He clearly accomplished his goal, but I wanted to know how he did it, how he depicted Japanese citizens as human beings, and converted his audiences’ latent hatred into one of compassion so that the reader could imagine himself/herself as the victim of a nuclear holocaust. As a former journalist and journalism instructor, my interest in the methods Hersey used to construct his piece so artfully was engendered from a lifetime of attempts at objective reporting. So just how did he do it, and why?

I believe his ultimate purpose, and his greatest feat, showed that this new kind of warfare resulted in death on such a terrible scale and in such a horrible manner that nuclear war could no longer be considered
an option.

…his ultimate purpose, and his greatest feat, showed that this new kind of warfare resulted in death on such a terrible scale and in such a horrible manner that nuclear war could no longer be considered an option.

I discovered many clues into his methods by an examination of his narrative style, one that Roger Angell described in an article in the New Yorker ^[2] nearly 50 years after the publication of Hiroshima. He said Hersey’s story was “stripped of mannerism, sentimentality, and even minimal emphasis… Hersey’s style and the atrocity of his subject matter contrive to shift the tone from contemporary war reporting to what feels like ancient tragedy.”

I think Angell summarized the greatness of Hersey’s work, but he did not really detail how the war correspondent did it. So I began my quest by first looking at Hersey’s personal history and then his experiences as a war reporter. I found out that Hersey was born in Tientsin, China, the youngest son of Roscoe and Grace Baird Hersey, American protestant missionaries. The importance of his Christian upbringing will become apparent as I note some of the scenes and his selection of the persons he interviewed and put in his story.

In 1936-37 he studied eighteenth-century English literature at Clare College, Cambridge and then went to work for Time Magazine, which was published by Henry Luce, who also was born in China. The two men shared a love for the Chinese, and a hatred for the Japanese after they stormed into China at the beginning of World War II in Asia.

In July 1942, Hersey wrote Men on Bataan, a book he later disowned because of its flattering assessment of General Douglas MacArthur. But this work, according to David Sanders, one of the foremost experts on Hersey, had much in common with his later and most famous work, Hiroshima, because it depended on Hersey’s “urgent effort — amounting to a duty — to report what he had not seen by a strenuously sympathetic effort to understand the testimony of those who had.”