Charles Pellegrino’s riveting book chronicles the atomic bombing through the voices and lives of its survivors as it has never been told before. To Hell and Back captures the terror of the bombing from the perspective of the hibakusha, their torment suffered down to the present, and their continuing roles as emissaries for peace and reconciliation. Pellegrino combines cinematic eloquence and clarity with scientific rigor to reveal why some, even those close to the hypocenter, survived while others died instantly.
The author does not address the geostrategic issues of great power conflict and presidential decision-making that have been the staple of long-running debate among historians and remain contested today: the decision to unleash the bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki and the bombing of civilians; the number of lives lost (or saved); the role of the bombs in ending the Second World War; the legacy of that moment in subsequent Soviet-American and global conflict and contemporary threats of nuclear proliferation. Pellegrino never strays from his singular mission of chronicling the lives of ordinary and extraordinary people before and after the bomb, and the fates that sometimes intertwined their lives. His work invites comparison with the writings of Japanese poets, novelists, and ordinary citizens who recorded the bombing and whose words continue to inspire advocates of a peaceful future free from the threat of nuclear weapons. As primary school student Sakamoto Hatsumi wrote,
When the atomic bomb drops
day turns into night
people turn into ghosts.
To Hell and Back implicitly encourages us to reflect anew on the ethics and horrifying outcome of World War II strategies of massive civilian bombing, whether by Germany, Japan, or England, or by American fire-bombing of German and Japanese cities and the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, strategies that have continued with ever-greater technological sophistication during wars in Korea, Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan, and elsewhere to the present. And, though horrifying to recall, we know that today’s hydrogen bombs have the capacity to destroy on a scale far greater than the Hiroshima and Nagasaki weapons that obliterated those cities in a flash.