John Hersey (1) (1914–1993)

John Hersey's Hiroshima recounts the lives of six survivors of the atomic bombing on 6 August 1945. His matter-of-fact reporting is as powerful now as it was when it first appeared in The New Yorker in 1946. Hershey humanizes an event so easily condensed into statistics (100,000 dead) and forces his American audience to wrestle with the implications of the terrible power the U.S. unleashed at the end of World War II. This early account of the atomic age should be read and re-read until show more nuclear weapons no longer menace humanity. show less

https://fromtheheartofeurope.eu/hiroshima-by-john-hersey/

This is a searing and vivid piece of journalism, in which the stories of six victims of the Hiroshima bomb are told in detail. Five are Japanese, and the sixth is a German Jesuit priest. One of the Japanese is a Methodist minister, two are doctors and two are women, one a widow, one a young factory worker. You immediately notice of course that these are chosen to appeal to an American readership – for instance, two Christians out of show more six is probably somewhat higher than the general ratio within the population of Hiroshima, then or now.

And yet it’s excusable; the point of the writing is to make the reader think about what nuclear war would mean for people like them (i.e. New Yorker readers), and it works very well – the instant agony of the explosion, followed by the horrible deaths of many of the survivors over the following days in a city whose infrastructure has been pulverised and poisoned. There were of course other terrible bomb raids in the Second World War and before and after, but I don’t think it is wrong to look at Hiroshima in particular. It was the first atomic bombing, and it was worse hit than Nagasaki both proportionally and absolutely. It matters.

Hersey concentrates on the six core characters of his narrative, but it’s not difficult to find other details of tragedy from that day. For instance, Hiroshima’s mayor, a Christian who had resisted Japanese military excesses against their own civilian population in the 1930s, was eating breakfast outdoors that sunny morning with his son and granddaughter, and they were instantly fried by the blast; his wife, who was inside the residence, survived for a month before dying, and their daughter who came to Hiroshima to nurse her also later died of secondary radiation. And there are two hundred thousand more stories like that from Hiroshima and Nagasaki, most of which will never be told.

There’s no explicit judgement here about nuclear weapons, or indeed about war as a whole. But there doesn’t need to be. Anyone making policy decisions (or even just aspirations) about war needs to be aware of the consequences, and here those consequences are described by some of the people directly affected. You can’t really do more than that. show less

On August 6, 1945, the United States dropped an atomic bomb on the Japanese city of Hiroshima, the first time nuclear weapons had ever been used in war and upon an entire city. War correspondent John Hersey was one of the first Western journalists to view its devastation, and he immediately set to work preserving for history interviews with eyewitnesses and victims. This work focuses on six survivors of Hiroshima – their backgrounds, what they were doing just prior to the event, what they show more experienced when the bomb went off, and what the aftermath was like for them and their loved ones.

Working in a public library, I'm noticing that Hiroshima is increasingly being assigned as required high school reading, which is how it ended up on my TBR. I recall very little on the topic of Hiroshima or WWII in the Pacific Theatre in my early-1990s high school history classes. We certainly did not discuss it in any ethical terms, only the role it played in accelerating the end of the war. I felt a moral obligation to read this, heavy and uncomfortable as it was. The details are horrifying, but Hersey's writing puts real human faces on suffering, closing the distance between the reader and what would otherwise have been anonymous victims. A must-read for any American, even (especially?) 80 years later. show less

A seminal change in reporting style, the zoomed in view of a handful of people to represent the tragedies of the bombing has a very gripping narrative of the events and aftermath, but becomes increasingly diffuse as it continues to follow their lives long after the events of the bombing. It completes the stories of their lives and the rebuilding efforts, but at the same time dilutes the catastrophe of the bombing itself. Is it more honest to continue the story as life just goes on? Would it show more have been just gratuitous to linger? Certainly the report itself seems to conclude most people did not reflect deeply on the whys, and either dealt with the trauma and medical aftermath - or not. show less