Book review: 'Fallout: The Hiroshima Cover-up' is highly recommended

 

The chief message to journalists: Don't give up.

If I were in charge of reading lists for journalism students, this would be on it, a story within a story of how a civilization was decimated by the atomic bomb, and how the people bombed lived to tell about it.

Which they did to John Hersey, reporter and novelist who won the Pulitzer Prize for A Bell for Adano, his first novel, the year before the bomb was dropped.

Lesley M. M. Blume's Fallout: The Hiroshima Coverup and the Reporter Who Revealed It to the World (2020) follows Mr. Hersey's account of his interviews with six bomb victims and the secret production of the story in the New Yorker which published the report in a 31,000 word issue, the first time it devoted its entire issue to a single topic.

In the article which came out a little more than a year after the bomb dropped, Mr. Hersey describes the U.S. government's efforts to withhold the effects.

The story portrayed for the first time, Japanese as human beings, like me and you, ordinary people (p. 127). Until the story, Americans resisted considering their enemy across the sea as anything but murderers intent on destroying their nation. But the bomb drop on Hiroshima on August 6, 1945 shattered the lives of civilians, children, families, people.

First atomic bombing of Hiroshima, Japan by B-29 superfortresses on August 6, 1945. Title from item. "Official photograph furnished by Headquarters, A.A.F. AC/AS-2"--stamped on back of print. "If published credit U.S. Army, A.A.F. photo"--stamped on back of print. Photo number: A-58914 AC. Forms part of the National Committee on Atomic Information records at the Library of Congress. PR 13 CN 1995:068 (1 AA size box)

Ms. Blum describes Mr. Hersey's three weeks in Japan interviewing survivors who became the focus of his article. How he got there and got "in" Hiroshima are important pieces of the story's puzzle.

His collaboration with the New Yorker's co-founder, Harold Ross, and an editor, William Shawn, were so secret, they kept the subject hidden from the magazine's staff who wondered about content missing for the next edition.

Two other journalists had earlier written about Hiroshima, but their reports were dismissed, although their reporting led to a requirement that reporters must be accompanied by an official.

Australian journalist Wilfred Burchett ridiculed "housetrained reporters" who simply wrote what the U.S. government wished (p. 30).

Worried about the U.S. military's response to the article, the New Yorker's trio passed it pre-publication for muster to Leslie Groves, the director of the Manhattan Project which developed the bomb. Surprisingly, with slight edits, he okayed it.

Tormented throughout his work, Hersey was horrified that a single bomb could cause so much destruction (p. 72).

One of the victims described eyes which melted, the liquid flowing down what used to be faces on people still alive.

Many ran naked through the streets.

Skin peeled off.

A baby choked on dirt swallowed in a collapsed house. The mother refused to relinquish her child's decomposing body for days (p. 85).

To escape the fires, some jumped into one of Hiroshima's seven rivers where bodies of massacred victims floated (p. 92).

Civilians appeared "like a procession of ghosts," one survivor told Mr. Hersey (p. 84).

Of 300 doctors in Hiroshima, 270 died or were wounded; nurses lost 1,654 of their 1,780 to death or injury (p. 89).

By November 30, 1945 the death count reached 78,000 with 14,000 people still missing.

Burned legs show the effects of atomic bombs on people who survived.Otis Historical Archives of “National Museum of Health & Medicine” (OTIS Archive 1)/Creative Commons, Wikipedia.

Partially incinerated child in Nagasaki. Photo from Japanese photographer Yōsuke Yamahata, one day after the blast and building fires had subsided. Once the American forces had Japan under military control, they imposed censorship on all such images including those from the conventional bombing of Tokyo which prevented the distribution of Yamahata's photographs. These restrictions were lifted in 1952  http://www.noorderlicht.com/en/archive/yosuke-yamahata/, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=66792817. 

On a press tour of facilities in New Mexico, Lieutenant General Groves told reporters that the number of Japanese who died from radiation was "very small" (p. 45) and that Hiroshima was "essentially radiation-free" (p. 46).

Speaking to the Senate Special Committee on Atomic Energy, he quoted doctors who said death by radiation "is a very pleasant way to die" (p. 47). Mr. Groves had no apologies for the bomb drop, unlike some scientists who showed misgivings (p. 146).

The day after Victory over Japan was declared on August 14, 1945, a poll showed the majority of Americans approved the bombings, and almost 25% said they wished America had bombed more (p. 24).

After the story was published, the eyewitness subjects applauded Mr. Hersey's acuity in retelling their lives.

The article was printed as a book, Hiroshima, which became a worldwide phenomenon which has never gone out of print, selling three million copies and available in several languages. At publication it was picked up by 500 radio stations, including the BBC, and thrust Mr. Hersey into the limelight, a position he resisted.

The welcome epilogue brings the reader up-to-date with key characters, but a glossary of them would have amplified the content and made it easier to follow, a wish I have for most books I read.

