NAGASAKI

Witnesses to horrific history tell their stories.

There are more than 100,000 still-living hibakusha—survivors of the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Sheftall’s book recounts the survivor memories of Aug. 9, 1945, when the world’s first plutonium bomb was dropped on Nagasaki, three days after the world’s first atomic weapon was dropped on Hiroshima. The decision to drop a second bomb so soon after the first was to bluff the Japanese into believing that there were many more such weapons in the American arsenal, the author says, and that they would continue to fall until Japan surrendered unconditionally. The Japanese, until that point, had seemed “prepared to die en masse in a final decisive battle…rather than dishonor [the country] with surrender.” Both sides were in a “strategic standoff in which bluff and resolve were indistinguishable.” American forces ran a series of conventional bombings across Japan designed to break the Japanese resolve. The biggest of those hit Tokyo in March 1945, when 3,000 airmen dropped seven tons of bombs in an unprecedented nighttime low-altitude raid that destroyed 41 square kilometers of the city, killed 100,000, and left one million people homeless. Japanese leaders still did not surrender, setting the course of the war toward Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Sheftall alternates stories of U.S. bombing preparations with vivid stories from Japanese survivors, notably Masako and Michiko, female workers in Mitsubishi ordnance plants. The book details the post-bombing meetings of the Japanese Supreme War Council that led to Japan’s surrender on Aug. 15. Sheftall writes of one teenager’s reaction to the war’s conclusion: “Sueko was overcome with a powerful mixture of regret and sadness over the defeat. She also felt—very much to her shame—relief that she was going to survive. As she began to bawl, her mother stroked her back, softly saying, ‘The war is over….Thank goodness.’”

A definitive account of a watershed moment in history.