The Case Of Hiroshima: First Atomic Bomb
The subject of this book report is Hiroshima by John Hersey, ISBN 10: 0679721037. This book was published in 1989 but was a reprint of the original which was published in 1946 just a year after the atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima. It provides stories from six different individuals who were there the day the atomic bomb hit and their unique experiences on the day and the months following. The author's purpose of writing this book was to inform his American audience as well as a worldwide audience or provide insight, of the tragedy and the struggles faced by the people of Hiroshima and the effects of a nuclear bomb being dropped. The theme of John Hersey’s book, Hiroshima, was to address and personalize the effects of a nuclear weapon on human beings and to shed the light of the severity of such a destructive weapon.
John Heresy was born in Tientsin, China, on June 17, 1914, to American missionaries. He grew up pretty “normal” in China and spoke fluent Chinese before he moved to the United States where his family settled in New York where he became more “Americanized”. He did his undergraduate at Yale University and graduate in 1936. Hersey continued his education at Clare College, Cambridge University, where he studied eighteenth-century English literature. He worked jobs as a waiter, librarian, lifeguard, and tutor. It has been said that Hersey never experienced a life of privilege, and it is possible that those jobs he held while enrolled in college gave him sympathy for the 'common man'. That probably lead to his writing of this book, in order to shed that light on those people not necessarily involved in the war who suffered from the effects of the atomic bomb. In the fall of 1937, he started work as an apprentice at Time magazine, where he stayed through 1945. In 1939, he returned to China as a war correspondent at the Chungking bureau of Time. During this time, he traveled throughout China and Japan, sending dispatches of military action and interviewing important leaders. He studied and wrote several pieces on the combat soldier's reaction to danger, the war, and the enemies. This theme of how men survived under terrible conditions would continue throughout his career Survival was a key idea in his thinking and writing and carried into his writing of Hiroshima, describing the stories of those six individuals and how they survived such an event.
In John Hersey’s book, Hiroshima, he describes the event of August 6, 1945, which was when the first atomic bomb was dropped from an American plane on 245,000 people in Hiroshima, Japan. Most of the city was destroyed and thousands of its inhabitants died immediately. Some of the citizens survived but suffered the devastating effects of horrible burns and radiation illness. He describes the lives of six of those survivors and what the days following the bombing were like for each.
Those six survivors are Miss Toshiko Sasaki, a clerk in the personnel department of the East Asia Tin Works; Dr. Masakazu Fujii, a medical doctor; Hatsuyo Nakamura, a tailor's widow, Father Wilhelm Kleinsorge; Dr. Terufumi Sasaki, a surgeon at the Red Cross Hospital and the Reverend Mr. Kiyoshi Tanimoto, a Methodist minister. He goes into detail about what each person experienced and what they were doing when the bomb exploded. The experiences of each were all very unique.
Early that morning, the Reverend Tanimoto and a friend push a handcart through the city streets, moving his daughter’s stuff. When the bomb detonates, his face was turned away from the city but he felt the pressure, and then splinters, boards, and fragments of tile from the nearby house land on him.
After listening to the “air-raid” sirens all night Mrs. Hatsuyo Nakamura put her three children to sleep when the “all-clear” sounds around 8 a.m. The bomb explodes, and Mrs. Nakamura sees a bright white flash and is thrown across the room, along with parts of her house. She can hear one of her children crying and sees that another is buried up to her chest in debris and unable to move.
The third survivor, Dr. Masakazu Fujii, had woken up early to say bye to a friend of his leaving on a train. When the first siren sounds at 7 a.m., Hersey describes him to be back at his home in his underwear, reading the paper on his porch. He sees a flash of bright white as well as he is thrown into the river and his house turned into debris. Dr. Fujii finds himself trapped between two logs in the water and to his surprise was still alive with his head above the water.
That same morning, Father Wilhelm Kleinsorge is resting on a cot on the third floor of the mission house of the Society of Jesus when he saw a bright white flash. The priest was knocked unconscious for a few moments and came to in a vegetable garden outside of the mission. He was bleeding from small cuts and was also, like Dr. Masakazu Fujii, wearing nothing but his underwear.
Dr. Terufumi Sasaki, another doctor, left his mother’s house and came to work that morning. Through an open window of the hospital, the doctor sees the bright white flash and falls down. The blast rips through the hospital, breaking Sasaki's glasses and the bottle of blood he was holding, but he survived nonetheless. He immediately begins helping people in the hospital.
In another part of town, Miss Toshiko Sasaki is sitting down to her clerk's job at her desk in the East Asia Tin Works. It is described that she turned to talk to a coworker beside her when the bomb hit. The caught a glimpse of the bright white light and it paralyzed her with fear. Toshiko Sasaki ends up trapped when the ceiling and people above her fall on top of her work area. In the destruction, a bookcase ended up falling on her crushed and breaking her leg.
I believe John Hersey goes into such detail of what the six survivors were doing when the bomb hit, and which it inevitably changed their lives forever, to drive home the fact this bomb was dropped on and affected everyday people doing everyday things. He tries to allow the audience to connect on a personal level and to have them imagine that in just a flash of bright white light while they were doing their everyday routine they were thrown from a house and had no idea what just happened.
John Hersey then begins to describe right after the explosion, that smoke is pushing up through the clouds of dust, as the houses burn. The bomb is said to have caused fires all across the city. The vast and random destruction that had occurred all over Hiroshima, left the six survivors, as well as the rest of the city, trying to grasp what it is that just taken place. He starts by telling the story of
Mr. Tanimoto, the minister, as he ran away from the estate and performed what he described as “various acts of mercy”. He explains that Mr. Tanimoto first thought there were several bombs dropped and that he ran up to a hill to look out as far as he could to see what happened.
