Hersey's Hiroshima

Drama of the Week

BBC

Drama, Fiction

3.9 • 1.9K Ratings

🗓️ 15 August 2025

⏱️ 58 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

John Hersey's ground-breaking account of the bombing of Hiroshima that brought the world face to face with the human reality of nuclear war. Told through the voices of six survivors, this powerful and unflinching retelling includes detailed accounts of the injury, loss, courage and consequence of that morning in August 1945.

Written after two weeks spent interviewing citizens in the devastated city, the article was originally published in The New Yorker in 1946 under tight secrecy, due to U.S. suppression of the bomb’s long-term effects. It sold out rapidly and helped shift public understanding from triumphalist narratives to the harrowing human cost of nuclear war.

Hailed by New York University as the most important work of journalism in the 20th century, Hiroshima remains a moving testament to the power of bearing witness.

Hersey focuses his account on six of the survivors he interviewed. Miss Toshiko Sasaki; Dr. Masakazu Fujii; Mrs. Hatsuyo Nakamura; Father Wilhelm Kleinsorge; Dr Terufumi Sasaki; Reverend Mr. Kiyoshi Tanimoto.

Part One takes us through the morning of the bombing and its immediate aftermath.

Read by: Akie Kotabe Ami Okumura Jones Dai Tabuchi Kae Alexander Mark Edel-Hunt Matt McCooey

Directed by Anne Isger Sound by Andy Garratt Production co-ordination by Sara Benaim and Jon Powell

A BBC Studios Audio Production

Transcript

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0:00.0	BBC Sounds, music, radio, podcasts.
0:05.3	Welcome to Drama of the Week.
0:09.2	Hiroshima by John Hersey.
0:13.1	Chapter 1. A noiseless flash.
0:19.8	At exactly 15 minutes past 8 in the morning, on August 6th, 1945 Japanese time,
0:28.0	at the moment when the atomic bomb flashed above Hiroshima,
0:32.2	Ms. Toshko Sasaki, a clerk in the personnel department of the East Asia Tin Works, had just sat down at her place in the plant office and was turning her head to speak to the girl at the next desk.
0:46.3	At that same moment, Dr. Masakazu Fuji was settling down cross-legged to read his paper the Osaka-Asahi on the porch of his private hospital
0:57.3	overhanging one of the seven Deltaic rivers which divide Hiroshima.
1:04.3	Mrs. Hatsyo Nakamura, a tailor's widow, stood by the window of her kitchen, watching a neighbor tearing down his
1:12.5	house because it lay in the path of an air raid defense fire lane.
1:18.4	Father Wilhelm Kleinsorke, a German priest of the Society of Jesus, reclined in his
1:25.3	underwear on a cot on the top floor of his order's three-story
1:29.3	mission house, reading a Jesuit magazine, Stimmon der Zeit.
1:35.6	Dr. Terufumi Sasaki, a young member of the surgical staff of the city's large, modern
1:41.8	Red Cross Hospital, walked along one of the hospital corridors
1:45.3	with a blood specimen for a vasamine test in his hand.
1:50.4	And the Reverend Mr. Kiyositani Moto,
1:53.5	pastor of the Hiroshima Methodist Church,
1:56.3	paused at the door of a rich man's house in Koi,
1:59.3	the city's western suburb.
2:02.1	A hundred thousand people were killed by the atomic bomb,
	...

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