37 Haunting Photos Of Hiroshima Before And After The Atomic Bombing

See what life in Hiroshima was like just before the atomic bombing of August 6, 1945 and in the devastating aftermath, when the city was virtually flattened.

Air-raid sirens were a familiar sound for the approximately 280,000 residents of Hiroshima that still remained in the city in August 1945.

At the time, American B-29 bombers regularly soared over the nearby coast en route to Lake Biwa, a strategic rendezvous point about 220 miles northeast of the city. Hiroshima was one of the few major Japanese cities that had been spared the wrath of United States airstrikes, though air-raid sirens sounded nearly every morning anyway.

What the residents of Hiroshima did not know was why they had so far avoided any airstrikes. They did not know they had been specially selected as the pilot site for an unprecedented weapon of mass destruction: the atomic bomb.

U.S. Department of Defense Aerial images of Hiroshima before and after the bombing. Ground zero, or the hypocenter, is noted by the bullseye.

The aftermath in Hiroshima following the detonation of the first atomic bomb ever used in warfare was unprecedented. Hiroshima before and after bomb were two different cities. There was virtually nothing left and this once-bustling metropolis had to be rebuilt from scratch.

See more powerful photos of Hiroshima before and after the atomic bombing in the gallery below, then learn the full story of this cataclysmic event that changed the world forever.

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1 of 38A mother and child sit in the ruins of Hiroshima four months after the bombing.Alfred Eisenstaedt/Pix Inc./The LIFE Picture Collection/Getty Images 2 of 38Hiroshima city officials meet in the destroyed city hall to discuss how to repair their home.Getty Images 3 of 38Everything within a one-mile radius of the bomb’s impact site was reduced to rubble.Bernard Hoffman/The LIFE Picture Collection via Getty Images 4 of 38A man looks at the ruins of the Hiroshima Prefectural Industrial Promotion Hall. The structure was preserved and was later renamed the Genbaku Domu (Hiroshima Peace Memorial). Bernard Hoffman/The LIFE Picture Collection/Getty Images 5 of 38Children wear masks to combat the pervasive odor of death in the air following the bombing.Keystone/Getty Images 6 of 38The shape of a victim burned into the steps of a bank. The heat and light generated by the bomb was so intense that it changed the shades of roads and buildings, leaving areas “protected” by human bodies closer to their original shades.Universal History Archive/UIG via Getty Images 7 of 38Another human shadow seared into bank steps by the bomb.Universal History Archive/UIG via Getty Images 8 of 38This image is often confused as the mushroom cloud that appeared over Hiroshima as the bomb exploded, but it’s actually the smoke from the myriad fires raging in the city’s center in Hiroshima’s aftermath.Wikimedia Commons 9 of 38A Japanese baby sits crying in the rubble.Getty Images 10 of 38Only the skeletons of a few buildings fortified for earthquakes remained standing.Imperial War Museums via Getty Images 11 of 38A lone man surveys the rubble.Getty Images 12 of 38A survivor whose skin had been burned in a pattern corresponding with that of the kimono she’d been wearing at the time of the blast.National Archives and Records Administration 13 of 38Aerial images of Hiroshima before and after the bombing.Library of Congress/Harry S. Truman Presidential Library & Museum 14 of 38A young Japanese boy stands with a shovel on a street that’s still devastated a full year after the bombing.Getty Images 15 of 38A victim of the Hiroshima bombing lies in a makeshift hospital.National Archives and Records Administration 16 of 38A group of children and adults left homeless warm their hands over a fire on the outskirts of Hiroshima.Alfred Eisenstaedt/Pix Inc./The LIFE Picture Collection/Getty Images 17 of 38The ruins of the city one month after the bombing.Galerie Bilderwelt/Getty Images 18 of 38A woman cleans up amid the rubble.Getty Images 19 of 38A Japanese soldier walks through an area leveled by “Little Boy.“National Archives and Records Administration 20 of 38An elderly survivor of the blast lies covered with flies in a hospital set up in what was a bank.CORBIS/Corbis via Getty Images 21 of 38A burn victim, circa two years after the attack on Hiroshima.Keystone/Getty Images 22 of 38The atomic cloud rises 20,000 feet above Hiroshima just after the bomb was dropped.National Archives and Records Administration 23 of 38Aerial view of the Hiroshima aftermath. 1946.Library of Congress 24 of 38Some victims of the catastrophe take refuge in the rubble of a bank that was transformed to house the wounded and homeless.Keystone-France/Gamma-Keystone via Getty Images 25 of 38Shortly after the bomb was dropped, smoke rises into the sky above the city while a shockwave traveling faster than the speed of sound devastates the area below.Galerie Bilderwelt/Getty Images 26 of 38Two women walk among the ruins.Smith Collection/Gado/Getty Images 27 of 38The remains of a fire truck devastated by the blast.National Archives and Records Administration 28 of 38Blast victims recover in a fly-infested, makeshift hospital in a bank building.National Archives and Records Administration 29 of 38Burned trees and bombed out buildings dot the landscape of Hiroshima in the aftermath of the bombing.National Archives and Records Administration 30 of 38The radiation burns of a Hiroshima survivor.National Museum of Health and Medicine 31 of 38The devastation from the bomb stretched several miles from ground zero.National Archives and Records Administration 32 of 38Residents walk through the streets now surrounded by rubble.Bernard Hoffman/The LIFE Picture Collection/Getty Images 33 of 38A man wheels his bicycle about 550 feet from ground zero.Keystone/Getty Images 34 of 38The city lies in ruins just days after the bombing.AFP/AFP/Getty Images 35 of 38A victim of the blast who received severe burns.Wikimedia Commons 36 of 38People walk along the roads through the ruins.Library of Congress 37 of 38A view of the destruction in 1947.National Archives and Records Administration 38 of 38Like this gallery?Share it:

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Devastating Photos Of Hiroshima Before And After The Atomic Bombing That Changed History Forever View Gallery

Why Was The Atomic Bomb Dropped On Hiroshima?

Hiroshima was an important military base for the Japanese, it was a hub of communications, and it was fortified by anti-aircraft guns. There were also an estimated 40,000 Imperial soldiers stationed there. As far as war strategy was concerned, it was an optimal headquarters to cut off. Also, as it had so far been spared bombing and airstrikes, the full effects of the atomic bomb itself could be studied.

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1 of 38A mother and child sit in the ruins of Hiroshima four months after the bombing.Alfred Eisenstaedt/Pix Inc./The LIFE Picture Collection/Getty Images

2 of 38Hiroshima city officials meet in the destroyed city hall to discuss how to repair their home.Getty Images

3 of 38Everything within a one-mile radius of the bomb’s impact site was reduced to rubble.Bernard Hoffman/The LIFE Picture Collection via Getty Images

4 of 38A man looks at the ruins of the Hiroshima Prefectural Industrial Promotion Hall. The structure was preserved and was later renamed the Genbaku Domu (Hiroshima Peace Memorial). Bernard Hoffman/The LIFE Picture Collection/Getty Images

5 of 38Children wear masks to combat the pervasive odor of death in the air following the bombing.Keystone/Getty Images

6 of 38The shape of a victim burned into the steps of a bank. The heat and light generated by the bomb was so intense that it changed the shades of roads and buildings, leaving areas “protected” by human bodies closer to their original shades.Universal History Archive/UIG via Getty Images

7 of 38Another human shadow seared into bank steps by the bomb.Universal History Archive/UIG via Getty Images

8 of 38This image is often confused as the mushroom cloud that appeared over Hiroshima as the bomb exploded, but it’s actually the smoke from the myriad fires raging in the city’s center in Hiroshima’s aftermath.Wikimedia Commons

9 of 38A Japanese baby sits crying in the rubble.Getty Images

10 of 38Only the skeletons of a few buildings fortified for earthquakes remained standing.Imperial War Museums via Getty Images

11 of 38A lone man surveys the rubble.Getty Images

12 of 38A survivor whose skin had been burned in a pattern corresponding with that of the kimono she’d been wearing at the time of the blast.National Archives and Records Administration

13 of 38Aerial images of Hiroshima before and after the bombing.Library of Congress/Harry S. Truman Presidential Library & Museum

14 of 38A young Japanese boy stands with a shovel on a street that’s still devastated a full year after the bombing.Getty Images

15 of 38A victim of the Hiroshima bombing lies in a makeshift hospital.National Archives and Records Administration

