Reviews

Hiroshima by John Hersey

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4adi's review against another edition

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dark emotional reflective fast-paced

4.75

kittyhollow's review against another edition

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hopeful informative reflective slow-paced

5.0

With such an important work, it’s hard to rate it anything other than a five star.

jameshafoster's review against another edition

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challenging dark emotional informative reflective sad medium-paced

4.5

Stories of six survivors around explosion and aftermath

Destruction of infrastructure

Mystery and theorising about what caused damage - dropped oil and set fire to it? Some chemical causing burning, smell, vomiting? Magnesium powder which ignited when it came into contact with power lines?

Refuge in park as theory was that if US bombed again, they would target buildings not green space

Trial and error for doctors treating in months after - new conditions, treated based on over-exposure to X-rays as same symptoms

“Of a hundred and fifty doctors in the city, sixty-five were already dead and most of the rest were wounded. Of 1,780 nurses, 1,654 were dead or too badly hurt to work. In the biggest hospital, that of the Red Cross, only six doctors out of thirty were able to function, and only ten nurses out of more than two hundred.”

“In a city of two hundred and forty-five thousand, nearly a hundred thousand people had been killed or doomed at one blow; a hundred thousand more were hurt. At least ten thousand of the wounded made their way to the best hospital in town, which was altogether unequal to such a trampling, since it had only six hundred beds, and they had all been occupied.”

“Under many houses, people screamed for help, but no one helped; in general, survivors that day assisted only their relatives or immediate neighbors, for they could not comprehend or tolerate a wider circle of misery.”

“On his way back with the water, he got lost on a detour around a fallen tree, and as he looked for his way through the woods, he heard a voice ask from the underbrush, “Have you anything to drink?” He saw a uniform. Thinking there was just one soldier, he approached with the water. When he had penetrated the bushes, he saw there were about twenty men, and they were all in exactly the same nightmarish state: their faces were wholly burned, their eyesockets were hollow, the fluid from their melted eyes had run down their cheeks. (They must have had their faces upturned when the bomb went off; perhaps they were anti-aircraft personnel.) Their mouths were mere swollen, pus-covered wounds, which they could not bear to stretch enough to admit the spout of the teapot. So Father Kleinsorge got a large piece of grass and drew out the stem so as to make a straw, and gave them all water to drink that way.”

“Scientists swarmed into the city. Some of them measured the force that had been necessary to shift marble gravestones in the cemeteries, to knock over twenty-two of the forty-seven railroad cars in the yards at Hiroshima station, to lift and move the concrete roadway on one of the bridges, and to perform other noteworthy acts of strength, and concluded that the pressure exerted by the explosion varied from 5.3 to 8.0 tons per square yard. Others found that mica, of which the melting point is 900° C., had fused on granite gravestones three hundred and eighty yards from the center; that telephone poles of Cryptomeria japonica, whose carbonization temperature is 240° C., had been charred at forty-four hundred yards from the center; and that the surface of gray clay tiles of the type used in Hiroshima, whose melting point is 1,300° C., had dissolved at six hundred yards; and, after examining other significant ashes and melted bits, they concluded that the bomb’s heat on the ground at the center must have been 6,000° C.

“Others were of the opinion that in total war, as carried on in Japan, there was no difference between civilians and soldiers, and that the bomb itself was an effective force tending to end the bloodshed, warning Japan to surrender and thus to avoid total destruction. It seems logical that he who supports total war in principle cannot complain of a war against civilians. The crux of the matter is whether total war in its present form is justifiable, even when it serves a just purpose. Does it not have material and spiritual evil as its consequences which far exceed whatever good might result? When will our moralists give us a clear answer to this question?”

“IN referring to those who went through the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings, the Japanese tended to shy away from the term “survivors,” because in its focus on being alive it might suggest some slight to the sacred dead. The class of people to which Nakamura-san belonged came, therefore, to be called by a more neutral name, “hibakusha”—literally, “explosion-affected persons.”

“Almost every year since 1946, on the anniversary of the Hiroshima bombing a Peace Memorial Meeting had been held in a park that the city planners had set aside, during the city’s rebuilding, as a center of remembrance, and on August 6, 1955, delegates from all over the world gathered there for the first World Conference against Atomic and Hydrogen Bombs. On its second day, a number of hibakusha tearfully testified to the government’s neglect of their plight. Japanese political parties took up the cause, and in 1957 the Diet at last passed the A-Bomb Victims Medical Care Law. This law and its subsequent modifications defined four classes of people who would be eligible for support: those who had been in the city limits on the day of the bombing; those who had entered an area within two kilometres of the hypocenter in the first fourteen days after it; those who had come into physical contact with bomb victims, in administering first aid or in disposing of their bodies; and those who had been embryos in the wombs of women in any of the first three categories. These hibakusha were entitled to receive so-called health books, which would entitle them to free medical treatment. Later revisions of the law provided for monthly allowances to victims suffering from various aftereffects.”

“On August 6th, the fourth anniversary of the bombing, the national Diet promulgated a law establishing Hiroshima as a Peace Memorial City, and the final design for the commemorative park by the great Japanese architect Kenzo Tange was revealed to the public. At the heart of the park, there would be, in memory of those who had died, a solemn cenotaph in the shape of a haniwa, an arch of clay, presumably a house for the dead, found in prehistoric tombs in Japan.”