A rather pleasant way to die

August 1, 2023 9:11 PM

On August 31, 1946 The New Yorker devoted an entire issue to a single 31,000 word article by John Hersey. The U.S. military had taken significant measures to suppress and censor reporting about the impact of the bombs dropped on Japan. General Groves even assured Congress that it was "a rather pleasant way to die."

That issue contained the stories of six residents of Hiroshima who survived the 1945 bombing, and overnight changed the way U.S. citizens thought about the atomic age and their role in it.

previously

posted by bunderful (29 comments total)

Hersey's writing is really excellent, clear and simple and compelling... and unsparing in its clarity, even though it is not lurid when it easily could be. It still reads like something published quite recently.
posted by cubeb at 9:34 PM on August 1, 2023 [4 favorites]

Can't wait to read this - even though I know it's going to be horrifying.
posted by BlackLeotardFront at 9:35 PM on August 1, 2023 [1 favorite]

Thank you for this. I just picked up a book at the library in their Barbienheimer themed books by Howard Zinn called Bomb. In the first chapter he mentioned this very article by John Hersey. Serendipitous that I don't have to search for it myself.
posted by AnyUsernameWillDo at 9:36 PM on August 1, 2023 [1 favorite]

I've read this before but it's time again.

The twentieth-century routinization of mass-scale terror bombing as a tool of the modern statesman is... remarkable. Historically it arose from theorists of Air War as a conquering terror before it was technically feasible. But as it moved toward feasibility, evil underperformed projections. The response from theorists of evil: evil more! EVIL HARDER! If firebombing Dresden and Tokyo doesn't do it, then nuke Hiroshima.

Some more reading: Sebald's On the Natural History of Destruction. Tanaka and Young's Bombing Civilians: a twentieth-century history.
posted by away for regrooving at 12:26 AM on August 2, 2023 [10 favorites]

To many people it must have come as a terrible shock to read Hersey's descriptions of the aftermath of the bombings because as I understand it, the stories published in US newspapers immediately after the bombing a little more than a year before simply lied about it, and almost completely suppressed the soul-wrenching and utterly horrifying truth.
posted by jamjam at 12:30 AM on August 2, 2023 [2 favorites]

(Appreciation to the New Yorker for putting (some of?) their archives online, and as readable text rather than some janky scanned PDF.)
posted by away for regrooving at 12:32 AM on August 2, 2023 [9 favorites]

My 12th grade high school English class was given the assignment to write an essay on why we thought John Hersey wrote the piece. While it seemed fairly obvious to me, I was a lazy student, and when I saw in the About The Author page (this was the book version) that he lived in West Palm Beach (I lived in Jacksonville), I decided to see if I could get him on the horn.

Found his number through Information (ahhh 1988), and he answered. He was quite elderly at this point, but he was very patient with me and answered all of my questions as to his reasons for writing the piece (I was right, it was obvious, he didn't want it to happen again, and he felt that putting human faces to the statistics might make a recurrence less likely).

Wrote the paper up and turned it in, and got a "C" because my assignment wasn't to interview the author, it was to write why I thought he had written the book.

Addendum: At the end of the year, when my passing of that class (and therefore my high school graduation) were very much in doubt, my teacher, Mr. Gresham, took pity on me and revised the grade to an "A+", because I had "shown initiative and creative thinking" in contacting Mr. Hersey. This allowed me to scrape into graduation by the skin of my teeth. (The more likely explanation is that Mr. Gresham couldn't bear the thought of having to deal with me for another year, but whatever).
posted by Optamystic at 1:53 AM on August 2, 2023 [120 favorites]

i get angered up, you know, in the blood thinking about teachers who wouldn’t immediately respond to that with anything that wasn’t functionally equivalent to “a+ for the semester, also, holy shit!”
posted by bombastic lowercase pronouncements at 2:30 AM on August 2, 2023 [42 favorites]

I haven't yet read the Hersey piece, but I really enjoyed the interview on Fresh Air with the author of a book about the piece and its historical context. An excerpt I liked:

DAVIES: You know, at the end of the book, you share some thoughts about why this story is important, this kind of journalism. Why?

BLUME: The project, for me, came from current events, even though it's a historical narrative. And, you know, I'm a second-generation newsperson. I'm married to a newsperson. My father worked for Walter Cronkite. And I wanted to find a historical narrative that really drove home how deadly important a free press is, not only as a cornerstone of democracy but in protecting the common good. And John Hersey's story was the sharpest and most poignant example that I could find of that.

Thanks for this post.
posted by eirias at 4:12 AM on August 2, 2023 [12 favorites]

Eirias, there’s a link to that very interview in the second paragraph! I stumbled across it while in the rabbit hole.

