Shockwave: The Countdown to Hiroshima [Paperback]

Shockwave is not a comprehensive history, nor a traditional 'ideas' book, but it does exactly what it sets out to do - namely to give you a detailed account of the weeks running up to the dropping of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima. Opening with the Trinity test, it takes you into the minds of General Groves and the team that built the bomb, it takes you close to Henry Stimson and Harry Truman, the men who took the decision to drop it, and it brings to startling life the characters of the airmen who set off from Tinian Island and actually dropped that bomb.

The dramatic structure of the book is very clever and works magnificently. Walker plays with our expectations using a novelistic technique that resembles Thornton Wilder's 'Bridge of San Luis Rey'. We all know the bomb went off. We all know what happened when it did. But focusing close-up on about fifteen characters, allows him to play out the drama with intricate detail, slowing the pace down as the actual explosion approaches. He spins out the tension superbly. And his description of the catastrophe itself is as horrifying as one could imagine.

The book is also subversive. It reminds you viscerally of something historians and analysts are inclined to forget. That the making of the bomb and its successful use over Hiroshima was an exciting process. The men who did it were not evil. At the top, they may have been misguided, but further down the chain, men were often motivated by the sheer excitement of seeing whether they could make the bomb 'Little Boy' work. Walker's compelling narrative style means that you cannot help identifying with these scientists and airmen. You too become caught up in making history. This is a brilliant, enthralling and very unusual book.

"Even blades of grass were driven into flesh." - Author Stephen Walker about the shockwave of the Hiroshima A-bomb

The world already knows the ending to Stephen Walker's book, SHOCKWAVE. But here, he brings the story of the atomic bomb up close and personal in a narrative based on eyewitness accounts of the Trinity test at White Sands, NM, on July 16, 1945, the dropping of "Little Boy" by the B-29 named the Enola Gay on Hiroshima On August 6, and the experiences of Japanese survivors of the blast.

The development of humankind's ultimate weapon at Los Alamos, NM, was an ultra top secret project accomplished by an army of scientists and technicians headed by J. Robert Oppenheimer and Major General Leslie Groves, many of whom, including one who was a Soviet spy, watched in stunned awe as a nuclear device was first successfully detonated at White Sands. But perhaps no experience of the event matched that of Georgia Green:

"Fifty miles north of Ground Zero, an eighteen-year-old girl was traveling in the front seat of a car next to her brother-in-law, Joe Willis. The girl's name was Georgia Green, and Joe was driving her to an early-morning music lesson in Albuquerque ... As they passed the town of Lemitar along an empty Highway 85, a flash of extraordinary brilliance suddenly filled the landscape. Georgia grabbed her brother-in-law's arm. 'What was that?' she cried."

Georgia Green, you understand, was blind.

The story next shifts to the Pacific island of Tinian where the 509th Composite (bombing) Group commanded by Colonel Paul Tibbets, after extensive training of his command in Wendover, UT, prepares to receive, assemble, and deliver the world's first atomic weapon on one of three Japanese cities, the ultimate target to be chosen only after the mission was already in the air and twenty-five miles from the coast of Japan. For the Enola Gay's crew, the six and one-half hour flight from Tinian to Hiroshima encompassed drama and boredom:

"On (Little Boy's) upper surface were the three green safety plugs that blocked the firing signal from the fuse. For a moment (bomb technician) Jeppson stood beside the trembling bomb holding his three red plugs. He was alone in the bomb bay. Many years later the thought occurred to him: 'If I had removed the green safety plugs and then simply tossed the red ones onto the bomb-bay doors, the bomb would have been a dud and there would have been no evidence. I'm willing to believe that a dud would have forced some high-level considerations. Possibly the invasion of Japan would have happened.' In a very real sense the power to change history now rested directly with him."

"In the narrow, thirty-foot pressurized tunnel that separated the nose and the waist compartments, Jake Beser lay stretched out, his first chance to sleep in twenty-seven hours. (Tail gunner) Bob Caron, assistant engineer Robert Shumard, and radar operator Joe Stiborik took turns rolling oranges down the tunnel toward him. Finally one bounced on Beser's head, waking him up."

Walker's brilliant achievement with SHOCKWAVE is the terrible fascination and foreboding engendered in the reader as the bomb inexorably approaches its target because interspersed within the narrative are sections which focus on the lives of several unsuspecting Hiroshima residents: army physician Dr. Shuntaro Hida, press photographer Yoshito Matsushige, schoolgirl Taeko Nakamae, army corporal Toshiaki Tanaka, engineering student Sunao Tsuboi, Special Attack Forces volunteer Isao Wada. On the evening of August 5th:

"In the stillness of the Shukkeien Garden ... Sunao Tsuboi and his lover, Reiko, lay side by side on the grass. They had entered the garden at dusk. The cool dark lake spread before them, crisscrossed by its tiny wooden bridges and miniature teahouses. The thick scent of flowers carried on the night air, like the perfume of the letters she sometimes sent him. Occasionally they heard the splash of carp ... Or perhaps the old heron had woken ... (They lay) like this together for hours on the still-warm grass, their fingers barely brushing for the very first time. She had such beautiful fingers, thin and white and delicate. For the rest of his life Sunao would always remember their touch, just as he would remember the stars shining out of the clearest, widest, emptiest sky."

At 9:17 AM local time on August 6, what God had wrought was torn asunder by Man in an act of war, justifiably or not. Making his way to the city center from six kilometers out after the blast, Dr. Hida nearly collided with an object:

"He could not tell what it was. It did not look like a human being. It looked monstrous. Every part of its body was black, its arms, its head, its legs, its grotesquely swollen face. Its eyes protruded horribly like golf balls. It had no nose or hair. Its mouth gaped open like a huge hole. Its black lips were half the size of its face ... Black rags hung from its arms and torso. For a moment Hida thought these were pieces of burned clothing. Then he realized they were burned flesh ... Hundreds of shapes were coming up the hill toward him."

SHOCKWAVE contains a photo section featuring images from all points of the story, including the famous pictures of the mushroom cloud taken by Bob Caron, and a pair captured by Yoshito Matsushige, virtually the only ones depicting Hiroshima survivors on the day they encountered Armageddon.

"(President) Truman never swerved from (his decision to use the Bomb). In 1958 he wrote a letter to the Hiroshima City Council confirming that he would order the bomb to be dropped again, given similar circumstances. 'We'll send it airmail,' he is reported to have told his secretary. 'Be sure there are enough stamps on it!'"

After emerging from a forty-day coma, Sunao Tsuboi lived on to marry ten years later and father three children. At the time of this book's writing, he lived alone, a widower, in Hiroshima. How Reiko died on that fateful day remains unknown.

SHOCKWAVE is a horrific mirror that shows humans what they are capable of wreaking upon themselves. It's not pretty.

Stephen Walker's book is an incredible read. It spans the three week period leading up to and immediately following the dropping of the bomb on Hiroshima. The depth of research is amazing, yet the story is told with eloquence and is a real page turner. It unfolds in a unique way, giving a moment by moment account of the events and people directly involved, both American and Japanese - more like reading a novel than a piece of history. Maybe it occurred sixty years ago, but the account is written with such immediacy that you feel you are actually there, directly involved.