In the months after the end of the war, the US went to great lengths to cover up the truth about what happened in Hiroshima and Nagasaki and hide the horror from the American people. Even while the rough enormous casualty figures were public, the specifics of the destruction and the experiences of those in Hiroshima and Nagasaki emerged only slowly. Japanese-American correspondent Leslie Nakashima, who had spent the war in Japan, traveled to Hiroshima in late August to search for his mother and filed a dispatch with United Press on August 27, 1945, that was the first widespread report about the scale of devastation.
Leslie Nakashima, correspondent, United Press: That the atomic bomb, more than Russia’s entry into the war, compelled Japan to surrender as she did on August 15 instead of waging a showdown battle on the Japanese mainland is a justifiable conclusion drawn after one sees what used to be Hiroshima city. I’ve just returned to Tokyo from that city, which was destroyed at one stroke by a single atomic bomb thrown by a super flying fortress on the morning of August 6. There’s not a single building standing intact in the city—until recently of 300,000 population. The death toll is expected to reach 100,000 with people continuing to die daily from burns suffered from the bomb’s ultra-violet rays.
From The Devil Reached Toward the Sky: An Oral History of the Making and Unleashing of the Atomic Bomb by Garrett M. Graff. Copyright © 2025.
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