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.
strong vietnamese nations
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.
party political firsts
Ho joined the French socialist party, the first Vietnamese to be a member of a French political party.
circles ears demand
France turned a deaf ear to the demands, but Ho had succeeded in attracting great publicity in progressive French circles to the situation in Indochina.
ashes heat theory
Of thousands of others, nearer the centre of the explosion, there was no trace. They vanished. The theory in Hiroshima is that the atomic heat was so great that they burned instantly to ashes - except that there were no ashes.
party splits firsts
Ho, or Nguyen Ai Quoc, thus became the first Vietnamese communist and a founding member of the French Communist party, born out of the split.
cities hiroshima-and-nagasaki doe
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.
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.
profound hiroshima effects
Hiroshima had a profound effect upon me.
demand france modesty
As in all his subsequent dealings with France, Ho Chi Minh's demands were a model of modesty.
responsibility emotional intellectual
My emotional and intellectual response to Hiroshima was that the question of the social responsibility of a journalist was posed with greater urgency than ever.