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Hiroshima: in the shadow of the bomb
00:43:36
Iain MacGregor shares personal stories of individuals involved in race to build the atomic bomb – and those affected by its terrible aftermath
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Ian McGregor
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- [01:05]
Spencer Mizzen
Welcome to the History Extra Podcast. Fascinating historical conversations from the makers of BBC History magazine at 8.15am on 6 August 1945, an atomic bomb exploded over Hiroshima. It was an event that changed the course of history, but it was also one driven by individuals. Here in conversation with Spencer Mizzen, the author Ian McGregor tells this story through the eyes of people whose lives were forever changed by the quest to build the bomb. From the general charged with leading the Manhattan Project to the journalist who exposed its devastating consequences.
- [01:47]
Ian McGregor
So Ian, your new book charts the decade long journey towards the world's first atomic attack, introducing us to some of those people who played critical roles in the development of the bomb and also those most affected by its detonation. I guess one of the most powerful sections in the book is the one involving Hiroshima survivor Michiko Kodama, because you actually met her in person, didn't you? So I wonder if you could start by explaining what it was like to meet her and how how meeting her changed your perception of what happened 80 years ago.
- [02:24]
So Machiko's a very prestigious person in, in Japan in terms of very high profile. She is the Assistant Secretary General of the Atomic Survivors group and obviously their numbers are dwindling, but they have a big presence in the Japanese media and internationally. Last November that group won the Nobel Peace Prize, so they're very significant. So her time is limited and she was 88 when I interviewed her. So yeah, I mean it was just very, very emotional because I can read all the books I want and watch all the films and documentaries I want. But when you sat opposite someone who's survived and been an eyewitness to the destruction of the world's first atomic bomb. It's, it's incredible on so many different levels. Very emotional because she lost, you know, she lost a great deal. She was 10 years old and, you know, you. So the start of my book is experiencing this death and destruction from the atomic bomb in Hiroshima through the eyes of a 10 year old clinging to her dad's back.
- [03:31]
Of all the things she told you, is there anything that really particularly sort of stuck with you?
- [03:37]
Funnily enough, it ended up being a three hour interview. It was only supposed to be one hour. And in that one hour we did go through what she had experienced as a child, seeing all the destruction and death and how she survived. And thankfully her parents survived as well. They'd moved a mile and a half outside of ground zero. Her school was two miles outside of ground zero. That's obviously what saved her. But the key thing for me, and to get back to your first question was we got up to leave and we were doing the very traditional Japanese thing, bowing, handing our cards, thanking each other very politely. But then she interrupted, which is very un Japanese like, and said, would you want to know what my life was like after Hiroshima? And myself and Chi, my translator, looked at each other, yes, of course. I mean, we weren't expecting it. So we sat down and that took another two hours. And honestly, by the end, both Chi and I, I mean, Chi was crying and I was an emotional wreck and that was my first morning in Japan. Because Machiko is just a shining example of not only human spirit and surviving an atomic attack, but the life she led afterwards until today, as it's just been one of resilience, fortitude, rejection, ridicule. Because you've got to remember that generation that survived the hundreds of thousands that survived and then they started dying off of cancer and everything else. Through the 50s, 60s, 70s, 80s, 90s, up until today, they're seen as the tainted. They're not seen really. They're seen, I suppose, as victims. You could call them victims. But in Japanese society, to a lot of people, you know, they're unclean because of radiation poisoning and the ignorance around radiation poisoning. It's that kind of life where you have to not reveal who you really are. And you know, she, she found it hard to marry someone because as soon as the, the guy's family found out she was what's called atomic survivor Habashka, they would call the wedding off. Eventually she did marry someone who was an atomic survivor himself. They had one child. And then, you know, when that Their daughter grew up healthy and strong because they were worried, have we passed on any kind of radiation sickness to this child? Their fears weren't founded, but tragically, their daughter, at the age of 38, I think it was, she developed cervical cancer and was dead in six months. So the reason why we're emotional wreck, we're hearing all this. And then the last thing she said to me was, so my parents passed away of cancer related diseases. Both my younger brothers did. My. My husband's got cancer, my daughter's died of cancer, and I'm the only one left. And by that time, my translator was just in tears. Obviously, half of me is, I'm a human being. I'm just thinking, that is awful. I reach out and hold her hand. And then the other half of me coming away from the meetings thinking, well, I've got to tell this story. It's got to be the start of the book. Because it's a metaphor for the whole story.
