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.”
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AP book reviews: https://apnews.com/hub/book-reviews
Anita Snow, The Associated Press
