John Hersey (1) (1914–1993)

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

3.5, rounded up.

Written in 1944, while the war was still in progress, A Bell for Adano is a more positive and humorous read than I had expected. Not to say the angst of war and loss is not there, but the battles are in the background and this is really a story of reconstruction. It is the story of one man, Major Victor Joppolo, an Italian American, who is given the assignment of Civil Affairs Officer; his duties to see to the needs of the Sicilian town of Adano, which has just been freed show more from Nazi control.

Can you imagine this major job not being interfered with by bureaucrats who cannot get out of the way of what the men on the ground need to do? Neither could Hersey, so he included General Marvin, a character you cannot help but hate, and one I am positive was based on a real general Hersey knew, just as Joppolo was based on a real major, Mr. Toscani.

Victor Joppolo is a moral man. He makes mistakes, but he sincerely wishes to restore this town and its people to some semblance of the lives they led before the war, and it takes some moral courage and fortitude to do that. The bell in reference is a 400 year old bell that the Nazi’s seized and melted down for weapons production. For the town, and for Joppolo, this bell represents something more than itself, it is the symbol of their freedom and for all that was lost and cannot be restored. It is Joppolo’s mission to replace the bell.

This is a delightful and sweet read. While I feel it would not get even a nod by the Pulitzer committee today, it was very significant in its time. One of the most vital debates toward the end of the war was how to deal with the areas and the people who were under Nazi rule, particularly in areas like Italy where that might appear to be a choice they made, rather than their being a conquered population. How much assistance, monetary and otherwise, should be given to help rebuild? I like Joppolo’s answer to this question, and I believe most Americans did at the time. I think this explains the Pulitzer, and since the prize is for a specific year and cannot be separated from the historical events of the time, I think it was well bestowed. show less

On re-reading this classic, I was touched even more deeply than the first time I read it many years ago. Like "All Quiet on the Western Front," this book haunts the reader and , without a speck of moralizing or histrionics, points out the horror and absurdity of war.
As I grow older and see more and more of humanity and of what the world has to offer, I struggle more and more to even conceive of any notion of how man can see war as an acceptable tool of his existence. What is so important show more that we should murder each other, brutalized families left grieving and plunder the landscape?
The six characters of Hiroshima rise above the question of the morality using the atomic bomb and even above the question of the morality of warring in general, to show characters for whom the simple act of living is man's most noble achievement. 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