The Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings will always be remembered as two of the most devastating assaults in military history, but many historians consider the American firebombing raid on Tokyo, carried out on 9 March of the same year, to be the deadliest in history.Ĭode-named Operation Meetinghouse, the raid on Tokyo saw an armada of 334 B-29 bombers drop 1,665 tons of incendiaries on the Japanese capital, destroying more than 15 kilometres of the city and killing an estimated 100,000 people. Listen Now How do the death tolls compare to those of other World War Two bombings? Indeed, the estimated number of people killed by the “Fat Man” bomb at the end of 1945 ranges from 39,000 to 80,000.ĭan talks to Hirata San, a survivor of the Hiroshima attacks, and one of the few remaining survivors who speak English, about the Hiroshima bombing. Such complexities are no less applicable to Nagasaki. Other factors that have complicated the process of arriving at a reliable estimate include uncertainty around the city’s population before the bombing and the fact that many bodies were completely vanished by the eviscerating power of the blast. There are numerous reasons for such confusion, not least the administrative chaos that prevailed in the aftermath of the bombing. Other surveys have the 1946 Hiroshima death toll at around 90,000. The question of whether those who died of life-shortening illnesses linked to the effects of radiation should be added to the tally is contentious – if we include deaths that occurred in the decades following the bombings the tolls swell considerably.Ī 1998 study posited a figure of 202,118 registered deaths resulting from the Hiroshima bombing, a number that had swollen by 62,000 since the 1946 death toll of 140,000.Įven if we choose not to include post-1946 deaths in the total, the 140,000 figure is far from universally accepted. The impact of the bombings on the long-term health of survivors makes it hard to arrive at a definitive death toll figure. People who died (often years) later of radiation-induced cancers and other long-term complaints linked to the detonation.People who died, often in aid stations, in the first and second weeks after the detonations, often from burns and injuries sustained in the bombings.People who walked considerable distances in the aftermath of the detonations before collapsing and dying.People who died immediately as the result of evisceration or collapsing buildings.The bombs’ lethal impact can be divided into several phases: ![]() A boy being treated for burns of the face and hands in Hiroshima Red Cross Hospital, 10 August 1945
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