[In the following review, Benedict examines the cultural affects of Hiroshima.]

John Hersey's story [Hiroshima] of what happened to six ordinary persons at Hiroshima has been read all over America and heard by great radio audiences. Its stark simplicity has brought home to hundreds of thousands of persons what is meant to drop an atomic bomb on a great city. Some Americans have reacted with painful guilt at the thought that they belonged to the nation which catapulted this horror into the houses and streets of a city of whose very existence they had previously never heard. Many more have read it as the handwriting on the wall, prophesying the agony of the day when they will be citizens of a city marked for atomic destruction. Neither those who have read the book as a record of things past nor those who have read it as a portent of things to come have been able afterward to dismiss the negotiations of atomic commissions as if these statesmen were playing a mere impersonal game of diplomatic chess. The matter at issue has become for them scenes of the burned and wounded staggering endlessly along the roads, of living burial under fallen timbers and rubble, of vomit and suppuration and lingering death.

The hour-by-hour, day-by-day account of the experiences of a seamstress, a clerk, a Jesuit priest, a Japanese Methodist preacher, and two doctors is written with complete simplicity, and the calmness of the narrative throws into relief the nightmare magnitude of the destructive power the brains of man have brought into being. There is no preaching in this book. Not a single sentence "views with alarm." Even the page which calls attention to the fact that the bomb which destroyed Hiroshima was a mere feeler, one-tenth or one-twentieth as powerful as possible atomic bombs which could be developed in the future, is a matter-of-fact account of what well-equipped Japanese nuclear physicists learned about the nature of the bomb by investigating the ruins of the city. They mimeographed their findings in little books for private circulation in Japan during the months when the American authorities were maintaining security on the subject of atomic fission.

Now that John Hersey's book has been issued between covers it will be read by another vast audience. The fascination of the subject of atomic destruction and the pure human interest of the theory will put it high on the best-seller lists. It will stir a new set of readers to an understanding that all other issues in the world today pale beside the necessity of outlawing war among the nations.

Even at this moment, when the topical interest of John Hersey's story overshadows all else, Hiroshima is important on other counts. It is a capsule of Japanese life, and it tells more about our ex-enemy Japan than many learned books. Because so many people will identify themselves with the sufferers in Hiroshima, seeing their own dread foreshadowed in what has already happened there, they will miss the importance of this little volume as a sourcebook on Japanese behavior. But it is that too. The story is not a preview of what people would do if New York or Chicago were devastated by an atomic bomb. It is a story of how people in a Japanese city behaved. The record would be important because of this fact, even if it did not also tell the tale of how the curtain was raised upon the new Atomic Age.

For the Japanese did not behave as many Westerners had imagined they would. Even the German priests in the Novitiate three miles from the center of the city, one of them has said elsewhere, feared, until a messenger was dispatched to them, to go to the rescue of their brothers who were stationed in Hiroshima itself. They thought the populace might attack any Westerner. It was a reasonable fear; Westerners had dropped the bomb. But when they went into the city, no hand or voice was raised against them. A band of soldiers challenged them, on the theory that they might be American parachutists, and, when the priests identified themselves, the soldiers apologized. That was all. As the seamstress, a poor widow, said of the bombing, "It was war and we had to expect it." Hostility against Westerners was not shown in Hiroshima then or since. The first military commission after V-J Day was met at the airport by the Japanese officials drawn up in due order and invited to drink tea with their hosts. A year after the bombing the Hiroshima Planning Conference discussed plans for "erecting a group of buildings as a monument to the disaster and naming them the Institute of International Amity."

Nor was there mass hysteria among the sufferers at Hiroshima. Some Westerners had believed that toward the close of the war the time was ripe for such behavior among the Japanese in the homeland. It did not happen. With their leaders and doctors decimated and offices and hospitals destroyed, the populace acted, indeed, as sheep without shepherds. The able-bodied, during that first day, did not organize themselves into rescue teams. "Under many homes people screamed for help, but no one helped; in general survivors that day assisted only relatives or immediate friends, for they could not comprehend or tolerate a wider circle of misery." Nor did sufferers expect such help. In the parks and along the rivers where people streamed for refuge "it was not easy to distinguish the living from the dead, for most of the people lay still, with their eyes open. To Father Kleinsorge, an Occidental, the silence in the grove by the river, where hundreds of gruesomely wounded suffered together, was one of the most dreadful and awesome phenomena of his whole existence. The hurt ones were quiet; no one wept, much less screamed in pain; no one complained; none of the many who died did so noisily; not even children cried; very few people even spoke. And when Father Kleinsorge gave water to some whose faces had been almost blotted out by flash burns, they took their share and then raised themselves a little and bowed to him, in thanks."

Even the Reverend Mr. Tanimoto, the Methodist preacher who had studied theology in the United States, and who organized himself as a committee of one to carry water to the wounded and to ferry them across the river out of the way of the flames, was "as a Christian filled with compassion for those who were trapped," but "as a Japanese he was overwhelmed by the shame of being unhurt." "In his guilt he turned from right to left as he hurried and said to some of them, 'Excuse me for having no burden like yours.'"

Nine days after the bomb was dropped the Emperor spoke over the radio. In accepting defeat, he said, his people were to resolve "to bear the unbearable and to tolerate the intolerable and thus leave an imperishable foundation for generations to come." Over the radio in America his words seemed a kind of whistling in the dark. They did not seem to promise any specific kind of behavior. In Japanese eyes, however, they did. They promised a continuance of a behavior inculcated for centuries in Japan and expressed at Hiroshima when man by man and woman by woman they had "borne the unbearable" with patient fortitude. For the Japanese do not fight against circumstance; the bombing was a risk they had taken when they entered into war and "they had to expect it." Their duty is to fight weakness in themselves and to control their pain and personal sufferings. They do not have to reason why or to rail at a universe which requires such discipline. Westerners had doubted whether Japan could surrender; the Japanese knew that they could take capitulation with the same self-control the wounded and dying had showed at Hiroshima. If they could maintain such proprieties, they would not lose their self-respect in their own eyes.