16 of 38A group of children and adults left homeless warm their hands over a fire on the outskirts of Hiroshima.Alfred Eisenstaedt/Pix Inc./The LIFE Picture Collection/Getty Images

17 of 38The ruins of the city one month after the bombing.Galerie Bilderwelt/Getty Images

18 of 38A woman cleans up amid the rubble.Getty Images

19 of 38A Japanese soldier walks through an area leveled by “Little Boy.“National Archives and Records Administration

20 of 38An elderly survivor of the blast lies covered with flies in a hospital set up in what was a bank.CORBIS/Corbis via Getty Images

21 of 38A burn victim, circa two years after the attack on Hiroshima.Keystone/Getty Images

22 of 38The atomic cloud rises 20,000 feet above Hiroshima just after the bomb was dropped.National Archives and Records Administration

23 of 38Aerial view of the Hiroshima aftermath. 1946.Library of Congress

24 of 38Some victims of the catastrophe take refuge in the rubble of a bank that was transformed to house the wounded and homeless.Keystone-France/Gamma-Keystone via Getty Images

25 of 38Shortly after the bomb was dropped, smoke rises into the sky above the city while a shockwave traveling faster than the speed of sound devastates the area below.Galerie Bilderwelt/Getty Images

26 of 38Two women walk among the ruins.Smith Collection/Gado/Getty Images

27 of 38The remains of a fire truck devastated by the blast.National Archives and Records Administration

28 of 38Blast victims recover in a fly-infested, makeshift hospital in a bank building.National Archives and Records Administration

29 of 38Burned trees and bombed out buildings dot the landscape of Hiroshima in the aftermath of the bombing.National Archives and Records Administration

30 of 38The radiation burns of a Hiroshima survivor.National Museum of Health and Medicine

31 of 38The devastation from the bomb stretched several miles from ground zero.National Archives and Records Administration

32 of 38Residents walk through the streets now surrounded by rubble.Bernard Hoffman/The LIFE Picture Collection/Getty Images

33 of 38A man wheels his bicycle about 550 feet from ground zero.Keystone/Getty Images

34 of 38The city lies in ruins just days after the bombing.AFP/AFP/Getty Images

35 of 38A victim of the blast who received severe burns.Wikimedia Commons

36 of 38People walk along the roads through the ruins.Library of Congress

37 of 38A view of the destruction in 1947.National Archives and Records Administration

38 of 38Like this gallery?Share it:

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Devastating Photos Of Hiroshima Before And After The Atomic Bombing That Changed History Forever View Gallery

Devastating Photos Of Hiroshima Before And After The Atomic Bombing That Changed History Forever

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But there was another reason the United States targeted Hiroshima in particular. As a cosmopolitan hub on flat land, the sheer devastation of the atomic bomb could be witnessed by the world.

“Hiroshima is compact,” Alex Wellerstein, a historian at the Stevens Institute of Technology told NPR in 2015. “If you put a bomb like this in the middle of it, you end up destroying almost the entirety of the city.”

And the States wanted to show off that power in order to bring a swift end to World War II. Thus, Hiroshima was chosen to be the guinea pig for the first use of a nuclear weapon in warfare.

That weapon was dubbed “Little Boy,” a gun-style bomb that would blow when a uranium projectile was fired through a gun barrel at another uranium target. Once the two collided, they formed an unstable element and the nuclear reactions that followed resulted in an atomic explosion.

Little Boy was not tested before it was detonated over Hiroshima, but its creators were confident it would work — and it did.

Life In Hiroshima Before And After The Atomic Bomb Was Dropped

Archival footage of the dropping of Little Boy and the Hiroshima aftermath.

It’s likely that when those sirens rang out on the morning of Aug. 6, 1945, the residents of Hiroshima continued on with their daily routines. Imperial radars had only picked up a small number of planes at high altitude, so they believed no major threat was expected.

Archival footage of the dropping of Little Boy and the Hiroshima aftermath.

But one of those planes was the Enola Gay, an American B-29 bomber that had been rigorously outfitted to transport and drop Little Boy.

“I saw a black dot in the sky,” recalled survivor Fujio Torikoshi. “Suddenly, it ‘burst’ into a ball of blinding light that filled my surroundings. A gust of hot wind hit my face; I instantly closed my eyes and knelt down to the ground.”

