Wilfred Burchett
Wilfred Burchett
Wilfred Graham Burchettwas an Australian journalist known for his reporting of conflicts in Asia and his Communist sympathies. He was the first foreign correspondent to enter Hiroshima after the atomic bomb was dropped, and he attracted controversy for his activities during the Korean and Vietnam Wars...
NationalityAustralian
ProfessionJournalist
Date of Birth16 September 1911
CountryAustralia
cities police firsts
The police chief of Hiroshima welcomed me eagerly as the first Allied correspondent to reach the city.
cities people dying
In Hiroshima, thirty days after the first atomic bomb destroyed the city and shook the world, people are still dying, mysteriously and horribly-people who were uninjured in the cataclysm from an unknown something which I can only describe as the atomic plague.
war years eden
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.
men squares giving
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.
Could anything justify the extermination of civilians on such a scale?