John Hersey
“In two calculated blows, with two atomic bombs, American
imperialism killed or injured half a million human beings. The young and the
old, the child in the cradle and the aged and infirm, the newly married, the
well and the sick, men, women, and children—they all had to die in two blows
because of a quarrel between the imperialists of Wall Street and a similar gang
in Japan.”
James P Cannon[1]
The appearance of people was … well, they all had skin
blackened by burns. … They had no hair because their hair was burned, and at a
glance, you couldn’t tell whether you were looking at them from in front or
back. … Many of them died along the road—I can still picture them in my mind,
like walking ghosts. … They didn’t look like people of this world.
An eyewitness
“The question now being asked, quietly but nervously, in
capitals around the world is, where will this end? The once-unthinkable
outcome—actual armed conflict between the United States and China—now appears
possible for the first time since the end of the Korean War. In other words, we
are confronting the prospect of not just a new Cold War, but a hot one as
well.”
Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd
The 80th anniversary of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima will
be commemorated on August 6, 2025. This deliberate act of imperialist genocide
will be forever etched in the memory of hundreds of millions of people as a war
crime and a day that will live in infamy. However, despite the significant passage
of time, the threat of global annihilation has stayed with us, and it is now
openly talked about amongst the ruling elites around the world.[2]
Hiroshima is an extraordinarily well-written and vivid
account of the complete and total annihilation of the city of Hiroshima. Hersey’s
stunning piece of journalism reads like a novel. It is not surprising that it
was voted the most important piece of American journalism of the 20th Century
and deserves a wide readership as we come up to this 80th anniversary. Hersey
was a pioneer of “New Journalism”, a movement that included the use of literary
techniques in complex pieces in journalism. With the destruction from the bomb
so complete, it must have crossed Hersey’s mind if there were any stories left
to tell? Hersey answers in the affirmative. It is far from an easy read.
As Will Hersey (no relation) testifies, “It took me until
this January, three-and-a-half decades later, to steel myself to find out.
Hersey’s 30,000-word account of what happened to six survivors from moments
just before 8.15 am on 5 August 1945 when the US Air Force B-29 Superfortress
bomber “Enola Gay” dropped its 9,700lb uranium bomb — somewhat grotesquely
nicknamed “Little Boy” — is told almost entirely through their eyes: “Dr Fujii
hardly had time to think that he was dying before he realised that he was
alive, squeezed tightly by two long timbers across his chest, like a morsel
suspended between two huge chopsticks.”[3]
Most of these stories were never told straight away. In the
aftermath of the dropping of the bombs, the U.S ruling elite was mindful of the
international reaction. Newspaper Editors and columnists throughout America
denounced the silence and secrecy that had shrouded the aftermath of the
nuclear attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. One editorial in the Monterey
Peninsula Herald in Northern California called the US government “amoral
fools”.
The government issued a complete media blackout and cover-up
that even the Nazis would have approved of. No photographs or details of the
murderous casualties were allowed to be published. Any reports had to be filed through
the War Department. When enquiries were made as to whether the American bourgeoisie
had dropped two atom bombs on unarmed civilians, the bomb was downplayed as a
“labour-saving device” to speed up the end of the war. When reports came in
that people were dying from radiation, they were dismissed as “Tokyo tales”.
This suppression of what happened in Hiroshima could not
last for long, and as Hersey’s article came out, it made a massive impact. Newsstands
quickly sold out. Excerpts ran in newspapers around the world. Hersey only allowed
the serialisation on the condition that newspapers make contributions to the
American Red Cross after publication. The article was read on the radio, in its
entirety, over four consecutive nights. Albert Einstein is said to have ordered
1,000 copies for distribution.
As Steve Rothman writes, “The direct effect of 'Hiroshima'
on the American public is difficult to gauge. No mass movement formed as a
result of the article, no laws were passed, and the reaction to the piece
probably didn't have any specific impact on U. S. military strategy or foreign
policy. But certainly the vivid depictions in the book must have been a strong
contributor to a pervasive sense of dread (and guilt) about nuclear weaponry
felt by many Americans ever since August 1945.”
The only real opposition to the war crime came from the
Marxists with James P Cannon, leader of the American Socialist Workers Party, writing,
“In two calculated blows, with two atomic bombs, American imperialism killed or
injured half a million human beings. The young and the old, the child in the
cradle and the aged and infirm, the newly married, the well and the sick, men,
women and children—they all had to die in two blows because of a quarrel
between the imperialists of Wall Street and a similar gang in Japan... What an
unspeakable atrocity! What a shame has come to America, the America that once
placed in New York harbour a Statue of Liberty, enlightening the world. Now the
world recoils in horror from her name. Long ago, the revolutionary Marxists said
that the alternative facing humanity was either socialism or a new barbarism,
that capitalism threatens to go down in ruins and drag civilisation with it.
But in the light of what has been developed in this war and is projected for
the future, I think we can say now that the alternative can be made even more
precise: The alternative facing humanity is socialism or annihilation!.
Hersey was working for Time magazine during his first visit
to Japan to get first-hand reports and interviews. Given the dangers involved,
it was a courageous thing to do. Over 50 people were interviewed for the
article, which was later turned into a book.[4]
Hersey’s talent as a writer is evident in the book. Still, his intelligence and
kindness lay in letting people speak for themselves or describing what they witnessed
shine through in comments like this, he writes, “Mrs Nakamura stood watching
her neighbour, everything flashed whiter than any white she had ever seen … the
reflex of a mother set her in motion towards her children. She had taken a
single step … when something picked her up and she seemed to fly into the next
room, over the raised sleeping platform, pursued by parts of her house.
