Deep in the heart of the Pacific, the island of Tinian is getting ready for an operation that will mark the end of the Second World War. In total secrecy, a completely unknown weapon is loaded aboard a B-29 bomber. It's over ten feet long, weighs four and a half tons, cost around two billion dollars, and took up to 140,000 people to make.
It disappears into the hold, Little Boy, history's first-ever atomic bomb. At 2:00 in the morning, an elite team climbs on board the Enola Gay. Colonel Paul Tibbets doesn't yet know their destination.
One possible target is Hiroshima, in the west of Japan. In this one final attack, America claims it will end the war with Nazi Germany's ally, Japan. For the land of the rising sun, Hiroshima is a base of great logistical importance and home to garrisons of up to 40,000 soldiers.
In a city decimated by nuclear fire, one man, Yoshito Matsushige, will capture on film the moments immediately following the attack. For the first time, we can now witness in his photos the hell that it was to be there under the cloud of Hiroshima. It's Monday, the 6th of August, in Hiroshima.
For its 350,000 inhabitants, it's the start of a lovely day. It's rush hour. The trams are packed with people off to work.
The kids are on their way to school. I was on the second floor of the Savings Bureau. We opened all the windows facing the street full of trolley cars and said: "What a fine day.
" In the morning, I had breakfast at my usual restaurant. Just as I was about to leave, three underclass men came in. That day, I didn't have any summer holidays.
Like every day at 7:10, the air raid sirens have rung out. However, for 45 minutes now, things have been back to normal. Everyone's used to seeing bombers over the city.
No one's too bothered by the silver B-29 that splits the sky. It was a bright, sunny day. Those B-29s were flying high up in the clear sky.
They were silver and so neat. As I was walking towards Sendamachi, there was a sudden boom. Then suddenly, something like a massive ball of fire came in through the windows.
I tried to crouch down, covering my eyes and ears. Right over the Tsuchiya Hospital, I saw the bomb as it dropped. At 8:15, Little Boy explodes 2,000 feet over Hiroshima.
They call this point the hypocenter, ground zero. The sky lights up with the characteristic gamma-ray flash. All living beings are blasted with radioactivity and die instantly, with no time for the pain to reach their brains.
As the chain reaction unfolds, a huge fireball forms. At its center, the temperature can reach 6,000 degrees Celsius, as hot as the surface of the sun. The heat just carbonizes everyone.
They just vanish in the heat. A shock wave then arises and sweeps through the city in a devastating wind of up to almost 1,000 miles an hour. A killer wind that blows bodies apart and destroys 60,000 buildings and homes.
In a whirlwind of wind, steam and radioactive particles, a mushroom-shaped cloud forms, towering seven and a half miles high over Hiroshima. I didn't see the mushroom cloud. I was right under it.
My body was blown away with the cards in my hands. The next moment, I lost consciousness. Obviously, I was knocked unconscious.
When I came to, it was really dark. I couldn't see 100 meters in front of me. It's just after the blast.
Sunao Tsuboi and Mitsuko Kouchi are still alive, miraculously shielded by either a wall or someone's body. Seventy thousand others are already dead, though. For nearly two miles, around 90 percent of the city has been flattened.
Huge fires are raging and a huge cloud suffocates Hiroshima. It was so dark that I could hardly see the face of my wife, and she was right next to me. She was holding my hand, so I realized we hadn't been killed by the bomb.
Neither of us. Yoshito Matsushige is 32 years old, a photographer for the local Chugoku Shimbun newspaper, embedded with the military press corps. When the bomb goes off, he's less than two miles away from ground zero at home with his pregnant wife.
They're just finishing their breakfast. Where the wind came through, there was a huge hole in the wall. Right through both floors of the house and the sitting room was full of debris.
I pulled my camera out of the debris and put on the clothes I got from headquarters. I got ready and went out. Yoshito wants to get to the center of town, but the shockwave has completely leveled Hiroshima.
The streets are nothing but debris, burnt bodies, and people with dreadful wounds. It's impossible to go any further with the heat of the fire, so he turns back and heads for the Miyuki Bridge. It was such an awful scene that I just couldn't press the shutter.
