The terrifying Daisy Girl ad, in which Lyndon Baines Johnson used the threat of nuclear war to defeat conservative - some would say war-mongering - Senator Barry Goldwater in 1964 to continue the presidency he inherited when John F. The hushed conversations of adults during the Cuban missile crisis. Duck-and-cover drills in elementary school. I was not only the child of a WWII veteran, but of the Cold War. Or at least that there had been one, and we didn’t want there to be another. Days later, Japan surrendered to Allied powers and World War II ended.Įven as a young girl, I knew about the atomic bomb. Their destructive power was unprecedented, incinerating buildings and people, and leaving lifelong scars on survivors, not just physical but also psychological, and on the cities themselves. planes dropped two atomic bombs, one on Hiroshima, one on Nagasaki, the first and only time nuclear weapons have been used. My brother’s name was Greg.Ī mushroom cloud rises moments after the atomic bomb was dropped on Nagasaki on Aug. He was of that cohort of young men who answered the call to war, came home, got married, got a job, raised a family - and put a cap on the bottle of whatever had happened in the theater of battle. I have no idea what he did during the war, or where he was when the bombs were dropped.
Our father was, from what little I can glean, in the Army Air Force, stationed somewhere in the Pacific Theater. Their job was to bring an end to World War II. It is doubtful any of those names were known to the young Americans ordered to facilitate those deaths. The estimated 120,000 Japanese who were killed instantly in the two attacks had names, too, as did the tens of thousands more who died from the fallout in the weeks and months afterwards. So did the second bomb that was dropped three days later on Nagasaki: Fat Man. Army Air Force, flew over the Japanese city of Hiroshima and dropped the world’s first atomic bomb. 6, 1945, a plane called the Enola Gay, manned by a crew from the U.S. Illustration using an AP photo Seventy-five years ago, on Aug. He went on to write "Hiroshima," a nonfiction account of the dropping of the first atomic bomb, which was published in August 1946 in the New Yorker.
John Hersey as a correspondent for TIME magazine in World War II, photographed in 1944 in an unknown location.