- [06:40]
Yeah. And it's an incredibly powerful anecdote. I wonder now if we could also talk about somebody who didn't survive the bomb, and that's a man called Senkichi awa, who was mayor of Hiroshima when the bomb was dropped. Now, you've written a feature about him for a forthcoming issue of BBC History Magazine. And what's interesting, really interesting, about Uaya is the way his story kind of maps onto the story of Japan more generally over the first four decades of the 20th century. I wonder if you could just give us a little insight into how his story is. So it's representative of the rise and fall of Japan in this period.
- [07:20]
Yeah. And it's what they suffered as well, because I've got a very iconic, quite emotional family photograph of him sitting in the center, the proud father. He's at the top of his career. It's the late 1930s, and they're all dressed in Western clothes of the time. And he's got his five children around him with his wife. You know, most of them didn't survive the war, as you just said. They're a metaphor for what happened to Japan. But he's a fascinating character in terms of not, you know, an English audience. Doesn't really know him at all. I didn't know him. And I, you know, I've been doing. I've been researching this book for, you know, researching and writing three years. And I just happened to have a blinding flash of light one time when I was thinking about what major Japanese character do I really want to focus on for the book? And it just occurred to me, I wonder who was in charge of the city. And they must have died, but I wonder who was in charge. And that led me to his door. And to cut a long story short, his story hasn't been published in the English language. It's known to a degree in Japan, but not very well at all, because he's lost a history, because he died instantly. He's the mayor of Hiroshima. His residence by the river is literally a stone's throw away from what we know today is the atomic dome, close to ground zero, gone. So. And he, you know, he was. He died instantly. And because of that, and you're moving on, you're trying to rebuild the city. A new mayor takes over. The Americans come in. The occupational forces come in. Japan's getting built. He's just been forgotten about. But you're right, I mean, this is a man which I discuss in detail because I found, luckily for me, you know, sometimes you do dozens and dozens of investigative threads when you're researching a book, and some of them pay off, and most of them don't. And with this, it was just an incredible find. I was in Japan. I'd been told that three of his children survived the war. He had seven children altogether. Three survived. And in the 60s, they decided that they needed to record their father's life and generally the family's life. But it was mainly about their father because, you know, they're so proud of him and they'd lost him so brutally. So they wrote his Career, his life and his career, and there's one copy, and it's in the Tokyo National Library, and it was placed there, I think, in 1965, and hardly anyone's ever looked at it. And I found it, and so we translated it. And that's what inhabits my book is, as you just said, he was born in 1893. So that's 30 years into. By that time, three decades have gone by since the Americans have opened up Japan, feudal, traditional Japan, to capitalism, to the West. So by 1893, Senkichi Awa's family, they lived in a place called Sendai, which is to the northeast of Tokyo. His father works for an American railroad company. He's a senior bureau of karat. So he's going all around Japan. He's always away developing railroads, which are going to be the lifeblood to build a, you know, supercharged economy for Japan that can take on the West. And it works. But this is a man who grew up in a very Westernized household.
- [10:41]
Yeah, that was something that really stuck in my mind how influenced by the west this family was. I mean, they were. They were devout Christians as well, weren't they?
