Hiroshima (book)

Based on Wikipedia: Hiroshima (book)

The Magazine Issue That Changed How Americans Understood the Bomb

On August 31, 1946, something unprecedented happened in American publishing. The New Yorker—a magazine known for its urbane wit, its cartoons, and its fiction—threw out everything else. No humor columns. No reviews. No "Talk of the Town" chitchat. The entire issue was given over to a single piece of writing: 31,000 words about what happened to six ordinary people when an atomic bomb fell on their city.

It sold out within hours.

John Hersey's Hiroshima would go on to sell over three million copies in book form, never once going out of print. The ABC Radio Network preempted its regular programming to have actors read the complete text aloud across four half-hour broadcasts. The BBC did the same in Britain, where paper rationing meant they couldn't print it. The Book of the Month Club rushed out copies and sent them to members for free, with a note that said: "We find it hard to conceive of anything being written that could be of more importance at this moment to the human race."

What made this particular piece of journalism so powerful? And why did it land with such force, just over a year after the bomb itself?

A War Correspondent Sees Something Different

Hersey was no stranger to war. He'd covered the Pacific Theater for Life magazine and The New Yorker, following a young naval lieutenant named John F. Kennedy through the Solomon Islands after Kennedy's PT boat was sunk. He knew how to tell stories about combat, about heroism, about the machinery of war.

But when he arrived in Hiroshima as one of the first Western journalists to see the ruins, he encountered something that didn't fit the usual narratives. The U.S. military had released clinical reports about the bomb's yield and radius of destruction. There had been celebration at home—the weapon that ended the war. What there hadn't been was any attempt to describe what it felt like to be underneath that explosion.

William Shawn, the managing editor of The New Yorker, commissioned Hersey to fill that gap. "Shawn wants to wake people up," wrote Harold Ross, the magazine's founder, in a letter to the writer E.B. White, "and says we are the people with a chance to do it, and probably the only people that will do it, if it is done."

Hersey interviewed dozens of survivors. From these, he selected six.

Six Lives at 8:15 A.M.

The genius of Hiroshima lies in its specificity. Hersey doesn't write about "the Japanese" or "the victims" or "the population of Hiroshima." He writes about Miss Toshiko Sasaki, a twenty-year-old clerk at the East Asia Tin Works, who at exactly fifteen minutes past eight on the morning of August 6, 1945, had just sat down at her desk and was turning her head to speak to the girl beside her.

He writes about Dr. Masakazu Fujii, a hedonistic physician who owned a private thirty-room hospital with modern equipment, who was sitting on his porch reading the newspaper when a brilliant yellow flash appeared and he toppled into the river.

He writes about Reverend Kiyoshi Tanimoto, a Methodist pastor educated at Emory University in Atlanta, quick to talk and laugh and cry, who threw himself against a wall as pressure and splinters and debris rained down on him.

He writes about Mrs. Hatsuyo Nakamura, a widow with three children, who saw a flash "whiter than any white she had ever seen" and was thrown into the next room while her children were buried in rubble.

He writes about Father Wilhelm Kleinsorge, a thirty-eight-year-old German Jesuit priest, weakened by his wartime diet, who witnessed what he later described as "a terrible flash, like a large meteor colliding with the earth" and found himself standing in the mission's vegetable garden with only small cuts.

And he writes about Dr. Terufumi Sasaki—no relation to Miss Sasaki—a twenty-five-year-old surgeon at the Red Cross Hospital, who saw "a gigantic photographic flash" and found his glasses and shoes had been blown off his body while he himself remained untouched, suddenly the only uninjured doctor in a hospital rapidly filling with the dying.

The Mechanics of Horror

What sets Hiroshima apart from other war reporting is its refusal to look away while also refusing to sensationalize. Hersey describes people with melted eyeballs. He describes people who were vaporized so completely that only their shadows remained, etched onto walls by the force of the flash. He describes Mrs. Nakamura and her children vomiting continuously in the days after the blast, not yet knowing that what they were experiencing was radiation sickness—a phenomenon that most Americans in 1946 had never heard of.

But he describes all of this in plain, almost clinical prose. There's no commentary, no moral instruction, no exhortation to feel a particular way. Hersey later explained his choice:

"The flat style was deliberate, and I still think I was right to adopt it. A high literary manner, or a show of passion, would have brought me into the story as a mediator. I wanted to avoid such mediation, so the reader's experience would be as direct as possible."

