard said something to Louie that stuck in his head: Hiroshima had been hit by cholera. The city was shut down, he said, and no one could come or go.
    At one of the work sites, a civilian told a different story: One American bomb, he said, had destroyed an entire city. The POWs thought that he must have meant one raid with many bombs, but the man kept repeating that it was
one
bomb. He used a word that sounded like “atomic.” The word was unfamiliar, and no one knew how one bomb could wipe out a city. Tom Wade got hold of a newspaper. Something the paper called an “electronic bomb” had been dropped, and many people had died. The POWs didn’t know what to make of it.
    At Omori, the shaken camp commander gathered the POWs. “One plane came over,” he said, “and a whole city disappeared.” He asked if anyone knew what weapon could do such a thing. No one had an answer.
    On August 9, Nagasaki, like Hiroshima, disappeared.
    ——

    Uneasy days passed. Everything in Naoetsu remained the same, and day and night, the POWs were still sent to labor in Japan’s war production factories. Clearly, something catastrophic had happened, but Japan had not given in.

    Nagasaki, August 9, 1945.
Nagasaki Atomic Bomb Museum/epa/Corbis

    For the POWs, time had all but run out. It was now approaching mid-August, and the kill-all policy loomed. Even if Japan surrendered, many POWs believed that the guards would kill them anyway, either out of vengeance or to prevent them from testifying to what had been done to them. Indeed, an Omori interrogator had told Commander Fitzgerald that the Japanese had plans to kill the POWs in the event that they lost the war.
    With officials talking about taking them to a new camp in the