The reporter who exposed hidden horror of Hiroshima

As the US government covered up the truth, an American journalist filed a story from ground zero that shook the world

- LESLEY MM BLUME

When it came to reporters who documented the aftermath of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima, John Hersey wasn't the first, but his account was the one that mattered.

Several journalists reporting for Western press outlets managed to reach the smouldering ruins of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in the days and weeks immediately following the bombings on 6 August and 9 August 1945. Two of these journalists published terrifying initial reports of the cities' destruction by single, primitive nuclear bombs.

At first, the US government seemed like it was hiding nothing about its experimental new mega weapons: US president Harry S Truman boasted in an announcement that the Hiroshima bomb - dubbed “Little Boy” - had packed an explosive payload greater than 20,000 tonnes of TNT and had “harness[ed] the basic power of the universe”.

The Japanese - and, by implication, anyone else who messed with the world's then only nuclear superpower - could expect a “rain of ruin from the air, the likes of which has never been seen on this earth”.

Military photos released of the atomic cities revealed their total decimation, but these images, as the Daily Express pointed out, did “not tell the whole story”. It would take more than a year after the nuclear attack on Hiroshima for the bigger story to emerge, courtesy of Hersey's 30,000-word investigative story in The New Yorker.

After the official surrender of Japanese forces in September 1945 – and following those initial alarming reports from Hiroshima – US occupation forces imposed a lockdown on both Western and Japanese reporters.