The critic Hendrik Hertzberg observed that "if ever there was a subject calculated to make a writer overwrought and a piece overwritten, it was the bombing of Hiroshima. Yet Hersey's reporting was so meticulous, his sentences and paragraphs were so clear, calm and restrained, that the horror of the story he had to tell came through all the more chillingly."

This is the paradox of Hiroshima: by refusing to tell readers what to feel, it made them feel more intensely. By stepping out of the frame, Hersey gave readers nowhere to hide.

A New Kind of Journalism

Literary scholars now cite Hiroshima as one of the earliest examples of what would later be called New Journalism—the practice of applying the techniques of fiction to factual reporting. Tom Wolfe, Gay Talese, Joan Didion, and Hunter S. Thompson would later become famous for this approach in the 1960s and 1970s. But Hersey was doing it in 1946.

What does that mean in practice? It means scene-setting. It means following individual characters through time. It means dialogue and interior monologue. It means paying attention to what people were wearing and what they were thinking and what the weather was like. It means constructing a narrative arc with rising action and climax, rather than presenting information in the inverted-pyramid style of traditional news reporting, where the most important facts come first and each subsequent paragraph matters less.

Traditional journalism would have told you that approximately 135,000 people died when an atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima on August 6, 1945. Hersey's journalism told you that Miss Toshiko Sasaki was turning her head to speak to a colleague when a blinding light filled the room and a bookshelf fell on her leg, and that she would lie there unconscious, trapped under debris, for hours before anyone found her.

One approach gives you information. The other gives you understanding.

The Day After

Hersey structures his narrative in chapters, each covering a different phase of the disaster. The first chapter introduces the six characters and describes where each of them was standing at 8:15 in the morning. The second chapter follows the immediate aftermath: Dr. Sasaki working without method, moving from patient to patient like a robot, as the hospital filled with the wounded; Reverend Tanimoto running through the city searching for his family, apologizing to the injured he passed for being uninjured himself; Father Kleinsorge wandering the mission grounds with fragments of glass embedded in his back.

The third chapter tracks the days after the bombing, as radiation sickness began to manifest in ways no one understood. Mrs. Nakamura and her children kept vomiting. Hair fell out. Wounds refused to heal. The doctors, even the ones who had survived, had no framework for understanding what was happening to their patients.

In later editions, Hersey added a fourth chapter covering what had happened to his six subjects in the forty years since the bomb. It's a remarkable piece of follow-up journalism, turning what was already a classic into something even richer—a meditation not just on survival but on what it means to live with having survived.

The Secrecy of Publication

The New Yorker went to extraordinary lengths to keep Hiroshima secret before publication. Harold Ross and William Shawn spent long hours editing every sentence, but they told no one else on the staff what they were working on. When the normal weekly proofs weren't returned, staffers were baffled. Their inquiries went unanswered. Even the advertising department wasn't informed—they had no idea that the issue they were selling ad space in would contain nothing but a single 31,000-word article about nuclear holocaust.

Why the secrecy? Partly, no doubt, for dramatic effect. But also because Ross understood that what they were publishing was genuinely dangerous—not to national security, but to the comfortable narratives Americans had been telling themselves about the war. The bomb had ended the conflict. The bomb had saved American lives. The bomb had been necessary.

What Hersey's article said, without ever saying it directly, was: look at what we did. Look at what it meant to be on the receiving end. Look at the people—the clerks and doctors and priests and widows—who were going about their ordinary lives at 8:14 in the morning, one minute before everything changed.

The American Response

The reaction was immediate and intense. Copies sold out at newsstands within hours of publication. The magazine's offices were flooded with requests for reprints. Time magazine—which was owned by Henry Luce, who had been Hersey's first mentor and felt betrayed that Hersey had given the story to a competitor—nevertheless called Hiroshima "the most celebrated piece of journalism to come out of World War II."

Time also issued what amounted to a challenge to its own readers:

"Every American who has permitted himself to make jokes about atom bombs, or who has come to regard them as just one sensational phenomenon that can now be accepted as part of civilization, like the airplane and the gasoline engine, or who has allowed himself to speculate as to what we might do with them if we were forced into another war, ought to read Mr. Hersey."

And Americans did read it. Scientists who had worked on the Manhattan Project wept. One wrote that he cried as he remembered how he had celebrated when the bomb was dropped. The article forced a reckoning—not necessarily with whether the bomb should have been used (that debate would continue for decades) but with what it meant to use it, with what kind of weapon this actually was.

