John Hersey’s famous work, Hiroshima, was the first news story ever to describe the consequences of atomic weapons from the point of view of those on the ground, of those who took the hit. Everything published immediately about the destruction of Hiroshima, between August 1945 and September 1946, had been from the military’s point of view. In fact, after the bombing, U.S. Army General Leslie Groves, military head of the Manhattan Project, dismissed accounts of the horror the bomb inflicted as “propaganda.” He further is quoted by Patrick B. Sharp as stating that “according to doctors, (radiation sickness) is a very pleasant way to die.”^[1]

Hiroshima, 1946
JACKET DESIGN BY Warren Chappell
The New York Public Library Digital Gallery

I believe it is important to reconsider Hersey’s work, especially with the constant discussions on the use of weapons of mass destruction in relation to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and because the text, based on my own sampling of students over the last twelve years, is no longer standard fare in American high schools. It is also important because the national psyche, as it was during the Great Depression, is again distracted by an economic “downturn” that consumes the country as it did before World War II when we failed to focus on the transformation of Germany and Italy into totalitarian states.

Hersey never said that death from nuclear attack was good or bad, but he did write graphically of the death and/or fatal injuries sustained by some 148,000 people, some immediately, some over time, from the blast, from burns, and from longer-term radiation-related diseases. It’s been sixty-four years since his 31,347-word account of six survivors he interviewed was published, taking up an entire issue of the The New Yorker. (The cover of the magazine that week depicted people frolicking in a park. The issue was sixty-eight pages, contained only advertisements, the Going On calendar, and Hersey’s story.) Unlike today, Hersey’s name did not appear at the top of the piece, but on the last page, after the final paragraph. The issue immediately sold out and copies were resold for as much as $20 each. The article was selected by the Department of Journalism, New York University, as the most influential nonfiction work, in English, published in the twentieth century. Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring was listed second. In fact, Mitchell Stephens, who was acting chair of the department at the time of the selection of Hiroshima as “number one” said: “‘Hiroshima’ can be said to be the founding document of the anti-nuclear movement.”

Hersey’s Hiroshima is an example of what I term narrative rhetoric, or persuasion packed in a story format. His article had to first engender sympathy for Japanese survivors of the bomb, which in 1946 were still considered America’s bitter enemies, then second, to depict the horrors of nuclear warfare. He had to accomplish his first goal or the American reader of his day would have said, So what, they got what they deserved. If and only if he was able to get his readers to set aside their hatred could he hope they would ponder whether nuclear war was war beyond all reason.

Hiroshima BY John Hersey (Vintage, 1989) From the Publisher: “On August 6, 1945, Hiroshima was destroyed by the first atom bomb ever dropped on a city. This book, John Hersey’s journalistic masterpiece, tells what happened on that day. Told through the memories of survivors, this timeless, powerful and compassionate document has become a classic ‘that stirs the conscience of humanity’ (The New York Times). Almost four decades after the original publication of this celebrated book, John Hersey went back to Hiroshima in search of the people whose stories he had told. His account of what he discovered about them is now the eloquent and moving final chapter of Hiroshima.”

He clearly accomplished his goal, but I wanted to know how he did it, how he depicted Japanese citizens as human beings, and converted his audiences’ latent hatred into one of compassion so that the reader could imagine himself/herself as the victim of a nuclear holocaust. As a former journalist and journalism instructor, my interest in the methods Hersey used to construct his piece so artfully was engendered from a lifetime of attempts at objective reporting. So just how did he do it, and why? I believe his ultimate purpose, and his greatest feat, showed that this new kind of warfare resulted in death on such a terrible scale and in such a horrible manner that nuclear war could no longer be considered an option. …his ultimate purpose, and his greatest feat, showed that this new kind of warfare resulted in death on such a terrible scale and in such a horrible manner that nuclear war could no longer be considered an option. I discovered many clues into his methods by an examination of his narrative style, one that Roger Angell described in an article in the New Yorker [2] nearly 50 years after the publication of Hiroshima. He said Hersey’s story was “stripped of mannerism, sentimentality, and even minimal emphasis… Hersey’s style and the atrocity of his subject matter contrive to shift the tone from contemporary war reporting to what feels like ancient tragedy.” I think Angell summarized the greatness of Hersey’s work, but he did not really detail how the war correspondent did it. So I began my quest by first looking at Hersey’s personal history and then his experiences as a war reporter. I found out that Hersey was born in Tientsin, China, the youngest son of Roscoe and Grace Baird Hersey, American protestant missionaries. The importance of his Christian upbringing will become apparent as I note some of the scenes and his selection of the persons he interviewed and put in his story. In 1936-37 he studied eighteenth-century English literature at Clare College, Cambridge and then went to work for Time Magazine, which was published by Henry Luce, who also was born in China. The two men shared a love for the Chinese, and a hatred for the Japanese after they stormed into China at the beginning of World War II in Asia. In July 1942, Hersey wrote Men on Bataan, a book he later disowned because of its flattering assessment of General Douglas MacArthur. But this work, according to David Sanders, one of the foremost experts on Hersey, had much in common with his later and most famous work, Hiroshima, because it depended on Hersey’s “urgent effort — amounting to a duty — to report what he had not seen by a strenuously sympathetic effort to understand the testimony of those who had.”

