8:15 a.m. in Hiroshima; 11:02 in Nagasaki

This weekend marked the 81st anniversary of the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Today, I want to share some important and interesting new writing about the bombings — this originally started as a preamble to a column about AI and the Manhattan Project, but there was more to say than I initially imagined, so decided to send you this as a standalone and then that AI column will come to you tomorrow. So: Stay tuned!

I’ve spent a lot of this last year speaking about my oral history, The Devil Reached Toward the Sky, and had the chance this winter to go to Los Alamos itself.

• I try to steer clear of recommending items from that site, but if you’ve been on the fence about getting a copy, The Devil Reached Toward the Sky, is currently just $15 on Amazon, the cheapest it’s ever been there. (Signed copies, of course, are always available through my local indie, Phoenix Books!)

This was my second trip to Los Alamos — I highly recommend visiting Los Alamos if you ever find yourself even semi-close to Albuquerque or Santa Fe! — and I was able to tour the room where the bombs were assembled, the ground where explosives were tested, and the buildings where the Manhattan Project unfolded, as part of the National Historic Site that’s spread across the key facilities of Los Alamos, Hanford, and Oak Ridge. This spring, the incredible historical preservation team at Los Alamos found an old model of the “Gadget” and brought it back to the building that used to serve as the assembly facility, and I got to be one of the first people since July 15, 1945, to see the “Gadget” back in that room:

Now onto some new writing and scholarship:

First, the great Alex Wellerstein has written about the “Hiroshima Maidens” for the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists. The Hiroshima Maidens were a group of schoolchildren who had been injured and disfigured by the blast, who came to the US ten years after the attack for plastic surgery and treatment. As Wellerstein writes, “The primary intent was to ease their individual suffering, but the trip was understood by all involved to be more than that: the wounds being healed were not just physical, but political.” The trip was organized by another survivor, Kiyoshi Tanimoto — more about him below — and he ended up doing an episode of “This is Your Life” that also featured a (very drunk) Capt. Robert Lewis, the co-pilot of the Enola Gay — more about him below too! It appears to have been a terrible experience for all involved. The reconstructive surgeries and treatment took a year, while the “Maidens” lived with host families, and as Wellerstein writes and wrestles with, their story start-to-finish has two very different lenses — one optimistic story of rebirth, another darker and more cynical about the whitewashing of the atomic bombings. It’s a piece well worth reading.

• Alex Wellerstein is fantastic and thoughtful — he’s who I hope to grow up to be someday as a nuclear historian — and I’ve recommended before his now-Harry Truman Award-winning book, THE MOST AWFUL RESPONSIBILITY, which delves into how Truman set the precedents for presidential handling of atomic weapons and traces how it seems likely that Truman didn’t even know that there was a second bomb ready to drop on Nagasaki. Seriously, it’s a good book and one that significantly rewrites our understanding of World War II, presidents, and nuclear weapons.

Second, Tanimoto — one of the six survivors profiled in John Hersey’s world-shattering story and book, HIROSHIMA — is himself is back in the news too, because Random House has now published his lost memoir. Tanimoto was a 36-six-year-old Methodist minister on the morning of August 6th, on the outskirts of the city, and spent that day and the following ones helping to rescue victims and then, as days turned to weeks, trying to survive the city’s devastation himself amid famine and destruction. Then in the years and decades after the end of the war, Tanimoto became a leading peace activist; he even accompanied the “Hiroshima Maidens” mentioned above to the US in 1955.

Tanimoto wrote his own memoir of the bomb in the late 1940s and sent a copy of Hersey, where it’s evidently laid for decades in Hersey’s papers at Yale University, until the writer’s grandson found it anew in 2023. Now it’s been published as HIROSHIMA, 8:15, and represents an important new addition — particularly in English — to the vanishingly few memoirs we have of that era.

The opening of his memoir, which I read for the first time this year, highlighted one of the aspects of the war that I discuss in almost every book talk — how famine and starvation were already sweeping Japan even before the bombings:

I wrote about this last year in my column, “Were the atomic bombings necessary?” but we too often oversimplify the morality and ethics of dropping the bombs as a story of “should the US invade or drop the bomb?” Those first words of Tanimoto’s book are an important reminder that it was never that simple. Japan faced a dire situation, between firebombings and starvation, even before the dropping of either bomb, and even after the second bombing of Nagasaki, the Japanese surrender was a more close-run thing than we realized, as the right-wing elements of the Japanese government attempted a coup to stall the emperor’s surrender.

The whole book is just a little over a hundred pages, with diary entries that follow Tanimoto through the hellstorm of the bombing, his rescue efforts, and then the initial stages of the recovery in the weeks and months that follow, and how he rebuilt his church community. It’s deeply human and a still-rare first-hand perspective for us to read. It’s harrowing, as any of these stories are, but one that future scholars will be glad to have in their archive.

Third, and lastly, there was a more fun story in the New York Times this weekend about one of its reporters stumbling upon the Enola Gay logbook of copilot Capt. Lewis, which readers might remember I quote from extensively in the relevant chapter of The Devil Reached Toward the Sky. The original copy of the logbook is for sale for $950,000 from an antiquarian book dealer, if you’re keen for a piece of history.

More tomorrow about the modern-day legacy and impact of the Manhattan Project….

GMG