Russia publishes Soviet ambassador’s report on state of Hiroshima and Nagasaki after A-bombings

MOSCOW, August 6 /TASS/. A report on the state of Hiroshima and Nagasaki after the A-bombings in August 1945 prepared by the Soviet ambassador to Japan in the aftermath of the barbaric bombardments has come out in Russia for the first time. The Russian Historical Society posted it on its website www.rushistory.org on the initiative of the society’s head, Sergei Naryshkin, on Wednesday. The report contains a collection of materials about the consequences of US atomic bombings of the two Japanese cities - Hiroshima and Nagasaki - on August 6 and 9, 1945. On September 13, 1945, the Russian embassy in Tokyo sent a group of its employees to Hiroshima, including TASS correspondent Anatoly Varshavsky. He managed to walk around the city, which had been destroyed to such a degree that, according to him, it was impossible to find a shelter to hide from rain. The Soviet embassy workers also talked to the local residents and visited the A-bombing victims in a city hospital. The recollections of Hiroshima residents about the bombings and their terrible consequences became one of the report’s key themes. On September 18, 1945, the Soviet employees arrived in Nagasaki where, according to witnesses, the bomb had fallen on a University hospital. The Soviet report’s authors also listened to the recollections of the city residents and took notes of what they said. They also shared their own impressions of what they had seen in the city where the smell of corpses was still very strong. The Soviet embassy representatives who visited Nagasaki included a camera operator who shot the blast site and the destruction caused by the explosion. According to Alexander Ilyshev-Vvedensky, the head of the Japanese section of the Third Asian department of the Russian Foreign Ministry, the Soviet ambassador’s report was the first human description of the horrors of the A-bombings, which, if to be more precise, should be called crimes against humanity. "A full report or even parts of it have never been published. According to us, it deserves to be published on the eve of the 70th anniversary of the atomic bombings of the Japanese cities," the Russian diplomat stressed. On August 6, 1945, during World War II (1939-45), an American B-29 bomber dropped the world’s first deployed atomic bomb over the Japanese city of Hiroshima. The explosion wiped out 90 percent of the city and immediately killed 80,000 people; tens of thousands more would later die of radiation exposure. Three days later, on August 9, a second B-29 dropped another A-bomb on Nagasaki, killing an estimated 40,000 people. Japan’s Emperor Hirohito announced his country’s unconditional surrender in World War II in a radio address on August 15, citing the devastating power of "a new and most cruel bomb." Read more