HIROSHIMA DESTROYED BY FIRE AND BLAST

Southland Times, Issue 25747, 10 August 1945, Page 5

HIROSHIMA DESTROYED BY FIRE AND BLAST

VICTIMS DIED IN INCREDIBLE HEAT

(United Press Association—Telegraph Copyright) (Rec. 11.30 p.m.) NEW YORK, August 9. Devastation has been caused in the important Japanese port of Nagasaki by another atomic bomb, which was dropped from a Marianas-based Superfortress. Details of the damage caused are not yet available. After talking to the men on the first atomic bomb mission and seeing the photographic evidence of Hiroshima’s disintegration, one had to use all the imagination acquired from a close association with modern warfare to realize it was the result of one bomb, says the Guam correspondent of The New York Times. The Japanese, with good cause, probably looked on Hiroshima as one of the Empire’s best naturally and artificially protected cities as far as fire bomb danger was concerned. At least seven broad river channels and numerous firebreaks built by the residents provided seemingly efficient barriers, but from the photographs it is clear that Hiroshima was destroyed by fire and blast which either began simultaneously in areas of the city or resulted in fires so intense that they were able to jump even the largest firebreaks. A few buildings and walls were still standing, even near the presumed centre of the blast, but these were mostly concrete, which may be significant. Most of the 28 bridges in the city still span the rivers, but a close study of some indicated that steel girders had disintegrated. The victims of the first atomic bomb may have died in a temperature of 2,000,000 degrees Centigrade, according to scientific calculations made when the atom was first split in 1939, says The New York Herald Tribune. It would be incorrect to say that the victims were burned to death because the rays generated at that incredible heat explode atoms. In the unimaginably short instant when those human beings suffered the effects of the atomic bomb, there were probably millions of explosions touched off in the atoms comprising their flesh, blood and bones. Hiroshima’s people died a death nobody had died before.