The Hiroshima Men

At 8:15 a.m. on August 6, 1945, the Japanese port city of Hiroshima was struck by the world’s first atomic bomb. Built in the US by the top-secret Manhattan Project and delivered by a B-29 Superfortress, a revolutionary long-range bomber, the weapon destroyed large swaths of the city, instantly killing tens of thousands. The world would never be the same again.

The Hiroshima Men’s narrative recounts the decade-long journey towards this first atomic attack. It charts the race for nuclear technology before and during the Second World War, as the Allies fought the Axis powers in Europe, North Africa, China, and across the Pacific, and is seen through the experiences of several key figures: General Leslie Groves, leader of the Manhattan Project alongside Robert Oppenheimer; pioneering Army Air Force bomber pilot Colonel Paul Tibbets II; the mayor of Hiroshima, Senkichi Awaya, who died alongside over eighty thousand of his fellow citizens; and Pulitzer Prize–winning novelist John Hersey, who travelled to post-war Japan to expose the devastation the bomb had inflicted upon the city and, in a historic New Yorker article, described in unflinching detail the dangers posed by its deadly after-effect, radiation poisoning.

This thrilling account takes the reader from the corridors of power in the White House and the Pentagon to the test sites of New Mexico; from the air war above Germany to the Potsdam Conference of Truman, Churchill, and Stalin; to the savage reconquest of the Pacific and the deadly firebombing air raids across the Japanese islands.

The Hiroshima Men also includes Japanese perspectives — a vital aspect often missing from Western narratives — to complete MacGregor’s nuanced, deeply human account of the bombing’s meaning and aftermath.