JOHN HERSEY, THE MAN WHO PEERED INTO A LIVING HELL

“The crux of the matter is whether total war in its present form is justifiable, even when it serves a just purpose. Does it not have material and spiritual evil as its consequences which far exceed whatever good might result? When will our moralists give us an answer to this question?”

― John Hersey, Hiroshima

It was a time of frenzy. It was a time of hysteria. It was a juncture at which whether destruction and death would continue. It was a true testament to heroism. World War II, an intercontinental battle between absolute justice and evil, ended days after “Little Boy”, the atomic bomb, was detonated above Hiroshima, Imperial Japan. Few people in the U.S. knew how atomic bombs work; the majority of them only had a vague concept of what they meant. It was John Hersey—a journalist who had immersed himself in the post-cataclysmic wasteland that is Hiroshima—who encapsulated the horror of this deadly weapon for his American audience.

Hersey was born on June 17, 1914, in Tianjin, China. His father was a secretary for the local Young Men’s Christian Association and his mother was a missionary. The family returned to the U.S. when Hersey was ten. He would later graduate from Yale University in 1936 and would serve as a war correspondent for Time and Life magazines from 1937 to 1946, during which time he covered battles in Europe and Asia. In May 1946, Hersey visited Hiroshima for theNew Yorker magazine.

Correspondents who had gone to Hiroshima before Hersey have produced articles describing the desolation caused by the atomic blast, but none of which have illustrated what the bomb was really capable of. In the words of Homer Bigart of theNew York Herald Tribune in 1945:

But across the river there was only flat, appalling desolation, the starkness accentuated by bare, blackened tree trunks and the occasional shell of a reinforced concrete building.

Bigart’s language was pithy and powerful; his description was accurate and vivid, nothing we haven’t seen in other war correspondents’ articles capturing the cruelty of weapons of mass destruction. However, as to a bomb that evaporated an entire city within a matter of seconds with its radiation killing more people afterward, an article which mimics the style that of a report on the Battle of Berlin was woefully inadequate.

Then there is Hersey’s legacy, Hiroshima:

Their faces were wholly burned, their eye-sockets were hollow, the fluid from their melted eyes had run down their cheeks. (They must have had their faces upturned when the bomb went off; perhaps they were anti-aircraft personnel.) Their mouths were mere swollen, pus-covered wounds, which they could not bear to stretch enough to admit the spout of the teapot.

His writing style was unorthodox indeed; one could argue it has more traits of a fiction than that of a news story. Hersey constructed his article with the experiences of six people who had survived the atomic blast. Switching from one character to another, he had made Hiroshima almost a parallel-edited movie, and it had been considered a precursor to the New Journalism of the 1960s and 1970s. Hersey once said that in journalism, the readers are constantly aware of the writer and his/her attempt in explaining, but he would want them to be directly confronted by the characters, so the event could unfold itself.

Hersey was inspired by the approach of The Bridge of San Luis Rey by Thornton Wilder, in which five people died when a bridge collapsed. The idea of six people—different in character, and in the end—whose paths met at the moment of disaster emerged, and he set out to find the people whose experiences would oblige his piece. Hersey had talked to some fifty people before he narrowed them down to the final six; a story of such significance must not be compromised by cursory decisions.

Then the three weeks of research and interviews began. His 30,000-word piece consisted of a surgeon, a pastor, a widow, a doctor, a clerk and a German Jesuit. Through their eyes, Hersey learned things that were never exposed in any existing news reports, and it was the catastrophic result of the atomic bomb that led him to question the justification of its use. People died horrible deaths, and they would keeping dying from the radiation—many who had survived the initial blast were only to live on borrowed time. Hersey had to give the survivors a voice because no one would be able to accurately present a world of sheer misery; no one would be capable of conceptualizing “A Noiseless Flash” that ensued by utter decimation.

“My father had a very strong moral compass,” Baird Hersey, one of John Hersey’s sons, said in an interview by Russell Shorto. “Even though he wasn’t a religious person—he eventually reacted against being raised in that world—he had a strong sense of right and wrong, and a humility, and that colored his approach to ‘Hiroshima.’”

Immediately after the explosion, the U.S. government exercised stern censorship on information about the attack.Before Hersey, many attempts to file detailed information on the explosion out of Japan had been halted by the U.S. Occupying Forces, so he took his accounts back to New York himself.

Harold Ross, the editor at the New Yorker, having read Hersey’s work, decided to give all the editorial space to the story. Never before had a magazine dispensed the rest of the scheduled content for a single story and it has never happened again.

“What I admire is he has thrown himself into the midst of the world, engaging with the big issues of his day and trying, as a writer, to be compassionate and humane to make people think about all theses things.” Eric Schlosser, the author of the Illusion of Safety, said in an interview by Penguin Books UK. “Those are the writers I tend to admire the most—the ones who put themselves out there and assume personal risk in order to tell the world what is happening.”

Hersey’s Hiroshima has left an indelible mark on its audience; his narrative has shed light upon war and its inevitable destruction. Unfortunately, the people who are innocent are the ones who take the brunt. We cannot fathom the tragedy of nuclear warfare, but with Hiroshima, we can try to begin. As Hersey once said, “Journalism allows its readers to witness history; fiction gives its readers an opportunity to live it.”

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