Summary Of Hiroshima By John Hersey

The true story of Hiroshima is often skimmed through focusing on the numbers not the victims and who archives one of the biggest breakthroughs in mankind. At eight fifteen am on August 6, 1945, over one hundred thousand people die, twenty are innocent and those who survive often wonder, “why did they survive” (Hersey). American textbooks give the basic facts about the atomic bombs that America dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki which state that the bombs saved thousands of more lives on both sides. Nobody talks about what happens after the initial bomb and how the Japanese citizens react. The United States depict the Japanese as monkeys or gorillas in anti-Japanese propaganda in attempts to persuade Americans to feel no empathy for the Japanese.

Generally, American history textbooks state the facts with few details of the devastation the atomic bomb brought to Hiroshima, Japan. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt’s World History: Patterns of Interaction focuses on America’s role in demilitarizing after the war instead of all of the innocent victims taken by the deadliest bomb. John Hersey separates from typical historians with Hiroshima, during an interview Hersey says he decided to, “write about what happened not to buildings but to human beings” (Hersey). Hersey’s choice to focus on relatable individuals instead of numbers like many textbooks and historians do, makes the six survivors interviewed human. The public does not often hear about the aftermath of the bomb like the fire that engulfed the city and the floods that whipped everything else out of its path. Many people underestimate what terrible things happened to the victims of the atomic bomb and Hersey’s writings put readers in the shoes of a survivor, “their faces were wholly burned, their eye sockets were hollow, the fluid from their melted eyes had run down their cheeks,” (Hersey 20). Hersey paints a picture of broken people needing help that will never be given in the near future. The bomb is so powerful, it dehumanizes everyone in its path like the innocent people Mr. Tanimoto, a pastor of

The citizens of Hiroshima are the first to suffer from the most destructive weapon in human history. Japan is underprepared for the threat of a bombing from America during World War II by creating “safe areas” for families to meet up and gathering medical supplies and nonperishable food (Hersey 8). Within minutes of the bomb dropping a large fraction of Hiroshima’s hospitals and medical supplies are destroyed. Overran by the wounded, doctors and nurses are forced to help save the people who have a chance of living. Only 126 nurses survived out of 1,780 nurses and only six doctors out of thirty were able to function for the Red Cross hospital (Hersey 32). Dr. Sasaki’s glasses are lost when the bomb initially hit so Dr. Sasaki steals a wounded nurse’s glasses to use to bind up the worst cuts on victims. Dead bodies piled as high as the hospitals’ walls pile up as doctors and nurses do not have time to move hundreds of corpses. A few days after the commotion doctors and nurses begin to cremate thousands of bodies as most of the bodies are unidentifiable (Hersey). Hiroshima’s under preparedness for the strongest weapon in the world cause some foreigners to feel sympathy towards all of those who are