Latest news with #JohnHersey
Indian Express
4 days ago
- General
- Indian Express
Hiroshima and Nagasaki 80 years on: Books that told the truth
Eighty years ago, a Little Boy and a Fat Man wiped out two cities, killing and injuring thousands in the process. These were the names of the two atomic bombs dropped on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki on August 6 and August 9, 1945, paving the way for Japan's surrender, resulting in the end of World War 2. The devastation caused by the two bombs was unmatched with lakhs being killed almost immediately and almost as many succumbing to their wounds and radiation-related diseases and disorders later. A large part of both cities were razed to the ground. Initially celebrated by the victors, the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki sparked a lot of debate in the years that followed, and today are viewed with horror and regret rather than triumphalism. Many still insist that the bombs were necessary to make Japan surrender, but the human cost is no longer ignored as it had been initially (the US had even denied that any radiation existed in the two cities). And this has also been because of the books written on these bombings, which showed the world the picture that lay behind the mushroom clouds that covered Hiroshima and Nagasaki on those two days in August, 1945. It was a piece of writing that revealed the true tragedy of Hiroshima, which had initially been treated as just one of many cities that had been bombed in the Second World War. US journalist John Hersey shattered that belief with a detailed, almost 30,000 word article on Hiroshima in The New Yorker on August, 31,1946. Access to the city had been largely restricted by US forces which occupied Japan, but Hersey managed to get to Hiroshima and talk to people, and wrote about its bombing and its aftermath through the eyes of six survivors. His story was supposed to be published in four parts, but was so powerful that The New Yorker decided to publish it in its full form in a single issue. The article stunned readers and gained such popularity that within months, it was published as a book. Albert Einstein, the physicist known for his theory of relativity, claimed to have bought a thousand copies to distribute to those he knew. The slim, 175-200 page book never went out of circulation, and remains a sobering read even today. Hersey went back to Hiroshima in 1985 and spoke again to the six survivors, adding a new chapter to the book, so we recommend getting a new edition. Simply titled Hiroshima, it remains the book to read on the tragedy that hit the city. Hersey's effort to uncover the truth about Hiroshima can be read in Lesly MM Blue's Fallout: The Hiroshima Cover-up and the Reporter Who Revealed It to the World. Blume not only covers Hersey's work, but also reveals in disturbing detail the efforts the US administration took to ensure that the media either steered clear of Hiroshima or went there only under strict supervision. If Hersey's book captures the human impact of Hiroshima, Richard Rhodes' epic The Making of the Atomic Bomb, tells one the story of how the bomb was made. And does so in glorious, almost intimidating detail, beginning right from the interest around nuclear fission at the end of the nineteenth century and covering the advances made by different people and nations, right down to the (in)famous Manhattan Project. At almost 900 pages, it is a massive book, but Rhodes narrates it in almost thriller-like fashion, bringing characters such as Einstein Bohr, Fermi and of course, Oppenheimer to life, even while capturing the tension behind the tests and the race to build the bomb. Published in 1987, it won Rhodes a Pulitzer and remains the highest-selling book on the first atom bombs. This is the book for those who want to learn about the people, politics and the processes behind dropping the bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Just do not get too overwhelmed by the science in it. Of all the people involved in the development of the atom bomb, the most famous undoubtedly was J Robert Oppenheimer, now made even more famous by Christopher Nolan's Oscar winning film on him in 2023. And if you thought that the film was great, wait until you read the book it was based on: American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J Robert Oppenheimer by Kai Bird and Martin J Sherwin. Published in 2005, the book won a Pulitzer Prize and became a bestseller. At more than 700 pages, it is a little intimidating, but it is a far more nuanced (and less dramatic) look at the man many called The Father of the Atom Bomb than Nolan's spectacular work. The doubts that nag Oppenheimer after he learns of the destruction of the bomb and his ordeal in the 1954 security hearing are brilliantly captured. Brilliantly written though they are, both The Making of the Atomic Bomb, and American Prometheus, can be a little lengthy and intimidating to read. If you want a quicker look at the Manhattan Project and the bombing of Hiroshima, then the recently-released The Hiroshima Men: The Quest to Build the Atomic Bomb and the Fateful Decision to Use It by Iain MacGregor is an excellent read. In 450 superbly crafted pages, MacGregor looks at the events leading up to the bombing from US as well as Japanese perspectives, including those of