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Hiroshima showed what happens when the atomic bomb is used as a weapon of war. The world changed forever at 8:15 am on August 6, 1945, when the Enola Gay, a B-29 Superfortress bomber, dropped the 20-kiloton bomb “Little Boy�� on Hiroshima. And in one of the most important books ever written, John Hersey chronicles exactly what the use of an atomic bomb does to cities and their people. His book Hiroshima (1946) may be an important reason why nuclear bombs have not been used as a combat weapon since 1945.

Born in China as the son of Protestant missionaries, Hersey studied at Yale and Cambridge, and worked for a time as Sinclair Lewis’s private secretary. When the Second World War began, he served as a combat correspondent in both the European and Asian theatres, surviving helicopter crashes in Italy and assisting in the removal of wounded U.S. military personnel from Guadalcanal. And he drew literary inspiration from his wartime experience: by 1946, he had already won a Pulitzer Prize for his highly regarded World War II novel A Bell for Adano.

And Hersey’s time in Occupied Japan after the end of the Second World War led directly to the writing of Hiroshima. Hersey personalizes the vast, seemingly incomprehensible calamity of Hiroshima by telling the story of the bombing from the perspective of six Hiroshima residents who survived the bombing:

�� Dr. Masakazu Fujii, physician;
�� Father Wilhelm Kleinsorge, a German priest and member of the Jesuit order;
�� Mrs. Hatsuyo Nakamura, a widow with three children;
�� Dr. Terufumi Sasaki, a young physician;
�� Miss Toshinki Sasaki, a clerk in a tin works; and
�� Reverend Kiyoshi Tanimoto, a Methodist pastor.

The Japanese, we learn, referred to the large and powerful B-29 bomber as B-san, or “Mr. B.�� Vast fleets of B-san had conducted operations like the March 1945 “Operation Meetinghouse�� bombing of Tokyo in which more than 90,000 people were killed, and Hiroshimans had noted that theirs was, with Nagasaki, one of only two major Japanese cities not to have suffered a heavy bombing; but when one B-san flew over Hiroshima on the morning of August 6, no one in the city could have anticipated what was to come.

When the bomb was dropped, there was a noiseless flash of light, and then a tremendous fire. Whether one lived or died could depend upon factors as simple as whether, at the moment of the nuclear explosion, one happened to be walking by a window, or standing within a well-constructed doorway. Houses and buildings collapsed, trapping citizens underneath the rubble: “Under many houses, people screamed for help, but no one helped; in general, survivors that day assisted only their relatives or immediate neighbors, for they could not comprehend or tolerate a wider circle of misery�� (p. 29).

Hersey brings to vivid life the day of the bombing by providing many of the day’s strange details, as when Mr. Tanimoto saw “huge drops of water, the size of marbles�� falling from the sky, and concluded that their source was firehoses being wielded by firefighters combatting the large and growing fires. In fact, however, these outsized drops of water “were actually drops of condensed moisture falling from the turbulent tower of dust, heat, and fission fragments that had already risen miles into the sky above Hiroshima�� (p. 18).

Hersey also conveys, concisely and grimly, the awful mathematics of nuclear war-making: “In a city of two hundred and forty-five thousand, nearly a hundred thousand people had been killed or doomed at one blow; a hundred thousand more were hurt�� (p. 25). The dreadful mathematics of an A-bomb attack can also be applied to the scope of the humanitarian disaster that Hiroshima faced after the bombing: “Of a hundred and fifty doctors in the city, sixty-five were already dead and most of the rest were wounded. Of 1,780 nurses, 1,654 were dead or too badly hurt to work. In the biggest hospital, that of the Red Cross, only six doctors out of thirty were able to function, and only ten nurses out of two hundred�� (p. 24).

In a particularly moving passage, Hersey presents the official Japanese and U.S. pronouncements regarding the bomb, and then contrasts them with the lived experience of the Hiroshima residents on whose city the bomb was dropped. A Japanese radio broadcast in the days after the bombing stated simply that “Hiroshima suffered considerable damage as the result of an attack by a few B-29’s. It is believed that a new type of bomb was used. The details are being investigated.�� U.S. President Harry S Truman reported via shortwave radio that “That bomb had more power than twenty thousand tons of TNT��. In Hiroshima itself, by contrast,

Those victims who were able to worry at all about what had happened thought of it and discussed it in more primitive, childish terms �� gasoline sprinkled from an airplane, maybe, or some combustible gas, or a big cluster of incendiaries, or the work of parachutists; but, even if they had known the truth, most of them were too busy or too weary or too badly hurt to care that they were the objects of the first great experiment in atomic power�� (p. 48).