Hersey then gets into Mrs. Nakamura's struggles to free herself from the debris of her house and her attempts to rescue her children. After she gathered her children, she packed a bag full of emergency items and headed to an evacuation area. As she was leaving, the only building she sees standing is the Jesuit mission house.
Father Kleinsorge begins to assess the damage and starts digging out people who are reported missing. As he tries to take people to the hospital, he discovers it had been destroyed.
Dr. Fujii, who is still in the river, after realizing he had been dazed for about twenty minutes discovers his hospital was destroyed as well. He frees himself from the logs and finds a spot on the riverbank that is not on fire so he can exit the river.
Dr. Sasaki grabs bandages from the Hospital and immediately begins helping people. He started with the closest patients, then eventually prioritized those the ones in the worst conditions. 10,000 people made their way to the hospital with issues ranging from horribly burns, vomiting, and dying. He worked tirelessly from one patient to the next doing whatever he could.
Miss Sasaki in the debris of the Tin Works was knocked unconscious for three hours before she comes to. Eventually, she was dragged out with a broken leg. As the rain comes down, someone carried her to a location with a couple of other badly hurt individuals.
Like Mr. Tanimoto, Father Kleinsorge tried to help victims. Kleinsorge realized that they needed to leave the area because the fires are coming closer. Mr. Tanimoto heads into the city where he runs into hundreds of people with serious injuries. He witnessed people supporting others as others bowed their heads and were emotionless. He finds his wife and baby and they were described as being okay but strangely unemotional. Mr. Tanimoto then goes to a location where thousands of people are hurt and carries river water to them.
Hersey goes into such detail on the immediate actions and reactions of these six survivors after the bombing initially to explain the craziness that followed. I believe he wanted to demonstrate that nobody in Hiroshima fully understood what was happening or what had happened rather. But I also feel like he wanted to demonstrate that even in that uncertainty they all began to assist others, or in Miss Sasaki’s case was assisted by others. He wanted to show the human nature in the survivors and the suffering and devastation that surrounded them to once again drive home that point of the effects of the atomic bomb or in nuclear bombs in general.
Hersey explains that in the evening of August 6, 12 hours of post-bomb suffering, a Japanese naval ship begins to head down the rivers of Hiroshima. The ship will be stopping at strategic spots to help people out. A naval officer announces that there is hope and that the people should be patient because help was coming. This allows the survivors to relax more knowing help is on the way. While the citizens of Hiroshima, as well as a lot of Japan, are confused of what had just taken place a message over Japanese radio was put out stating that Hiroshima has been attacked. The message described what they believed was happening and that the 'details are being investigated.' The people of Hiroshima did not hear the broadcast from the American president saying that it was an atomic bomb that hit Hiroshima. Then Hersey tells that on August 9, and at 11:02 a.m. an atomic bomb is dropped on Nagasaki. He also adds that finally on August 15, Emperor Tenno gives a radio address, telling his people the war is over. The Japanese naval ship
that promised hope never came through. While the Japanese people counted on their government to provide aid in the relief, medical supplies, doctors, nurses, food, and water was never delivered. The ship was just assessing the overwhelming needs. The naval ship is checking on the extent of the bombing and forming theories about the cause instead of focusing on helping their people.
Hersey tells about this process to make a point that they were not prepared for such an attack. The process to provide help to the citizens was slow and they could not adequately pass out information to the survivors. The fact is that the helpless survivors have no access to and they do not have time to think about official information. This brings up an issue to the rest of the world to have a plan in place if such a tragedy should happen again.
John Hersey also strategically placed facts throughout the book, Hiroshima, in order to provide better context to the stories being told by the individuals. He used those facts to help the audience fully grasp the devastation of the accident as well as to provide scientific reasoning to some of the things that were happening after the bomb had his like the rain falling, why things were on fire, and why people were vomiting. I think that a lot can be learned from his book about the devastating effects of such a powerful weapon. John Hersey made it pretty clear with his descriptive storytelling of the true effects of the atomic bomb.
My overall impression of John Hersey’s Hiroshima was really that it was a really well-written, informative book that provided a lot of insight on such a historical event. Hersey’s ability to provide such clear and concise detail of the stories of the six survivors while interlaying facts of things actually happening during the timeframe of their stories led to a great piece of work. His ability to have their emotions felt through the words and personalize the events for the reader was impressive. His theme and goal of the book which was to have the stories of the six survivors displayed to the American and to the world in order to shed light on the situation and to explain the effects it had on everyday people I felt was achieved
The things I was able to away from my reading of John Hersey’s Hiroshima included a better understanding of the history of the atomic bomb, the devastation, a personalized feeling of the lives affected, and some of the lack of government preparation. Learning more about the atomic bomb is good because that was a major event in history and really changed a lot of things for the future of war. The sheer devastation and the personalized stories Hersey provided gave an insight to the effects and made me think about if that was me or if that happened to my family. I believe this book also provided criticism of the Japanese government and their lack of urgency to help the citizen and the lack of plans in place to aide in an attack. This provided a point for the United States and other countries to consider these things and to have plans in place to quickly and effectively aide the citizen, provide safety, provide clean up, and to communicate to the citizens in a time of chaos This was a good book for ENGR 454 because it provides a good history lesson of the atomic bomb and the engineering challenges such as quickly and effectively aiding the citizen, providing safety and clean up, and to communicate to the citizens in a time of chaos as just discussed. Those are all issues that can be solved by engineering. I would recommend this book to anyone interested in the history of the atomic bomb or of nuclear weapons.
