John Hersey, Hiroshima.

 

- I finally got around to reading this extraordinary book by American journalist John Hersey.

- Hersey visited Hiroshima one year after the atom bomb was dropped in August 1945, and spent a month walking around and talking to residents. He details the impact on six people in particular who survived the experience. 

- The long 30,000 word article was published in The New Yorker in August 1946. The editors considered it so powerful they gave the whole issue over to it.

- Hersey soberly depicts the excruciating pain, the crushed limbs, the severe burns, the shedding of skin, the total destruction of houses and other buildings, and the fierce fires everywhere. Those residents who were not killed instantly died slowly and in agony. And they didn’t know what sort of bomb it was, or even whether it was a bomb at all. It was horrific.

- And then a strange ‘radiation sickness’ appeared, killing many more and affecting the survivors for decades to come.

- In all, 60,000 people were killed and 100,000 injured, and almost the whole of a great seaport, a city of 250,000 inhabitants, was destroyed by blast or by fire. 

- The New Yorker Publisher's Note: 

Many accounts have been published telling - so far as security considerations allow - how the atom bomb works. But here, for the first time, is not a description of scientific triumphs, of intricate machines, new elements, and mathematical formulas, but an account of what the bomb does - seen through the eyes of some of those to whom it did it: of those who endured one of the world's most catastrophic experiences, and lived.