Just after 8:15 a.m., a flash of blinding light erupted over the city. Within a matter of seconds, Hiroshima transformed into an inferno as Little Boy detonated 1,900 feet above the city center.

“Where we had seen a clear city two minutes before, we could now no longer see the city,” recalled Enola Gay’s navigator, Theodore Van Kirk. “We could see smoke and fires creeping up the sides of the mountains.”

When Little Boy collided with Hiroshima, its surface temperature reached 10,000 degrees Fahrenheit. Nearly everything within 1,600 feet of the bomb’s blast zone was cremated. According to UCLA, anything and anyone within a mile was destroyed. Fires raged up to four miles from the crash site. Around 70 percent of the city’s buildings collapsed.

Almost instantly, some 80,000 people, about 30 percent of Hiroshima’s population, had been killed. Among them were non-natives, including foreign laborers and American prisoners of war.

The bomb also missed its precise target, the Aioi Bridge, and instead detonated directly over the Shima Surgical Clinic.

The Horrifying Aftermath In Hiroshima And The Haunting Pictures That Remain

Footage captured in the aftermath of the Hiroshima bombing.

Because the residents had been given an all-clear after the earlier air-raid warning, many were outside when the bomb detonated. More than 50 percent of the casualties died from burns while many others who did not succumb to the initial blast or the fires in the immediate Hiroshima aftermath later died of radiation exposure. Survivors recalled near-lifeless, scorched bodies wandering the streets for a few seconds before they fell to the ground and died.

Footage captured in the aftermath of the Hiroshima bombing.

Meanwhile, because ground zero happened to be above a hospital, many of the city’s doctors and nurses were killed or injured in the blast. The city was thrown into chaos as those still alive scrambled to create makeshift hospitals to aid the wounded.

As the weeks progressed, citizens began to feel the effects of radiation poisoning and a misinformed public believed this condition to be contagious. As a result, those who were suffering with radiation poisoning were ostracized from their communities.

The United States had little aid to offer. Scientists on the Manhattan Project, which created the atomic bombs, claimed to know little about the biological effects of nuclear fallout. Even the deputy medical director at one of the project’s laborites admitted that, “The idea was to explode the damned thing… We weren’t terribly concerned with the radiation.”

Just three days later, the approximate 200,000 residents of Nagasaki were subjected to a much larger bomb, “Fat Man,” as it detonated over their city and wiped out 60,000 people instantly.

U.S. National ArchiveThe post office savings bank in Hiroshima is bleached with nuclear shadows from the window frames made by the flash of the detonation.

Beyond those who were killed or injured, the true scale of the Hiroshima aftermath revealed itself for generations to come as health issues like birth defects and cancer continued to plague those exposed to a blast unlike anything the world had ever seen before.

The city of Hiroshima estimates that over 200,000 people died as a result of the bomb, whether in the blast itself or due to the effects of radiation later.

As one minister who was witness to the explosion and the aftermath in Hiroshima recalled, “The feeling I had was that everyone was dead. The whole city was destroyed… I thought this was the end of Hiroshima — of Japan — of humankind… This was God’s judgment on man.”

See the harrowing devastation of the atomic bombing in the photos of Hiroshima in the gallery above.

Following this look at pictures of Hiroshima before and after the atomic bombing, read the story of Tsutomu Yamaguchi, the survivor who lived through both atomic bombings. Then, learn about the USS Indianapolis, the ship that delivered parts of Little Boy before succumbing to the worst maritime disaster in U.S. Naval history.

See what life in Hiroshima was like just before the atomic bombing of August 6, 1945 and in the devastating aftermath, when the city was virtually flattened.#

Why Was The Atomic Bomb Dropped On Hiroshima?#

Life In Hiroshima Before And After The Atomic Bomb Was Dropped#

The Horrifying Aftermath In Hiroshima And The Haunting Pictures That Remain#

See what life in Hiroshima was like just before the atomic bombing of August 6, 1945 and in the devastating aftermath, when the city was virtually flattened.

Why Was The Atomic Bomb Dropped On Hiroshima?

Life In Hiroshima Before And After The Atomic Bomb Was Dropped

The Horrifying Aftermath In Hiroshima And The Haunting Pictures That Remain