One of the scenes shared by all the bloodiest conflicts of the 20th century could have been taken straight out of the movie The Road Warrior: spectral landscapes, erased buildings, dry trees, and lifeless deserts. The photographs in this gallery offer a panorama of those starkly bleak scenes, a battered panorama of war from Verdun to Iwo Jima, from Chosin Reservoir to Pork Chop Hill – images taken in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, it was Japan in September 1945.
SEE ALSO:
But far from the chronicle of the consequences of a military campaign sustained, painfully, these images tell of the devastation produced, in a few seconds, by the unspeakable violence. Here’s images of both cities taken in the weeks and months following the bombings that killed a combined 120,000 people directly, and tens of thousands more thanks to radiation injuries and illness. They include, in addition, typed notes by photographer Bernard Hoffman – revealing notes in silence like the one he wrote on September 3, 1945, for LIFE image editor Wilson Hicks:
“Today we saw Hiroshima – or what little is left of it, we were so dumbfounded by what we saw that most of us felt like crying, not out of sympathy for the Japanese, but because of this new and terrible form of destruction. Compared to Hiroshima, Berlin, Hamburg and Cologne are virtually untouched… The sweet smell of death is everywhere.”
LIFE
Comments