It’s been 80 years since Hiroshima. I remember two things about the discussion around the Oscar-winning film Oppenheimer, one of commission, and the other, omission.
You may recall the scene of the protagonist uncomfortably accepting accolades from workers after World War II, an honest reflection of his ambivalence. The other was the feeling by some critics that the results of the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki should have been reflected.
To the latter point, I don’t think so; it wasn’t where the American consciousness was at the war’s end. From staff writer Jane Meyer in the New Yorker: “Thirty years after this magazine published John Hersey’s ‘Hiroshima,’ [paywall] I sat in his classroom at Yale, hoping to learn how to write with even a fraction of his power. When ‘Hiroshima’ appeared, in the August 31, 1946, issue, it was the scoop of the century—the first unvarnished account by an American reporter of Hiroshima and Nagasaki of the nuclear blast that obliterated the city.
“Hersey’s prose was spare, allowing the horror to emerge word by word. A man tried to lift a woman out of a sandpit, ‘but her skin slipped off in huge, glove-like pieces.’ The detonation buried a woman and her infant alive: ‘When she had dug herself free, she had discovered that the baby was choking, its mouth full of dirt. With her little finger, she had carefully cleaned out the infant’s mouth, and for a time the child had breathed normally and seemed all right; then suddenly it had died.'”
Starting the dialogue
“Hersey’s candor had a seismic impact: the magazine sold out, and a book version of the article sold millions of copies. Stephanie Hinnershitz, a military historian, told me that Hersey’s reporting ‘didn’t just change the public debate about nuclear weapons—it created the debate.’ Until then, she explained, President Harry Truman had celebrated the attack as a strategic masterstroke, ‘without addressing the human cost.’ Officials shamelessly downplayed the effects of radiation; one called it a ‘very pleasant way to die.’ Hinnershitz said, ‘Hersey broke that censorship.’ He alerted the world to what the U.S. government had hidden.”
Saving a million American lives?
When I was in sixth grade, we had a rigorous debate about whether the atomic attacks were justified. Most of us were opposed, but our teacher, Paul Peca, suggested they were appropriate.
Mr. Peca likely would have supported the position of Henry Lewis Stimson, who wrote in Harper’s in February 1947: “The decision to use the atomic bomb was a decision that brought death to over a hundred thousand Japanese. No explanation can change that fact, and I do not wish to gloss it over. But this deliberate, premeditated destruction was our least abhorrent choice. The destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki put an end to the Japanese war. It stopped the fire raids and the strangling blockade; it ended the ghastly specter of a clash of great land armies.”
Only recently, I learned that McGeorge Bundy, a future national-security adviser, was the ghost writer for Stimson, when they “claimed that dropping nuclear bombs on Japan had averted further war, saving more than a million American lives. Kai Bird, a co-author of ‘American Prometheus,’ the definitive biography of J. Robert Oppenheimer, [said] that this pushback was specious: ‘Bundy later admitted to me that there was no documentary evidence for this ‘million’ casualty figure. He just pulled it out of thin air.”
As I noted here, Dwight Eisenhower wrote in 1963: “Japan was already defeated, and dropping the bomb was completely unnecessary… Secondly, our country should avoid shocking world opinion by the use of a weapon whose employment was, I thought, no longer mandatory as a measure to save American lives.”
To this day, the debate continues.
Movie
I saw the 1982 documentary The Atomic Cafe in the cinema; here’s the trailer. “A disturbing collection of 1940s and 1950s United States government-issued propaganda films designed to reassure Americans that the atomic bomb was not a threat to their safety.” It was really good, and also had a killer soundtrack (but not the last track on this YouTube chain).
Here’s a list of seven books on Hiroshima, starting with Hersey’s book and including Barefoot Gen by Keiji Nakazawa (1982); the “comic book has little of the artfulness and refinement of the modern graphic novel. But the storytelling’s power, simplicity, and anger, based on the author’s experience, are indelible.” I bought it at the time and still own it.
This week, ABC News touted a new book that uses oral history to tell the story of the atomic bomb. Martha Raddatz spoke with author Garrett M. Graff about his new book, The Devil Reached Towards The Sky, on the nuclear bombing during WWII.
The events of eight decades ago still resonate with me since I have written about Hiroshima every five years since 2010.
