John
Hersey,
the son of US missionary parents, was born in China
on 17th June, 1914. After graduating from Yale
University he became correspondent in the Far East for Time
Magazine.
During
the Second World War Hersey also wrote for Life
magazine and the New Yorker.
He accompanied the US Army in the invasion
of Sicily
and Italy.
Hersey used some of the information he gathered as a war journalist
for his best-selling novel A Bell for Adano (1944). The book
won the Pulitzer
Prize in
1945.
In 1944
Hersey covered the war in the Pacific
and his many articles included one detailing the heroism of Lieutenant
John F Kennedy when his Motor Torpedo
Boat was sunk close to the Soloman Islands.
Hersey
was one of the first western journalists to arrive in Hiroshima
after the atom bomb explosion on 6th August
1945. Commission by the New Yorker
to write a series of articles on the effects of a nuclear explosion,
he decided to focus on the experiences of six people who had been
in the city: two doctors, a Protestant minister, a widowed seamstress,
a young female factory worker and a German Catholic priest. When the
editor saw the articles he decided to devote one issue (31st August,
1946) to the material. Later that year it was published as the book
Hiroshima (1946).
Other books
by Hersey include the Child Buyer
(1947), The War Lover (1959),
Under the Eye of the Storm (1967),
The Walnut Door (1977), Antonietta
(1991) and Key West Tales (1993).
John Hersey died in Key West, Florida, on 24th
March, 1993.
(1)
John Hersey wrote about the heroism of John
F. Kennedy after interviewing members
of the crew of the American Motor Torpedo Boat that sank in the Blackett
Straight. The article appeared in the New Yorker on 17th June
1944.
All morning they watched for the plane which they thought would be
looking for them. They cursed war in general and PTs in particular.
At about ten o'clock the hulk heaved a moist sigh and turned turtle.
McMahon and Johnston had to hang on as best they could. It was clear
that the remains of the 109 would soon sink. When the sun had passed
the meridian, Kennedy said, "We will swim to that small island,"
pointing to one of a group three miles to the southeast. "We
have less chance of making it than some of these other islands here,
but there'll be less chance of Japs, too." Those
who could not swim well grouped themselves around a long two-by-six
timber with which carpenters had braced the 37-millimetre cannon on
deck and which had been knocked overboard by the force of the collision.
They tied several pairs of shoes to the timber, as well as the ship's
lantern, wrapped in a life jacket to keep it afloat. Thorn took charge
of this unwieldy group. Kennedy took McMahon in tow again. He cut
loose one end of a long strap on McMahon's Mae West and took the end
in his teeth. He swam breast stroke, pulling the helpless McMahon
along on his back. It took over five hours to reach the island. Water
lapped into Kennedy's mouth through his clenched teeth, and he swallowed
a lot. The salt water cut into McMahon's awful burns, but he did not
complain. Every few minutes, when Kennedy stopped to rest,
taking the strap out of his mouth and holding it in his hand, McMahon
would simply say, "How far do we have to go?"
Kennedy would reply, "We're
going good." Then he would ask, "How do you feel, Mac?"
McMahon always answered,
"I'm OK, Mr Kennedy. How about you?"
In spite of his burden,
Kennedy beat the other men to the reef that surrounded the island.
He left McMahon on the reef and told him to keep low, so as not to
be spotted by Japs. Kennedy went ahead and explored the island. It
was only a hundred yards in diameter; coconuts on the trees but none
on the ground, no visible Japs. Just as the others reached the island,
one of them spotted a Japanese barge chugging along close to shore.
They all lay low. The barge went on.
(2)
John
Hersey, Hiroshima (1946)
On
August 7th, the
Japanese radio broadcast for the first time a succinct announcement
that very few, if any, of the people most concerned with its content,
the survivors in Hiroshima, happened to hear: "Hiroshima suffered
considerable damage as the result of an attack by a few B-29s. It
is believed that a new type of bomb was used. The details are being
investigated." Nor is it probable that any of the survivors happened
to be tuned in on a short-wave rebroadcast of an extraordinary announcement
by the president of the United States, which identified the new bomb
as atomic: "That bomb had more power than twenty thousand tons
of TNT. It had more than two thousand times the blast power of the
British Grand Slam, which is the largest bomb ever yet used in the
history of warfare." Those victims who were able to worry at
all about what had happened thought of it and discussed it in more
primitive, childish terms – gasoline sprinkled from an airplane,
maybe, or some combustible gas, or a big cluster of incendiaries,
or the work of parachutists; but, even if they had known the truth,
most of them were too busy or too weary or too badly hurt to care
that they were the objects of the first great experiment in the use
of atomic power, which (as the voices on the short wave shouted) no
country except the United States, with its industrial know-how, its
willingness to throw two billion gold dollars into an important wartime
gamble, could possibly have developed.
