Today is the eightieth anniversary of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima. Every time I have to teach the undergraduates, I give them John Hersey’s essay, “Hiroshima” (The New Yorker, 23 August 1946) to read and analyse. Many give up, but those who persevere, are stunned by it. For many of these students, reading English at the best of times is a bit of a struggle and most certainly a long essay that made up the entire special issue of The New Yorker.

In the newsletter circulated by the magazine on 3 Aug 2025, their staff reporter, Jane Mayer writes:

Thirty years after this magazine published John Hersey’s “Hiroshima,” I sat in his classroom at Yale, hoping to learn how to write with even a fraction of his power. When “Hiroshima” appeared, in the August 31, 1946, issue, it was the scoop of the century—the first unvarnished account by an American reporter of the nuclear blast that obliterated the city. Hersey’s prose was spare, allowing the horror to emerge word by word. A man tried to lift a woman out of a sandpit, “but her skin slipped off in huge, glove-like pieces.” The detonation buried a woman and her infant alive: “When she had dug herself free, she had discovered that the baby was choking, its mouth full of dirt. With her little finger, she had carefully cleaned out the infant’s mouth, and for a time the child had breathed normally and seemed all right; then suddenly it had died.”

Hersey’s candor had a seismic impact: the magazine sold out, and a book version of the article sold millions of copies. Stephanie Hinnershitz, a military historian, told me that Hersey’s reporting “didn’t just change the public debate about nuclear weapons—it created the debate.” Until then, she explained, President Harry Truman had celebrated the attack as a strategic masterstroke, “without addressing the human cost.” Officials shamelessly downplayed the effects of radiation; one called it a “very pleasant way to die.” Hinnershitz said, “Hersey broke that censorship.” He alerted the world to what the U.S. government had hidden.

Soon after “Hiroshima” was published, the influential Saturday Review ran an editorial condemning “the crime of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.” America’s military establishment tried to quell the outrage with a piece in Harper’s by Henry Stimson, a retired Secretary of War. The article—ghostwritten by McGeorge Bundy, a future national-security adviser—claimed that dropping nuclear bombs on Japan had averted further war, saving more than a million American lives. Kai Bird, a co-author of “American Prometheus,” the definitive biography of J. Robert Oppenheimer, told me that this pushback was specious: “Bundy later admitted to me that there was no documentary evidence for this ‘million’ casualty figure. He just pulled it out of thin air.”

Hersey’s report helped transform The New Yorker. Although the magazine had published dispatches from brilliant war correspondents, including Janet Flanner, it was still widely considered a weightless amusement. “Hiroshima” marked a new, more serious era. It also changed journalism. For many reporters of my generation, “Hiroshima” was a model of what might be called the ethical exposé. It was built on rigorous reporting and meticulously observed details, and, through its quiet, almost affectless voice, the reader became another eyewitness. Hersey’s narrative approach was deceptively simple. Threading together the stories of six survivors, he described the destruction from their perspective, which implicitly made the point that nuclear warfare posed an unconscionable threat to humanity. People usually think of investigative reporting as relying on obscure documents and dry financial data. But Hersey, whose 1944 novel, “A Bell for Adano,” won a Pulitzer, showed that to truly affect readers such reporting must be paired with literary craft and be propelled by a sense of urgency.

Hersey, the secular son of high-Wasp missionaries to China, transferred an almost stern sense of morality to his work. As a professor, he was priestly, soft-spoken, and intimidating. His reverence for journalism as a sacred duty could be self-righteous, but it set a standard for conscientiousness that I still try to meet. His seminar Form and Style in Non-Fiction Writing required students to analyze and emulate the techniques of great writers from Homer to Thornton Wilder. In fact, “The Bridge of San Luis Rey,” Wilder’s 1927 novel, which unfurls the personal stories of characters who die at the bridge, had inspired the form of “Hiroshima,” and Hersey hoped to teach us through such examples. Private tutorials were equally inspiring and mortifying. Some of my Yale classmates still burn with embarrassment when recalling them. One remembers Hersey pulling out a copy of Fowler’s “Dictionary of Modern English Usage” and asking, “Are you familiar with this?” Another will never forget Hersey, who marked comments in pencil, noting that she’d misspelled “masturbation.” A third says that Hersey, a stickler for accuracy, criticized a description of fingernails “bitten to half the normal length” as hyperbolic. After making each point, Hersey erased his notes. The message was clear: now we were on our own.

Years ago, my mother had visited Hiroshima. She was very moved by the experience. She bought a memento for me. First I tied it to whichever handbag I carried. Once the threads weakened and fell apart, I put it into a pocket of my handbag and carry it still. I do not know what the letters in Japanese spell out but the changing colours of the design in different lights is extraordinary.