Not for at least 20 minutes. I eventually took a photo, then went in a few feet closer for another, but the viewfinder was clouded over with my tears. I still remember that to this day.
It was just hell. Here they are, Yoshito Matsushige's two photos on the Miyuki Bridge, taken on the 6th of August, 1945, just three hours after the bomb went off. They're the very first photos to show so clearly the victims of the first atomic bomb in the history of mankind.
There on the bridge, he realizes how lucky he has been and just how violent the explosion was. He will write in his memoirs that he was born to be there at that moment. The wounded, all their eyes were fixed on me.
It was as if they wanted me to tell the whole world what was happening to them. Was it cruel of me to photograph them, or was it the best thing I could do? I was in terrible conflict.
Matsushige's photos, preserved here in Hiroshima at the Chugoku Shimbun press offices, should never, in fact, have existed. In Japan, during the Second World War, it was an offense to photograph events that were bad for public morale. However, unbeknownst to the authorities, the forbidden photos were circulated.
The negatives were seriously deteriorated and they might well have disappeared. However, in the 1970s, painstaking restoration work saved them from oblivion. What did they really go through, these people preserved for eternity on the Miyuki Bridge?
Who are they? What do they remember? Scarcely a word has been written about it.
However, the wounded photographed by Yoshito Matsushige, have been identified. Their average age now would be well over 80. Only two of them are left.
However, ten other eyewitnesses have also been found. For the purposes of this unique investigation, a team of specialists has availed itself of the very latest technology. We must stick to what the witnesses have told us.
When the images were scanned, new details started to emerge, hitherto invisible to the naked eye. Like these bodies here on the ground. Or this parapet blown away by the explosion.
By recreating the scene in 3-D, and thanks to eyewitness accounts, the photos have been brought back to life. The better to understand what really went on in Hiroshima, in the heart of the mushroom cloud. Hiroshima means the big island.
It lies beside the Pacific Ocean. The many branches of the River Ota also winds through it. It's almost like a floating city, but when it gets so hot that all that water starts to boil, there's no way out of the trap.
In the midst of all the frenzy, the Miyuki Bridge played a vital role for the survivors. It stood right at the edge of the fires that raged after the bomb, a mile and a half from the hypocenter. It was the bridge between life and death.
On the Miyuki Bridge, Matsushige's photos are now part of an actual monument. The time has now come, though, for them to yield up their secrets. The survivors arrive at the Miyuki Bridge bearing all the scars of what they've been through in the explosion.
The young girl next to the little boy looks like her hair has been burnt. Another's clothes are in tatters and her arms exposed. Off to the side, the people are all barefoot.
Did they flee like that with no shoes, or did they lose them as they ran? If you put the photos side by side, you notice one figure that appears in both. A young girl in school uniform.
Her name is Mitsuko Kouchi. Here in 1945, she's 13 years old. She's in her second year at Hiroshima's Business School for Girls.
She's under a mile from ground zero. Today, she's over 80. She still lives in Hiroshima.
Mitsuko Kouchi remembers everything about Monday, the 6th of August, 1945. In the photo, she's wearing a scarf given to her by her cousin who works at the Yamaguchi Police Station. It's not part of Hiroshima's regular school uniform.
Her sleeve is torn and she's bleeding profusely. My friend ran over and clung to me. She said: "Mitsuko, my head is cracked.
" I looked and she was covered in blood. Since she was clinging on to me, I was covered in blood too. When the bomb goes off, Mitsuko isn't at school.
She's been requisitioned to work at the postal savings bank. The shock wave hits the building at 160 miles an hour. The building withstands it, but all its windows are blown in and the flying glass seriously wounds Mitsuko and her friends.
The building is right at the heart of the huge fires that follow the explosion. Six of the young girls somehow make it badly burned to the Miyuki Bridge. Mitsuko Kouchi is overwhelmed by what she sees there.
No one was talking. I didn't see anyone talking. Everyone was in silence, facing downwards.
Some were crying in pain. Everyone looked like monsters. Some got burnt on their faces.
That looked terrible. He didn't look human. Half his body was covered in blood.
Anyone not fully clothed ended up naked. They were everywhere, all black, their clothes in tatters. They might have been a bit embarrassed, but it wasn't the moment to be prudish.
