Today’s Frightfully Injured Yet Truly Morbid Fact!
At exactly 8:15:17 a.m. on August 6, 1945, the ‘Little Boy’ atomic bomb was released from the bomb bay of the Enola Gay as it passed over Hiroshima. The following are eyewitness accounts of the aftermath of the bombing.
“On the broad street in the Hakushima district, naked burned cadavers are particularly numerous. Among them are the wounded who are still alive. A few have crawled under the burned-out autos and trams. Frightfully injured forms beckon to us and then collapse.” – German Jesuit missionary
Hiroshima victims
“I had the feeling that all the human beings on the face of the earth had been killed off and only the five of us were left behind in an uncanny world of the dead… I saw several people plunging their heads into a half broken water tank and drinking the water… When I was close enough to see inside the tank I said, ‘Oh!’ out loud and instinctively drew back. What I had seen in the tank were the faces of monsters reflected from the water dyed red with blood. They had clung to the side of the tank and plunged their heads in to drink and there in that position they had died. From their burned and tattered middy blouses I could tell that they were high school girls, but there as not a hair left on their heads; the broken skin of their burned faces was stained bright red with blood. I could hardly believe that these were human faces.” – Schoolboy
“Streetcars were standing at Kawaya-Cho and Kamiya-Cho and inside were dozens of bodies, blackened beyond recognition. I saw fire reservoirs filled to the brim with dead people who looked as though they had been boiled alive… In one reservoir there were so many dead people there wasn’t enough room for them to fall over. They must have died sitting in the water.” – Doctor
Hiroshima burn victim
“We were still in the river by evening and it got cold. No matter where you looked there was nothing but burned people all around.” – Schoolgirl
“As I came to the river and went down the bank to the water, I found that the stream was filled with dead bodies. I started to cross by crawling over the corpses, on my hands and knees. As I got about a third of the way across, a dead body began to sink under my weight and I went into the water, wetting my burned skin. It pained severely. I could go no further, as there was a break in my bridge of corpses, so I turned back to the shore.” – Ship designer
Culled from: Eyewitness Hiroshima: First-hand Accounts of the Atomic Terror that Changed the World
Ghastly! Indonesian Volcano Edition
All this talk of burns reminds me – have you seen the videos the volcano eruption burn victims made in Indonesia? Creepy stuff.
Andersonville Prisoner Diary Entry Du Jour!
This is the continuation of the 1864 diary of Andersonville prisoner Private George A. Hitchcock (see the archived version for all entries up until now).
Here’s today’s entry:
August 24th. Very hot. I am feeling much stronger. Shep went outside to the dead-house with a dead body. When he returned, after a stay of some ten minutes, he seemed greatly refreshed. Another man close by us died to-night. Some commissioned officers, disguised as privates, were taken out and sent away.
Culled from: Andersonville: Giving Up the Ghost