people like Oppenheimer and Paul Tibbets, the man who flew Enola Gay, the aircraft that dropped the bomb on Hiroshima. As more information about the bombing and its aftermath become available to researchers, there is a strong line of thought developing that perhaps the atom bombs were not necessary. Veteran historian Richard Overy's slim and succinct, Rain of Ruin: Tokyo, Hiroshima, and the Surrender of Japan, looks at the Allies' decision to bomb Hiroshima and Nagaski and also fire bomb Tokyo, which claimed even more lives. Overy's narrative might strike some as being a little dry but over about 200 pages he looks at the military strategy behind the use of the atom bombs and the bombing policy (pursued by US general Curtis Le May) and points out that while Hiroshima and Nagasaki did accelerate the Japanese surrender, they were not the sole causes for it, as projected by many. If Overy's work is a trifle on the short and dry side, then Paul Ham's Hiroshima Nagasaki: The Real Story of the Atomic Bombings and Their Aftermath, published in 2013, makes a passionate case against the use of the atom bombs. Spanning about 700 pages, Hiroshima Nagasaki covers the destruction of the two cities, with interviews with survivors, as Ham argues that the Japanese were already defeated and that they surrendered mainly because of the USSR's decision to attack Japan. It is a deeply moving but provocative book, and totally de-glamourises war in general and atom bombs in particular. Eighty years might have passed since Paul TIbbets told his crew in Enola Gay, 'Fellows, you have just dropped the first atomic bomb in history,' but Hiroshima remains relevant even today. And needs to be. As John Hersey, the man who showed the world the truth about the place, wrote in 1985: 'What has kept the world safe from the bomb since 1945 has not been deterrence, in the sense of fear of specific weapons, so much as it's been memory…The memory of what happened at Hiroshima' Which is why we need to keep reading about Hiroshima. To remember what happened. And to make sure it does not happen again.
The Guardian
5 days ago
- Politics
- The Guardian
I changed my mind on banning the bomb, but the threat of nuclear war is growing – and so is complacency
This week marks 80 years since the horrors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, as the few remaining witnesses tell of incinerated, melted and obliterated families. Soon there will be none left to remember. Survivors' graphic accounts of 'the noiseless flash' were captured by John Hersey in his book Hiroshima, read by my generation with shock and fear. Nevil Shute's On the Beach taught us every gut-wrenching detail of the radiation sickness I fully expected to die of. Civil defence leaflets told families how to hide under the stairs with a radio and torch. I grew up expecting early death by nuclear war. My father was a 1957 founder of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament who didn't expect us to survive inevitable nuclear holocaust. He carried a large bottle of suicide pills, enough to kill us all when the bomb fell, to save us from slowly perishing by strontium-90. When he left the jar behind driving on holiday to Wales, he had to turn back halfway there to fetch it. We lived under the shadow of the mushroom cloud. We knew that the three white geodesic domes of the Fylingdales early warning system would give us exactly four minutes, enough to boil an egg or run a very fast mile. I set off with him aged 11 on the first Aldermaston march (though after speaking in Trafalgar Square, my alcoholic father got no further than the Bunch of Grapes in Knightsbridge). But every year afterwards I went with friends on that four-day Easter march to the atomic weapons research establishment in Berkshire: it was the high social event of the year, the Glastonbury of our generation, though our fear and outrage were real too. What let that sense of imminent doom fade? The Vietnam war took over most protesting energies, and now the climate crisis is evident, desperate and immediate. The nuclear threat fell down the league table of fear, though it's as great or greater. The US and Russia show alarming readiness to use nuclear weapons as a sabre-rattling threat. 'I have ordered two nuclear submarines to be positioned in the appropriate regions, just in case these foolish and inflammatory statements are more than just that,' Donald Trump announced in response to former Russian president Dmitry Medvedev tweeting that he would be ready to launch a nuclear strike over the war in Ukraine. In the cold war standoff, mutually assured destruction seemed to make the use of them pretty unthinkable, though neither side could gauge the other's willingness to end the world. There were close calls, over the Cuban missile crisis and the 1980s deployment of tactical nuclear weapons in Europe. Now neither Trump nor Putin may be rational, nor think each other rational, and either might twitch their finger on the button. To talk nuclear threat suggests first use is not taboo. Trident, our US-dependent nuclear-armed submarines, are our 'weapon of last resort'. New designs can be deployed on a battlefield. Are these a more plausible deterrent or a more dangerously 'usable' weapon? The non-proliferation treaty has not prevented Pakistan, North Korea, India or Israel becoming nuclear states: Iran may soon follow. Disarmament and world peace made no progress: 61 armed conflicts in 2024 were the most since the second world war. Nato has fallen apart, never again certain that the US will defend its allies, whoever is president. With Russia more threatening than ever, Europe must defend itself, pulling the continent together with joint French, British and, they hope, German nuclear capacity. Unilateral nuclear disarmament by Britain does not look a good proposition. Nuclear weapons are as terrifying and as mad as ever they were, but getting rid of them and burying the knowledge to make them looks ever harder in a more dangerous world. 