Hersey does not sanitised what happened when the bomb was
dropped as this quote shows “He reached down and took a woman by the hands, but
her skin slipped off in huge, glove like pieces”; “their eye sockets were
hollow, the fluid from their melted eyes had run down their cheeks”; “abandoned
and helpless… beside the woman who had lost a breast and the man whose burned
face was scarcely a face anymore”
According to The National WWII Museum, the bomb “engulfed
the city in a blinding flash of heat and light. The temperature at ground level
reached 7,000 degrees Fahrenheit in less than a second. The bomb vaporised
people half a mile away from ground zero. Bronze statues melted, roof tiles
fused, and the exposed skin of people miles away burned from the intense
infrared energy unleashed. At least 80,000 people died instantly. The bomb
destroyed 70 per cent of all buildings in Hiroshima, and an estimated 140,000
people had been killed by the end of 1945. Survivors suffered from increased
rates of cancer and chronic disease”.
The National Museum of Nuclear Science and History explained
the aftermath of the explosion. “One man left only a dark shadow on the steps
of a bank as he sat. … Many others in Hiroshima, farther from the Little Boy epicentre,
survived the initial explosion but were severely wounded, including injuries
from and burns across much of their body. Among these people, panic and chaos
were rampant as they struggled to find food and water, medical assistance,
friends and relatives and to flee the firestorms that engulfed many residential
areas.”
There is only one weakness in the book, and unfortunately,
it is a significant one. At no point does Hersey explain the reasons behind the
dropping of the bombs or the geopolitical reasons behind the war crimes.
As the Marxist writer David Walsh explains, “The more
profound motives behind the bombings involved American imperialism’s goal of
terrorising the Soviet Union as part of the already unfolding Cold War. As the
recent film Oppenheimer has made clear, “Trinity,” the code name for the first
test of a nuclear weapon, was scheduled for July 16, 1945, so that Truman could
hold the existence of the bomb over the heads of Stalin and the Soviet
delegation at the Potsdam Conference, which opened the following day. According
to this line of thinking, the US would not need to make concessions and could
force the Soviet leadership to submit to its demands.
When the bomb was developed as part of the Manhattan
Project, the Truman administration imagined that its supposed nuclear monopoly
would ensure the hegemonic role of the US for years to come. This notion was
considered delusional by scientists, who understood that it was only a matter
of time before the USSR would develop the bomb. Truman was ignorant enough to
assert that “those Asiatics” (in the Soviet Union) could never build so
complicated a weapon.”[5]
It must be said that most of the scientists who worked on
the Manhattan Project supported the use of the Bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
It was only later that some regretted what
they had done. A Manhattan Project scientist wrote to a friend, “I wept as I
read John Hersey's New Yorker account of what has happened during the past year
to six who were lucky enough to survive Hiroshima. I am filled with shame to
recall the whoopee spirit ... when we came back from lunch to find others who
had returned with the first extras announcing the bombing of Hiroshima. That
evening we had a hastily arranged champagne dinner, some forty of us; ... [we
felt] relief at the relaxation of security, pride in our part in ending the
war, and even pride in the effectiveness of the weapon. And at the exact
moment, the bomb's victims were living through an indescribable horror we
didn't realise. I wonder if we do yet.[6]
Robert Oppenheimer, who led the bomb project, was disquieted
at what he had done, but he never apologised or expressed regret. The dropping
of the atomic bomb on Japan was a war crime in which he fully participated. He
did have blood on his hands.
At the moment, Penguin has made no plans to release a new
edition of the book to coincide with the 80th anniversary. This is
surprising given that the threat of a new world war and nuclear annihilation is
greater today than at any time since the atrocities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
The fractious nature of world politics as seen in when Trump
facetiously traded remarks with Kim Jong Un about the size of his nuclear
button highlights that the very existence of these weapons of mass destruction
pose a grave danger that at some point, in a time of intense crisis, they would
be used against foreign foes or even domestic opposition.
As the historian Gabriel Jackson perceptively wrote, “...
the use of the atom bomb showed that a psychologically very normal and
democratically elected chief executive could use the weapon just as the Nazi
dictator would have used it. In this way, the United States—for anyone
concerned with moral distinctions in the different types of government—blurred
the difference between fascism and democracy.”
The recent release of the film Oppenheimer, which has struck
a disturbing chord with audiences, shows there is a growing disquiet amongst
people regarding the dangers of Nuclear war. The choice between Socialism and Barbarism
could not be made starker.[7]
Notes
James P. Cannon-A: A Statement on the War(22 December 1941)
https://www.marxists.org/archive/cannon/works/1941/dec/21.htm
The Publication of "Hiroshima" in The New Yorker-Steve
Rothman www.herseyhiroshima.com/hiro.php
[1]
James P. Cannon on the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, “An unspeakable
atrocity”https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2020/08/07/cann-a07.html
[2]
How to Survive the New Nuclear Age National Security in a World of
Proliferating Risks and Eroding Constraints Vipin Narang and Pranay
Vaddi-Foreign Affairs July/August 2025
[3]
John Hersey's Hiroshima Is Still Essential Reading, 75 Years Later-www.esquire.com
23 April 2021
[4]
www.newyorker.com/magazine/1946/08/31
[5]
78th anniversary of US atomic bombing of Hiroshima www.wsws.org/en/articles/2023/08/07/fniq-a07.html
[6]
The Publication of "Hiroshima" in The New Yorker-Steve Rothman
www.herseyhiroshima.com/hiro.php
[7]
Oppenheimer: A drama about “the father of the atomic bomb”https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2023/07/27/znjf-j27.html