Optamystic, I’m glad you got the A - finally. Love that story.
posted by bunderful at 5:56 AM on August 2, 2023 [1 favorite]

Oh my god. I forgot to include that the same year the article appeared in the New Yorker, it was published by Alfred A Knopf. The Book of the Month Club distributed copies for free. You can search for the nearest library copy on WorldCat.
posted by bunderful at 6:05 AM on August 2, 2023 [6 favorites]

Hersey wrote what is in my opinion one of the most important news stories in history. People went from thinking that it’s just a massive bomb, just a giant version of the bombs that were dropped by the hundreds, to getting a glimpse of the true horrors of an atomic explosion. What’s more is that these horrors are suffered not by combatants, but ordinary people. (The hell of the Dresden and Tokyo and other firebombings were also mostly on the populace, but they didn’t capture people’s attention like this.) Ordinary people who were now badly burned, alive but gorily mangled, vomiting relentlessly, poisoned. When the Soviet Union got the bomb, and then ways to deliver it to the US mainland, people knew these were the types of horror that millions would experience in an exchange. Imagine a world where people just thought these were big versions of conventional explosions. There would have been enough public support for the use of nuclear weapons that we would have inevitably ended up in a devastating war. God knows there’s enough generals and admirals who would gladly advocate for using them, even now.

If you haven’t read Hiroshima, you need to.
posted by azpenguin at 6:35 AM on August 2, 2023 [9 favorites]

Eirias, there’s a link to that very interview in the second paragraph! I stumbled across it while in the rabbit hole.

Oh yes, that’s where I found it! I was just trying to give context for what I was quoting so people wouldn’t be like, “wait, where was that in TFA??” Maybe I should have said “link #3” :)

[/MeFi style derail]
posted by eirias at 7:30 AM on August 2, 2023 [2 favorites]

My great-aunt was a teacher at Hiroshima Jogakuin Girls' School for nearly 20 years prior to the war, and was among the very first American civilians allowed to return there following the war. The devastation in Hiroshima was immensely personal to her, as she was very close to everyone in her village and had taught their children for a generation. She wrote a book about it that her nephew finally got published a few years ago, and it's quite interesting.

Hersey's article is among the most important works of American journalism in the 1900s, I think.
posted by LooseFilter at 8:07 AM on August 2, 2023 [10 favorites]

Growing up during the Cold War, doing duck and cover drills in the fourth grade, seeing Peter Watkin’s film, The War Game, reading this book was the most personal experience of the threat of nuclear war. It still haunts me.

For another impression of Mr Hersey, read his novel The Call. It’s about an American missionary who goes to China to bring them the truth and improve their lives. Hersey was born in China, his parents were missionaries there. The main character in this book, firm in his beliefs, has to confront an ancient culture, huge and complex, and the actual people of China. Needless to say, the main character is the one who learns his lesson.
posted by njohnson23 at 9:02 AM on August 2, 2023 [2 favorites]

I grew up in a nightmare of a small midwestern town. Having high school teachers that commuted from less insular places helped make it a little more bearable. One of those teachers had us read John Hersey's book. Another showed us films of the Nazi death camps, with naked, emaciated bodies being bulldozed into pits.

Now that the area has gone full unhinged MAGA (four residents arrested for Jan. 6!), I wonder if teachers would still be allowed to teach with those materials.
posted by LindsayIrene at 9:07 AM on August 2, 2023 [5 favorites]

The role of the U.S. military leadership in soft-pedaling the consequences of atomic war, both at Hiroshima/Nagasaki and domestically—we were told to hide under our desks in case of a nuclear attack on NY—is one of the largest black marks in its history.

Beyond the (im)morality of A-bombs' use in Japan, that U.S. soldiers, in tests and other settings, were regularly exposed to what would prove to be lethal levels of radiation (without informed consent, if they'd ever even been allowed to opt out) is just beyond the pale even for the historical deviousness of this country's military and civilian leadership.

Thanks for sharing this.
posted by the sobsister at 9:23 AM on August 2, 2023 [2 favorites]

Less often remembered is the firebombing of Tokyo in March 1945, which killed an estimated 100,000 people.
posted by neuron at 9:39 AM on August 2, 2023 [6 favorites]

In 1995, on the fiftieth anniversary of the Hiroshima bombing, the UK politics weekly The New Statesman (long before it became the neo-liberal fanzine it is now) put a copy of Hersey's book on the cover - it's one of those books that's useful to have a lot of copies just floating around in a society that continually forgets what these weapons do
posted by thatwhichfalls at 10:15 AM on August 2, 2023 [1 favorite]

FYI Iron Curtain governments gave the same hide-under-desks directives. Mostly to give the kids something to do. My mother firmly refused to see Oppenheimer because of childhood trauma in the 60s.

