Today’s Ghostly Yet Truly Morbid Fact!
The following are eyewitness accounts from the aftermath of the atomic bomb set off over Hiroshima at 8:15 a.m. on Monday, August 6, 1945:
“There were numberless injured persons all around me, lying on the ground, some held down by fallen timbers, all screaming and shouting for help. I saw that they were all still alive, but horribly injured. Many looked like ghosts, with the skin peeled off their faces and hanging down over their shoulders like thin silk pennants. All those who had been facing in the direction of the blast had their exposed skin torn off in a thick layer which had blown back. The sight left me numb with horror.” (Kite maker)
Hiroshima victim
“As I continued to search for my wife along the banks of the river, I saw more corpses at the foot of a bridge, damming the water.” (Accountant)
“We went up the slope of the hill at Koi and looked around, there were indeed some students from Prefectural Girls’ High there but my sister was nowhere to be seen.
“The next day we hunted for her in the same way, far and wide. The students at the river’s edge who yesterday had been rather hopeful – today they could not say a word and just looked at us in appealing recognition. Many of them who had still been alive yesterday were now dead. As we were about to leave there, they said in small, faint voices, ‘Sayonara…’
“It was hard for us to leave them. The next day when we went there those students were all dead.” (Schoolgirl)
Hiroshima Aftermath
“A little farther on there was a woman lying with a big log fallen across her legs so that she couldn’t get away.
“When father saw that he shouted, ‘Please come and help!”
“But not a single person came to help. They were all too intent on saving themselves.
“Finally father lost his patience, and shouting, ‘Are you all Japanese or not?’, he took a rusty saw and cut off her leg and rescued her.” (Schoolgirl)
Culled from: Eye-Witness Hiroshima
Weegee Du Jour!
Roy Bennett, twenty-seven years old, had come from Texas to New York City by bus and immediately tried his hand at big-city crime. His first attempt at a stickup was his last: detectives shot him dead as he tried to escape on August 11, 1941. Weegee was on the scene with his camera and recorded Bennett’s body being fingerprinted by police.
Culled from: Shots in the Dark: True Crime Pictures