- [10:49]
Absolutely, yeah. I mean, that's what I find fascinating. There's very few photos of him. I think there's two or three maybe. And one of them is a family photo from the 1920s, the early 1920s, with his. His brother and his mother and father. And honestly, the clothes they're wearing, they could be walking down the Champs Elysees or walking through Hyde Park. They're just dressed as Westerners would dress, but because they completely embraced it, because their wealth, influence and position in society had skyrocketed, because the father was doing so well, working for a Western company. And that. That's the same story for tens of thousands of other Japanese people. You got to remember, Japan was a. It's something like 73 million by the time of the Second World War, Pearl Harbor, 1941, there's about 73 million Japanese on the home islands, and that's about 5% of the world's population, but they're living on 1% of the world's landmass. So it's a very densely populated country, but it's still got a growing economy. And this family was well, in the center of. Well, we are going to be the new middle to upper middle class generation that's established itself in Japan. And with that you'll go into the professional classes. Granted, you might go into the armed forces, but in Senkichi's case, he went into civil administration. And that's why his memoir, and that's what tells us, and that's what fascinated me was he really believed in the rule of law. He believed in. It was the civil administration's job to rule Japan, whether whatever the army did abroad in terms of building the empire, because he was a patriot, which he believed in Japan's place in the world and he thought it was right that Japan should expand. But it was. The rule of law mattered to him, and that's where he went. So he worked for the Ministry of Home affairs from, I think about 1925 onwards. And he was spotted from university. He was spotted. He was a gifted academic and he looked like he had all the skills to be a brilliant administrator. And his story tells us that in 1926, he'd only been working just over a year. He's chosen to lead, ironically, he's because, you know, he's from the Tokyo, Greater Tokyo suburbs. He's sent down to Hiroshima to oversee their police force. And that's the kind of role he would have all the way through as we head towards the war in the early 1940s. He's just a brilliant man, manager. He's fair with his staff. He's fair with the police forces he commands. He's very fair in administrating the law. And you can tell that because as you do with any civil administrative job, you're on a cycle, aren't you? You'll be going from position to position to position. So he went to various cities to do a similar job, and it was always successful. And cut a long story short, it's only as the country is slipping into authoritarianism, you could argue a military dictatorship, where the military are really flexing their muscles at home as well, in terms of the political arena, that he has got the guts, has got the moral, I suppose, fiber to push back against that and said, no, it's the civilian rule of law that counts. And if soldiers, imperial soldiers, Imperial navy and airmen are breaking the law in a city that I'm running the police, I will prosecute them. And so he made a lot of enemies.
- [14:30]
What was his attitude, though, to the news coming back from abroad of Japanese expansionism? Would he have gotten wind of the atrocities that were being perpetrated overseas by Japanese armed forces? And do you know what his attitude was to that news?
- [14:47]
It's slightly hypothetical. It doesn't go into great detail at all. All it says was there were a couple of foreign trips that he did abroad for the Ministry of Home affairs, and that was in the agricultural department. So this is when Japanese forces have taken Manchuria and they're going into other places. And then. Then when the war starts on mainland China, he visited there as well. And I think that was to oversee or analyze what kind of logistical supplies they would need while they're occupying those lands in terms of getting food supplies to them, that kind of thing. Huge amounts of, you know, horse trains that would be needed for the army to get around. He was involved in that. And that's what makes me think, well, he clearly was definitely in the government machine that was supporting whatever the army was doing abroad. I have no idea whether that meant he had tacit approval of the kind of things that the Imperial army might have been doing on mainland China in terms of brutal treatment of the population. Things like the massacres, especially in Nanking, or, you know, slave laborers in Korea, that kind of thing. His memoir doesn't touch upon that, I would guess, and it's just a guess that if you're that high up in government, you would have known about certain things going you would have done because you would have seen reports. And what the story that's published that I've seen does tell and what I record in my book is he is very aware towards the end of the war, once the American Army Air Force is bombing Japan, the Japanese mainland, with a B29 raids, whether it's high explosives or whether it's incendiaries, he's well aware of what's going on. He's well aware of the damage that they're doing because he witnesses it. And I record that in the book where he's got the power to travel across the country. He travels up from Hiroshima to Tokyo because that's where the family home was, because he hears about the great Tokyo fire raid on, on the night of March 8th to the night or around about that time, and he's worried about his family. So they, there's not many people can just say, I'm traveling up in the next couple of days on an army train. You only get that kind of ticket if you're the mayor and you've got power. So he was able to do that. And he sees the devastation. And that's, that's ironically, that's the reason why he encourages his wife and some of his children to move down to Hiroshima because the city hasn't been touched by bombing and he thinks they'll be safe there. And obviously, tragically, that was incorrect.
- [17:29]
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You did.
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- [18:58]
Ian McGregor
One aspect of this story that really comes through in your book is the widespread demonization of Japanese people in America. I mean, do you think that made the US authorities, and by extension the American public sort of less squeamish, hesitant about pursuing the project to develop a nuclear bomb?
