It was necessary to bluff the Japanese camp commanders, with whatever authority I could muster, that I had come officially to ensure that the surrender terms were being complied with and that living conditions for the POWs were being immediately improved.
In this first testing ground of the atomic bomb I have seen the most terrible and frightening desolation in four years of war. It makes a blitzed Pacific island seem like an Eden. The damage is far greater than photographs can show.
Could anything justify the extermination of civilians on such a scale?
Vietnamese must be made to feel that they are racial inferiors with no right to national identity.
And just as there was something of every Vietnamese in Ho Chi Minh so there is something of Ho Chi Minh in almost every present-day Vietnamese, so strong is his imprint on the Vietnamese nation.
Ho joined the French socialist party, the first Vietnamese to be a member of a French political party.
When you arrive in Hiroshima you can look around and for 25 and perhaps 30 square miles you can see hardly a building. It gives you an empty feeling in the stomach to see such man-made devastation.
Hiroshima does not look like a bombed city. It looks as if a monster steamroller had passed over it and squashed it out of existence.
