The Children of Hiroshima and Nagasaki

How many children were killed?

It is estimated that more than 38,000 children were killed in the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

According to surveys by the city of Hiroshima, 73,622 children under 10 years of age were exposed to the bombing, of whom 7,907 had died by the end of 1945. Among older children and adolescents, the death toll was thought to be 15,543.

In Nagasaki, authorities estimated that 49,684 children under 10 were exposed to the bombing, of whom 6,349 had died by the end of 1945, with 8,724 older children and adolescents also counted among the dead.

These official estimates, however, do not include the many children who died years after the attacks from cancers and other radiation-related illnesses.

Hiroshima:

Prior to the atomic bombing of Hiroshima, around 23,500 babies and children were evacuated from the city due to fears of possible US air raids. Many went to live with relatives in the countryside, which was deemed safer.

But tens of thousands of children remained in the city on the morning of 6 August 1945, including 26,800 students mobilised to perform various tasks, such as creating firebreaks in the city’s centre – a measure aimed at limiting destruction in the event of an air raid.

Of the 8,400 students performing this particular task, around 6,300 were killed. Most were 12 to 14 years old, in junior high school. Hundreds of students who had been mobilised to perform other tasks across the city were also killed. The total death toll for mobilised students was around 7,200.

In the aftermath of the attack, school officials in Hiroshima made earnest efforts to determine which of their students had died and which had survived. The schools closest to the bomb’s hypocentre (ground zero) generally had the highest death tolls.

In 1951, the US government published a multi-volume report on the medical effects of atomic bombs, which included detailed casualty figures for schoolchildren in Hiroshima as of the end of October 1945.

The report grouped the students according to their distance from the hypocentre. For the first group – those less than one kilometre away – 2,579 of the 3,440 students, or roughly three in four, were confirmed dead. A few hundred more were missing but presumed dead.

“In the centre of [Hiroshima] were some 8,400 students from grades seven and eight who had been mobilised from all the high schools in the city to help clear fire lanes … nearly all of them were incinerated and were vaporised without a trace, and more died within days. In this way, my age group in the city was almost wiped out.”

– Setsuko Thurlow, atomic bomb survivor and disarmament advocate

Many of the students close to the hypocentre were outside at the time of the attack, completely unshielded from the bomb’s effects. They stood little chance of survival.

Of the “unshielded” schoolchildren within one kilometre of the hypocentre, 94 per cent were killed, according to the casualty figures published by the US government. For those between one and two kilometres, around 85 per cent were killed. Relatively few students were indoors at the time of the attack.

At some schools close to the hypocentre, there were no known survivors. For example, of the 174 students attending the First Prefectural Girls’ School on the morning of the attack, all 174 were killed.

Around 400 students from the Honkawa Elementary School, a three-storey concrete building just 410 metres from the hypocentre, were killed. One student, 11-year-old Imori Kiyoko, miraculously survived.

At the First Hiroshima Prefectural Junior High School, hundreds of severely burnt students dived into the school’s swimming pool to escape the unbearable heat of the fires engulfing the city and to ease their pain. They died in the water.

While detailed records were made of children attending school on the day of the bombing or those mobilised to perform various tasks across Hiroshima, less is known about the fate of the city’s many children who had not yet attained school age, including babies.

In total, around 340,000 to 350,000 people were in Hiroshima at the time of the bombing, of whom an estimated 140,000 were killed instantly or had died from their injuries by the end of 1945. In addition, thousands succumbed to radiation-related illnesses years later, adding to the complexity of calculating the overall death toll.

Suffice it to say, the number of children killed in Hiroshima – with a single atomic bomb that US officials code-named “Little Boy” – was staggering.

Nagasaki:

For Nagasaki, the population on the day of the atomic bombing (9 August 1945) was around 240,000 people, of whom an estimated 74,000 were killed instantly or had died from their injuries by the end of 1945.

Prior to the attack, approximately 17,000 children and elderly persons had been evacuated from the city. It is thought that a large proportion of these evacuees were children, but there is no official record. Despite the evacuations, tens of thousands of children were still in Nagasaki on the day of the bombing.

The bomb devastated the Urakami district, where Nagasaki’s main residential communities and schools were concentrated.

“A mother cradled her headless infant and wailed … Tiny, barefoot children squatted in the ruins or wandered past corpses, calling out for their mothers and fathers. One woman whose husband had died, and who would soon lose her four daughters and four-year-old son, came to understand that when one of her children stopped asking for water, it meant that she or he had died.”

– Susan Southard, author of Nagasaki: Life After Nuclear War

From the Shiroyama Elementary School, close to the bomb’s hypocentre, over 1,400 students were killed in the attack; from Yamazato Elementary School, 1,300 students perished. Several other schools near ground zero also suffered high death tolls. In total, an estimated 5,500 students and teachers were killed.

As in Hiroshima, thousands of Nagasaki’s students had been mobilised to perform various tasks across the city, but a smaller proportion of them were outdoors at the time of the bombing. Still, many were killed, including 580 at one of the Mitsubishi factories close to the hypocentre.

Workers there expressed great distress that “many persons who were recognised as only very slightly injured at first gradually deteriorated in health and died” from acute radiation illness, and the “victims include many teenage students”.

Even among the mobilised students who were beyond the main zone of destruction – more than 1.5 kilometres from the hypocentre – approximately 680 were killed.

Several years after the attack, when US researchers began studying the impact of the Nagasaki bombing on children, they were able to identify just 134 surviving children who had been within one kilometre of the hypocentre. So many others had perished.

Dead bodies scattered over a playground

Fujio Tsujimoto, five years old, was at a school playground with his grandmother when they heard an aeroplane in the distance over Nagasaki.

I grabbed my grandmother by the hand and ran towards the shelter. “Enemy plane!” yelled the watchman on the roof of the school building as he struck the bell. “Look out!” People on the playground came running straight for the shelter. I was the first to plunge into the deepest part of the shelter. But at that moment – flash! – I was blown against the wall by the force of the explosion.

After a while, I peered out of the shelter. I found people scattered all over the playground. The ground was covered almost entirely with bodies. Most of them looked dead and lay still. Here and there, however, some were thrashing their legs or raising their arms. Those who were able to move came crawling into the shelter. Soon the shelter was crowded with the wounded. Around the school, all the town was on fire.

My brother and sisters were late coming into the shelter, so they were burnt and crying. Half an hour later my mother appeared at last. She was covered with blood. I will never forget how happy I was as I clung to my mother. We waited and waited for Father, but he never appeared.

Even those who had survived died in agony one after another. My younger sister died the next day. My mother, she also died the next day. And then my older brother. I thought I would die, too, because the people around me, lying beside each other in the shelter, were dying one by one. Yet, because my grandmother and I had been in the deepest part of the shelter, we apparently had not been exposed to [as much] radiation and in the end we were saved.

Among the victims of the nuclear attacks were people from outside Japan, including many who were brought to Japan from its colonised areas. This included as many as 70,000 Koreans – many of whom were forced labourers – and people from China and Taiwan. Some were children.

Lee Su-yong, from Korea, survived the attack on Hiroshima as a 15-year-old girl but sustained a permanent foot injury and developed uterine cancer and other illnesses later in life due to her exposure to radiation.

“Everything I could see was destroyed,” she said, describing the immediate aftermath. “Children were crying for their mothers. Charred bodies were strewn all over the city. Many people lost their arms or legs … It was horrendous.”………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………… more https://www.icanw.org/children?utm_campaign=2024_children_launch_an&utm_medium=email&utm_source=ican#childrenkilled

August 7, 2024 - Posted by Christina Macpherson | history, Reference, weapons and war

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