Just before 8:15 a.m. on August 6, 1945, war-weary residents of Hiroshima observed a single B-29 bomber overhead. Random decisions in the next few moments, like stepping indoors or walking behind a wall, made the difference between life and death. The Little Boy uranium bomb exploded 1,900 feet over the city, unleashing a blinding flash (pika) then a thunderous explosion (don). The flash incinerated flammable objects and scorched human skin, while the blast wave obliterated nearly everything near the hypocenter.
As the Enola Gay took photographs of the mushroom cloud rising over Hiroshima, the airmen had little idea of the hell their mission had created below. Severe burns gave human skin a reptilian texture, turning men and women into blackened "alligator people." Radioactive black rain fell on desperately thirsty survivors who were already cooked on the inside by gamma rays. The disfigured and doomed formed mindless "ant lines" trudging single-file away from fiery cyclones and choking ash. Some survivors took a working suburban train line to nearby Nagasaki, where a second, more powerful plutonium bomb was dropped on August 9.
To Hell and Back: The Last Train from Hiroshima by Charles Pellegrino (Farewell, Titanic) was originally published in 2010 as The Last Train from Hiroshima before Holt recalled the book when testimony from a supposed American airman turned out to be fiction. To Hell and Back omits this false eyewitness account and, barring any other unforeseen fabrications, is an astounding portrait of the horror inflicted by the first and last atomic bombs used on human targets, with a focus on those truly unlucky souls who experienced both attacks. --Tobias Mutter, freelance reviewer