Portrait of John Hersey
BY Carl Van Vechten
Library of Congress
Prints & Photographs Division
Carl Van Vechten Collection
(LC-USZ62-54231)

In 1944 Hersey wrote, in three weeks, A Bell for Adano, based on people he had met and interviewed while covering the war in Italy, and featured events involving General George Patton. For his efforts, Hersey was awarded the 1945 Pulitzer Prize in fiction. It was his first effort at fictionalizing historical events and characters, and sharpened his storytelling skills. These too would be tested to the limit in Hiroshima.

Before he wrote A Bell for Adano, he joined a Marine combat unit’s assault on the island of Guadalcanal and spent some time on the aircraft carrier Hornet. He left the ship five days before it was sunk. While onboard he interviewed an airman who was rescued after his plane crashed into the sea while returning from the April 1942 Doolittle raid on Tokyo. The Sino-American Aviation Heritage Foundation has reported that the Japanese tortured and killed as many as 250,000 Chinese after the Doolittle raid because they “might” have aided the American airmen who flew to China after dropping their bombs.

If the carnage he had witnessed first hand and the stories he had learned from combatants had not further embittered him against the Japanese, it would seem nothing would. But Hersey was a complex man and had the ability to set aside his animosity, against the Italians when he wrote A Bell… and later for the Japanese when he wrote Hiroshima. This single quality marks him as both a great journalist and humanitarian. It also allowed him to set aside his hatred for the Japanese civilians, who were devastated by the bomb that virtually leveled their city.

Next I learned, from a biography on Ross by Thomas Kunkel (Genuis in Disguise, Harold Ross of the New Yorker, Random House, 1995), the backdrop for Hersey’s assignment to write about Hiroshima and the affects of the atomic bomb. Kunkel notes that it had been about nine months since the bomb had been dropped (August 6) when the decision was made to hire Hersey. Although thousands of words had been written about the bombing, editor William Shawn realized that “no one had written a human prospective of the event.” He wired Hersey in Shanghai: “the more time that passes, the more convinced we are that piece has wonderful possibilities.” Ross reportedly told E. B. White that Shawn “wants to wake people up and (he) says we are the people to do it.”

The Bridge of San Luis Rey
First Edition Cover
BY Thornton Wilder
(Albert & Charles Boni, 1927)

(Hersey originally composed his text in four parts assuming it would be published serially. Ross, when he read it, decided to publish it in a single issue. Ross was notorious for his attention to detail, and sometimes, according to Hersey, “hovered over a single word…(He) quibbled with the description of some of the bicycles near ground zero as ‘lopsided’. Asked Ross, can something that is two-dimensional be ‘lopsided’?” It was changed to ‘crumpled.’”)

Then fate intervened and, I believe, provided Hersey with his greatest rhetorical guidelines. This occurred when he was traveling aboard a U. S. Navy destroyer in the Pacific. He became ill and found in the ship’s library a copy of Thornton Wilder’s The Bridge of San Luis Rey, Wilder’s fictional account of the death of five random people who happened to be on a bridge when it collapsed in Peru. Wilder’s work clearly had an immense impact on Hersey. After all, Wilder and Hersey both attended Yale, both were raised in China, both had been awarded the Pulitzer for fiction, and both constructed narratives about disaster befalling random, innocent people. Wilder’s work is divided into five parts; Hersey’s into four. Wilder’s text is 117 pages, Hersey’s 90.

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.

It is hardly news now when writers of fact use the techniques of fiction writers to shape their stories. The era of the so-called New Journalists, born in the 1960s, (Hersey once said he was the grandfather of the movement) used first and third person fictional narrative styles to tell their tales, to bring power and immediacy to their work.

