Stephen Walker - Shockwave: The Countdown to Hiroshima

London: John Murray, 2005

Why is this book on the bedroom floor?: This is another of the bargains I picked up in the library booksale when I worked there. The price inside showed that it would have cost one lucky punter 40p, so I got it for half that because of library privilege.

About the Author: A prolific writer and television producer, Stephen Walker has won numerous awards for his work including an Emmy, a BAFTA and the Rose d'Or at Montreux. He is currently working on a book surrounding the events of Major Yuri Gagarin's flight into space.

Plot: A tense account of one of the most vivid events in history, when the city of Hiroshima suffered a spectacular bombing raid, destroying the city and ushering in the start of the nuclear age.

Review: On a bright, clear morning, high above the mountains which surrounded the port of Hiroshima, air raid sirens began to shriek. Although this was not an uncommon occurrence, this particular air raid differed in three important respects: firstly, the residents of Hiroshima were used to American bombers bypassing their city as they made their way up the so-called ‘Hirohito Highway’ towards other places, such as Tokyo. Secondly, Allied bombing raids on the Japanese mainland happened at a height of around five thousand feet at night, and the silver speck in the blue sky was just that, floating six miles above the port’s seven rivers. Thirdly, and perhaps the most discomforting aspect, this plane was alone.

As it turned out, the B-29 bomber which approached Hiroshima on the morning of August 6th, 1945 caused no direct harm, and was shortly dismissed as a reconnaissance plane. The end of the war was in sight, and the starving people of Japan were working towards the final confrontation with the United States. Having lost control of the Pacific theatre, there was only one possible route for the Americans to begin an armed assault, landing on the southernmost island of Kyushu before fighting a bloody battle to the death against a population conditioned to die with honour. 

Hiroshima itself had been remarkably untouched by the bombing raids. While Tokyo and Osaka had been almost totally destroyed, many thousands perishing in hellish firestorms, Hiroshima had suffered mostly in its absent war dead, its privations and its famines. This quiet port facing the Inland Sea was home to a large army garrison and some light industry, but in a country in which even the Emperor had to suffer bombs landing in his gardens, it was a mystery as to why they had been spared. There were even rumours that President Harry S. Truman’s mother was secreted there, sitting out the war in safety.

So, no, that single plane spotted just after eight o’clock on a clear, bright Pacific morning in southern Japan didn’t cause any harm. Apart from informing the two planes following its path an hour behind that the weather was perfect to drop a very new kind of weapon. A weapon which would change the world, the human race and the lives of hundreds of thousands of people in a tenth of a second.

There is room for debate as to when the atomic age truly began. Was it at 9.16am, on that Monday morning 1,900 feet above what is now the Shima Hospital, when less than 2% of enriched uranium fissioned and exploded? Or was at 5.29am a little less than a month earlier, when the scientists of the Manhattan Project counted down towards the shot of the Trinity test, imploding a tennis ball sized clump of plutonium with a yield of 20,000 tons of TNT? But perhaps the question isn’t so much when it began as much as whether we were ready for it. Thirty years on from the nominal end of the Cold War, and seventy-five years distant from the light of two suns searing the deserts of New Mexico, the nuclear nightmare is still scaringly real and yet unreal enough for us to refer to VJ Day, when an exhausted Japan accepted a surrender after two staggering punches of unimagined magnitude. Were we not still fascinated by the power of the mismatched pair of Little Boy and Fat Man, we would perhaps not be celebrating the consequences, rather mourning the action which led us there.

The uranium ore which was dug out of the ground in Central Africa had lain there for millions of years, and before physicists like Albert Einstein and Leo Szilard began to talk particle theory, would probably have laid there for a damn sight longer. In part inspired by Einstein’s Special Theory of Relativity, which expressed that energy and matter were in fact the same thing, the idea of using atomic physics to release huge amounts of energy from small amounts of material gained traction in the early part of the twentieth century, building on the work of pioneers like Marie and Pierre Curie. All matter has such potential, but the key lies in its controlled liberation. Atoms are hardy and were long-thought to be indivisible, but scientists began to realise that unstable isotopes of certain elements could be refined and treated in such a way that their neutron release could literally destroy their nuclei, potentially giving mankind limitless energy. However, this potential could also be used for ill, such as in a bomb, and hence while the Nazi shadow fell across Europe, leading scientists urged the United States of America to pursue atomic weapons research, lest Hitler’s scientists beat them in this final arms race.