For the 13-year-old girl, the Miyuki Bridge is like an antechamber of hell. What Mitsuko Kouchi tells us, she has kept deep inside for over 70 years. A woman who was holding a child.
She had her hair held up in a hair elastic. I suppose she was the older sister of the child. She was screaming and swirling around, holding a charred child in her arms.
I felt so sorry. The child was dead. She cried out a name, the child's name, I guess, and said: "Wake up, wake up!
" Of course, the baby never woke up. All we saw was a charred body. Mitsuko has thought of that mother with her dead baby ever since.
Every single day. She can't forgive herself for not trying to help her. Confusion reigns on the Miyuki Bridge that morning of the 6th of August.
It is three hours since the bomb went off. The wounded are crowding in, wanting to get across to escape the heat of the city center. When Yoshito Matsushige takes these two photos, no one knows the explosion was a nuclear bomb.
I don't remember who was there, yet I was standing there in the photo. I wondered why would this person be photographing such a terrible scene. At that time, a man in national uniform with a camera in his hands.
Naturally, it felt strange to see a man with a camera. I remember he asked me: "What happened to Hiroshima? " What really happened that morning in Hiroshima under the cloud?
Witnesses tell us the wounded arriving at the Miyuki Bridge are parched with thirst. Some of them throw themselves into the river trying to cool off and soothe their wounds, but exhausted, they drown. The Ota fills up with bodies.
While up on the bridge, in deathly silence, everyone just waits. For what? That man in a cap in front of Mitsuko, what's he doing?
Why is this man touching his feet? This container, what's in it? There, a man lifts his head looking for something.
He appears to have a shaved head. What is he waiting for? That is Mr Tsuboi.
He is the other person in the photo who is still alive. His testimony is precious because he knows exactly what everyone's doing there on the Miyuki Bridge. Mr Tsuboi's face still bears the scars of the 6th of August, 1945.
He was 20 years old. On that day, he's just had breakfast with some friends and he's walking along the street. When the bomb explodes, he's three-quarters of a mile from ground zero.
The radiation burns his face. His back is bleeding, and he looks for medical aid. In the street, he sees a man holding his own intestines in his hands.
Another, with his eye hanging out. In the face of all this horror, he gives up on getting to the hospital and heads for the bridge. According to Mr Tsuboi, everyone on the bridge had come there to tend to their burns.
They brought rapeseed oil there. It's a cooking oil. You couldn't put it on everyone.
People were daubing themselves as best they could with their arms in the bucket. That canister on the ground is full of oil. An emergency first aid remedy for burns.
The man in the foreground with a cap and in uniform, Mr Tsuboi tells us, is a member of the civil defense who'd been instructed to treat burn cases in this way. Further back in a uniform of a lighter shade, another man from the temporary first aid post is doing his best at this thankless task. However, there are just too many people and too many burns, and the precious rapeseed oil soon runs out.
It's replaced with thick, dark sump oil hastily appropriated from the nearby train depot. They started using that because at least it was oil. They covered themselves in it and their faces were getting all black.
They really look like monsters. However, it's not enough. Here in this makeshift hospital, some are simply running out of strength and starting to give up on life.
Over to one side, a young girl is doubled over, her arms covered in dreadful burns, exhausted by the pain. We can make out the legs of others who just lie there at death's door with no strength left to fight. There was nothing more to be done.
Those who were going to die, died. The others kept on living. There on the Miyuki Bridge, Mr Tsuboi feels his end is near.
His identity papers are all burned, so he's worried that if he dies, his body will never be identified. Never returned to his parents. As the dying people around him look on, he scratches a message on the bridge with a stone.
Thinking my life would end at 20, it was a lonely feeling. Thinking no one will help me, I wrote "Tsuboi is dying here. " Lonely.
Maybe futile would be a better word. We were hardly capable ourselves, of moving. How could we do anything for those people there on the ground?
Those who were dying said: "Mother, Father," and then died. Many people died at Miyuki Bridge. Many people came to the Miyuki Bridge in search of aid and comfort.
Many just came there to die. This summer of 1945, the children have been sent away from the city for fear of bombardments. The youngest ones were the first to go.
