What was the tragedy in Hiroshima and Nagasaki ?

In 1976, Japan donated 53 bonsai trees to the United States for its bicentennial, including a white pine that had been tended daily since 1625 and managed to survive the Hiroshima atomic blast. It’s history wasn’t known until 2001 when two brothers showed up at the museum to check on their grandfather’s tree.

There was a three day Go championship game happening in Hiroshima when the city was nuked. The building was damaged and several spectators were injured, by the game continued normally after a lunch break and finished at the end of the day.

The design for “Little Boy,” which was the first atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima, was never field tested before being used. The scientists were so confident in the design that they believed one was enough.

Allied carpet bombing of Tokyo killed more civilians than the atomic bombing of both Nagasaki and Hiroshima combined.

About 20 Americans were killed by the atomic bomb in Hiroshima. This wasn’t acknowledged by the United States government until the 1970s.

Jimmy Carter is the only American president to have visited Hiroshima’s ground zero.

Bernard Waldman, an American physicist, flew on the atomic bombing of Hiroshima to try and record the explosion for research. However, he forgot to open the camera shutter and didn’t manage to record anything.

A month after the nuclear bombing of Hiroshima, a massive typhoon called Makurazaki Typhoon, hit the city, killing 2,000 people.

. When the atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima, the intensity of the blast was so strong that it permanently burned shadows of people and objects into the ground.

In 1945, Japanese radar operators detected a small number of incoming United States planes, one of which carried the bombs, but decided not to intercept as the small number of planes weren’t seen as a threat.

The Gingko Biloba species of tree is 270 million years old and it rarely suffers disease or insect attack. It was one of the only living things left in Hiroshima after the bombing. The trees managed to heal very quickly and are still alive today.

It took Tokyo about 3 hours to realize that Hiroshima has been bombed.

The Japanese army planned to have every man, woman and child fight the United States to the death after Hiroshima. They even attempted a coup after the Emperor surrendered.

The closest known survivor of the Hiroshima bombing was in a basement only 170 meters, or 560 feet, from ground zero.

After the bombing of Hiroshima, there were “ant-walking alligators” that the survivors saw everything. They were men and women who, “were now eyeless and faceless with their heads transformed into blackened alligator hides displaying red holes, indicating mouths.”

The amount of matter that was converted to energy in the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima was about 700 milligrams, which was less than one third the mass of a United States dime.

Some Hiroshima survivors grew black fingernails, which were rod shaped fingernails that had active blood vessels and bled profusely when they broke off.

Godzilla was created by Japan as a reaction to the bombings of Hiroshima. The monster itself was created as a result of the nuclear detonations of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

During World War II, Kyoto was spared from the bombings by Henry L. Stimson, who was the sitting United States Secretary of War who had admired the city when he went on his honeymoon a few decades earlier. Stimson managed to replace Kyoto for Nagasaki.