And so years of work led to New Mexico - Los Alamos to be precise - where the scientists of the Manhattan Project put together a spherical object weighing four tons, with a revolutionary construction and firing unit, all of which remained classified until well after the test itself. In the middle of a lightning storm, the thing they named The Gadget was raised to the top of a rickety tower and housed in a tin shed, being guarded by a scientist called Don Horning. Attempting to concentrate on pulp novel Desert Island Decameron, Horning babysat the bomb which had cost at least $2 billion, while rain whipped across the doorway in the pitch black, knowing that wayward electrical signals were well capable of setting off the X-unit and bringing to bear the terrible destruction of an element which existed nowhere in nature.

As history has shown, the Trinity test was an unqualified success, blowing a huge hole in the desert and justifying the work of J. Robert Oppenheimer and his military counterpart, General Leslie Groves. The civilian and the Army man made an odd couple, but together they developed a weapon of war so awesome that its yield surprised the pair of them. Even President Truman, finding his restless feet in Potsdam at the same table as war leaders Churchill and Stalin, was moved to giddiness when he learned of Trinity’s potential application. The place it would be applied was going to be Japan, with the country’s only option to avoid the fate of New Mexico’s flora and fauna being a total and unconditional surrender. Tragically, Japan was relying on entreaties to the Soviet Union, who were not only massing troops in Manchuria to flood into Japan’s territory, but who also knew about the bomb thanks to a spy in the Manhattan camp. From the point at which The Gadget’s tower was vaporised, Hiroshima was on a countdown, which would end with an explosion heard only by a few hundred scientists and security-cleared Army personnel, as well as maybe the population of the states bordering the Jornada del Muerto, or the aptly-named Dead Man’s Journey.

Shockwave: The Countdown to Hiroshima watches that ticking clock, criss-crossing the Pacific Ocean on a flight which touches down on coral islands, salt flats, exquisite tea gardens and Imperial palaces. Stephen Walker’s book is an authoritative piece of popular history, solidly researched and relayed at a breathless pace. Leaving aside the shock inherent in that title, Walker tells the incredibly human story of an inhuman act.

The story of August 6th, 1945 has no real beginning, because each player in Walker’s telling can point to the exact moment they began to influence the course of the bomb’s descent. While some seem more important than others, such as Oppenheimer and Groves, can you discount Truman, who while surprised even at the project’s existence was determined not to derail a project which had cost billions in secret US dollars? Or can you leave aside secretary of war Henry L. Stimpson, the very essence of a Victorian diplomat, who ensured that primary target Kyoto was spared simply because he had spent his honeymoon there in the 1920s and had been captivated by its beauty? This is a major strength of Shockwave: the chemical mix of the disparate parties involved. Just as Los Alamos scientists used non-sparking beryllium in their construction tools, Shockwave gives equal consideration to its less obvious characters: rakish bombardiers, smart-mouthed secretaries, and gunners who fill their Zippos with aviation fuel. The quick flicks between characters give the book a much greater depth, Walker cutting his scenes at the exact point they should be cut.

This equality extends to the Japanese perspective. In actual fact, Walker’s prologue is rooted in the Shukkeien Gardens in Hiroshima, focussed on two prospective lovers as they start a chaste romance. It’s not too obvious a leap to suppose their brief touch remains so, but it also helps frame the device Walker uses to steady his pace - the section is noted as twelve hours before zero, and each subsequent chapter is fixed with a date and a time, so the reader is well aware of how quickly time is running out. 

There is a real dichotomy between the technological leaps being taken by the Americans and the circumstances of the Japanese. The former take a speck of land in the ocean which only weeks before was being fought for, and level it out to create a bombing group complete with the mile-long runways needed for their gleaming high-altitude bombers. In contrast, the people of Hiroshima are grateful for their morning newspaper so they can start a fire to warm water, and children are sent to pick grass so their families can survive another day.

