A Noiseless Flash
- This chapter describes where each of the six individuals chronicled in this story were when the bomb actually went off at 8:15 a.m. on August 6, 1945, and what they saw/did.
- First we get the details of the Reverend Tanimoto's day. His wife and baby had been spending nights in Ushida, a northern suburb, but he had remained in town. He had been helping a friend, Mr. Matsuo, move some of his things to the house of a local rayon manufacturer (Mr. Matsui). Mr. Matsui's estate was unoccupied, and he was letting friends/acquaintances store things there/have it on hand as a possible evacuation site since it was two miles from town.
- Hersey describes Tanimoto's memories of the flash from the bomb.
- Because Tanimoto and Matsuo were so far from the blast, they had some time after impact to consider what to do. Matsuo ran into the house and hid in some bedding that was stored there. Mr. Tanimoto braced himself against a rock. When the concussion from the blast reached them, the Matsui house collapsed.
- Tanimoto ran out into the street, finding injured soldiers emerging from a dugout they had been digging.
- Meanwhile, Mrs. Nakamura had had her own eventful morning leading up to the blast. After evacuating her young children because of warnings overnight and returning home very early, she and the kids were pretty tired. So, when there was another warning siren, she was loath to leave. After asking the advice of a neighbor, Mr. Nakamoto, she decided to stay put unless an "imminent danger" alarm went off.
- She was relieved when she heard the all-clear signal at 8 o'clock. However, a few minutes later, as she was watching her neighbor tear down his house to make room for a fire lane, the atomic bomb was dropped.
- Afterwards, Mrs. Nakamura was trapped underneath some rubble, but quickly got herself out. When she did, she saw her youngest daughter up to her armpits in rubble, and she had no idea where her other children were.
- We then zoom our focus over to Dr. Masakazu Fujii, who had his own small (i.e., single doctor) hospital. He had had to turn away patients lately, since he knew he wouldn't be able to evacuate a full hospital of patients by himself.
- Fujii was sitting outside on his porch when the blast happened, sending the hospital toppling into the nearby river.
- Now we're with Father Kleinsorge, and we learn about what he was doing in the hours up to the blast. Apparently, he wasn't feeling well, so he was delayed in reading Mass that day. After he had completed Mass and was reading the Prayers of the Thankful, the warning sirens sounded. He stopped the service there and went to his room to change into a military uniform he had somehow acquired when he was teaching in Kobe. It's never quite clear what that was about…
- When Father Kleinsorge went outside and saw the weather plane that went through every day (which frequently set off the air raid sirens), he figured nothing else was going to happen. Sure enough, the all clear sounded soon after.
- He went back up to his room and stripped down to his underwear. He was laying on his bed reading when the bomb was dropped.
- He doesn't remember how, but he ended up outside wandering in the garden in his underwear, cut and bleeding. Mrs. Murata, the housekeeper, was also outside.
- Then the narration switches focus to Dr. Terufumi Sasaki, a young doctor at the Red Cross hospital.
- Dr. Sasaki commuted two hours into Hiroshima from Mukaihara, where he lived with his mother. We learn that he had been doing some unofficial doctoring without a permit (he had just finished his medical training), and he was worried about getting in trouble for it.
- He was carrying a vial of blood to the lab when the bomb went off. Through pure dumb luck, he ended up being the only doctor in the Red Cross who wasn't injured.
- He believed that only his building had been hit, so while he got to work bandaging up the injured in his hospital, he was totally unaware that wounded people all around Hiroshima were on their way to his hospital… yikes.
- Finally, we meet Toshiko Sasaki (no relation to Terufumi), the personnel clerk. She had gotten up very early that morning to cook for her whole family, including her mother and younger brother (who was in the hospital for a stomach complaint). She lived in Koi and commuted in 45 minutes to her job.
- When she got to work, she helped set up a memorial for a former employee who had committed suicide the previous day.
- She was sitting at her desk when the bomb was dropped. She lost consciousness, and as the ceiling caved in and the bookcases behind her fell over, she was thrown on the floor, her leg breaking in the process.