Yet many of the wounded in Yoshito Matsushige's photos look like children or teenagers. Here, a young girl with long hair. Beside her, a boy with a shaven head.
These girls and boys along what was the parapet, they're wearing school uniforms, surely. Back there, this boy, half-naked and alone, what's he doing there? Did all Hiroshima's school kids meet up here at the bridge?
On the Miyuki Bridge, I don't remember who was sitting alongside me, but they looked like schoolgirls and boys. Maybe seventh or eighth graders, judging from their satchels. Most likely they were college students.
Mitsuo Kodama, who was 13 at the time, pays his respects to all the children from his class who never had a chance to grow up. The bomb goes off just half a mile from his school. Like all his classmates, he has terrible radiation burns and he faints.
However, the fact that there were schools back at ground zero doesn't of itself explain the large number of children on the Miyuki Bridge. The kids a year older than me were off to work in the factories. Japan is at war and the men are all off at the front.
Behind the lines, life goes on. From the age of 12 or 13, teenagers are drafted into all sorts of duties. The girls contribute to the war effort by working for the post office or as tram conductors.
This August though, Hiroshima's young are needed for a much more important and dangerous task. To prevent firebomb attacks, buildings were being torn down and spaced out. We were doing something that was totally useless.
These young people are working for the army now, retrieving stones from the buildings to build fire barricades. Swelling the ranks of young people scattered all around the hypocenter. In a radius of just over a mile from the blast, there are more than 8,000 of them.
Many students were mobilized, 60 percent of those within 1,000 meters of the epicenter like myself, were killed. For some years now, Professor Keiko Otani has been charting the age of the victims of the Hiroshima bomb. Her studies confirm the survivor's testimonies and the conclusions drawn from Yoshito Matsushige's photos.
At Hiroshima on the 6th of August, 22 percent of the victims were adolescents. Most of them between 13 and 14 years old. When you see from this diagram that so many innocent children died, it drives home the awfulness of the situation.
On the morning of the sixth, 13-year-old Chiyoko Kuwabara is helping with the demolition work. She has a tummy ache. She's lying under a tree when the bomb goes off.
With serious wounds to her face, she flees along with her classmates towards the Miyuki Bridge, where she finds a lot of other children. We were still kids, so all we wanted was to go home. We were only thinking about getting home.
On the bridge, the children don't know where to go, so they just wait. I will never forget what we went through. Kuwabara is one of just a handful to make it this far, unharmed.
It makes me cry when I think of them waiting there for their family to come to find them. I always feel so sorry for them. The children's lives hang by a thread.
It's not enough just to have reached the bridge. They're still in grave need of help. For the military, it's out of the question that Japan surrenders.
In the inferno that is now Hiroshima, their first priority is to save the vital resources to carry on the fight. The fire that's consuming the city is getting dangerously close to the Miyuki Bridge. For everyone fleeing the blaze, the bridge has in fact become the border between life and death.
More and more victims of the blaze are starting to arrive. Eyewitness testimony has made it possible to reconstruct what's going on around the edges of Yoshito Matsushige's photos. It's an endless ballet of military vehicles.
Relief efforts are being organized to get the burn victims to the hospitals that haven't been destroyed. Goro Takeuchi is a 22-year-old army cadet stationed in a suburb of Hiroshima. He sees a searingly bright light fill the sky and hears a huge, dull thump.
Half an hour later, along with 100 other soldiers, he sets off to help evacuate the victims. When he gets to the Miyuki Bridge, he is shocked by the orders he's been given. He ordered me to give priority to military men.
Women and children were not important. Children, women, and the elderly were considered weak. Only young men were allowed a ride.
In a deathly silence, and under the eye of the wounded waiting stunned on the bridge, the evacuation begins. Young soldiers were still a valuable part of the war effort. I think that's why this order was given.
To win the war required people who could hold a gun. Women couldn't shoot. Women and children were thought to be of little use and had to wait.
They had to join the queue. When I first received the order, I thought that made sense. However, the situation at Miyuki Bridge brought me to my senses.
I couldn't just rescue the military personnel. In the midst of all the chaos on the Miyuki Bridge, everybody's trying to stay alive. A little girl goes up to a truck to beg for help.