'Don't make us a target' is CND's current campaign slogan. But Europe abandoning these weapons would make us Russian vassals. Jeremy Corbyn, a CND vice-president, who is in Hiroshima this week for the commemoration, said: 'As we reflect on 80 years since the criminal bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, we must ask where is the leadership in pursuing the urgent need for nuclear disarmament?' Criminal? The inconvenient truth is that most historians think fewer people died in those bombings than would have perished in a prolonged invasion of Japan. That doesn't diminish the horror. Corbyn this week called on Britain to 'rethink its disastrous nuclear expansion'. But unilateral disarmament always blighted Labour's chances, as Nye Bevan knew when he urged the party not to send a Labour foreign secretary 'naked into the conference chamber'. Unilateralism, and a pledge to leave the common market, made Michael Foot's 1983 manifesto the 'longest suicide note in history'. Neil Kinnock, once a CND supporter, persuaded his party to abandon unilateralism ahead of the 1992 election. That Kinnock journey is one many of us took. But old Aldermaston songs stay embedded: 'Don't you hear the H-bombs' thunder / Echo like the crack of doom? / While they rend the skies asunder / Fallout makes the Earth a tomb', with its rousing refrain, 'Ban the bomb, forever more!' It was a walking political education under multitudinous banners for anarchists, young communists, Quakers, the ANC and 57 varieties of socialist splinters, Trotskyite, Maoist and Stalinist. Traitors, terrorists? Bertrand Russell, aged 89, led direct action, causing mass traffic obstruction with Whitehall sit-ins: would they now be called 'terrorists', following Labour's draconian and provocative ban on Palestine Action? Whatever their causes, atrocities from Hiroshima to Gaza deserve the right to public expression of plain, Quaker-style revulsion at monstrous inhumanity. The mayor of Hiroshima at Wednesday's memorial ceremony linked the Ukraine and Gaza wars to a growing acceptance of nuclear weapons: their perpetrators 'flagrantly disregard the lessons the international community should have learned from the tragedies of history'. The white doves released didn't really suggest hope. He was right to call for a renewed urgency of a bygone age to remind those grown complacent of the reality of nuclear warfare. Forgetting that debate these days makes the unthinkable possible. Human idiocy has many ways to end the world. Polly Toynbee is a Guardian columnist This article was amended on 7 August 2025 – Neil Kinnock's Labour abandoned unilateralism in 1989, ahead of the 1992 general election
The Guardian
6 days ago
- Politics
- The Guardian
I changed my mind on banning the bomb, but the threat of nuclear war is growing – and so is complacency
This week marks 80 years since the horrors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, as the few remaining witnesses tell of incinerated, melted and obliterated families. Soon there will be none left to remember. Survivors' graphic accounts of 'the noiseless flash' were captured by John Hersey in his book Hiroshima, read by my generation with shock and fear. Nevil Shute's On the Beach taught us every gut-wrenching detail of the radiation sickness I fully expected to die of. Civil defence leaflets told families how to hide under the stairs with a radio and torch. I grew up expecting early death by nuclear war. My father was a 1957 founder of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament who didn't expect us to survive inevitable nuclear holocaust. He carried a large bottle of suicide pills, enough to kill us all when the bomb fell, to save us from slowly perishing by strontium-90. When he left the jar behind driving on holiday to Wales, he had to turn back halfway there to fetch it. We lived under the shadow of the mushroom cloud. We knew that the three white geodesic domes of the Fylingdales early warning system would give us exactly four minutes, enough to boil an egg or run a very fast mile. I set off with him aged 13 on the first Aldermaston march (though after speaking in Trafalgar Square, my alcoholic father got no further than the Bunch of Grapes in Knightsbridge). But every year afterwards I went with friends on that four-day Easter march to the atomic weapons research establishment in Berkshire: it was the high social event of the year, the Glastonbury of our generation, though our fear and outrage were real too. What let that sense of imminent doom fade? The Vietnam war took over most protesting energies, and now the climate crisis is evident, desperate and immediate. The nuclear threat fell down the league table of fear, though it's as great or greater. The US and Russia show alarming readiness to use nuclear weapons as a sabre-rattling threat. 