But, as noted, and unlike Wilder, Hersey had a major obstacle to overcome — America’s then near universal hatred of the Japanese. Patrick Sharp, in his “From Yellow Peril to Japanese Wasteland: John Hersey’s Hiroshima” concluded that there is substantial evidence to establish that hatred of the Japanese had been engendered in the United States years before the War. Since the turn of the century, American authors had been writing future-war stories in which Asian invaders armed with superior technologies attack the United States. The most well known story in this tradition was Jack London’s “The Unparalleled Invasion,” published in 1910.

According to Sharp, even President Truman “set the tone for this ‘revenge’ narrative with his assertion that ‘the Japanese began the war from the air at Pearl Harbor. They have been repaid many fold.’” He also notes the “U.S. government (had) engaged in a long and protracted battle” to control narratives about the atomic bomb, and… had hired William Laurence, the New York Times Pulitzer prize-winning science writer, as the official reporter of the Manhattan Project.” Rather than detail what had happened to Japanese civilians, the reports from Hiroshima and Nagasaki in the year following the attacks “emphasized strategic damage to buildings, bridges, and other war-related infrastructure…” Not people.

So, Hersey moved carefully, and he picked amongst his 30 interviewees, selecting a clerk and widow, two doctors, including one who worked for an international relief agency. The choice of medical professionals allows Hersey to reveal, through their eyes, the effect of radiation on those killed and those who survived the blast. He also chose two members of the clergy, one Catholic, one Protestant. The protestant had been educated in the U.S., been under suspicion by Japanese authorities because he wore American clothing, and had connections with America.

Rather than detail what had happened to Japanese civilians, the reports from Hiroshima and Nagasaki in the year following the attacks ’emphasized strategic damage to buildings, bridges, and other war-related infrastructure…’

He chooses his words carefully, too. He begins with the Reverend Mr. Tanimoto and tells how he got up at 5 a.m., alone in his parsonage, because “for some time his wife had been commuting with their year-old baby to spend nights with a friend in Ushida…” He notes that of all the important cities of Japan, “only two, Kyoto and Hiroshima, had not been visited in strength by B-san, or Mr. B, as the Japanese, with a mixture of respect and unhappy familiarity, called the B-29.” Those who lived in Hiroshima were almost “sick with anxiety,” expecting American bombers to arrive over their airspace. Hersey notes, with terrible irony, many of the city’s inhabitants expected something “special” had been planned for the city.

Hersey, like a good reporter setting the scene for his story, informs his readers that Hiroshima comprised six islands formed by seven estuarial rivers that branch from the Ota River, and several evacuation programs had reduced its population from a “wartime peak of 380,000 to about 245,000.” But that morning, the remaining inhabitants experienced a “tremendous flash of light.” To Mr. Tanimoto it seemed a “sheet of sun.” He took a few steps and “threw himself between two big rocks” in a garden. Hersey reports the man did not see what happened but “felt a sudden pressure, and then splinters and pieces of board and fragments of tile fell on him.”

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.”

Hersey also describes a theological student who had carried with him a bundle of clothes in which he had packed two pairs of leather shoes, but had lost one pair. “It’s funny, but things don’t matter any more. Yesterday, my shoes were my most important possessions. Today, I don’t care. One pair is enough.”

I believe the incident serves as another example of Christian ethics materializing in this devastated city, springing forth from within a character as he manifests a realization of what is truly important in life — and it isn’t shoes.

Hersey and his editors were persuaders. As Ross said about Shawn, it was necessary to “wake people up.” His story, Hiroshima, dramatizes a cataclysmic event. These were real people, not statistics, not buildings, not train stations, highways, or military targets. Hersey’s text enfleshed the people interviewed, and drew his readers, despite their then prejudices against the Japanese, close to them. His writing stands as an example of the power and pathos that can be achieved through the use of language.

Hersey’s text enfleshed the people interviewed, and drew his readers, despite their then prejudices against the Japanese, close to them. His writing stands as an example of the power and pathos that can be achieved through the use of language.

Did he stack the deck? Yes, absolutely. He would later say in the The Yale Review, 1985-86, there “is no such thing as objective reportage. Human life is far too trembling-swift to be reported in the whole; the moment the reporter chooses nine facts out of ten he colors the information he views.”

As a narrative, Hiroshima was effective rhetoric. As rhetoric, it was successful storytelling that helped change the way the American public perceived atomic weapons. It was not “journalism” as commonly defined. It does, however, definitely exemplify New Journalism, even before the term “New Journalism” had been coined by Thomas Wolfe and others some twenty years after the publication of Hiroshima. It is New Journalism because it is narrative shaped with a point of view, one that raises the persuasive text to a masterpiece that should not soon be forgotten because it shows the horrors of nuclear war.