I still remember his voice. It was stern and without compassion. It really scared her that he shouted at her and she started crying.
She was just a little thing. Then she rushed off. Alone, with no idea where she's going, the girl heads back into the blazing heart of the city.
There were flames everywhere and I could see the whole city burning up. What happened to her? She died, of course.
Even adults couldn't survive, so what hope was there for a little girl? How many children came to the Miyuki Bridge on that Monday the 6th of August, only to disappear again, like that little girl who's forever burned into Mr Tsuboi's memory? Rie Kutsuki is very familiar with Yoshito Matsushige's two photos.
Since her early childhood, she's grown up with a strange certainty, one shared by her whole family. There in the photo, right behind the man applying the oil, a little boy with a shaven head stands with his back to us. He's clearly there in this photo.
Why did he never make it back? I was told my grandparents heard the same question from people many times. For the whole family, there was never any doubt.
This boy here is Uncle Akira. His unusually shaped ears are the indisputable proof. He's never been found.
However, one day my grandmother came across this famous photo. She recognized her son Akira, even from the back. Akira, the brother of Kutsuki's father is at school when the nuclear mushroom cloud blooms over Hiroshima.
He's alone and he tries to get home. He's pulled along in the rush towards the Miyuki Bridge, where Yoshito Matsushige photographs him. He's clearly there in this photo.
Why did he never make it back? When a huge number of people all die at once, you can never know what happened to each one of them. That's the cruelty of war and the atomic bomb.
Hiroshima, an entire city wiped out in a fraction of a second. Thousands of lives were brought to a sudden end. Bit by bit, thanks to the photos of Yoshito Matsushige, it's been possible to trace how events unfolded that Monday morning.
However, what do we know of the actual suffering people endured under the cloud? Doctor Harada is a surgeon at Osaka Hospital. He's also a specialist in emergency medicine.
He can shed new light on Matsushige's photos. Their hair is burned, as well as their clothes. They must be burnt all over their bodies.
A series of details strikes him straight away. In Doctor Harada's opinion, all the victims in the photo show characteristic symptoms of very serious burns. This can be seen from the parts of their bodies that are overexposed in the photos.
It's not the kind of burn you get today in the normal course of our lives. When a person is exposed to radiation from an A-bomb, the skin absorbs the rays and gives off heat. The burns are all the more intense because the victims were lightly dressed for a summer day.
Many parts of their bodies weren't protected by clothing. It was a very deep and serious burn. That was a surprising revelation.
Indeed, when an A-bomb goes off, the temperature will cause hair to frizz. The skin is burned very deeply. Very rapidly, enormous blisters form, which then burst, leaving the flesh exposed.
The nerve endings are thus in direct contact with the air. The pain the people suffered would have been the worst pain a person could ever experience. They were saying: "Mummy, it's hot," with their hands held out.
There were people walking like this with their hands out. They were walking slowly, but walking. I was wondering why their clothes were hanging off their arms.
However, in fact, it was their skin. That's what I found out at the hospital. The skin had peeled off, the reddish flesh was exposed, and that too was burned.
Their skins turned outward and fluid was oozing out. When you grill fish, the skin shrinks. It was like that.
Mitsuko Kouchi's father is there on Miyuki Bridge too. He has very bad burns on his arms. I held this side of him saying: "Are you all right?
" Then from here, the skin peeled completely off. It was his hand. The skin came off and it looked so watery.
Mr Kouchi's burns are characteristic of burns from a nuclear weapon. The heat of the explosion burns everything in its path. Its power is such that it leaves imprints of things on the ground and on the walls, like the shadow of death.
Any hospital left standing is submerged by the victims of serious burns. The effects are beyond the power of human imagination. Professor Hasai is a physicist.
Like Doctor Harada, he has been studying for a long time the consequences of the atomic bomb. He too, has remarked on the severity of the victims' burns. In the data gathered by the American army, the burn victims were a hidden factor.
Yes, because it was just too awful. If this had been made public before, the US and the whole world might have reacted differently. However, the US prefers to keep quiet about suffering on this scale.
What they want is to recuperate all their huge investment by developing the civil applications of nuclear power, and that means not scaring people. For a long time, all their studies on the effects of the bomb remain confidential. What these studies show are the victims of keloids, a type of scarring characterized by extensive growths of flesh.
