Bombings at Hiroshima
The United States wanted to choose cities that would greatly affect the Japanese if bombed and make them want to surrender. Hiroshima was thought to be a good choice because it was a very industrial city with a large population and military surrounding it. Hiroshima was also a very large city. Even though the government had been trying to slowly evacuate its population, it still had a population of about 340,000-350,000 at the time of the bombing. Japanese radars had caught the planes flying in, but dismissed it when they saw that there weren't that many planes coming. The bomb was dropped on Hiroshima at 8:15 on August 6, 1945. This bomb, know as "The Little Boy, contained about 130 pounds of uranium and destroyed about 4.7 square miles of the city.
"The mushroom cloud itself was a spectacular sight, a bubbling mass of purple-gray smoke and you could see it had a red core in it and everything was burning inside. . . . It looked like lava or molasses covering a whole city. . . ." Staff Sergeant George Caron
"The mushroom cloud itself was a spectacular sight, a bubbling mass of purple-gray smoke and you could see it had a red core in it and everything was burning inside. . . . It looked like lava or molasses covering a whole city. . . ." Staff Sergeant George Caron