There were other likenesses between Hersey and Wilder from Sanders’ second text on Hersey, entitled John Hersey Revisited. (Sanders kindly read my Masters thesis on Hiroshima. His only criticism was that I should list Hiroshima as “one” of the great works of the 20th century, not the greatest. My thesis was duly amended, even though twice, in the 1960s and 1990s when I checked such lists, Hiroshima came out on top).

To begin, Sanders helped me to see further similarities in the structure of the opening pages of both texts. Wilder begins his tale: “On Friday noon, July the twentieth, 1714, the finest bridge in all Peru broke and precipitated five travelers into the gulf below.” Hersey copied the same opening structure, using time as the marking point for his readers: “At exactly fifteen minutes past eight in the morning, on August 6, 1946, Japanese time, at the moment when the atomic bomb flashed above Hiroshima…”

Both men violated the general print journalistic rule that holds one should not start a summary lead with the “time” or “when” element. I believe that both writers broke the rule for the same reason President Franklin Roosevelt did it in his famous declaration of war speech: “Yesterday, December 7, 1941 — a date which will live in infamy— the United States of America was suddenly and deliberately attacked by naval and air forces of the Empire of Japan.”

These men used an opening to their story, or in the case of FDR, a speech, focusing on the time element to mark a date in the mind of their audiences, to make sure their readers did not forget the day.

…Hersey must have meditated on Wilder’s declaration at the end of his novel, when he has one character state: ‘But soon we shall die and all memory of those five will have left the earth, and we ourselves shall be loved for a while and be forgotten.’

Beyond that, Hersey, I believe, must have pondered Wilder’s narrative description about his own narrator as he sets the stage for his story. Wilder writes, “If there were any plan in the universe at all, if there were any pattern in human life, surely it could be discovered mysteriously latent in those lives so suddenly cut off. Either we live by accident and die by accident, or we live by plan and die by plan. And on that instant Brother Juniper (Wilder’s narrator) made the resolve to inquire into the secret lives of those five persons…”

Wilder’s narrator spends six years knocking at doors in Lima, asking thousands of questions, filling scores of notebooks, in his effort to establish the fact that each of the lost lives was a perfect whole. Hersey interviewed thirty people. He focused on six.

All we need to do is substitute Hersey’s name for Brother Juniper’s, and we have discovered his determination to focus on the use of the atomic bomb on the city, its inhabitants, and the consequences of the use of atomic weapons in wars to come.

There is a major difference, of course, between Wilder’s bridge collapse and the use of the atomic bomb. Wilder declared that the bridge collapse was an act of God; Hersey’s event was an act of man. Yet, Hersey must have meditated on Wilder’s declaration at the end of his novel, when he has one character state: “But soon we shall die and all memory of those five will have left the earth, and we ourselves shall be loved for a while and be forgotten.”

It was Hersey’s goal, and of course Ross’s and Shawn’s, that there should be a testimonial remembrance of Hiroshima, and that it should not be forgotten. To forget the lessons of the past is to set the stage to repeat them and so Hersey has his six survivors each recount their own experiences. For emphasis, he turns the clock back to the morning the bomb strikes again and again, each time to begin revelations from his next interviewee as if to further indicate, Reader, take note.

Hersey’s concludes the introduction to his story with the Wilder-like theme of The Bridge Over San Luis Rey: “They still wonder why they lived when so many others died. Each of them counts many small items of chance or volition — a step taken in time, a decision to go indoors, catching one streetcar instead of the next — that spared him. And now each knows that in the act of survival he lives a dozen lives and saw more death than he ever thought he would see. At the time, none of them knew anything.”

The expression “none of them knew anything” sets the stage for Hersey’s telling, and his readers are to put aside their animosities of the Japanese and imagine that they too know nothing of the consequences of the use of atomic weapons. His story will show, not tell, the destructive forces unleashed by the bomb, more than any man or woman might want to know.