In this image, it looks green, but I have seen it a vibrant blue, a dull gold-brown and even turn to black. I have no idea why or how it does this, but it does.

Yesterday, Hachette India sent The Hiroshima Men. I have as yet to read it but it is a timely publication.

Here is the book blurb:

At 8:15 a.m. on August 6th, 1945, the Japanese port city of Hiroshima was struck by the world’s first atomic bomb. Built in the US by the top-secret Manhattan Project and delivered by a B-29 Superfortress, a revolutionary long-range bomber, the weapon destroyed large swaths of the city, instantly killing tens of thousands. The world would never be the same again.

The Hiroshima Men’s unique narrative recounts the decade-long journey towards this first atomic attack. It charts the race for nuclear technology before, and during the Second World War, as the allies fought the axis powers in Europe, North Africa, China, and across the vastness of the Pacific, and is seen through the experiences of several key characters: General Leslie Groves, leader of the Manhattan Project alongside Robert Oppenheimer; pioneering Army Air Force bomber pilot Colonel Paul Tibbets II; the mayor of Hiroshima, Senkichi Awaya, who would die alongside over eighty-thousand of his fellow citizens; and Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist John Hersey, who travelled to post-war Japan to expose the devastation the bomb had inflicted upon the city, and in a historic New Yorker article, described in unflinching detail the dangers posed by its deadly after-effect, radiation poisoning.

This thrilling account takes the reader from the corridors of the White House to the laboratories and test sites of New Mexico; from the air war above Nazi Germany and the savage reconquest of the Pacific to the deadly firebombing air raids across the Japanese Home Islands. The Hiroshima Men also includes Japanese perspectives – a vital aspect often missing from Western narratives – to complete MacGregor’s nuanced, deeply human account of the bombing’s meaning and aftermath.

Reviews published on Amazon India

I can think of no more important book for our time. Written with moral clarity, tremendous verve, and the ability of a truly great historian to render the immensity of a moment through the smaller voices as well as being faithful to the facts. I recommend this magisterial, haunting book to all generations — Fergal Keane, award-winning BBC foreign correspondent and author of Road of Bones: The Siege of Kohima 1944

Iain Macgregor’s compelling account impresses in many ways. Unheralded individuals take centre stage. Vividly drawn characters spring to life. But it is his expertly managed juxtaposition of science, strategy and visceral horror that stands out — Joshua Levine, New York Times bestselling author of Dunkirk

The nuclear destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki was one of the most iconic moments of the twentieth century. Yet little has been written about the individuals whose actions led to Japan’s unconditional surrender. Iain MacGregor’s The Hiroshima Men is epic in scale yet intimate in detail, its pages filled with mavericks and geniuses who forever changed our world. A meticulously researched and compellingly written tour-de-force — Giles Milton, author of The Stalin Affair

The Hiroshima Men is a brilliant, superbly researched story of genius and terrifying destruction — Alex Kershaw, New York Times bestselling author of Against All Odds: a True Story of Ultimate Courage and Survival In World War II

The atomic bombing that obliterated Hiroshima has not lacked for attention from historians and other writers. But Iain MaGregor’s gripping book vastly expands the cast of characters: politicians and scientists in Japan and the United States; military men on both sides, from generals to pilots and air crews; victims on the ground both dead and alive; writers and journalists covering the story – all portrayed vividly as the story dramatically unfolds — William Taubman

Once again, MacGregor weaves together a wide range of sources to create a gripping, moving and frequently surprising narrative, this time of how World War II ended in human-created apocalypse, and a new era began with a mix of hope and horror that still characterizes our lives eight decades later — Frederick Taylor, author of Dresden: Tuesday 13 February, 1945

A meticulously researched and profoundly thought-provoking account of one of history’s most consequential events . . . More than just a work of history, this is also a sobering meditation on war, science and morality. Superb — James Holland

The Hiroshima Men is a searing and humane reckoning with the human cost of atomic warfare, blending meticulous history with unflinching moral clarity — Philip W Blood, author of War Comes to Aachen: The Nazis, Churchill and the ‘Stalingrad of the West’

Iain MacGregor has been an editor and publisher of nonfiction for thirty years working with esteemed historians such as Simon Schama, Michael Wood and James Barr. He is himself the author of the acclaimed oral history of Cold War Berlin: Checkpoint Charlie and his writing has appeared in the Guardian, the Express, as well as the Spectator and BBC History magazines. As a history student he has visited East Germany, the Baltic and the Soviet Union in the early 1980s and has been captivated by modern history ever since. He has published books on every aspect of the Second World War. Iain is a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society and lives with his wife and two children in London.

6 August 2025