- [19:23]
Well, two things. Firstly, you've got to remember that there's a great patriot, a justifiable patriotic fervor in the United States because the Japanese have attacked them by surprise and destroyed their fleets, or most of their fleets at Pearl harbor, the U.S. pacific Fleet. And then in that first year of the war, there is sweeping gains by the Imperial Japanese army through the Pacific bases, through Asia, basically, and all the atrocities that are committed against the Allies, British and, and American. So they know the kind of fight that they're up against. And what I saw in the propaganda, in terms of how you educate the population and, you know, gird the loins for what's going to be a brutal, long campaign, the, the initial Allied propaganda is this snarling, evil, villainous Japanese soldier who's a super soldier. You know, he's just, he's got everything, you know, he's. He's the best jungle fighter, can survive on basic rations, march for days, all that kind of thing. Maybe that's to excuse the fact that they just suffered so many defeats at their hands. They had to kind of think, well, this is who we're up against, though. But then you see the change over from, I suppose, late 1942. Once the Americans have systematically defeated the Japanese in their first major campaign at Guadalcanal on land and then on the sea, they've decisively beaten them at Midway. And that's the big turning point in terms of naval power, naval air power. Definitely. A lot of the publications that I was looking at in archives, the visualization of the Japanese as you go for the remaining years of the war, of course, it's demonization. It's demonization. They're apes. They're savage apes. They're swinging from the trees. They look like apes in the cartoons. You look at some of the covers of the U.S. marine Corps magazine, the Bootleg, and yeah, it's like anything else you'd see in any theater of the war, whether it's the Soviets demonizing Germans, German demonizing the Soviets. It's at that level and it is I mean, it's been said many times before, it's a brutal, brutal campaign across the Pacific. No holds barred, no weapon, I suppose, other than poison gas off the table. The long term strategies that had begun in the 1930s from the US armed forces in preparation of potentially if they went to war in the Pacific. And it potentially could be Japan, the weapons that they're going to use. Yeah, I mean, and don't get me wrong, if the Japanese has had a B29 and if the Japanese had had incendiary bombs as lethal as the Americans that they had in the B29 bombers, of course they would have used them. They just didn't have the capability and the technology to do that.
- [22:19]
Speaking of the B29, you've described that as possibly the greatest American weapon of the entire Second World War. Why is that? Why did you reach that conclusion in.
- [22:30]
Terms of explosive power? So I go into great detail about the fear of most governments, especially Western governments, watching the Nazis in the 1930s, not just in the Spanish Civil War with Italy and, and German aircraft bombers, but then in those first couple of years of the European war before America came in. The bomber always gets through. That was the big fear across government, especially in Britain, especially in America. So they needed to develop their own. That was the big urgency before the atomic. The race for the atomic bomb was we need to develop our own four engine bombers that can take big payloads, can have a big range, ideally 1500 to 2000 to, you know, we get to the B29 which is a 3000 kilometer range there and back that can hit the enemy behind the front line and take the war to them in order to defeat them. So therefore we are not taking enormous casualties on the front line as we try and make our way to them to defeat them. And that's the reason, I mean, some people would pick other weapons. It could be the T34 tank on the Eastern front, which was incredible for the Soviet Union in decimating German forces on the Eastern front. You know, mobile armed force. Or it could be, some people have argued it's the P51 Mustang long range fighter bomber, which guaranteed a protective screen around bombers flying over Europe and then ultimately flying over Japan. But I would say in terms of dropping ordinance and crippling a country, it's got to be the B29 because it was such a futuristic design and concept on multiple levels. It's just an amazing project. You know, it reinvigorates American industry smack bang in the areas of the Midwest of America that had suffered the Most in the Great Depression, re energizes the economy, guarantees the American military a strike force. That's lethal. And you could argue, I'm sure we'll talk about it towards the end. Yes, they dropped the atomic bombs, but fundamentally, that air force was built to bring Japan to its knees through mass air raids. And it's only when high explosive didn't work because of various reasons, primarily to do with the jet stream that flies over Japan was just causing havoc with navigation and bomb aiming for the B29s at high altitude. As soon as they decided, right, we've invented napalm, and we're going to use this incendiary on Japan because we know we've been doing reports on it since the 1930s. A traditional city built from paper and wood. We can torch it. And that's exactly what they did. And that's why I think the B29 is such a devastating weapon that turned the tide of war to bring Japan to the brink of surrender.
- [25:26]
Right. Ian, I'd like to read you a quote from your book. And that is, Groves is the biggest SOB I have ever worked for. He is the most egotistical man I know. Now, that's how Colonel Kenneth Nichols described Colonel Leslie R. Groves, the director of the Manhattan Project, which is obviously the project to build a nuclear bomb. What made Groves the right man to do this job? I mean, what skill set did he bring to this, like, enormous, enormous task?
