{"id":43673,"date":"2023-08-24T06:49:55","date_gmt":"2023-08-24T14:49:55","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/?p=43673"},"modified":"2023-08-24T06:50:19","modified_gmt":"2023-08-24T14:50:19","slug":"reactions-to-john-herseys-hiroshima-shook-the-pro-bomb-narrative","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/2023\/08\/24\/reactions-to-john-herseys-hiroshima-shook-the-pro-bomb-narrative\/","title":{"rendered":"Reactions to John Hersey’s ‘Hiroshima’ Shook the Pro-Bomb Narrative"},"content":{"rendered":"

Reprinted with permission from Greg Mitchell\u2019s newsletter Oppenheimer: From Hiroshima to Hollywood<\/a>.<\/i><\/strong><\/p>\n

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Earlier this week, we looked at the genesis<\/a> of John Hersey\u2019s famous \u201cHiroshima\u201d article for <\/em>The New Yorker (which appeared 77 years ago this week) and book. Now here is the response to the landmark piece, including criticism that it did not go far enough, adapted from my recent book <\/em>The Beginning or the End<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n

Columnists and editors, most of whom had expressed strong support for the use of the bomb, nevertheless praised the massive Hersey article, many calling it the strongest reporting of its time. The New York Times<\/em> declared that every American \u201cwho has permitted himself to make jokes about atom bombs, or who has come to regard them as just one sensational development that can now be accepted as part of civilization . . . ought to read Mr. Hersey.\u201d The editorial reminded readers that the \u201cdisasters at Hiroshima and Nagasaki were our handiwork,\u201d and that the crucial argument that the bomb reputedly saved more lives than it took might appear unsound after reading Hersey.<\/p>\n

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On top of that, Hersey chronicled the gruesomely unique way so many perished in death-by-radiation, which caused at least 20 percent of the casualties. Writing to New Yorker<\/em> editors, the journalist Janet Flanner compared the article to Matthew Brady\u2019s photographs during the Civil War, one of the first \u201crecords of how people really looked in war.\u201d<\/p>\n

Some readers felt this grim account of six of the first atomic bomb survivors was somewhat diminished by its surroundings in the upscale magazine \u2013 the usual ads for quality booze, Tiffany pins, leg cosmetics, and vacations abroad. A flood of letters to The New Yorker<\/em>, however, revealed that most readers were terribly moved. A college student wrote, \u201cI had never thought of the people in the bombed cities as individuals.\u201d Many mentioned that they were now ashamed of what America had done.<\/p>\n

A young scientist, once proud of his work for the Manhattan Project, revealed that he wept as he read the article and was \u201cfilled with shame to recall the whoopee spirit\u201d with which he and others had received the news of the bombing, recalling a \u201cchampagne dinner\u201d that night. \u201cWe didn\u2019t realize\u201d the horror and human effects, he added. \u201cI wonder if we do yet.\u201d (This could be written today \u2013 after Oppenheimer.<\/em>)<\/p>\n

One reader not pleased was Henry Luce, Hersey\u2019s main employer. Time<\/em> claimed that Hersey \u201chad practically stumbled into\u201d this story and that New Yorker<\/em> editor Harold Ross (\u201ca man given to juvenile and profane tantrums\u201d) had only printed the article at that length in one issue because he was notably short of good material.<\/p>\n

The novelist Thomas Mann had an interesting take himself. He hailed the article but declared it should not be translated for the postwar Germans because it is \u201ctheir only pleasure to enjoy the mistakes and sins committed anywhere else in the world.\u201d<\/p>\n

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Would \u201cHiroshima\u201d provoke a public rethinking of the wisdom of Truman\u2019s decision to use the bomb? To date that debate had centered on what to do with the next bombs, not what had been done with the first ones. Atomic scientists who had never before addressed the divisive Hiroshima decision \u2013 the new Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists<\/em> had just called it \u201cwater over the dam\u201d \u2013 were now speaking out. Albert Einstein commented that the bomb probably was used primarily to end the Pacific war before Russia got into it. (J. Robert Oppenheimer, on the other hand, remained silent.)<\/p>\n

