Myths and mistakes

The bombs and the missions

• Not true

  Said: Hiroshima was warned by leaflets before the bomb.

  Widely repeated online, partly from leaflets catalogued with the wrong date.

  What the records show

  No leaflet warned of an atomic bomb before 6 August. The atomic bomb leaflets were ordered on 7 August, the day after Hiroshima, and reached Nagasaki only after it too had been bombed. Earlier leaflets warned of ordinary firebombing; whether any fell on Hiroshima is disputed.^{Sources: 1, 2, 3}

• Not true

  Said: The Great Artiste dropped the bomb on Nagasaki.

  Some official reports of 1945, and the New York Times reporter on the mission.

  What the records show

  The crews swapped aircraft. Charles Sweeney flew Bockscar and dropped Fat Man; The Great Artiste carried the instruments, as it had at Hiroshima. No names were yet painted on, which caused the confusion. Bockscar’s name and nose art were added after the mission.^{Sources: 4, 5, 6}

• Partly true

  Said: Nagasaki was the target on 9 August.

  What the records show

  Nagasaki was on the target list, but it was the secondary target. The primary was Kokura. After three runs over Kokura, hidden by smoke and haze, and with fuel running low, the crew turned to Nagasaki.^{Sources: 5, 7, 8}

• Partly true

  Said: USS Indianapolis delivered the atomic bombs to Tinian.

  Made famous by the speech in the film Jaws.

  What the records show

  Indianapolis carried Little Boy’s uranium projectile, about half the uranium-235 then in existence, with the gun parts. The rest of Little Boy’s uranium came by air, and so did everything for Fat Man.^{Sources: 8, 9, 10}

• Not true

  Said: The bombs exploded on the ground.

  What the records show

  Both were air bursts, set off by radar fuses. Little Boy exploded about 600 metres above Hiroshima, Fat Man about 503 metres above Nagasaki.^{Sources: 11}

• Not true

  Said: Hiroshima and Nagasaki are still radioactive.

  What the records show

  RERF’s answer is “The practical answer is, ‘No.’” The City of Hiroshima says radiation there today is at the same low levels as anywhere on Earth. Residual radiation was real in the first days, and about 80 per cent of it was given off within 24 hours.^{Sources: 11, 12, 13}

• Partly true

  Said: Hiroshima was a military base.

  President Truman, radio report, 9 August 1945.

  What the records show

  Hiroshima held army headquarters and a port of embarkation, and about 10 per cent of the city was military land. But it was a city of some 250,000 to 350,000 people, the bomb was aimed at its centre, and most of the dead were civilians.^{Sources: 11, 14, 15, 16, 17}

• Not true

  Said: The bombs were the first nuclear explosions.

  What the records show

  The first was the Trinity test in New Mexico on 16 July 1945. Hiroshima was the first use of a nuclear weapon in war.^{Sources: 17, 18}

• Not true

  Said: Kyoto was spared because Stimson had his honeymoon there.

  Repeated widely, and used for a laugh in the film Oppenheimer (2023).

  What the records show

  Stimson visited Kyoto in 1926 and 1929, more than 30 years after his wedding, and never gave a honeymoon as his reason. The historian Alex Wellerstein judges the story “more probably than not a myth”. Stimson’s own diary gives a political reason.^{Sources: 19, 20}

• Not true

  Said: The planners said in 1945 that an invasion would cost a million American lives.

  What the records show

  In June 1945 General Marshall compared the first landing to Luzon, about 31,000 casualties. The figure of a million appears after the war, in Stimson’s article of 1947 and Truman’s letter of 1953, and both speak of casualties, not deaths. Historians still argue over what the planners expected by August.^{Sources: 17, 21, 22}

• True, with a caveat

  Said: Enola Gay was named after Paul Tibbets’s mother.

  What the records show

  Tibbets named the aircraft after his mother on 5 August 1945, the day before the mission. It was not normally his aircraft; Robert Lewis was its usual pilot.^{Sources: 8, 23}

• Not true

  Said: Little Boy was tested before it was dropped.

  What the records show

  Trinity tested the plutonium implosion design used in Fat Man. The uranium gun design of Little Boy was never fully tested before Hiroshima, though its parts were.^{Sources: 8, 18}

• Partly true

  Said: The Enola Gay crew did not know what they were carrying.

  What the records show

  Two days before, the crews were told only of a new weapon equal to 20,000 tons of TNT. Tibbets, Parsons and a few others knew all along. Most of the crew heard the word “atomic” over the intercom after take-off.^{Sources: 8, 24}

• Partly true

  Said: Bockscar ran out of fuel.

  What the records show

  It did not run dry in the air. It landed on Okinawa with about seven gallons left, refuelled, and flew back to Tinian.^{Sources: 5, 6, 8}

• Not true

  Said: A single B-29 flew each mission.

  What the records show

  Seven B-29s took part in the Hiroshima mission and six in the Nagasaki mission, including weather aircraft, instrument and camera aircraft, and a spare.^{Sources: 6, 8, 24}

• Not true

  Said: Truman gave a separate order to bomb Nagasaki.