(In Poland popular speculation had it that the best thing to do was to cover yourself with Trybuna Ludu - the propaganda rag with the densest print in lead-based ink - and crawl towards the cemetery for convenience's sake. In a more useful way, most Communist-era metro stations double as fallout shelters, currently in active use as bomb shelters in Ukraine.)
posted by I claim sanctuary at 12:58 PM on August 2, 2023 [5 favorites]

I read this years ago on a MegaBus to Chicago and some of the imagery in it will haunt me until the end of my days. Truly required reading. Swords into plowshares.
posted by mostly vowels at 5:18 PM on August 2, 2023 [2 favorites]

Wrote the paper up and turned it in, and got a "C" because my assignment wasn't to interview the author, it was to write why I thought he had written the book. That's unbearably bad teaching; even though it was later revised. Well done, Optamystic, I think MeFi gives you an A+.
posted by theora55 at 7:00 PM on August 2, 2023 [3 favorites]

I read Hiroshima in high school; it was assigned. The US military routinely lies about wars. Sadly, since the horrific mess of the war in Viet Nam that was well-covered and televised, information is aggressively managed. Nuclear bombs are horrific for a lot of people, and the radiation lingers and causes disease around the world. But the firebombing of places is horrific, drone bombings are horrific, Pearl Harbor, the siege of Leningrad, it's all horrific. I think everybody involved is traumatized by it, including those who think it's glorious; they have internalized something deeply twisted. I know people with PTSD from Southeast Asia, Kent State/ draft resisting, Afghanistan.

The whole business (literally, it's awfully profitable) of killing people on a mass scale or on a small scale is uncivilized and Hiroshima demonstrated how intrinsically evil it is. My parents, like most Americans, viewed it as an end to long years of war. Thanks for posting this.
posted by theora55 at 7:18 PM on August 2, 2023 [2 favorites]

Less often remembered is the firebombing of Tokyo in March 1945, which killed an estimated 100,000 people.

And Dresden as well. And others. These were horrific events that, had the US lost WWII, would have caused US officials to be hauled in for war crime trials.

The big difference with nuclear weapons is that those were structured military operations, happening over the course of hours, requiring hundreds of aircraft, thousands upon thousands of bombs, thousands of men, and a massive amount of planning and coordination that takes a lot of time. Now one man can deliver even worse upon a larger population within a half hour by making a phone call.
posted by azpenguin at 8:30 PM on August 2, 2023 [2 favorites]

it's one of those books that's useful to have a lot of copies just floating around in a society that continually forgets what these weapons do

Add the film Threads to that. And The War Game mentioned above - that was originally going to be a BBC television special, but the BBC got cold feet at first, so it was released as a docudrama in movie theaters and won the Best Documentary Oscar in 1967. In Roger Ebert's original 1967 review he said that "they should string up bedsheets between the trees and show this in every public park."

The warnings have always been there. Hersey's article, then The War Game, then The Day After, When The Wind Blows and Threads...and yet as time passes the world still finds ways to forget. Last year, New York City's Office of Emergency Preparedness released a bizarre PSA about "how to survive a nuclear attack" - it was something Mayor Adams started working on in 2019, but his administration has been a little cagey about why they did it in the first place, and - I and many other older New Yorkers found it incredibly tone-deaf. (I think a joke I cracked was that clearly Mayor Adams needed someone from Gen-X on that board because when he proposed that idea, we could have said "dude, just.....no.").
posted by EmpressCallipygos at 3:54 AM on August 3, 2023 [1 favorite]

“This is the official report, published nearly 11 months after the first and only atomic bombings in history (to date), of a group of military physicians and engineers who accompanied the initial contingent of U.S. soldiers into the destroyed cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The report presents a clinical description of the devastation, loss of life and continued suffering of the survivors that resulted from the world’s first and only atomic bombings. The appendix is an eyewitness account, contrasting vividly with the dispassionate sang-froid of the report itself, written by a German Jesuit priest who survived the blast at Hiroshima, and whose order assisted in rescue efforts following the catastrophic attack. This recording was completed on the 63rd anniversary of the events.”

The Atomic Bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki” - single link Apple Podcasts

The priest must be Fr Kleinsorge. Hersey read a document by Kleinsorge which led him to Kleinsorge who then introduced him to other survivors. I wonder if the appendix was that document.
posted by bunderful at 4:09 PM on August 3, 2023

Found a link to the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers post-war report on the bombings. Seems the priest interviewed was yet another, a Father John A. Siemes.
posted by coolname at 11:05 PM on August 3, 2023 [1 favorite]

The US military routinely lies about wars....

To be fair, all militaries, all governments, all societies and the vast majority of people routinely lie about wars.
posted by senor biggles at 6:49 PM on August 4, 2023 [2 favorites]

I read it as a teenager, but now at 64 I find I cannot bear to read it again. We may have all been paranoid in the eighties about nuclear bombs dropping from the skies, but at least most of the culture and common opinion believed that they were weapons which should never be used. Cue Putin rattling the atomic sabre in the last year or two; time erases memory and humans make the same mistakes over and over. Soon the last eyewitnesses of WWII will be gone (among them my mother, who as a child watched German bombers fly over Birmingham). This article caused a sea change in American understanding of what the atomic bomb could do and did; I can't imagine in our media clogged age a similar document which could sweep into common knowledge in such a way.
posted by jokeefe at 4:16 PM on August 5, 2023 [2 favorites]