Making of ‘208-N-43888’ (by Charles Levy, 1945), 2013

The story behind the photograph…

On 6 August 1945, the US Air Force B-29 bomber Enola Gay dropped an atomic bomb, codenamed ‘Little Boy’, on Hiroshima in Japan. Three days later, the Japanese were hit by an even more powerful bomb – nicknamed ‘Fat Man’ for its wide, round shape. The original target was Kokura, but heavy cloud cover obscured the city, so the mission proceeded to its secondary target, the sea port of Nagasaki. Here, some 40,000 citizens were killed outright; others died later from blast and burn injuries, and many more suffered long-term health effects including radiation sickness. Lieutenant Charles Levy (1918–1997) was on board The Great Artiste, one of the Superfortress bombers that was deployed in the attack. When later interviewed by the Free Lance-Star newspaper, he recalled: ‘We saw this big plume climbing up, up into the sky. It was purple, red, white, all colors – something like boiling coffee. It looked alive … we were all plenty scared.’ He took several photographs of the explosion, but the most powerful and widely circulated was of the vast mushroom cloud climbing into the stratosphere. Six days later, Emperor Hirohito announced Japan’s unconditional surrender, bringing to a close the hostilities of the Second World War.