  What the records show

  The order of 25 July covered “Additional bombs” as soon as they were ready. The date of the second mission was set on Tinian by the weather. Truman’s own act came on 10 August, when he ordered a halt.^{Sources: 8, 17, 25}

Films, famous words and stories

• Partly true

  Said: Oppenheimer cried out “Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds” at the Trinity test.

  What the records show

  Oppenheimer said the line came into his mind at Trinity. The famous film of him saying it was made for an NBC documentary in 1965. No record from 1945 has him saying it aloud; his brother Frank remembered him saying “It worked!” Most translators render the key word as Time, not Death.^{Sources: 26, 27}

• Not true

  Said: Einstein helped build the bomb.

  What the records show

  Einstein signed the 1939 letter to Roosevelt that helped start American research. He was refused security clearance in July 1940 and had no part in the Manhattan Project; in the war he advised the US Navy on explosives. Linus Pauling recorded him calling the letter “one great mistake”.^{Sources: 28, 29, 30}

• Not true

  Said: The first Hollywood film of the bomb, The Beginning or the End (1947), shows what happened.

  What the records show

  General Groves had final script approval, and the White House shaped Truman’s scenes. In the film Truman promises ten days of warning leaflets, and the bomber flies through heavy flak; neither happened. It leaves out Nagasaki altogether.^{Sources: 31, 32, 33}

• Partly true

  Said: Above and Beyond (1952) is the true story of Tibbets and Enola Gay.

  What the records show

  The American Film Institute says the outline of Tibbets’s career and most of the crew are accurate, but many characters are fictional or composites. The Air Force approved the film before its premiere.^{Sources: 34}

• Not true

  Said: Sadako Sasaki died before she could fold a thousand cranes, at 644.

  From a 1977 children’s novel.

  What the records show

  The Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum says Sadako had folded 1,000 cranes by the end of August 1955, and went on to fold over 1,300. The museum notes the story has been changed in many tellings.^{Sources: 35, 36}

• Partly true

  Said: The shadow on the bank steps is all that is left of a person vaporised by the bomb.

  What the records show

  The Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum says the person sitting on the steps “is thought to have died on the spot”. The dark mark is the stone their body shielded from the heat, while the stone around it was bleached. The museum does not say the person was vaporised.^{Sources: 37}

• True, with a caveat

  Said: Paul Tibbets never regretted the mission.

  What the records show

  In 2002 he told the writer Studs Terkel, “Second thoughts? No.” He said he knew many people would die, but believed the mission would save a lot of lives. The American Film Institute notes he expressed regret at the loss of life, while always backing the decision.^{Sources: 34, 38}

• Partly true

  Said: Japan tried to surrender before Hiroshima.

  What the records show

  Japan was trying to end the war through Soviet mediation. Its Foreign Minister rejected unconditional surrender. Historians still disagree over how close Japan was to giving in.^{Sources: 17, 39}

Slips in reliable sources

Good sources make mistakes too. These were found while checking facts for this site. Each is set against the original record, and the rest of each source has been used where it is sound.

• US Department of Energy, Manhattan Project history

  Who issued the Potsdam Declaration

  Truman, Stalin, and Clement Attlee (the new British prime minister, below) issued their warning to Japan

  The record

  The declaration was issued on 26 July 1945 in the names of the United States, Britain and China. Truman signed for himself and wrote in the other two names. Stalin did not sign; the Soviet Union joined it on 8 August.^{Sources: 40, 41}

• Atomkeller Museum, Haigerloch, main page

  Did the last German reactor work?

  “kommt die Kettenreaktion im Uranreaktor in Gang” (the chain reaction in the uranium reactor gets going)

  The record

  The museum’s own page on the experiment says the multiplication factor was about 7 and the reactor did not go critical. It would have needed to be about one and a half times the size.^{Sources: 42, 43}

• atomicarchive.com

  Interim Committee notes under the wrong date

  Notes of the Interim Committee Meeting, June 16, 1945

  The record

  The notes on that page are of the meeting held on Thursday 19 July 1945.^{Sources: 44}

• Atomic Heritage Foundation

  The Hyde Park promise, paragraph 2

  Full collaboration between the United States and the British Government should continue after the defeat of Japan

  The record

  The signed text includes the words “in developing Tube Alloys for military and commercial purposes”, which are left out. They matter, because they show the promise covered civil atomic energy as well as weapons.^{Sources: 45, 46}

• American Institute of Physics and atomicarchive.com

  Weizsäcker at Farm Hall

  There is no question that we were very nearly as far as they were

  The record

  The translation in the US National Archives copy reads “It is not a question that we were very nearly as far as they were”, which means the opposite. Weizsäcker was setting aside how far Germany had got, not claiming it was nearly level.^{Sources: 47, 48, 49}

Mistakes on this site

If you find a mistake here, write to hello@tinian1945.com with the page and, if you can, a source. Every correction to a fact is listed on the Changes page, saying what was wrong and what it is now.