- [25:59]
Well, I mean, his credentials just before they offered in the Manhattan Project were impeccable. So very, very driven man, a great man, manager. But in terms of driving people, I don't think he wasn't soft and cuddly by any stretch of the imagination. Hence your quote. That's a typical quote. You would probably get right across his senior management team. But he was one of the pivotal figures of the American armed forces across the Allied armed forces in the Second World War. Before he got the job for the Manhattan Project, he'd built on time and to budget what was at the time the biggest building in the world, which was the Pentagon. He built the Pentagon. Not only that, he was one of the key figures that would then reinvigorate and rebuild America's military infrastructure, whether it's ports, airfields, air bases, training facilities, supply depots, completely overhauled it. And again, he did it. The targets that were set him, Savvy man, political player. I would argue that the film Oppenheimer where you've got Matt Damon playing him, it's a shame, because Matt Damon, I mean, he's only Got a few minutes in the film, to be honest, he drifts in and out of the film. You only see him a couple of times, unleash that kind of snarling bulldog determination. But they could have made so much more of him in the movie because he's a pivotal figure. Without Groves, you don't have the success of the Manhattan Project, but you don't have those moments where he had so much power and influence in the job they gave him. He could make the decision such as, I don't care if the security issues and concerns about the guy. I want to lead the weapons laboratory. It's going to be. It's going to be Oppenheimer. He's my man. I want him. And they. And he got him. And the same goes for many of the other issues in terms of Huey wanted to get into those pivotal positions. So, for instance, Tibbets, I mean, Tibbets was on the verge of a court martial in North Africa when he was brought back to the states in 1943 to be the test pilot for the B29 because it was going through a lot of teething problems. It crashed quite a few times, killed a lot of people. It's such an amazing project that you're building on record breakneck speed, but once it's ready to roll, you know, Groves knew that, you know, Tibbets is one of the finest pilots in the Army Air Force. And he might be about to have papers drawn up against him for court martial will bring him back. So that's what they did. What I liked about Groves was he could talent spot, and if he trusted you to do the job he'd hired you for, that was good enough for him. It's not that he would leave you to get on with it. You know, generally you had a lot of authority. He would check in on you, which is, you know, that's a good, that's just a good man manager. But he knew a good leader when he saw it. And hence he hired Tibbets and confided a lot in Tibbets as well and gave Tibbets just, just incredible authority and power again within the armed forces structure. This is just a kernel, but the power that Groves invested in him meant he had, he could just get what he wanted for his unit that was going to drop this top secret bomb. And then on top of that, he's just. I think Groves could have been one of America's greatest industrialists if he put his mind to it. Because as you just said, the Manhattan Project's not just Los Alamos. It's a nationwide cobweb of factories, laboratories, manufacturing areas that's employing over 100,000 people, the majority of whom have no idea they're building. What they're doing is pushing forward to creating an atomic bomb. So on many levels, political, scientific, militarily, Groves is just on it. It's just amazing. I find him just a fascinating character.
- [30:05]
Do you get the sense at any point he felt overwhelmed by the enormity of what he was working on, or did you think he just thrived on that?
- [30:12]
He thrived upon it. In fact, I would argue he got frustrated quite a lot of the time because they just wouldn't in Washington. He'd have to go through levels of bureaucracy to get what he wanted. Generally, he still got them quite quickly. But when it got to the sharp end of the war and you're getting closer to, you know, the bomb's going to be ready soon and what are we going to do with it, you know, where we're going to drop it. So you're getting into all these higher senior political committees like the Target Committee and that kind of thing. That's where he's got to be in a collective decision making process. And I would argue that's where he made some enemies post war, because again, this is a man for the last four or five years who's thrived thinking it's my way or the highway, I'm just going to get on and do it. He's got to work within this new structure. And you do, you know, you push people up the wrong way and he didn't care about that.
- [31:06]
Okay, I'd like to talk about another American character in your book, something very different to Groves, and that's a Pulitzer Prize winning war reporter, John Hersey, because he wrote, didn't he, a 30,000 word report in the New Yorker magazine which described in graphic detail the horrendous impact that the bomb had had once it'd been dropped on Hiroshima. Now, wonder if you could give us an insight on how that changed Americans attitudes to the narrative around the bombing? Because I think I'd be right in saying that most Americans thought it was. Generally thought it was a good thing. Did this sort of move the dial a little bit, this article?