Much like another book reviewed previously here (Rowland White’s Vulcan 607), stories of this type rely on the human element rather than the technological, and it’s only a very skilled writer who can merge the two to create a book you simply cannot put down. Walker achieves this with aplomb, because for such a well-known event he describes the attack on Hiroshima with a freshness that can only come from its mastery of detail. Unlike the other book mentioned, there is very little ‘garden shed’ about the 509th Composite Group and their pugnacious leader Colonel Paul Tibbets, and hence very little which can stop them dropping an atom bomb, yet still it leaves you on the edge of whatever you choose to sit on.

However, for all its balance, I feel you come away from Shockwave in no doubt that the use of the bomb was an extreme and callous act of brutality. There is no way to leave aside that an American invasion of Japan would have been a bloody mess (the US minted so many Purple Hearts for the campaign in anticipation of its casualties that they haven’t needed to manufacture any since), with estimates of Allied casualties of possibly a million or more, but with Walker’s researches taking him from laboratories to airfields with no expense spared (including an ice cream which cost $25,000 to create), it seems clear to me that no American was going to be able to spare Hiroshima its fate. Not even an abdication by the Emperor, a living God, would have done so. The biggest American advocate of not using the weapon, Stimpson, seemed to droop and give in when faced with its power.

But then the lead-up to the morning itself is peppered with shocking detail: Hiroshima was spared from bombing precisely because it was a ‘clean’ target which would allow them to measure the bomb’s destructive power; Little Boy was daubed with messages of revenge for the sinking of the U.S.S. Indianapolis, which itself had delivered the core of the bomb; military planners had suggested dropping the bomb with powerful sirens so people would look up at the moment of the flash and be blinded.

This is not a review which will deal with the conduct of the Japanese (or the Americans), and likewise Shockwave only touches tangentially on them, but it’s perhaps enough to say that the gung-ho spirit of the otherness of a bomb which can destroy a city pales into comparison with the charred living skeletons encountered by fortunate survivors further away from the blast’s hypocentre. Walker through his archive research and personal interviews discovers a subsequent sorrow with many of the crew members of Enola Gay and Bockscar, who between them caused the deaths of some quarter of a million people, but as for guilt? That seemed to be in much smaller quantities than the total weight of the fissile material.

The aftermath of that instant in Hiroshima is a much tougher journey than the fourteen hour one undertaken by the crew under Colonel Paul Tibbets. With the city’s seven rivers clogged with corpses and a shortage of medical aid, people with ninety percent burns staggered to the T-shaped Aioi Bridge to be given handfuls of cooking oil and wrapped in rags and leaves. Ironically, it was Major Tom Ferebee’s aiming point, its distinctiveness being labelled ‘the most perfect aiming point of the whole damn war’. A firestorm, whipped by the paper and timber buildings, scorched much of the city and killed still more. Then, a couple of hours after the detonation and destruction, a thunderstorm swept in, coating survivors in huge sticky droplets of black rain, chock full of dust, dirt and radioactive particles. With seventy thousand pipe breaks in Hiroshima’s water supply, people gratefully lapped up the deadly moisture to counteract the broiling sun and heat of the fires. 

It is only in studies like these when we find out the true cost of war. While Shockwave is perhaps not the most rigorous academic study (which is not to say that it’s badly written or researched), bare facts will only suggest half the story of Hiroshima and its twin city in tragedy, Nagasaki. Stephen Walker has set out to put life into the photographs we know, and fill in the blanks of what we don’t. This tale has images of heroism, villainy, honesty and deception. It has great scientific triumphs and inescapable suffering. It is at once absorbing in its detail yet a precise combination of oral and archival history. I can’t think of a better way in which to fully detail an event humanity will always carry with it, from beneath the cradle of life in Africa to the skies above Japan, and if somebody manages it, then they’re one hell of a historian.

Will I keep this book on the bedroom floor?: No, but for the very good reason that a new edition of it was published about two weeks ago, so I would very much like that copy rather than the one I have.