There were 76,000 buildings in Hiroshima at the time of the attack: 70,000 (92 percent) were damaged or destroyed, 48,000 of them (63 percent) completely. As a Japanese assessment later reported, “It is no exaggeration to say that the whole city was ruined instantaneously.”
Eighteen emergency hospitals and 32 medical clinics were destroyed and 90 percent of all medical personnel in Hiroshima were either killed or severely wounded.
Read John Hersey’s powerful, unforgettable August 1946 New Yorker article, “Hiroshima,” describing the horrific devastation of the city as recounted by six survivors: a clerk, a doctor, a tailor’s widow, a German priest, a surgeon, and a Methodist pastor—the first unvarnished account of the bombing.