(3)
John Hersey, Hiroshima (1946)
The lot of Drs. Fujii, Kanda, and Machii right after the explosion–and,
as these three were typical, that of the majority of the physicians
and surgeons of Hiroshima–with their offices and hospitals destroyed,
their equipment scattered, their own bodies incapacitated in varying
degrees, explained why so many citizens who were hurt went untended
and why so many who might have lived died. Of a hundred and fifty
doctors in the city, sixty-five were already dead and most of the
rest were wounded. Of 1,780 nurses, 1,654 were dead or too badly hurt
to work. In the biggest hospital, that of the Red Cross, only six
doctors out of thirty were able to function, and only ten nurses out
of more than two hundred. The sole uninjured doctor on the Red Cross
Hospital staff was Dr. Sasaki. After the explosion, he hurried to
a storeroom to fetch bandages. This room, like everything he had seen
as he ran through the hospital, was chaotic–bottles of medicines
thrown off shelves and broken, salves spattered on the walls, instruments
strewn everywhere. He grabbed up some bandages and an unbroken bottle
of mercurochrome, hurried back to the chief surgeon, and bandaged
his cuts. Then he went out into the corridor and began patching up
the wounded patients and the doctors and nurses there. He blundered
so without his glasses that he took a pair off the face of a wounded
nurse, and although they only approximately compensated for the errors
of his vision, they were better than nothing.
(4)
John
Hersey, Hiroshima (1946)
Dr. Sasaki and his colleagues
at the Red Cross Hospital watched the unprecedented disease unfold
and at last evolved a theory about its nature. It had, they decided,
three stages. The first stage had been all over before the doctors
even knew they were dealing with a new sickness; it was the direct
reaction to the bombardment of the body, at the moment when the bomb
went off, by neutrons, beta particles, and gamma rays. The apparently
uninjured people who had died so mysteriously in the first few hours
or days had succumbed in this first stage. It killed ninety-five per
cent of the people within a half-mile of the center, and many thousands
who were farther away. The doctors realized in retrospect that even
though most of these dead had also suffered from burns and blast effects,
they had absorbed enough radiation to kill them. The rays simply destroyed
body cells– caused their nuclei to degenerate and broke their
walls. Many people who did not die right away came down with nausea,
headache, diarrhea, malaise, and fever, which lasted several days.
Doctors could not be certain whether some of these symptoms were the
result of radiation or nervous shock. The second stage set in ten
or fifteen days after the bombing. Its first symptom was falling hair.
Diarrhea and fever, which in some cases went as high as 106, came
next. Twenty-five to thirty days after the explosion, blood disorders
appeared: gums bled, the white-blood-cell count dropped sharply, and
petechiae [eruptions] appeared on the skin and mucous membranes. The
drop in the number of white blood corpuscles reduced the patient's
capacity to resist infection, so open wounds were unusually slow in
healing and many of the sick developed sore throats and mouths. The
two key symptoms, on which the doctors came to base their prognosis,
were fever and the lowered white-corpuscle count. If fever remained
steady and high, the patient's chances for survival were poor. The
white count almost always dropped below four thousand; a patient whose
count fell below one thousand had little hope of living. Toward the
end of the second stage, if the patient survived, anemia, or a drop
in the red blood count, also set in. The third stage was the reaction
that came when the body struggled to compensate for its ills–when,
for instance, the white count not only returned to normal but increased
to much higher than normal levels. In this stage, many patients died
of complications, such as infections in the chest cavity. Most burns
healed with deep layers of pink, rubbery scar tissue, known as keloid
tumors. The duration of the disease varied, depending on the patient's
constitution and the amount of radiation he had received. Some victims
recovered in a week; with others the disease dragged on for months.
As the symptoms revealed
themselves, it became clear that many of them resembled the effects
of overdoses of X-ray, and the doctors based their therapy on that
likeness. They gave victims liver extract, blood transfusions, and
vitamins, especially Bl. The shortage of supplies and instruments
hampered them. Allied doctors who came in after the surrender found
plasma and penicillin very effective. Since the blood disorders were,
in the long run, the predominant factor in the disease, some of the
Japanese doctors evolved a theory as to the seat of the delayed sickness.
They thought that perhaps gamma rays, entering the body at the time
of the explosion, made the phosphorus in the victims' bones radioactive,
and that they in turn emitted beta particles, which, though they could
not penetrate far through flesh, could enter the bone marrow, where
blood is manufactured, and gradually tear it down. Whatever its source,
the disease had some baffling quirks. Not all the patients exhibited
all the main symptoms. People who suffered flash burns were protected,
to a considerable extent, from radiation sickness. Those who had lain
quietly for days or even hours after the bombing were much less liable
to get sick than those who had been active. Gray hair seldom fell
out. And, as if nature were protecting man against his own ingenuity,
the reproductive processes were affected for a time; men became sterile,
women had miscarriages, menstruation stopped.
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