Hiroshima by John Hersey

     This was a short but very impactful book about the events of August 6, 1945, when American forces dropped the first atomic bomb on Hiroshima. Hersey went to Hiroshima and interviewed survivors one year later about the dropping of the bomb and the days and weeks that followed, and this book was originally published in the New Yorker Magazine in August, 1946. It took over the entire issue, with all cartoons removed, with only a short preface stating that, "The NEW YORKER this week devotes its entire editorial space to an article on the almost complete obliteration of a city by one atomic bomb, and what happened to the people of that city. It does so in the conviction that few of us have yet comprehended the all but incredible destructive power of this weapon, and that everyone might well take time to consider the terrible implications of its use." I think I read portions of this as a freshman in college, but I'm pretty sure this was the first time I read the piece in full.

    The book is most interesting in the beginning, I thought, because of the intense confusion and horror that came in the immediate hours after the explosion, which have a disproportionate number of pages dedicated to them. What's amazing is that no one in Hiroshima could actually hear the bomb. It seems that the sound was only audible much further away, and Hersey recounts that a fisherman twenty miles away described the sound as louder than bombings just five miles away. The uniqueness of the dropping of the bomb is what stands out so much more than anything else. Even though the firebombings of Tokyo killed more people, the atomic bomb was just so completely demoralizing. First, it seemed to come out of nowhere. Despite the fact that air raid alarms went off, most people didn't take much action since they were going off every day when American surveillance teams flew over the city. One survivor even saw that there was just one plane and continued going about his day, not knowing that plane was the Enola Gay. Second, the bomb's obliteration was beyond anything imaginable. Out of 245,000 people in Hiroshima, 100,000 were dead in the initial explosion, and at least 10,000 went to the city's Red Cross hospital on the first day, where there were only 600 beds. Of 150 doctors in Hiroshima, 65 were dead in seconds and most of the rest were wounded. Of 1,780 nurses, 1,654 were dead or too badly hurt to work, and at the Red Cross hospital, they had only six of thirty doctors and ten out of two hundred nurses.

    And then there is so much personal horror. One survivor describes trying to help a dying woman up, but when he grabs her arm, her skin slides off like a glove. The same man helps bring people too weak to move to higher ground when flooding begins, but finds the next day that they've all been washed away. The pain of living through this event must have been horrible. And then many people got radiation sickness and lost hair and grew blisters for weeks and months after. Atomic weapons are so clearly an abomination, and this book has to be one of the best arguments for their containment. Most Japanese people it seems are portrayed as not really blaming America for using the bombs, but I am not sure I believe it. Really, it seems like the problem is letting a conflict escalate into total war in which people believe it becomes necessary to annihilate civilians because the line between civilian and combatant has been blurred beyond recognition. That distinction is very important, and crossing that line leads to enormous evil.

Miscellaneous Fact:

• After the explosion, some of the survivors found pumpkins roasted on the vine and potatoes baked underground.