The Americans and the Hiroshima atomic bomb. Shedding light on the horror

On the morning of 31 August 1946, America realised for the first time what had truly happened a year earlier in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. It discovered this at the newsagent’s, whilst buying the most extraordinary issue of The New Yorker ever published – an issue containing a single article spanning 68 pages. A report by a 32-year-old journalist, John Hersey, with a title of startling simplicity: “Hiroshima”. It was whilst leafing through the pages of the magazine, with pain and horror, that in that late summer eighty years ago Americans came to understand the atomic age into which they had just entered. An article that was serialised on radio stations across the country, later republished as a book, and whose extracts circulated around the world, helping to change global perceptions of the new weapons that would define the Cold War. “Hiroshima” sparked a global debate on nuclear weapons. J. Robert Oppenheimer had not yet become, at least in public, the scientist in the throes of a crisis of conscience portrayed by Christopher Nolan in his famous film. But the scientific community was already engaging in deep reflection, and Hersey’s article provided it with crucial insights: Albert Einstein purchased a thousand copies of the magazine and sent them to colleagues all over the world.

The two bombs that brought the Second World War to a close had made an enormous impression immediately after the explosions. By the end of 1945, between 150,000 and 240,000 people had died in the two cities, most of them instantly and many others from their injuries and radiation exposure: estimates have never been able to be more precise. Equally immense was the consternation felt by the global public upon discovering what had taken place in the Nazi concentration camps. But before long, both of these historical tragedies had faded from the spotlight and the front pages of newspapers. The world needed rebuilding; there was a desire to start afresh and to forget humanity’s most devastating war. In the United States, the Truman administration was focused on mounting tensions with the Soviet Union and on the – ultimately failed – attempt to keep the Russians from acquiring nuclear capability. The bombs dropped on Japan were still a mystery to the public and had, until then, been described merely as technological marvels. In Hollywood, filming was under way for an MGM film, "The Beginning or the End", which the filmmakers intended to be an accurate historical reconstruction of the Enola Gay bomber’s mission to Hiroshima. However, pressure from the government led to significant changes to the script, distorting the account of how President Harry Truman had handled the decision to use the atomic weapon and filling the film with inaccurate details and events.

The White House, the State Department and the Pentagon did not want the events in Japan to be examined in too much detail. Attention was now entirely focused on Europe; the foundations of the Truman Doctrine and the Marshall Plan were beginning to take shape; a continent needed to be rebuilt and contested against the Soviets, who had already erected what Winston Churchill, in his famous speech in March 1946 in Fulton, Missouri, had dubbed "the Iron Curtain". Japan, with its three million dead and its cities in ruins, was no longer at the forefront of American thinking: General Douglas MacArthur had taken up residence in Tokyo, and the Allied military occupation was under way, intended to transform the country into a pacifist power and reduce Emperor Hirohito to a purely symbolic figure.

It was against this backdrop that the editorial team at "The New Yorker" decided to do something different. Harold Ross, the magazine’s founder and editor, and above all his deputy William Shawn – a legendary figure who would go on to lead the magazine from 1952 to 1987 – wondered what had really happened that day on the streets of Hiroshima and what had become of the survivors. Over the past year, horrific images of the city’s devastation had emerged and some people had ventured into the rubble, but little was still known, particularly about the effects of radiation. The US government played down these effects and insisted that the price paid by Japanese civilians had served to avert the bloodshed that would have been inevitable in the event of an American invasion of Japan. This is largely the argument that still divides historians today, but the journalists at "The New Yorker" did not wish to enter into this debate: they wanted to hear the voices of the people of Hiroshima and document what had happened on that day and in the months that followed. No one had done so yet. Shawn chose Hersey for this task. A journalist born in Tientsin, China, the son of American Protestant missionaries, who had learnt Chinese before English and knew every corner of Asia. When, in March 1946, Hersey received Shawn’s telegram asking him to go to Hiroshima, the journalist was in Shanghai and was already a star reporter, whom the New Yorker had poached from its rivals at Time and Life, with whom he had been working for some time. Throughout the Second World War, he had travelled between Europe and Asia, always finding himself on the front line and surviving four aeroplane crashes. In 1944, he had published a feature in The New Yorker entitled "Survival", which recounted the misadventures and heroics of a young second lieutenant commanding a torpedo boat in the Pacific, the PT-109, which had been rammed and sunk by the Japanese: his name was John F. Kennedy. Years later, his father, Joe Kennedy, would have thousands of copies of this account reprinted to use as campaign material for JFK’s campaigns.

