I ran across this in a letter my grandfather wrote to his parents when he was in the Navy in 1945.

It is about 15 miles from Kure to Hiroshima, but after about 7 miles you begin to notice that all the buildings are leaning a little in your direction. People here don’t seem as cheerful as in Kure or Hiro. A little further there aren’t any roofs or windows and some of the houses are turned over on their sides. 

It isn’t much farther until you begin to realize that all the talk about atomic power wasn’t just talk. Hiroshima, like all Japanese towns here, sits down in a hole with mountains around it. As far as you can see from one side to the mountains on the other side, 7 to 10 miles, there is a broken, battered, heaving pile of rubble. All that breaks in the horizon is the shattered pieces of about seven huge stone buildings in the center of town that have a few stones on each other and one or two empty windows, a smokestack that oddly remains standing, and the twisted, charcoal remains of the blasted trees. The streets have been scraped open and a trolley line put through the debris. The people here don’t smile or look up. They just walk around and look sadly at the ground. 

The ground is covered with broken tile and twisted bits of metal. I have seen pictures of the last war’s No Mans’s Land that were like it, with the gaunt, broken limbs of leafless trees pointing skyward. 

Oddly enough throughout all the concussion and fire none of the bridges seem to have been damaged. There was no hole in the ground like most bombs make (there is said to be a hole at Nagasaki), but there are miles and miles and miles of city simply obliterated. 

When you don’t see much you’re in Hiro, when you don’t see anything you’re in Kure, but when you see less than nothing you know then you are in Hiroshima. 

And the people walk around dazed, looking at the ground, picking in the ashes of their houses, perhaps thinking of the dead, too numerous to bury, who were put in piles on the street corners and burned. 

I felt a lump in my heart. 

-Bernard Murtaugh, 25 October 1945