A bomb (Hiroshima - John Hersey)

Member Name: pje

Product:	Hiroshima - John Hersey
Date:	21/11/01 (388 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Chilling and compelling.

Disadvantages: Harrowing.

When I was at college during the early 1980's, I remember a friend of mine
(a glass-is-half-full kind of guy) saying that he didn't think anyone would
ever use nuclear weapons. That, when push came to shove, no-one could
actually press the button. It was only some time afterwards it struck me...
someone already had. Twice.

The people of Hiroshima were expecting to be bombed. The air raid siren would regularly sound at around 7am every morning, when an American weather plane flew over. August 6th, 1945, was no different in that respect. But when radar operators saw only three planes coming, they presumed
it was just a reconnaissance mission, and so, at about 8am, the all clear
was sounded. Then at 8:15 there was a flash, and everything went white.

The atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima exploded with the power equivalent to 20,000 tons of T.N.T. The temperature at ground zero reached 6,000°C. More than 60,000 people were killed, and 62,000 buildings were destroyed. And that was just in the first few moments after the explosion.


John Hersey's first novel (A Bell For Adano) won the Pulitzer Prize in 1945, and the following year he wrote this account of the bombing of Hiroshima.
He combines the stories of six survivors into a narrative which reconstructs the horrifying scenes that one little bomb caused. (I've racked my brains trying to think of other books which adopt this approach, and the only one that springs to mind is News of a Kidnapping by Gabriel Garcia Marquez.)

The six survivors, who were all just under a mile from ground zero, were:-

Miss Toshiko Sasaki -
A clerk in a Tin Works. She turned to speak to someone and *flash*
the next thing she knew, the factory had collapsed on top of her.

Mrs. Hatsuyo Nakamura -
A war widow who was at home with her three young children.

Father Wilhelm Kleinsorge -
A German, who was reading a Jesui
t magazine in a mission house.

Dr. Masakazu Fujii -
One moment he was sat, cross-legged, on the porch of his private hospital, wearing nothing but his underwear, and the next: "Dr. Masakazu Fujii's hospital was no longer on the bank of the Kyo River; it was in the river."
And so was he.

Reverend Kiyoshi Tanimoto -
Who saved himself by diving between rocks in a rock garden, and later felt ashamed because he was uninjured. He encounters a young neighbour carrying her dead baby, and she asks him to help her to find her husband
so that he can see their baby for one last time. Her husband had just been drafted into the army, and the barracks were in the middle of the town... Absolutely heartbreaking.

and

Dr. Terufumi Sasaki (no relation to Miss Toshiko Sasaki) -
A surgeon at the Red Cross Hospital, who only survived because he had taken an earlier train than usual that morning. When the bomb exploded
he was walking down a hospital corridor, and had just passed a window otherwise, again, he wouldn't have survived. Such are the tiny differences between life and death, the flapping of the butterfly wings of fate.
He had just left a patient who was worried about syphilis- it was the last thing that that patient did worry about. Dr. Sasaki was the only uninjured doctor in the hospital, which, by the end of the day, was swamped by ten thousand casualties. He only got one hours sleep in the next three days.

It's often the little observations which make you stop and think.
Do you remember being told in Physics lessons that black things tend
to absorb heat, whereas white ones tend to reflect it? Yes? Well just think about this: those people who happened to choose to wear black clothes that morning were more badly burned than those who dressed in white.
There's the fickle finger of fate for you.

"Fate is not an eagle, it creeps like a rat" (Elizabe
th Bowen, 1935)

The aftermath of such an unimaginably destructive event would render most people speechless; but Hersey uses simple, but powerful, prose to describe the indescribable. Now you would probably like to be spared further details, well, I'm sorry, but I think I must include an extract - you can always skip it
if you don't have a strong stomach...
______________________________________________ _______________
Father Kleinsorge borrowed a blanket from someone nearby and wrapped her up, but she shook more and more, and said again, "I am so cold,"
and then she suddenly stopped shivering and was dead.

Mr. Tanimoto found about twenty men and women on the sandspit.
He drove the boat onto the bank and urged them to get aboard. They
did not move and he realized that they were too weak to lift themselves.
He reached down and took a woman by the hands, but her skin slipped off
in huge, glovelike pieces. He was so sickened by this that he had to sit
down for a moment. Then he got out into the water and, though a small man, lifted several of the men and women, who were naked, into his boat.
Their backs and breasts were clammy, and he remembered uneasily what the great burns he had seen during the day had been like: yellow at first, then red and swollen, with the skin sloughed off, and finally, in the evening, suppurated and smelly. With the tide risen, his bamboo pole was now too short and he had to paddle most of the way across with it. On the other side, at a higher spit, he lifted the slimy living bodies out and carried them
up the slope away from the tide. He had to keep consciously repeating to himself, "These are human beings."
______________________________________________ _______________

Everyone will remember where they were, and what they were doing,
on September 11th 2001, certainly no-one in New York will ever forget.
It was in the New York
er magazine that this work was first published,
fifty-five years earlier. Hersey updated it in 1985, and in the last chapter he chronicles the subsequent lives of those six survivors, including an account
of an appallingly tacky U.S. edition of This Is Your Life honouring Tanimoto.
Incidentally, some Japanese people avoid the word 'survivor' as it could be considered disrespectful to the dead, so these survivors became known as 'hibakusha' (meaning "explosion affected persons"). To add insult to injury, the hibakusha were subsequently discriminated against by some unfeeling employers, who considered them a liability because of their poor health.
A shabby attitude that is deservedly shown up by the heroics of Dr. Sasaki and the Reverend Tanimoto.

I remember forcing myself to watch the film The Killing Fields when it was shown on television one Christmas, and I was glad I did. Similarly, this is one of those books you should read, even if you do have to force yourself.
Let's hope that no-one will ever have to write anything like it again.


¶ Paperback: £6.99 ¶ pp 196 ¶ ISBN: 0140182918 ¶
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