'I have ordered two nuclear submarines to be positioned in the appropriate regions, just in case these foolish and inflammatory statements are more than just that,' Donald Trump announced in response to former Russian president Dmitry Medvedev tweeting that he would be ready to launch a nuclear strike over the war in Ukraine. In the cold war standoff, mutually assured destruction seemed to make the use of them pretty unthinkable, though neither side could gauge the other's willingness to end the world. There were close calls, over the Cuban missile crisis and the 1980s deployment of tactical nuclear weapons in Europe. Now neither Trump nor Putin may be rational, nor think each other rational, and either might twitch their finger on the button. To talk nuclear threat suggests first use is not taboo. Trident, our US-dependent nuclear-armed submarines, are our 'weapon of last resort'. New designs can be deployed on a battlefield. Are these a more plausible deterrent or a more dangerously 'usable' weapon? The non-proliferation treaty has not prevented Pakistan, North Korea, India or Israel becoming nuclear states: Iran may soon follow. Disarmament and world peace made no progress: 61 armed conflicts in 2024 were the most since the second world war. Nato has fallen apart, never again certain that the US will defend its allies, whoever is president. With Russia more threatening than ever, Europe must defend itself, pulling the continent together with joint French, British and, they hope, German nuclear capacity. Unilateral nuclear disarmament by Britain does not look a good proposition. Nuclear weapons are as terrifying and as mad as ever they were, but getting rid of them and burying the knowledge to make them looks ever harder in a more dangerous world. 'Don't make us a target' is CND's current campaign slogan. But Europe abandoning these weapons would make us Russian vassals. Jeremy Corbyn, a CND vice-president, who is in Hiroshima this week for the commemoration, said: 'As we reflect on 80 years since the criminal bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, we must ask where is the leadership in pursuing the urgent need for nuclear disarmament?' Criminal? The inconvenient truth is that most historians think fewer people died in those bombings than would have perished in a prolonged invasion of Japan. That doesn't diminish the horror. Corbyn this week called on Britain to 'rethink its disastrous nuclear expansion'. But unilateral disarmament always blighted Labour's chances, as Nye Bevan knew when he urged the party not to send a Labour foreign secretary 'naked into the conference chamber'. Unilateralism, and a pledge to leave the common market, made Michael Foot's 1983 manifesto the 'longest suicide note in history'. Neil Kinnock, once a CND supporter, persuaded his party to abandon unilateralism ahead of the 1989 election. That Kinnock journey is one many of us took. But old Aldermaston songs stay embedded: 'Don't you hear the H-bombs' thunder / Echo like the crack of doom? / While they rend the skies asunder / Fallout makes the Earth a tomb', with its rousing refrain, 'Ban the bomb, forever more!' It was a walking political education under multitudinous banners for anarchists, young communists, Quakers, the ANC and 57 varieties of socialist splinters, Trotskyite, Maoist and Stalinist. Traitors, terrorists? Bertrand Russell, aged 89, led direct action, causing mass traffic obstruction with Whitehall sit-ins: would they now be called 'terrorists', following Labour's draconian and provocative ban on Palestine Action? Whatever their causes, atrocities from Hiroshima to Gaza deserve the right to public expression of plain, Quaker-style revulsion at monstrous inhumanity. The mayor of Hiroshima at Wednesday's memorial ceremony linked the Ukraine and Gaza wars to a growing acceptance of nuclear weapons: their perpetrators 'flagrantly disregard the lessons the international community should have learned from the tragedies of history'. The white doves released didn't really suggest hope. He was right to call for a renewed urgency of a bygone age to remind those grown complacent of the reality of nuclear warfare. Forgetting that debate these days makes the unthinkable possible. Human idiocy has many ways to end the world. Polly Toynbee is a Guardian columnist
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The Independent
06-08-2025
- Politics
- The Independent
Eighty years later, John Hersey's ‘Hiroshima' is more pertinent than ever
