THE HIROSHIMA MEN

An oft-told story from an uncomfortable perspective.

Journalist MacGregor, author of The Lighthouse of Stalingrad, moves the Manhattan Project and J. Robert Oppenheimer into the background in favor of the war, the men and the plane that delivered the bomb, its victims, and the revelation—to America, if not Japan—of what actually happened in Hiroshima. It opens with an 87-year-old survivor’s description of her experience. A chapter near the end delivers MacGregor’s account of the city’s bombing, and a third toward the middle describes Tokyo’s 1945 firebombing—conventional but equally ghastly. Doing his journalistic duty, MacGregor focuses on individuals, the principles being Paul Tibbets, who commanded the B-29 unit and piloted the bomber, and Time-Life reporter John Hersey. Tibbets spent two years training his unit for a secret mission; Hersey covered the war and wrote several popular books, but the author adds a large cast of characters and many events distantly related to his subject, such as the battles for Iwo Jima and Okinawa. Exhilarated by Japan’s unexpectedly sudden surrender, Americans accepted the official story that ordinary superbombs had won the war. Stories of gruesome injuries and agonizing deaths that continued to occur months afterward were censored or officially denied. By 1946 Hersey was a Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist, chafing at Time-Life’s reluctance to let him travel. More amenable, New Yorker editors sent him to Asia, where he returned traditional stories before traveling to Hiroshima, which, despite a year’s passage, smelled of death. Interviewing widely, he concentrated on stories from half-a-dozen survivors. The result, filling the Aug. 31, 1946, issue, was a jolt, and the later book a worldwide bestseller. Both gave rise to the belief, still popular if not unanimous, that the bomb must never be used again.

An account less about a brilliant technical achievement than a weapon of mass murder.