It was not until a week later that “a vague, incomprehensible rumor reached Hiroshima �� that the city had been destroyed by the energy released when atoms were somehow split in two. The weapon was referred to in this word-of-mouth report as genshi bakudan -- the root characters of which can be translated as ‘original child bomb’�� (p. 62).

There are also plenty of horrifying details of the wounds and injuries wrought by the vast destructive power of the atomic bomb. I will not share them here. You can read them for yourself. Everyone should read them. Everyone should know precisely what an atomic bomb does to people.

The bomb had other, odder, more lingering, more menacing effects. One month after the atomic-bomb attack, “Weeds already hid the ashes, and wildflowers were in bloom among the city’s bones. The bomb had not only left the underground organs of plants intact; it had stimulated them�� (p. 69). And around that same time, many Hiroshima survivors, including four of Hersey’s six informants, experienced odd medical symptoms signifying that “they were coming down with the strange, capricious disease which came later to be known as radiation sickness�� (p. 68).

Originally, Hiroshima appeared in The New Yorker, as the entire August 31, 1946, edition of the magazine. But the edition you should read is the one that adds a new chapter, “The Aftermath�� �� a chapter written by Hersey 40 years later, and published in a July 1985 issue of The New Yorker.

For “The Aftermath,�� Hersey returned to Hiroshima to look into the later lives of his six survivor-informants, starting with Hersey’s recap of the afflictions facing the six survivors in their post-bombing lives �� Dr. Fujii losing the hospital he had built, Father Kleinsorge repeatedly needing hospitalization, Ms. Nakamura living in poverty, Dr. Sasaki battling severe fatigue, Ms. Sasaki dealing with significant physical injuries, Mr. Tanimoto confronting the destruction of his church and the ruination of his health. Hersey notes laconically that “The lives of these six people, who were among the luckiest in Hiroshima, would never be the same�� (p. 86).

With a sensitivity to the nuances of Japanese culture, Hersey writes that “In referring to those who went through the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings, the Japanese tended to shy away from the term ‘survivors,�� because in its focus on being alive it might suggest some slight to the sacred dead. [This] class of people…came, therefore, to be called by a more neutral name, ‘hibakusha�� �� literally, ‘explosion-affected persons’�� (p. 91). Much of the rest of Hiroshima looks at the later lives of the six hibakusha informants whose testimony Hersey sought out �� and, by implication, at the later lives of all the hibakusha of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

Amidst the details of how, over the subsequent decades, leukemia and other cancers proliferated among the hibakusha in rates far greater than those for the general population, the words of one of Father Kleinsorge’s fellow German Jesuits, who escaped the destruction of Hiroshima because he was in the outlying town of Nagatsuka at the time, resonate. In a report to the Vatican, the priest questioned the “total war�� doctrine that does not differentiate between civilian and military targets.

“It seems logical,�� the priest wrote, “that he who supports total war in principle cannot complain of a war against civilians. The crux of the matter is whether total war in its present form is justifiable, even when it serves a just purpose. Does it not have material and spiritual evil as its consequences which far exceed whatever good might result? When will our moralists give us a clear answer to this question?�� (p. 89) Clearly, those questions still stand.

Hiroshima closes on a grim note. Hersey notes in an afterword, written in the Orwellian year of 1984, that “The surviving hibakusha had been polled by Chugoku Shimbun…and 54.3 per cent of them said they thought that nuclear weapons would be used again�� (p. 151). One can only hope that that 54.3 percent of surviving hibakusha were wrong.

I took up Hersey’s Hiroshima on August 6, 2020 �� the 75th anniversary of the bombing. Recently, I took my grandson to the Dulles Annex of the Smithsonian Institution’s Air & Space Museum, near Dulles International Airport in Northern Virginia; there, the restored Enola Gay B-29 bomber is one of the best-known exhibits. May the legacy of Hersey’s great work be a world where nuclear weapons are never used in war again.