This is a small book with an index of almost 100 pages which consumes almost a third of the total pages. I wished for more research, a longer book with additional "behind-the-scenes" descriptions.

Still, a book to be reckoned with and acknowledged as another chapter in America's gruesome past.

patricialesli@gmail.com

Book review: 'The Girls of Atomic City'

What could have been is not in this book which is about as dull and lifeless as the September 11 Memorial at the Pentagon.

For a layperson, a good chunk of The Girls of Atomic City: The Untold Story of the Women Who Helped Win World War II by Denise Kiernan is about as compelling as a manual on neutrons splitting, "liquid thermal diffusion" or "concentric vertical pipes" which actually fill up every other chapter with descriptions about the development of the atom bomb. Yawn. Once I figured out the pattern I skipped about a third of those confounded interruptions (they got more interesting) and moved on since a nuclear scientist I ain't.

Even with a character list in the front, the women who are the subjects are too many and varied to keep straight. Who did what and with whom? And what was her background?

An improvement would have been a biographical sketch of each woman separately, rather than assembling all the players together in one jumbled heap, chapter after chapter.

Another flaw are the tenses: present tense, past tense, and past progressive tense, as in far too many "was's." "Was" this, "was" that. (I "was tense." Just kidding.) I couldn't help but think that in the hands of a more skillful writer or editor, the story would have been vastly more absorbing. But you must catch my drift by now.

 The focus is a handful of female employees who worked at the Oak Ridge plant in the 1940s, workers who unknowingly assisted in the production of the atom bomb.

Were they happy with the end product when they learned what it was after it was dropped on Hiroshima on August 6, 1945?  Not really.  No one ran around slapping high-fives or drinking champagne.

Rather than the main characters, the true horror story threaded throughout the book is the history of the development of the town with no name which the governor of Tennessee didn't even know existed until a year after the place got started in 1942.   (It was called “Clinton Engineer Works” for short before it was christened Oak Ridge in 1949.)

Practically none of the thousands of new employees knew what anyone else was doing, or what they were working towards or building, and, as a matter of fact, they didn't even know what they were working on since everything was "hush, hush."  Asking questions would certainly raise suspicions.  After all, it was the "Secret City" where  everyone was sworn to secrecy, except for enlisted "snitches."

About all that was “publicly” known was they had accepted jobs in an undeveloped new town in Tennessee, which drew employees from various parts of the U.S., to work at who knows what in a mud mess of a place filled with quickly constructed "hutments" (defined by Wikipedia as  "one room shacks") which passed for living accommodations for those less fortunate.

The employees socialized whenever possible, despite efforts by the government to keep them quiet and harnessed.  That way, communication between employees was kept at a minimum.  As for blacks, married black couples were not permitted to live together nor could they swim in the pool. Or attend the schools. (They were sent to nearby Knoxville.)

Have there been any studies on comparative cancer rates among Oak Ridge employees who lived and worked on the bomb?  Just asking.

You think Hitler only practiced in Europe? Seems like the U.S. military got hold of his playbook early, to wit:

Any "creep" could report anyone anonymously for "sedition," and based on one person's account, the reported employee and his or her family could be thrown out of Oak Ridge within 24 hours. Pay your own way back to wherever you came from, please. (Okay, so they weren't murdered a la Hitler. Please read on.)

Why not test the effects of deadly plutonium on humans by injecting it into an unsuspecting black man without his consent, an automobile accident victim with broken bones?  Why bother to get consent?  And why not wait 20 days to set his broken bones to check on plutonium's effects upon broken bones?  Great idea!   And while you're at it, why not extract some of his teeth without his permission, like about 15 of them, and ship them to New Mexico to find out what plutonium does to teeth.? Oh, and then have the subject, labeled HP-12 (real name:  Ebb Cade) "conveniently" disappear and die at age 61?

Yes and why not administer electroshock to an employee who talks too much? And place him in solitary confinement, too, for good measure? That'll show the rest of 'em to keep their mouths shut!

A World War II billboard in Oak Ridge, Tennessee/James E. Westcott and Wikimedia Commons

There once was an couple in Oak Ridge who went parking (click here for a definition), and a stranger poked his head in the car window while said couple was parked on a lonely road and called out the woman's name. At work the next day, the man's boss approached the woman and ordered her not to see the man any more. Don't worry! I want to keep my teeth!

During the 1940s my ex-father-in-law, whom I never met, was an engineer at Oak Ridge who died mysteriously one night while at work. He was 37. His superiors said he died of a "heart attack" which the coroner confirmed. Do you think a coroner back then (and what about now?) would reject the military's pronounced cause of death?

Over the years I've urged my children to exhume their grandfather's body and find out if a "heart attack" was the cause of his death. Early heart attacks then and now are not part of his family's history. Except for his.

Correction on page 277:  It was not Kingston which was/is the site of Tennessee Eastman's main operations, but Kingsport, where I graduated high school.

patricialesli@gmail.com