As the title implies, Iain MacGregor’s The Hiroshima Men is a people-centric history of the atomic bombing of Japan in 1945. In my view it’s only partially successful in that aim. In telling the stories of the people involved, the book also tries to cover, in various degrees of detail, the development of the bomb, the B-29 development program and subsequent operations against Japan, the Pacific campaign from Coral Sea to Okinawa, the decision making processes in the Roosevelt–Truman government and US-British-USSR alliance politics. Those topics are obviously relevant to the subject at hand, but collectively it’s a lot of ground to cover in 366 pages, especially given that there are many volumes already dedicated to each.
However, one of the main threads in the book—and for me the most interesting one—is the story of how journalist John Richard Hersey came to write a ground-breaking 30,000 word article Hiroshima, published in The New Yorker in August 1946 for the first anniversary of the bombing. The article was an immediate success, driving up the magazine’s sales. The article was widely reprinted internationally, later as a book, and was adapted for radio within the United States. The New Yorker said in its introduction that it was devoting its entire editorial space in that issue
to an article on the almost complete obliteration of a city. It does so in the conviction that few of us have yet comprehended the all but incredible destructive power of this weapon and that everyone might well take time to consider the terrible implications of its use.
As Macgregor tells it, the piece was highly influential in shifting public opinion away from the triumphalism that followed the end of the war to a more sympathetic appreciation of the suffering of enemy non-combatants. And, in no small way, by bringing the horrors of atomic weapons to public attention, the seeds were sown for the public perceptions of the Cold War nuclear stand-off.
MacGregor also covers the experience of Hiroshima’s civilian population, most effectively in a moving prologue describing his interview with a ‘composed, elderly Japanese lady’, Michiko Kodama, a survivor of the Hiroshima bomb. Kodama tells of the sights she saw at the time and of the prolonged suffering and deaths of several family members in the years that followed.
There is also an effective and interesting thread on the mayor of Hiroshima at the time of the attack, Senkichi Awaya, who died in the initial blast. Awaya had long worried about the likelihood of an attack on his city, having seen the results of the devastating fire bombing of Tokyo in March 1945. As well as the construction of shelters, the civil defence of Hiroshima and other Japanese cities at the time was to raze strips of buildings in an attempt to produce firebreaks. Of course, such steps were completely ineffective against an atomic explosion, though it perhaps spared some of the displaced people who moved out to the countryside instead.
For a typical reader of The Strategist, this book, published in 2025, is likely to prove interesting, though maybe less than completely satisfying in some respects. For example, it doesn’t attempt to provide a detailed history of the development of the atomic bomb, being content with a broad—and necessarily abbreviated—overview of the processes, places and people involved. Consequently, many of the key players in that program, such as physicists Leo Szilard, Neils Bohr, Enrico Fermi and even program leaders General Leslie Groves and Robert Oppenheimer have much less space devoted to them than people in other aspects of the story. That’s not a great drawback in one way, because anyone interested in a deeper dive into the weapon program is likely already aware of Richard Rhode’s magisterial The Making of the Atomic Bomb which, even three decades years after publication, remains the go-to on the subject.
Similarly, readers interested in the conduct of the Pacific campaign should start with Ian Toll’s Pacific War trilogy (my Strategist review of Volume I is here), while the American decision-making process and the various ructions within Japan in the closing stages of the war are covered in J Samuel Walker’s 1997 Prompt and Utter Destruction: Truman and the use of atomic bombs against Japan, which is something of a classic on the topic (though his conclusions remain contested).
Overall, for anyone coming new to the subject of the atomic bombing of Japan, this book is probably a good starting point. And it covers so much ground (probably too much), there’s likely something new for most people. The style is very readable, marred only by a few poorly edited sentences—a couple of which make no sense even on repeated reading—and the odd technical error, such as a reference to Lockheed P-38 Lightnings flying from carriers.