"The little family took refuge in a surviving park, the children vomiting uncontrollably from heavy radiation exposure; they were gradually surrounded by scores of charred and mutilated people who had also staggered into the park."

In this photo released by the U.S. Army, a mushroom cloud billows about an hour after a nuclear bomb was detonated above Hiroshima, Japan, August 6, 1945.

Wall Street Journal

From Hiroshima’s Devastation, a Wrenching Account of the Human Toll

John Hersey shook Americans by telling the story of history’s first atomic bombing from the survivors’ point of view.

Instead of emphasizing the biblical, end-of-days approach to telling the story of the Hiroshima bombing, he decided to dial it down to a human vantage point. He would profile a small group of blast survivors—everyday people—who had been caught up in this man-made apocalypse. Not every reader could comprehend how the atomic bomb worked or visualize a nuclear war, but practically anyone could grasp a story about a handful of regular people—mothers, fathers, grade-school children, doctors, clerks—going about their daily routines when the bomb exploded. Hersey’s goal, as he later put it, was to make the reader “become the characters enough to suffer some of the pain, some of the disaster.”

Hersey managed to wangle his way into Hiroshima, under the eyes of Gen. MacArthur’s occupation forces. He gathered the testimonies of six Hiroshima residents whose names and stories would soon become world-famous: Hatsuyo Nakamura, a young widow with school-age children; Toshiko Sasaki, a young clerk; two doctors, Terufumi Sasaki and Masakazu Fujii; a German priest, Father Wilhelm Kleinsorge; and a Japanese Methodist pastor, Rev. Kiyoshi Tanimoto.

The novelistic article that resulted was simply entitled “Hiroshima,” and it took up nearly all of the New Yorker’s issue of Aug. 31, 1946. The details were harrowing. Mrs. Nakamura’s three children had been buried in the debris of their crushed house but survived, Hersey wrote. The little family took refuge in a surviving park, the children vomiting uncontrollably from heavy radiation exposure; they were gradually surrounded by scores of charred and mutilated people who had also staggered into the park.

The article succeeded in making millions of Americans confront the horror of the bombing. Relieved that the war was finally over, most had stopped thinking about Hiroshima; they had come to accept nuclear weapons as a new element of modern life, along with the radio and the airplane. “Hiroshima” shattered their indifference and apathy.

Even Lewis Gannett was impressed: Hersey had overcome the statistics barrier. “For the first time,” Gannett wrote, “you feel that you are reading, seeing, experiencing, understanding what happened at Hiroshima. The heart of the story—of any story—is the individual.” Hersey created a visceral reaction on a mass scale, changing overnight the American public’s view of atomic weapons.

The U.S. government scrambled to regain control of the story of Hiroshima and return it to the realm of sterile statistics. The 100,000 nameless, faceless dead had been unavoidable casualties, government representatives argued—necessary to avoid the deaths of many more American and Japanese soldiers. “The face of war is the face of death,” wrote former Secretary of War Henry Stimson in a response in Harper’s Magazine. But for millions of Hersey’s readers around the world, the faces of Hiroshima now included the haunting images of a mother, a clerk, a young doctor and others who had narrowly escaped the most terrifying weapon yet conjured up by humankind.

Hersey’s then-revolutionary approach didn’t solve the problem of anesthetizing casualty statistics. But “Hiroshima” gave reporters and editors an important tool in telling the story of subsequent calamities. It remains imperative to humanize mass casualties, whether the more than 800,000 murdered in Rwanda’s 1994 genocide, the over two million Vietnamese civilians killed in the Vietnam War, the 3,000 slain by al Qaeda on 9/11 or the 155,000-plus American dead in the Covid-19 crisis. Such storytelling remains crucial in bringing the powerful to account—and giving voices to those who can never speak again.

—Ms. Blume is the author of “Fallout: The Hiroshima Cover-Up and the Reporter Who Revealed It to the World,” published this week by Simon & Schuster.