When it came to reporters who documented the aftermath of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima, John Hersey wasn't the first, but his account was the one that mattered. Several journalists reporting for Western press outlets managed to reach the smouldering ruins of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in the days and weeks immediately following the bombings on 6 August and 9 August 1945. Two of these journalists published terrifying initial reports of the cities' destruction by single, primitive nuclear bombs. At first, the US government seemed like it was hiding nothing about its experimental new mega weapons: US president Harry S Truman boasted in an announcement that the Hiroshima bomb – dubbed 'Little Boy' – had packed an explosive payload greater than 20,000 tonnes of TNT and had 'harness[ed] the basic power of the universe'. The Japanese – and, by implication, anyone else who messed with the world's then only nuclear superpower – could expect a 'rain of ruin from the air, the likes of which has never been seen on this earth'. Military photos released of the atomic cities revealed their total decimation, but these images, as the Daily Express pointed out, did 'not tell the whole story'. It would take more than a year after the nuclear attack on Hiroshima for the bigger story to emerge, courtesy of Hersey's 30,000-word investigative story in The New Yorker. After the official surrender of Japanese forces in September 1945 – and following those initial alarming reports from Hiroshima – US occupation forces imposed a lockdown on both Western and Japanese reporters. Journalists coming into the country with occupation forces were at first corralled in a 'press ghetto', as one reporter called it. Even when they were allowed to move more freely, occupation forces closely regulated their travel permits, fuel, food and kept close tabs on them. Hiroshima became a restricted topic; Japanese journalists could not even mention the atomic city in poetry, much less in a critical news report. Meanwhile, General Leslie Groves – the head of the Manhattan Project, which had produced and readied the bomb – downplayed the horrific after-effects of it, at one point even telling a US congressional committee not to worry: radiation poisoning was actually a 'pleasant way to die'. Stories to the contrary were 'Tokyo tales', propaganda of a defeated enemy. For John Hersey, a veteran war correspondent, this did not sound especially convincing, and in the spring of 1946, he applied for entrance to Japan. His quiet mission: to investigate the true effects of the bombs on human beings. He was something of a Trojan horse applicant: after all, a few years earlier, he had written a glowing book, Men on Bataan, about General Douglas MacArthur, who was now overseeing the occupation. Here was a good team player, occupation officials reasoned as they greenlit Hersey's admission to the country. They soon came to regret their decision. Hersey had been given permission to briefly visit Hiroshima, where he quickly interviewed dozens of survivors. He ultimately selected six testimonies given to him by highly relatable civilians, including: a single mother with three young children; a 20-something female clerk; a young, bespectacled medic; and a young pastor with a wife and a baby. Hersey collected their stories, took his notes back with him to New York, and there composed one of the most influential works of journalism ever written. His protagonists had relayed memories of the bombing in graphic, harrowing detail, and Hersey held nothing back: the charred corpses lining the streets; the voices of those trapped beneath their demolished homes, left to burn to death as fire tornadoes tore through the city. The young reverend told Hersey of his attempts to pull a victim into a small boat to paddle her away from the flames, across one of the city's rivers, only to have the victim's skin 'slip off in huge, glove-like pieces'. Sickened, the reverend had to sit down to compose himself after that, and repeatedly remind himself: 'These are human beings.' As Hersey and The New Yorker team were preparing to release his article, most of his fellow Americans had already moved on from Hiroshima. Other reporters and newspaper editors deemed it an 'old story'. Yet when his article – entitled Hiroshima – was released in the magazine's 31 August 1946 issue, it was explosive in its own right. Here, at last, was a raw, uncensored glimpse into what it had been like to come under nuclear attack. More than 500 radio stations covered Hersey's story, which earned front-page headlines, excerpts and editorials around the world. Both ABC and the BBC adapted 'Hiroshima' for dramatic radio readings. Even those who hadn't read it were talking about it, as one critic put it – and those who had read it would never forget it. Hersey had transformed unfathomable horror into unmissable, compulsive reading. He also showed that this so-called 'old story' was not old at all, and that it never would be again, because it showed what was in store for all humans, in every country and on every continent, should nuclear war ever break out. This is what it meant to have entered the atomic age. Eighty years later, the United States remains the only country to have used nuclear weapons in warfare. Hersey later said that the memory of Hiroshima's devastation helped fortify government reluctance to use nukes again. Indeed, his Hiroshima – which remains as sobering today as it was in 1946 – has been credited with contributing to a so-called 'nuclear taboo' surrounding atomic attack. Nuclear arsenal stockpiles are significantly down from their peak Cold War levels. According to the Federation of American Scientists, the US inventory peaked at 31,255 in 1967, and currently contains an estimated 5,177 nuclear warheads, with around 3,700 in the active military stockpile. Russia currently maintains nearly 5,460 nuclear warheads, with an estimated 1,718 deployed. Yet some experts warn that we have entered into a new nuclear arms race in