Quote

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.

Wilfred Burchett

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Wilfred Burchett
Age: 72 †
Born: 1911
Born: September 16
Died: 1983
Died: September 27
Journalist
War Correspondent
Melbourne
Australia
Wilfred Graham Burchett
Makes
Ground
Photographs
Shows
Seem
Island
Seems
Terrible
Frightening
Desolation
Firsts
Seen
Islands
Atomic
First
Four
Bombs
Eden
Years
Greater
Damage
Pacific
Like
Show
Scary
Bomb
War
Photograph
Testing

More quotes by Wilfred Burchett

Image
Vietnamese must be made to feel that they are racial inferiors with no right to national identity.
Wilfred Burchett
Image
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.
Wilfred Burchett
Image
Hiroshima had a profound effect upon me.
Wilfred Burchett
Image
My anger with the US was not at first, that they had used that weapon - although that anger came later.
Wilfred Burchett
Image
As in all his subsequent dealings with France, Ho Chi Minh's demands were a model of modesty.
Wilfred Burchett
Image
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.
Wilfred Burchett
Image
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.
Wilfred Burchett
Image
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.
Wilfred Burchett
Image
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.
Wilfred Burchett
Image
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.
Wilfred Burchett
Image
The police chief of Hiroshima welcomed me eagerly as the first Allied correspondent to reach the city.
Wilfred Burchett
Image
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.
Wilfred Burchett
Image
Ho joined the French socialist party, the first Vietnamese to be a member of a French political party.
Wilfred Burchett
Image
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.
Wilfred Burchett