Mr. Tanimoto heard no roar, Hersey reports. He then parenthetically comments: almost “(no one in Hiroshima recalls hearing any noise of the bomb…).”

Hersey next describes how Mr. Tanimoto found himself enveloped in a dust cloud as the “day grew darker and darker.” We learn that Mr. Tanimoto was about 3,500 yards from the epicenter of the bomb blast. (All of those interviewed were similarly close to the epicenter.) Hersey’s other interviewees also described the power of the erupting flash. One of the doctors likened it to a photographic flash, and he too noted that an X-Ray machine in his hospital had film exposed from the bomb’s radioactive effects. Another recalled a story he had read as a boy of a “large meteor colliding with the earth.” Hersey reports that it seemed that everyone he interviewed believed he/she had taken a direct hit.

Hiroshima. From the top of the Red Cross Hospital
looking northwest. Frame buildings recently erected.
The National Archives

Hersey moves with the force of a skilled rhetorician into the mind of his interviewees, and then out again, mixing fictional writing techniques and those prescribed for the objective journalist. He often drops the conventional, journalistic, “he said,” or “she said,” and prescribes emotional states to his subjects. We must trust that he has accurately read them, understood their moods and thoughts. Seymour Chatman, in his famous analytical work Story and Discourse, describes this kind of covert, indirect free form of narration as a merging of “two voices” with the implication that it “doesn’t matter who says or thinks this; it is appropriate to both character and narrator” and that the ambiguity “may strengthen the bond between the two, make us trust still more the narrator’s authority.” He adds: “a feeling is established that the narrator possesses not only access to but an unusual affinity or ‘vibration’ with the character’s mind.’”

Here is an example of Hersey’s descriptive powers at their greatest: he reports the actions of Father Kleinsorge who views survivors in Asano Park: “…the silence in the grove by the river, where hundreds of gruesomely wounded suffered together, was one of the most dreadful and awesome phenomena of his whole experience. The hurt ones were quiet; no one wept, much less screamed in pain; no one complained; none of the many who died did so noisily; not even the children cried; very few people even spoke… (as he, as an example of Christian ethics in action, gave water to some of these survivors, some) raised themselves a little and bowed to him, in thanks.”

Another example of Hersey’s descriptive powers, this time describing another action of mercy similar to those of Father Kleinsorge but performed by Mr. Tanimoto as he walked to a riverbank in the park to look for a “boat in which he might carry some of the most severely injured across the river… away from the spreading fire.” Mr. Tanimoto found a good-sized punt, but in and around it was an “an awful tableau — five dead men, nearly naked, badly burned, who must have expired more or less all at once.” Mr. Tanimoto lifted them away, and as he did so he experienced “such horror at disturbing the dead, preventing them from launching their craft and going on their ghostly way. He spoke out loud: “Please forgive me for taking this boat. I must use it for others, who are alive.’”

Hersey again uses Father Kleinsorge to describe what I believe is one of the most gruesome scenes in the entire book. Kleinsorge is searching for water and he finds a faucet that still worked. In the process he comes upon twenty men, in uniform. He saw that they were all “in exactly the same nightmarish state: their faces were wholly burned, their eye sockets were hollow, the fluid from their melted eyes had run down their cheeks.” He speculates that they must have been antiaircraft personnel and had their faces “upturned when the bomb went off.” He adds, “their mouths were mere swollen, pus-covered wounds, which they could not bear to stretch enough to admit the spout of the teapot (he used to carry the water.) Father Kleinsorge searches for and finds a piece of grass and made it into a straw, and “gave them all water to drink.”