- [31:47]
No, it absolutely did because it shifted the debate. So you can't blame the American public that, you know, the bombs are dropped, the war's over in a matter of a couple of weeks. And this is when they're reading reports, you know, the first six, seven months of 1945American forces are taking massive casualties, much more than they thought they would because they're getting closer to the Japanese home islands. So the Japanese are putting up a fierce resistance, suicidal resistance, as we all know, kamikaze attacks, that kind of thing. You know, garrisons on the islands where they're doing the island hopping campaign to get close to Japan, whole garrisons just choosing to fight to the last man. And by the time they get to Okinawa, which is the last big island off mainland Japan, you know, even civilians would rather jump off the cliffs and kill themselves than be taken prisoner. It's that kind of fanaticism. And so if you're worried that, my gosh, we're going to take horrendous casualties trying to subdue this country, and then within two weeks, because of the bombs, they've surrendered this huge positive support for what's happened. The numbers are in the 80 to 90% in opinion polls nationally saying that it was the right thing to drop the bomb and they should have dropped more to finish them off. The real hard line is they're saying we should have finished them all off and dropped more bombs. But Hersey is one of those men in the right place at the right time who had the right credentials. You said he's a Pulitzer Prize winning novelist, but he was a seasoned veteran war correspondent. He's one of my big heroes in the book. He reinvented the role of the war correspondent in the Second World War in terms of, I'm not going to wait back at headquarters behind the front line to get all the reports and I'll file my story. I'm going to don a helmet, I'm going to get out there, I'm going to be on patrols into the jungle. If I'm reporting in Guadalcanal in the Pacific, for instance, or I'm going to be sitting in the cockpit of the first wave of US Bombers that are going to bomb Rome in the European theater. He landed with the Americans at Sicily as well.
- [33:54]
So he's quite a courageous guy himself.
- [33:56]
Yeah, I mean, he survived four plane crashes. It's incredible what he did. And then ultimately he's riding alongside the Red army as they forge through Eastern Europe and they're liberating these ghettos and destroyed cities, and he's seen just the carnage. And then he has time to write a Pulitzer Prize winning novel before he even got the Russian gig. But ultimately, as I say to audiences when I'm giving these talks, he's a freelance commissioned journalist. He needs jobs. So there are stories, even though Allied, mainly American, but Allied Occupational Forces are in charge of Japan. They are doing a good job in terms of they're going to rebuild the country, they're going to demilitarize it, they're going to bring back over a million Japanese troops and integrate them into society, and they're going to rebuild Japan as a mirror, democratic mirror of America. That's ultimately, we'd all agree, a good thing. But as this is going on and General MacArthur's the de facto emperor in charge of Japan, there are reports coming through, why are people still dying in their thousands in these two cities, Nagasaki and Hiroshima, that were bombed? We don't understand, you know, they're dying of all these various cancers. And these are the reports that you don't, you don't want a bad news story. So they were covered up or censored. Censored is probably the right word. And even in America, when a couple of Western journalists managed to tell a snippet of the story, they don't have details because they don't do what Hersey does. Get and get in there for a period of time to interview people. They just give some stories, as in that there must be some kind of after effect from these bombs, radiation poisoning, blah, blah, blah, blah. And this is where, which Oppenheimer doesn't cover and it should have done, is Groves and Oppenheimer are front and center of the government response to say, well, that's nonsense. Groves goes in front of a congressional committee and says, well, my experts tell me that radiation poisoning is a pleasant way to die. And Oppenheimer dismisses a couple of the scientists in the Manhattan Project team who break ranks, whistleblowers, you could call them and say, well, we always had issues about this and it is radiation poisoning and it could go on for years. And he goes in front of the camera and says, well, no, that won't happen. That's the background. And so Hersey gets this job from the New Yorker magazine and say, can you get there? You were born in China, you speak Chinese. Pretend that you're going on a fact finding mission to China and see what's been going on there, but sneak into Japan. That's ultimately. Cut a long story short, what happens? He gets into Tokyo, he gets on a train down to Hiroshima. He makes contacts with key Western Jesuit priests who have always been there for years and are trusted. And they're his key to open the door for survivors, Japanese survivors, who will then think, okay, we trust you, we'll tell you our story. He interviews over 30 people over a couple of weeks. But he knows their stories are so powerful that he really needs just to pick a few of them to then really hit the reader with a punch about what's this, what this bomb has done to them and what's it done to the city? And that's what