Hersey had also accompanied the Allies during the invasion of Sicily and had recounted their exploits in a novel, "A Bell for Adano", which won him the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1945. The story was based on the real-life adventures in Licata of Major Frank E. Toscani, the local military governor, and on the account of how he had returned to the village church the bell that had been melted down to make bullets. Adano was a fictionalised version of Licata, and Major Toscani had become Major Joppolo, to whom Hersey, however, had decided to attribute a fictionalised love affair with a Sicilian woman. The real Toscani took it badly and sued him for libel, but in the end it all ended with a dinner in New York at a restaurant named after the book, ‘Adano’. Hersey had already spent a long time in Tokyo after the end of the war and, amongst other things, had come across a document written by a German Jesuit who had survived the bombing of Hiroshima, Father Wilhelm Kleinsorge, which recounted in detail what had happened in the city before and after the bomb. Determined to track down Kleinsorge, the journalist set off from China for Japan in the spring of 1946, taking with him “The Bridge of San Luis Rey”, Thornton Wilder’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel which recounted the impact on people’s lives in Peru following the collapse of a bridge in 1714. The protagonist was a friar who pondered the tragedy and the role of Providence. Hersey was deeply impressed by it and decided that his account would focus on a number of personal stories, recounted with the utmost rigour and as much detail as possible.

In Hiroshima, over the course of several weeks, the journalist, accompanied by Father Kleinsorge, interviewed dozens of survivors and eventually chose six whose stories he would tell: two doctors, the Jesuit priest, a Methodist minister and two women, one of whom had been at home and the other at work that day. In the summer, Shawn received a 30,000-word report – practically the length of a book. Hersey suggested publishing it in a series of instalments, but Ross and Shawn decided to do something completely new. They put together a seemingly ordinary issue of The New Yorker, without announcing anything about Hersey’s work. The cover, designed by Charles E. Martin, was innocuous – a holiday-themed illustration depicting Americans on the beach and on country paths. The only warning to readers was a terse note from the editorial board: the magazine was devoting all its space to an article on the near-total annihilation of a city by a single bomb, in the belief that few had yet grasped the power of that weapon. Inside, only the advertising pages had been retained, whilst all other content apart from Hersey’s report had been omitted: a 68-page account bearing that simple yet powerful title: “Hiroshima”.

The opening lines were equally concise and have since found their way into journalism school textbooks: “At exactly 8.15 am on 6 August 1945, Japanese time, just as the atomic bomb flashed over Hiroshima, Miss Toshiko Sasaki, a clerk in the personnel department of East Asia Tin Works, had just sat down at her desk in the factory office and was turning her head to speak to the girl at the next desk.” Hersey recounted six ordinary lives and how everything had changed for them in a flash. Toshiko Sasaki was buried beneath collapsed shelves that shattered one of her legs. Dr Masakazu Fujii was trapped between the beams of his hospital, which had slid into the river. Hatsuyo Nakamura, a widow with three children, dug her way out of her house in ruins. Father Kleinsorge wanders, wounded, amongst the survivors. The young surgeon Terufumi Sasaki, almost the only uninjured doctor, works for days on end amongst thousands of wounded people. Pastor Kiyoshi Tanimoto ferries bodies from one bank to the other, searching for his own. The report followed them hour by hour, then day by day, in plain prose that eschewed all commentary. No one at the scene understood what had happened. In the days that followed, symptoms appeared that no doctor could explain: fever, haemorrhages, hair loss. It was radiation sickness, about which America had not yet read a thing. Hersey concluded his account with the shattered lives that carried on, battered, without any catharsis. The strength of the report lay precisely in its restraint, in avoiding any judgement or superfluous detail, to focus on six ordinary lives. It showed what a bomb had done to someone who, that morning, had merely turned round to speak to a colleague.

The impact was enormous, despite the fact that "The New Yorker" had deliberately avoided any promotion of the magazine, concealing its contents until the very last moment with a holiday-themed cover. The issue sold out at newsagents within a few hours. Newspapers from Rhode Island to London requested reproduction rights. Einstein ordered a thousand copies. The Book-of-the-Month Club distributed it free of charge. The ABC network read Hersey’s article in full on the radio across hundreds of stations. The radio reading was broadcast for four consecutive evenings from 9 September 1946. The BBC and Canada’s CBC followed suit shortly afterwards. A year ago, to mark the eightieth anniversary of the bombing, investigative journalist Jane Mayer reflected once more, in an article in The New Yorker, on the importance of "Hiroshima" in the history of American journalism: "Hersey's candour had a seismic impact," she recalled, "the magazine sold out and the book version of the article sold millions of copies. Stephanie Hinnershitz, a military historian, told me that Hersey’s report ‘did not merely change the public debate on nuclear weapons: it created it’. Until then, she explained, President Harry Truman had celebrated the attack as a strategic masterstroke, ‘without addressing its human cost’. Officials shamelessly downplayed the effects of radiation; one described it as ‘a very pleasant way to die’. ‘Hersey broke that silence,’ said Hinnershitz. He warned the world of what the US government had kept hidden.”