It's a symptom presented by almost all the burn victims from Hiroshima, and Nagasaki as well. Several reports have shown that outside the zone hit by the wind from the explosion, the number of victims who died from burns was considerably higher than the number of those who died instantaneously inside the zone. When Little Boy explodes at 8:15, nobody yet knows what the consequences will be.
Oppenheimer himself, the architect of the bomb, estimates 20,000 dead in the first second. There will be more than three times that number. Hiroshima, which was spared all the bombing raids, is, therefore, a reliable choice for testing the destructive power of this new weapon.
When, in September 1945, US scientists arrived in Japan with the occupying army, they seized all photos, medical records, and samples taken by doctors since the 6th of August. To handle all this information, an atomic bomb casualty commission is set up. Under the cover of medical care for the people of Hiroshima, a great deal of information is collected, all intended for a proper inquiry into the effects of the blast.
Everything is noted down, photographed, archived, and classified as top secret by the US military. Beyond the confines of the ABCC, Japanese doctors are under permanent surveillance by US military police. They're not to ask too many questions if they don't want to lose their license.
Throughout the whole Hiroshima region, the burns from the bomb are filmed. However, sometimes mere images are not enough. Kouchi's father too turns to the ABCC.
When he dies, his son wants to recover his body. My brother asked me to contact the ABCC. I found out that my father's body had been preserved in formaldehyde.
He'd been dissected. Four days after the blast, a strange sickness is raging. Vomiting, bleeding, decomposition of the flesh, hair loss, the Hiroshima plague.
The inhabitants are learning of the effects of radioactivity. Dozens of women will give birth prematurely in the rubble of the still-burning city. Takeuchi, the military cadet, will help deliver them of their stillborn babies.
The newborns I saw weren't the normal red. They were all white. They have a name for the survivors of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki blasts.
The hibakusha. They're suffering from burns, but also from the effects of the radioactivity. Cancers and leukemia.
In Japanese society, to have the status of hibakusha gives you access to a pension and free medical care, but it soon turns on the victims. People are afraid of the hibakusha. The women will give birth to monsters, the men are all sterile.
Already suffering the guilt of still being alive, the victims find themselves having to hide away or keep their terrible secret for fear of being ostracized. This, in the truest sense, adds insult to injury. A third person in Matsushige's photos prefers to remain anonymous.
This woman is still alive, but she doesn't want to be named. I didn't want anyone to know either, but my brother insisted because our father was in the photo. For a long time, to avoid their children and grandchildren being stigmatized, the hibakusha have preferred to keep quiet.
The people from the Miyuki Bridge want to die in peace as if the bomb had never blown their lives apart. Some people need to forget. Others need to remember.
Every morning at the exact hour that Little Boy exploded, a bell rings out through the streets of Hiroshima. Every 6th of August at 8:15 a. m.
, the whole city shuts down and welcomes people from all over the world to celebrate peace. Like many other survivors, Mr Tsuboi has lived in the shadow of the bomb. Like many, still being alive has given him a mission.
The Miyuki Bridge isn't just where all those injured people went. For me, it's where the rest of my life began. It was like a rebirth for me.
On the Miyuki Bridge, in an instant, Tsuboi, Kouchi, Nishioka, Kodama, and all the others lost their innocence. It shouldn't have happened. That endless line of burned victims.
It's like I'm watching something I shouldn't. Like Takeuchi, they all want their lives after the 6th of August 1945, not to have been in vain. After we die, there will be no one left to tell these stories.
I have to do whatever I can do as long as I live. To pass it on to the young, it has been my duty to remember it all and collect all the documentation I could. I want them to understand the true value of peace, and never to forget Hiroshima.
That's what I want. Yoshito Matsushige passed away in 2005, but these photos are now part of our collective memory. They are a homage to the 210,000 victims of the Hiroshima bomb, as well as the one that fell on Nagasaki three days later.
They are a rare testimony to that Monday, the 6th of August, 1945, and to what they all suffered, those men, women, and children caught in the hell of the nuclear blaze under the cloud of Hiroshima, so that humanity may never see its like again.