he does. So they're called the Hiroshima Six Gets back to America, the New Yorker, in a very kind of subterfuge sort of way. They pretend they're working on a shadow magazine. Most of the staff think it's just a normal magazine. This is a magazine that would, you know, you open the pages, you're reading stories about which famous Hollywood stars drinking in the best cocktail bar, what holiday you should go on, what car you should buy, what fridge freezer you should buy. Because it's a new thing. They don't do stories like this. And so the real story's being conducted behind closed doors by a very small, skeleton, handpicked team that put the story out and it hits America like a tsunami. You know, that's the metaphor I could use. I mean, it sells, I think, 300,000 copies in its first week, and within three weeks of it hitting the newsstands in August 1946, so a year after Hiroshima had been bombed, within three weeks of the magazine coming out, BBC radio have dramatized the story. Because what they've done is very cleverly, instead of making Hersey's article one of, say, several that would pepper the magazine issue, they've decided it's going to take up the whole issue. All 30,000 words, undistilled are in that issue. And I would say to your listeners, go, because the books, you know, Penguin bought the rights to the magazine article and I think to date, it's never been out of print. The book, obviously it's a small book because it's 30,000 words sold, 3.8 million copies. It's incredible. And so, yes, it changed the debate. And I've just got something I'd like to read. It's the question, crucial thing is, the story came out. There is obviously a backlash because you've got millions of returning veterans in America and obviously in Britain. And they're saying, quite rightly, you didn't see the horror show of the Pacific and what the Japanese did to the populations they ruled over, and obviously, the kind of fighting they put up against us, it was barbaric. They deserved everything they got. You could argue that point. But crucially, big newspapers started to come on side of the New Yorker once the story had been published. And so this is from the New York Times. And this encapsulates the whole thing. It says, the disasters at Hiroshima and Nagasaki were our handiwork. They were defended then and are defended now by the argument that they saved lives, that they took more lives of Japanese as well as more lives of Americans. The argument may be sound or it may be unsound. One may think it's sound when you recall the losses at Tarawa, Iwo Jima, or Okinawa. One may think it unsound when he reads Mr. Hersey. And that's the thing. It's like, okay, yes, this war was barbaric, but you've got to realize this new age of a new superweapon, this is the consequences.
- [39:57]
Was this the moment when the sort of terrifying reality of future warfare became apparent with this new weapon?
- [40:06]
Yeah, well, it would gradually get there because it came out, the story came out in 46. And this is a time where you will work towards the Atomic Energy Agency. And the American public's being told in some ways accurately that, you know, atomic energy is the future. This could revolutionize the way we live our lives in terms of fuel, industry, everything else. Everything would be cheaper, everything would run more efficiently. You would travel to places faster, all that kind of thing. It's a good thing. So when this story comes out, it's obviously telling you something completely different, as in, this is the human cost if we ever get into a nuclear war. And so by the time you get to 1949, 1950, that's when, you know, the Americans didn't know. So Soviet agents had penetrated Los Alamos. Stalin was well aware of what they had. And by 1949, 1950, as the Cold War's settling in, the Red army are parked in Central Europe, and they're not going to move anywhere. The Russians test their own bomb, and you'd argue that's what drives the coming years of Reds under the bed, McCarthyism, et cetera, et cetera. And Oppenheimer, the film covers that really well. I mean, that's where Oppenheimer falls from grace. But that's the key thing. And I would say that Hersey's story really takes off, in my opinion, anyway, is when you're getting to the Americans testing the hydrogen bomb and then the Soviets, who would then be led by Khrushchev once Stalin dies testing their own hydrogen bomb, because you're moving then from a super weapon that can destroy a city or a heart, you know, a big harbor or something like that, it destroys it in one fell swoop to where you get a hydrogen bomb, which is basically genocidal, that's gonna end humanity. And I think that's where the real core argument of Hersey's article really comes to the fore, because he's literally told you the future. This is what he looks like.
- [42:02]
Spencer Mizzen
That was Ian McGregor. The Hiroshima men, the Quest to Build the Atomic Bomb and the Fateful Decision to Use it is published by Constable. Thanks for listening. This podcast was produced by Lewis Dobbs.
- [42:24]
Narrator
At bp. We're not just talking strategy, we're making it happen. Growing our upstream business with six major new projects in 2025, four already live, two more scheduled this year expecting to add 135,000 barrels a day to peak production, helping drive long term shareholder value. For more on our growth plans, visit bp.com strategyatwork if you work in quality.
- [42:54]
Grainger Representative
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