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their plane parked beside another on the ground.

The next mission was to Hiroshima. This time we chose to use a Canadian built Noorduyn Norseman, a rather large single engine plane. We had two of them, but one was down with an engine problem. The normal 550 H. P. engine in the plane we took had been replaced with a 500 H. P. engine, so we were 50 H. P. short for maximum performance. Flying the plane was a Command Pilot with thousands of hours flying time. We also have a co-pilot and two or three others who sat back with me on canvas bucket seats that ran fore and aft on both sides of the plane. As we approached Hiroshima, I unbuckled my seatbelt, took off my parachute, and placed it on the floor in front of the door to kneel on because the window in the door was too high to properly position the K-20 aerial camera.

Hiroshima had been the target of the first atomic bomb, a uranium gun type called "Little Boy," on 6 August, 1945. My photographs clearly show the two mile diameter circle of maximum destruction where 100,000 people were incinerated instantly by the searing heat (one hundred million degrees at the bomb's core and 5,400 degrees below at the hypocenter). They also show the six-mile diameter circle of radiation which continued to kill as many as 100,000 more people over a period of many years. We had miscalculated the area of radiation. In later years Norman F. Ramsey who had been senior scientist of the bomb design group explained: The people who made the decision to drop the bomb made it on the assumption that all casualties would be standard explosion casualties… The region over which there would've been radiation injury was to be a much smaller one than the region of so-called 100% blast kill… Any person with radiation damage would have been killed with a brick first."

It was a bumpy ride but things were going OK until I took a picture number forty-one of the most where an old castle had stood. We were at about 800 feet (the length of two city blocks) above the ground when we hit a severe downdraft. The left wing flipped down and I found myself with my back pinned to the ceiling on the opposite side of the plane. Then I went weightless and rotated, floating with my back down toward the door. When we hit the updraft I slammed into the door backwards, my elbow hit the door handle, and I saw daylight above my head as the door popped open several inches. As quickly as it had opened, it slammed shut knocking me across the plane. I was still holding onto the camera with both hands. It was over in seconds although it went by in slow motion for me and seemed like a minute. We had fallen about 200 feet. The co-pilot, knowing that I was not strapped in, had turned around in time to see me floating and banging the door open. He informed the pilot who told me to buckle up and said, "Let's go home!".

He spent quite a bit of time circling over the city to gain altitude before we headed back over the mountains. The flight back was very bumpy, and the engine sounded like it was laboring. Clouds enrolled in, and there were more downdrafts than up thermals. I noticed that we seems to be getting a lot closer to the mountain tops but we finally made it back to the air base. After we landed, the pilot told us that it was the roughest flight that he ever had, and because we lacked that 50 H. P., we almost went down in the mountains. I never flew in that plane again and I doubt that he did either. After those two missions I photographed quite a few other bombed out cities from low altitudes. In contrast to the mile wide area of total destruction that I saw in the two atom bomb cities, other cities had irregular shaped spots – some cleaned out by blasts, others burned out by fire bombs. This was the result of selective targets –

[[image – the area of total destruction of the city of Hiroshima by by the atom bomb – looks like the layout of a city, but is nothing more than completely flat grid with a river in the middle of it. On the upper right side a spot is marked with "X"; caption – The black "X" marks the hypocenter of the Hiroshima bomb. (Photo: Jones)]]

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[[image – drawing of a bird with open beak – as if making a sound, head only, facing right toward following text:]] Friends Journal VOL. 21, NO.3 FALL 1998

docks in one area – factories in another area – military facilities in another. Tokyo had been hardest hit with an area of 16 square 
 miles burned out with napalm and magnesium fire bombs, killing 83,000 people in the first of several incendiary bomb raids on the city. Incendiary bombs, unlike atomic bombs, caused a conflagration which burned all oxygen out of the air, suffocating all in the area.

The fire bombings had extracted a terrible price from thousands of Japanese civilians and military personnel alike. General Curtis LeMay had 80 cities on his "hit list" including those on the atomic bomb list. The latter were off limits until the final decision was made and use of the atomic bombs occurred. If the atomic bombs were not used or if they proved to be duds, LeMay almost certainly would have killed more people with incendiary bombs than were killed with atomic bombs in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. LeMay had already destroyed 58 Japanese cities by the end of July, 1945, killing hundreds of thousands more people then were killed by the two atomic bombs. I believe that the use of the atomic bombs broke a stalemate within the Japanese Supreme Council for the Direction of the War and ended the war early. As I flew out of Atsugi, headed for the United States on 9 August, 1946, I believed that the U. S. possession of atomic bombs would deter any future wars. Little did I know that Klaus Fuchs had passed almost total atom bomb design details to Russia through Julius and Ethel Rosenberg. This, coupled with the capture and deportation to Russia of the German A-bomb team at the end of the war in Europe, enabled Russia to have the A-bomb by 1949, which was the start of the Cold War.











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[[Image – filled in black outline of one of the atomic bombs dropped on Japan, with the words in white – "Little Boy" and "Fat Man"]]
[[image – photo of a museum room in which can be seen models of the tall, cylindrical Little Boy and the huge convex Fat Man, interspersed with photos and displays on the walls of this museum]]

The first (and the last) atomic bombs used in warfare were named "Little Boy" and "Fat Man." Little Boy was the atomic weapon which was dropped on the Japanese city of Hiroshima on August 6, 1945. This weapon had an explosive force equivalent to 20,000 tons of TNT. It was a gun-type weapon using uranium and was delivered by the B-29 Enola Gay. A major portion of the Enola Gay is currently on display at the National Air and Space Gallery in Washington, D. C.

"Fat Man" was dropped three days later on August 9, 1945, on the city of Nagasaki. It too had an explosive force of 20,000 tons of TNT. This weapon, however was an implosion type of nuclear device using plutonium. This bomb was delivered on Nagasaki by the B-29 Bockscar. Bockscar is on permanent display in its entirety at the U. S. Air Force Museum. Behind the Bockscar is an interesting exhibit which explains more about the two atomic bombs dropped on Japan (see photo above). It contains the actual spare casings of these atomic weapons.
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