The Bombing of Hiroshima, Part 1
Photographing the incomprehensible, from the sky.
At exactly fifteen minutes past eight in the morning, on August 6, 19451, an atomic bomb ignited above Hiroshima, instantly killing over 70,000 people.
When President Truman heard the news, he turned to a group of soldiers and said, “This is the greatest thing in history. It’s time for us to get home.2”
The official cameraman for the mission was American physicist Bernard Waldman, on board the Necessary Evil, a B-29 sent to photograph the explosion. But Waldman came up empty. There’s a couple of theories about what happened. The Los Angeles Times falsely claimed that Waldman, “in his excitement,” forgot to open the Fastex camera’s shutter. Another theory suggested an electromagnetic pulse from the bomb caused the camera to malfunction. But in reality, it was a Capa-esque processing malfunction.
“Waldman believed he obtained good Fastax records from a point some 19 miles out,” John Malik wrote in 1985. “Because the film developing malfunctioned, the Fastax~ film was torn, the emulsion was or was scraped off, and the film came out clear where emulsion did image was visible.”
Four others had better luck.
The most widely-seen photo was taken by Staff Sergeant George R. Caron, tail gunner on the Enola Gay. Just before takeoff, Jerome Ossip, the 509th’s photography officer, was booted from the mission for not having a parachute. So Ossip handed off his Fairchild K-20 to Caron, who had never used a professional camera before.
“Pull the trigger on the pistol-grip shutter like this,” Ossip told him. “Don’t change the aperture and shoot anything you see.”
A cropped version of Caron’s photo, which he described as a “peep into hell3,” was used on this leaflet that was supposedly dropped on Nagasaki warning of the impending bombing.
It seems unlikely that the threat pictured on the leaflet could be fully understood. A black and white photo from the sky cannot fully capture the horror of an atomic bomb.
This alternate frame of Caron’s was published in The New York Times six days after the attack, on August 12 (next to a photo from Nagasaki), and in the August 20 edition of LIFE magazine.
Second Lt. Russell Gackenbach was also on the Necessary Evil. He snuck his personal camera, an Agfa PB 20 Viking, onto the plane and made two photographs of the billowing atomic cloud.
“We saw a very, very bright light and the start of a mushroom cloud. At the first chance I had, I got out of my seat,” Gackenbach told NPR in 2018. “I went to the side navigator's window and quickly picked up my camera and took two photographs. I'll never forget that.”
We just looked at each other. We didn't talk. We were all dumbfounded.”
Surprisingly, the military never tried to confiscate Gackenbach’s photos. “I made a deal with our intelligence officer, that I always flew with a camera,” he told the Voices of Manhattan Project in 2016. “To this day, nobody said anything.”
This is the other, less widely-seen, photo taken that morning by Gackenbach.
A print of Gackenbach’s photo, his Agfa PB 20 Viking, and other personal artifacts were auctioned in 2019, fetching $20,000.
This is the only motion picture taken of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima.
American physicist Harold Agnew is credited with shooting the footage, as The New York Times noted in his obit. But that’s not entirely true. It was indeed Agnew’s camera (a Bell & Howell) but the tail gunner, Albert Dehart, actually shot the historic film.
Fellow Manhattan Project physicist Lawrence Johnston, who was on The Great Artiste with Agnew, wrote, “Harold Agnew had the foresight to bring an 8-millimeter home movie camera, which he gave to our tail gunner. Since we were flying away from Hiroshima when the bomb went off, the gunner had a perfect vantage point and recording the rising cloud starting a few seconds after the detonation.4”
The only image taken directly above the blast was shot by Sgt. John McGlohon, an aerial reconnaissance photographer in a plane flying inadvertently over Hiroshima during the bombing. What are the odds of that?
“We took off from Guam about 2 o’clock in the morning on what we assumed to be a regular, assigned mission,” McGlohon said in an interview with The National WWII Museum. “It happened that our flight line assigned to us that day was over the city of Hiroshima…to return to Guam late that afternoon.”
As the plane’s photographer, McGlohon was looking through a 12-inch window straight down on Hiroshima when the bomb detonated. “There was just a brilliant flash, as if somebody had fired a flashbulb in your face.”
“We flew directly over it,” McGlohon recalled.
“I picked up a handheld camera, a little 4x5 K20, and walked up in the blister, and as we flew away, I took the other picture.”
When the military pieced together what happened, McGlohon’s photos were seized and classified until 1995.
The identities of the photographers who captured two other images of the Hiroshima blast are a mystery.
The New York Times revisited this photo in 2016 and, working with an expert on Hiroshima, determined that the image is not of a mushroom cloud, but of smoke from the fires caused by the explosion. They also reported that the photo was taken more than three hours after the strike.
That timeframe doesn’t align with George Caron on The Enola Gay or Russell Gackenbach aboard The Necessary Evil, which means it was taken by another photographer on another plane flying near Hiroshima later in the day.
A negative very similar to this image was up for auction on eBay in 2019 for a Buy It Now price of $1,989,989.33. It didn’t sell.
The mushroom cloud is ominous, shrouding the horror beneath. These photos were all that the world would see of the bombing in Hiroshima for years.
Asahi Shimbun newspaper photographer Hajime Miyatake shot this shocking photo of one of the victims. It’s unknown whether she survived.
Miyatake hid his negatives from the military under his porch for over six years, until the end of the American occupation. This photo was eventually published in the Asahi Picture News weekly magazine, August 6, 1952.
“Looking at people near death laid out on concrete, their faces and bodies burned, only shreds of clothing still clinging to them, groaning in a way that did not sound human, I stood frozen to the spot, camera in hand.” Miyatake wrote in his journal.
A second atomic bomb was dropped in Nagasaki August 9, 1945, killing another 40,000.
John Hersey, Hiroshima (New York: Bantam Books, 1946), 1.
Harry S. Truman, Memoirs by Harry S. Truman (New York: Doubleday & Company, Inc., 1955), 421.
Gordon Thomas and Max Morgan Witts, Enola Gay (New York: Stein and Day, 1977), 262.
Lawrence Johnston, Discovering Alvarez (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1987), 66.
Brilliant reporting on this