At exactly fifteen minutes past eight in the morning, on August 6, 1945, Japanese time, at the moment when the atomic bomb flashed above Hiroshima, Miss Toshiko Sasaki, a clerk in the personnel department of the East Asia Tin Works, had just sat down at her place in the plant office and was turning her head to speak to the girl at the next desk. At that same moment, Dr. Masakazu Fujii was settling down cross-legged to read the Osaka Asahi on the porch of his private hospital, overhanging one of the seven deltaic rivers which divide Hiroshima; Mrs. Hatsuyo Nakamura, a tailor’s widow, stood by the window of her kitchen, watching a neighbor tearing down his house because it lay in the path of an air-raid-defense fire lane; Father Wilhelm Kleinsorge, a German priest of the Society of Jesus, reclined in his underwear on a cot on the top floor of his order’s three-story mission house, reading a Jesuit magazine, Stimmen der Zeit; Dr. Terufumi Sasaki, a young member of the surgical staff of the city’s large, modern Red Cross Hospital, walked along one of the hospital corridors with a blood specimen for a Wassermann test in his hand; and the Reverend Mr. Kiyoshi Tanimoto, pastor of the Hiroshima Methodist Church, paused at the door of a rich man’s house in Koi, the city’s western suburb, and prepared to unload a handcart full of things he had evacuated from town in fear of the massive B-29 raid which everyone expected Hiroshima to suffer. A hundred thousand people were killed by the atomic bomb, and these six were among the survivors. They still wonder why they lived when so many others died. Each of them counts many small items of chance or volition—a step taken in time, a decision to go indoors, catching one streetcar instead of the next—that spared him. And now each knows that in the act of survival he lived a dozen lives and saw more death than he ever thought he would see. At the time, none of them knew anything.
Crimes of War
Crimes of War
When we think about the battles waged by Americans both at home and abroad, we tend to remember the big picture questions. Why were Americans fighting? Who else was involved? What were the outcomes?
Less remembered are the civilian victims of the violence wrought by Americans in the course of their wars. In this exhibit, you'll find a range of writing about those victims, and about the extent to which Americans have acknowledged and accounted for the atrocities committed in their name.
Founding Violence
View Connections03Native Soil
View Connections14Victims of Empire
View Connections08The Good War?
View Connections20Crimes of War
The Good War?
Hiroshima
A hundred thousand people were killed by the atomic bomb, and these six were among the survivors.…Where the War Wasn't Cold
View Connections09Vietnam
View Connections16War on Terror
View Connections14Accounting for Crimes
View Connections17How We Remember, What We Forget
View Connections07