Museum of Flight Foundation // Getty Images officials had immediately gone into overdrive to contain and spin the story of the A-bomb aftermath.Ī plane known as the Enola Gay, seen here on a tarmac, dropped the atomic bomb named 'Little Boy' on Hiroshima, Japan on August 6, 1945. Both in Washington, D.C., and in General MacArthur’s Tokyo, U.S. government had been put on the defensive after the initial Hiroshima press reports came out, during the chaotic first days of the occupation. The American journalism world was very close-knit then, and many of Hersey’s correspondent friends had been posted to Japan to cover the occupation. It is unclear whether Hersey and Shawn knew the extent of the restrictions that had been imposed on Tokyo-based reporters, but they likely had some idea.

When Americans opened their newspapers each morning, they instead saw news of the homecomings of American troops, the reconstruction of Europe, the Nuremberg trials of war criminals in Germany, and, of course, the escalating antagonism between the United States and the Soviet Union, among other international developments. Other stories had since edged out front-page Hiroshima and Nagasaki headlines.

Yet no one had yet followed up with a major, comprehensive story on the true fallout there, and what Hiroshima had looked like under the “impenetrable cloud of dust and smoke masked the target area,” as the New York Times put it.įurthermore, what initial coverage there had been was now tapering off. A few early-arriving Allied reporters had managed to get out some distressing dispatches about the fate of Hiroshima, and there were dozens seasoned, ambitious foreign correspondents now based in Tokyo.

Fallout by john solomon