Hiroshima

Broadcast for the first time since 1948, to tie in with BBC Radio 4’s documentary Hersey’s Hiroshima (Monday 22 August at 11pm -11.30pm, Radio 4), Radio 4 Extra broadcasts John Hersey’s unflinching 30,000 word account of the holocaust in Hiroshima.

Hersey’s account is the story of what happened to six citizens of Hiroshima when the city was almost obliterated by a single atomic bomb. The action starts a few minutes before the bomb was dropped and traces the horrors of the days and weeks that followed.

The narrative was the work of the American journalist John Hersey (1914 – 1993), who visited the devastated city to piece the story together.

Hersey's account was first published on 31 August 1946 by The New Yorker, which devoted an entire issue to Hiroshima. The story created a sensation in world journalism and listeners heard it for the first time in four parts on successive nights on the BBC Third Programme, beginning on 14 October 1946. It was then broadcast on the Light Programme on Saturday 30 November 1946 as a continuous programme for the benefit of a wider audience. Today’s programme is a new production of the shorter script broadcast on the Third Programme on 6 August 1948.

Alistair Cooke wrote in the Radio Times on 22 November 1946 that “nobody has described what it felt like to be a human being exposed to the swift approach of the bomb itself. Hersey agreed to try and redress the balance”.

Cooke called it the greatest piece of journalism ever and around 50 years later it was given first place in the panoply of 20th Century journalism.

First broadcast on the BBC’s Third Programme in 1948.

Publicity contact: RH