Courtney McGrailThe Books Editor
“At exactly 15 minutes past eight in the morning on August 6, 1945, Japanese time, at the moment when the atomic bomb flashed above Hiroshima, Miss Toshiko Sasaki, a clerk in the personnel department of the East Asia Tin Works, had just sat down at her place in the plant office and was turning her head to speak to the girl at the next desk.”
This is the opening sentence of John Hersey’s Hiroshima, a celebrated, but perhaps still too little read, masterpiece of reporting, first published in 1946. Before appearing in book form it filled an entire issue of the New Yorker magazine, a unique event, a literary tribute which has never been repeated by the editors. It is still available (in Penguin Modern Classics, £7.99). If one were to read no other book about World War II, this should be it.
The book is simple in its approach. Perhaps influenced by Joyce’s narrative technique in Ulysses, Hersey recounts the events of the dreadful day through the experiences of some six people moving about their daily affairs in the city of Hiroshima, one of them a Jesuit priest, the dreadful day the city was destroyed and some 100,000 children, women and men were killed.
But in some ways, those who died were the lucky ones for unlike conventional weapons, the atom bomb went on killing for decades after. That initial figure gives little idea of the total casualty figure for the attack. A later book, again a fine piece of reporting, is Robert Jungk’s Children of the Ashes (now out of print), dealing with the nuclear aftermath and the courage of the local people to renew their city.
Later still it was learned that one unfortunate visitor to Hiroshima that day, though badly burned, returned to his home in Nagasaki only to be a victim of the second atom bomb dropped there on August 9.
The use of these atomic bombs immediately raised serious moral issues. One of the most profound is that the professional military men and the politicians who direct them (one cannot really call them statesmen) see civilians as legitimate targets during military operations.
This fact is nearly always obscured in war reporting, as we have seen too often in recent decades. News sources do not care to shock their audiences with too graphic images of death and destruction. There is also the possibility that those who used the used the bombs – which were of two different types – wished to see what they would do. There were important military lessons to be learned.
Arguments
The bombings of August 1945 still haunt the world. The recent book on the events by Australian historian Paul Ham, Hiroshima Nagasaki (Penguin Random House, £13.20) deals with the events in over 600 harrowing pages.
Whatever arguments might be put forward for the use of the bomb, Paul Ham’s conclusion is disturbing. He claims that these were a last blow in a long strategic air war waged largely not at military targets but at the civilian populations of Japanese cities. With the deflation of war by the Soviet Union on Japan and the launch of its campaign in Manchuria, the Japanese might have been brought to surrender merely by a demonstration of the bomb on a people free target.
The recent tension in the Middle East over the nuclear treaty with Iran show that the nuclear threat is still with us. The bombs have not gone away you know. Iran has not yet built such a bomb, but India and Pakistan have. And Israel too has tested their bomb in the southern Indian ocean (courtesy of the former apartheid regime in South Africa.)
We are still living in the shadow of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. And will continue to do so until world peace can become an international civilian movement. After all civilians are the major casualties of war, not only around the world but here in Ireland.