Not everyone responded positively. \u201cI read Hersey\u2019s report,\u201d one subscriber wrote The New Yorker<\/em>. \u201cIt was marvelous. Now let us drop a handful [of atomic bombs] on Moscow.\u201d General Thomas Farrell was so angry he asked Bernard Baruch to propose another article to the editors at the magazine \u2013 about six POWs mistreated by the Japanese and how they felt about the bomb. (That American POWs died in the Hiroshima attack would remain a secret for decades.)<\/p>\n

Others felt Hersey had not gone far enough. The writer himself admitted to publisher Alfred A. Knopf that he had \u201cbeen at great pains to keep the tone of guilt about using the bomb at a minimum.\u201d The New York Times<\/em>, in a second \u201cminority opinion\u201d editorial, charged that Hersey had merely \u201cgiven us a picture of war\u2019s horrors as the world has long known them, rather than a picture of the unprecedented horrors of atomic warfare.\u201d The simple number 100,000 \u2013 indicating the number killed in one day \u2013 conveyed more about the meaning of Hiroshima than any evocative anecdote.<\/p>\n

The left-wing critic Dwight Macdonald was more caustic. Macdonald despised the article\u2019s \u201csuave, toned-down, underplayed kind of naturalism,\u201d its \u201cmoral deficiency\u201d in vision, its \u201cantiseptic\u201d prose. Naturalism, he suggested, was no longer adequate \u201ceither esthetically or morally, to cope with the modern horrors.\u201d<\/p>\n

The writer Mary McCarthy mocked The New Yorker<\/em> for declaring a moral \u201cemergency\u201d while surrounding the Hersey article with all those cigarette and perfume ads. While agreeing that the atomic bomb threatened the continuity of life, she unfairly characterized the key survivors in the Hersey article as \u201cbusy little Methodists.\u201d Hersey, she asserted, minimized the atomic bomb \u201cby treating it as though it belonged to the familiar order of catastrophes. . . . The existence of any survivors is an irrelevancy, and the interview with the survivors is an insipid falsification of the truth of atom warfare. To have done the atom bomb justice, Mr. Hersey would have had to interview the dead.\u201d<\/p>\n

But it was Saturday Review<\/em> editor Norman Cousins whose reaction would end up having the most impact. He had already argued that the bomb might have been aimed at the Russians as much as the Japanese. Now in an editorial titled \u201cThe Literacy of Survival,\u201d he asserted that Americans, despite Hersey\u2019s achievement, still did not fully comprehend what they had done.<\/p>\n

Have we as a people any sense of responsibility for the crime of Hiroshima and Nagasaki? Have we attempted to press our leaders for an answer concerning their refusal to heed the pleas of the scientists against the use of the bomb without a demonstration?<\/em><\/p>\n

He concluded by calling for a national \u201cmoratorium\u201d on all normal habits and routine, \u201cin order to acquire a basic literacy\u201d on the moral implications of the atomic bombings and the atomic age. If this accomplished little it would at least \u201cenable the American people to recognize a crisis when they see one and are in one.\u201d<\/p>\n

What this editorial, along with the Hersey article (his book derived from the article was still being rushed to press), would accomplish more than anything, unfortunately, was to inspire pro-bomb authorities, from Harvard president James Conant to Truman\u2019s Secretary of War, Henry L. Stimson, to take redemptive action, involving a quite different major article in another leading magazine, to reinforce the Hiroshima narrative they had promoted from the start. We will turn to that disturbing, highly influential \u2013 to this day \u2013 saga next, along with President Truman\u2019s response to the Hersey piece.<\/p>\n

Just published: an expanded edition of my book Atomic Cover-up<\/a>, now with several thousand words of mine re: Oppenheimer. And it\u2019s on sale this week as an ebook for just $3.99 ($12.95 for the paperback).<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

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Thanks for reading Oppenheimer: From Hiroshima to Hollywood! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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