Nagasaki, Hiroshima Aug 6, 1945 – Aug 9, 1945

 

Nagasaki: the little boy carrying his dead brother in 1945.

A boy stands at attention with a tight face. He was biting his lip hard. He was trying to be brave in his grief. He carries his dead brother on his back and waits to deliver him to the pyre.

"The child was looking at the flames. He was biting his lip so hard it was bleeding,” writes Joe O'Donnell, who took the photo.

The photographer had spoken to a Japanese journalist about the history of the photograph:

“I saw a ten-year-old boy walking. He was carrying a baby on his back. During the days I was in Japan, I saw many children carrying their siblings on their backs and playing. However, this boy was different. I could tell that he had come to this place for a serious reason. He wasn't wearing shoes. His face was hard. The baby seemed to be sleeping. The child stood there for five or ten minutes. People in white masks approached him and removed the baby carrier he was carrying. Then, I saw it was dead. The men placed it on the fire. The child stood there, motionless, staring at the flames. He was biting his lip so hard it was bleeding. As soon as the fire slowly died down, the boy turned and left."

 "...In total, the August 6th and 9th bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, respectively killed more than 200,000 people. Six days after the second attack, Hirohito announced Japan's unconditional surrender..." (Smithsonian Magazine).

"No doubt, history is filled with inexplicable horror. I suppose up to 1945, the war atrocities of the Japanese prison camps, German concentration camps, Nazi and American incendiary obliteration bombings, and the dropping of 'an uranium bomb that yielded an estimated 16 kilotons of TNT (reaching temperatures of 5,400 degrees) on a civilian population in Hiroshima and the dropping of an implosive plutonium bomb on Nagasaki' by America were nonpareil historical terrorism."

Stone, Oliver and Peter Kuznick. The Untold History of the United States. New York: Gallery Books, 2012. 160-178.