recent years. The US alone plans to spend more than a trillion dollars maintaining and upgrading its nuclear arsenal over the next three decades. Leaders of the world's superpowers are once again engaging in nuclear sabre-rattling. We have entered such a perilous nuclear landscape that the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists has set its famous Doomsday Clock to '89 seconds to midnight' (ie 89 seconds to armageddon). The clock has never been set this close to midnight, not even during the depths of the Cold War. All of these developments beg the question: is anyone still listening to John Hersey? While Hiroshima – which was immediately released as a bestselling book after the article was first published – was widely read and taught in schools for decades, it's unclear how prevalent it is in curricula now. Vocal survivors of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings – called hibakusha in Japanese – are also dwindling in numbers, and as each witness dies, there is one fewer living connection to this catastrophic cautionary tale. By the 1980s, as Cold War hostilities surged, Hersey gave an interview in which he warned about the possibility of 'slippage' – a hair-trigger mistake or misinterpretation between two nuclear powers that could lead to an immediate nuclear confrontation. If such slippage occurred now, leaders of nuclear nations could, in a matter of minutes, wipe out civilisation. This danger may be amplified by the insertion of AI into military and defence infrastructures. Recent public opinion studies have also revealed that the nuclear taboo may be waning as well. Yet even with the apparently diminished impact of Hersey's work and warnings, there are encouraging signs that the world is waking up to the threat that nuclear weapons still pose. The Oscar-winning Oppenheimer engrossed audiences around the world and earned nearly $1bn in ticket sales. Last year, the Nobel Peace Prize was given to Nihon Hidankyo, an organisation devoted to fighting for hibakusha rights and raising awareness about the devastating impact of the Japanese bombings. As global awareness once again surges about the nuclear threat, more action to counter that threat is possible. And John Hersey's Hiroshima will always be there to remind us of the stakes.
Yahoo
18-07-2025
- General
- Yahoo
Book Review: ‘The Hiroshima Men' is a reminder of the horrific human costs of atomic attack
John Hersey was a 32-year-old reporter who returned from Japan with in 1946 with a groundbreaking story that challenged U.S. government's version of its atomic bomb attack on Hiroshima, showing the human consequences were far more horrific and extensive than the American public had been told. Hersey's 30,000-word piece for The New Yorker magazine focused on a few of the thousands of survivors who fell ill, and often died, from the lingering effects of radiation long after the bomb's initial impact killed tens of thousands of Japanese men, women and children. Hersey is among diverse group of men author and historian Iain MacGregor profiles in his new book, 'The Hiroshima Men: The Quest to Build the Atomic Bomb, and the Fateful Decision to Use It.' MacGregor earlier wrote 'Checkpoint Charlie,' an acclaimed history of Cold War Berlin, as well as 'The Lighthouse of Stalingrad: The Hidden Truth at the Heart of the Greatest Battle of World War II.' With the 80th anniversary of the Hiroshima attack approaching next month, 'The Hiroshima Men' is a potent reminder of the extreme human costs that were wrought by the first atomic weapon employed during warfare. By profiling some key players, MacGregor pulls readers into their personal stories with visually enticing description and lively dialogue. One was pilot Paul Tibbetts, Jr., who fell in love with flying at age 12 when he rode in an old biplane that took off from a horse racing track outside Miami. He named the Boeing B-29 Superfortress that he was flying when it dropped the atomic bomb on Aug. 6, 1945, for his mother, Enola Gay. Another profile is of J. Robert Oppenheimer, the brilliant scientific theorist who inspired a team testing the atomic bomb at a secret research laboratory in rural New Mexico. There's also Maj. Gen. Henry 'Hap' Arnold, who led the U.S. Army Air Corps in World War II and understood what could be achieved with the faster long-range B-29 bomber, which could travel farther and fly much higher than the popular B-17 that had been used on Europe. MacGregor also introduces us to Senkichi Awaya, the mayor of Hiroshima, a city founded in the late 1580s by a powerful warlord who built a castle headquarters on the shores of a strategically located bay. There are many more. The most powerful sections of the book come toward the end, when MacGregor describes the ghastly aftermath of the bombing — a gruesome hellscape littered with charred bodies and stunned survivors with skin dangling from their bodies and eyes hanging from the sockets. He then invites readers to reflect on the event's profound costs: 'I hope, looking right across the experience of this terrifying and cataclysmic event, that you, the reader, can judge for yourself whether this journey through the experiences of a city mayor, a bomber pilot, an Army general and an award-winning journalist, who all were intimately connected to Hiroshima, was worth it.' ___ AP book reviews:
