ABSTRACT
At 8:15 A.M. on August 6, 1945, Hiroshima looked bright in the summer sunshine from the B–29 bomber, Enola Gay. A moment later, the city would be engulfed in a hellish conflagration. Thousands of American citizens, the children of Japanese parents in the United States, were living there at the time, but there is no evidence that the crew members of the Enola Gay had any knowledge of this. The matter had never been discussed among military personnel on the island of Tinian, the launching base of the Enola Gay, nor had it ever come up during planning discussions in Washington, where the decision to drop the atomic bomb on Hiroshima was made. The Nisei (American-born children of Japanese immigrants to the United States), together with approximately a dozen downed U.S. pilots imprisoned in Hiroshima, were “forgotten Americans.”
