A comprehensive and provocative account of the race for nuclear weaponry and the horror that followed
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Photo credit: 509th Operations Group / public domain
Author Iain MacGregor | Price £25 (Hardback) | Released Out now
Iain MacGregor, author of acclaimed histories of Cold War Berlin and the Battle of Stalingrad, returns with a thought-provoking account of the race for the atomic bomb through the eyes of American and Japanese participants.
He guides us from the corridors of Berkeley and the White House to the New Mexico desert and the Trinity Test site. On the other side of the world, Japanese infantrymen desperately hold on in the brutal Pacific War, fire storms engulf Japanese cities and, with shocking finality, thousands in Hiroshima and Nagasaki are vapourised in nuclear blasts brighter than the Sun.
History of War readers will already be familiar with much in MacGregor’s book, yet he finds space to break new ground. The Hiroshima Men’s greatest achievement lies in MacGregor’s telling of the largely unknown story of Senkichi Awaya – the mayor of Hiroshima.
Killed instantly when Little Boy detonated, Awaya became “a man lost to history”. MacGregor uncovered Awaya’s remarkable life after finding his papers in the Tokyo National Library, stored there in obscurity since 1965.
MacGregor also dedicates admirable space to the man whose efforts continue to determine how we remember Hiroshima and think about nuclear weapons. The Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist and war reporter John Hersey travelled to Japan months after VJ Day and brought tales of the bombing’s human impact, including its deadly after-effects, to a Western audience for the first time.
The Hiroshima Men continues Hersey’s work, giving a comprehensive account of the facts and leaving us to decide if it was justifiable.
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