As Roger Angell, the essayist who would later become one of The New Yorker's most beloved writers, put it in 1995: "Its story became a part of our ceaseless thinking about world wars and nuclear holocaust."

A Different Kind of Enemy

There's another reason Hiroshima landed so powerfully in 1946. American propaganda during the war had portrayed the Japanese as subhuman—as fanatics, as monsters, as an enemy so alien and implacable that any means of defeating them was justified. The internment of Japanese Americans, the firebombing of Tokyo, the atomic attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki: all of these were made easier by the dehumanization of the enemy.

Hersey's article performed a radical act of re-humanization. His subjects weren't soldiers. They weren't political leaders. They were ordinary people: a widow trying to raise her children, a doctor who practiced medicine illegally in underserved communities because he was upset about the poor quality of healthcare available to the poor, a young woman who had just gotten engaged, a priest who felt unaccepted in the country where he served.

They had names. They had families. They had quirks and flaws and hopes. And they were the people we had incinerated.

Suppression and Translation

In Japan itself, the article had a more complicated reception. The U.S. military government under General Douglas MacArthur discouraged publishers from printing the book, and when the Nippon Times requested permission to publish it in English in late 1946, they were refused. MacArthur would later claim that Hiroshima was never officially banned, but occupation authorities clearly worked to limit its circulation.

Small numbers of copies made their way into the country regardless. In January 1947, Hersey himself gave a reading in English in Tokyo. A Japanese translation was finally published in 1949, and like the English edition, it has never gone out of print since.

That the survivors of an atomic attack would want to read about their own experience might seem obvious. But there's something more going on here. Hiroshima gave the survivors—the hibakusha, as they came to be called—a way of understanding their own experience as part of a larger narrative, one that the wider world was finally beginning to pay attention to.

The Reluctant Celebrity

Hersey himself seems to have been uncomfortable with his own celebrity. His longtime editor, Judith Jones, recalled that he rarely gave interviews and "abhorred going on anything resembling book tours." He let the work speak for itself.

This, too, was consistent with his method. If the power of Hiroshima lay in Hersey's absence from the text—in his refusal to insert himself as a mediator between reader and subject—then it made sense that he would also refuse to insert himself into the public discussion of the work. The story wasn't about him. It was about Miss Sasaki and Dr. Fujii and Reverend Tanimoto and Mrs. Nakamura and Father Kleinsorge and Dr. Sasaki.

It was about what happened at 8:15 in the morning on August 6, 1945, in a city called Hiroshima, to people who were just going about their lives.

The Limits of Witness

Not everyone was persuaded by Hiroshima's approach. The critic Mary McCarthy offered a sharp dissent: "To have done the atomic bomb justice, Mr. Hersey would have had to interview the dead."

It's a devastating observation, and it points to a genuine limitation of the work. By focusing on survivors—people who, by definition, lived to tell their stories—Hersey necessarily excluded the vast majority of the bomb's victims. The 135,000 who died at Hiroshima have no voice in the article. Their shadows on walls are mentioned, but they themselves are silent.

This is, in a sense, the fundamental problem of atrocity journalism. The dead cannot speak. We can only hear from those who made it through, and their survival may have been a matter of pure luck—standing in one spot rather than another, turning one's head at the right moment, being far enough from the hypocenter to escape instant vaporization.

Hersey knew this. His article opens with Miss Sasaki at her desk, "turning her head to speak to the girl at the next desk." That small motion—turning her head—may have saved her life. A fraction of a second earlier or later, a different angle, and she would have been among the voiceless dead rather than one of the six witnesses whose stories would be read by millions.

Legacy

Harold Ross, the founder of The New Yorker, told his friend the author Irwin Shaw: "I don't think I've ever got as much satisfaction out of anything else in my life." Coming from a man who had built one of the most influential magazines in American history, that's a remarkable statement.

But Ross's satisfaction was earned. Hiroshima didn't just sell copies or win acclaim. It changed how Americans thought about nuclear weapons. It introduced the concept of radiation sickness to a public that had barely heard of it. It demonstrated that journalism could do more than report facts—it could create empathy, could bridge the gap between "us" and "them," could make readers feel what it was like to be in a place they had never been, experiencing something they could barely imagine.

And it proved that sometimes the most powerful response to horror is not to scream or moralize or point fingers, but simply to bear witness. To describe exactly what happened, in plain prose, without embellishment. To let the facts speak for themselves.

The flat style was deliberate. And Hersey was right to adopt it.