Aims of the lesson:

1. Aims of the lesson: To explore how visual imagery is used in August 6 1945 To explore the affect of language in the poem

7. Although the count-down had begun long before, the final order to drop 2 atomic bombs on Japan was given by President Harry Truman - who himself was in the air at the time, flying home from Germany. (He had been at the Potsdam Conference, meeting the UK's prime minister Winston Churchill and the Russian leader Joseph Stalin to discuss how to sort out post-war Europe).In a letter he wrote 8 years later Harry Truman said, 'Dropping the bombs ended the war, saved lives and gave the free nations a chance to face the facts'. He had asked a military chief to estimate how many US soldiers might be killed if the US army invaded Japan. He was told it could be up to a million. 'We sent an ultimatum to Japan. It was rejected.'The B-29 Superfortress bomber named 'Enola Gay' had been (with 14 others) specially modified to carry the weight of an atomic bomb yet still fly high and fast. The crew were trained to operate the planes, but they were not told just what bomb they were carrying until take-off on August 6. The only member of the crew in the know was the Enola Gay's pilot, Colonel Paul Tibbets Jr. The bomb had a nickname too: 'Little Boy'.The Enola Gay flew from the island of Tinian in the Pacific, accompanied by 2 observation planes, there to observe the military experiment this was. On the way, Paul Tibbets did a symbolic and unscheduled circuit of Iwo Jima, the Pacific island where many US soldiers had been killed in a month-long battle with Japanese troops earlier in 1945 - the first US invasion of Japanese territory. (Nearly 7,000 US Marines were killed there; only 212 of the 20,000 Japanese survived. There is a famous photograph of soldiers raising the US flag on Mount Suribachi. It's not quite what it seems, as the first film was unsatisfactory and the scene was re-shot later. )

8. After 'Little Boy' was dropped, 'a bright light filled the plane,' wrote Paul Tibbets later. 'We turned back to look. The city was hidden by the mushrooming cloud.' His co-pilot, Robert Lewis, wrote in his journal, 'What have we done?'On the ground, the blast demolished buildings, killing many people. Half an hour later, a fire storm began, which turned into a tornado. Over a large area a black, sticky rain fell, leaving indelible stains. In the river, the fish died. Many people were severely burned. An estimated 140,000 people died either at once or within a few days.An interviewer asked Paul Tibbets, much later on in life, what he thought was the significance of the 'mission'. He replied: 'The use of the bomb helped save countless American, Allied and Japanese lives. It demonstrated the spectre of atomic destruction, such that those weapons have never again been used in anger. But to me the most important thing will be that we convinced the Japanese that it was futile to go on fighting'. What sort of answer is that? It's a military answer. (To spell it out a bit: the lives 'saved' were soldiers' lives, the ones who didn't have to invade Japan after all. The lives that weren't saved were civilian lives. One of the most significant, and dreadful, developments in 20th century war was the killing of many millions of innocent non-combatants.)