Rain of Ruin by Richard Overy

Rain of Ruin: Tokyo, Hiroshima, and the Surrender of Japan

By Richard Overy

W. W. Norton, 2025

The bomb worked just as it was supposed to. It exploded 1,800 feet above ground, destroying all life within a radius of 1.5 kilometers from the hypocenter, burning those within 5 kilometers, followed by a blast wave that tore off the skin and damaged the internal organs of those who survived the initial radiation then briefly by a hurricane-force wind. The thermal radiation up to 500 meters from the hypocenter was 900 times more searing than the sun. The ionizing radiation released left survivors to die a slow death from vomiting and diarrhea and bleeding from the bowels, gums, nose, and genitals.

This grim passage, in his slim new book Rain of Ruin, is how Richard Overy, one of our great World War Two historians, opens his description of Hiroshima’s August 6, 1945 destruction by the atomic bomb nicknamed Little Boy.

The 30,000 feet reason for this – or should we say 1,800 feet? –  and the follow-up bombing of Nagasaki on August 9 was, as Overy notes, “to force Japanese surrender, end the war quickly, and save American lives.” In other words, the point was to purchase American soldier’s lives and civilian’s toil at the price of incinerating Japanese men, women, and children.

That was a moral decision in addition to a political and military assessment. Dissatisfying as it might be, Overy decides from the start to cut out an element: “The object in this book is not to judge the past but to try to understand it better in its own terms, as all good history should do.”

Overy as a World War Two historian, of all possible things, really ought to know better than most that some of our very best histories do both (they are, in fact, over-represented in his own subject), but the decision to account for other’s judgments while not judging them yourself is a perfectly legitimate way to do history. Perhaps frustrating when applied to mass killing, but perfectly legitimate, and usually delicately pulled off by Overy himself in his many books.

Rain of Ruin, unfortunately, slides from being simply a neutered affair into something worse around the halfway point when we’re told, of the twin bombings, that “[t]he question asked is usually ‘was it necessary?’; the question, however, should really be ‘why was it thought necessary at the time?’”

Why? What can possibly be the point of a distinction like that? If we are denuding our history of moral judgement, the question of “necessity” reduces to whether or not the means they used (atom bombings) were required to achieve their ends (a quick end to the war and saving of American lives). In this case, the only difference between the two questions is if we are considering the range of facts available to us now or those known to the decision-makers at the time. What’s more, these are not alternatives, and any truly complete book on the subject would answer both.

At best he is being lazy, but a suspicious reader might view such an evasive distinction as preparing them for apologetics. Yet the decidedly odd thing about this book is that the plain facts Overy provides allows us to answer both those questions in the negative and even to inflict judgement on the decision makers (we can, in fact, judge them ‘on their own terms’). A major conclusion of this book is that the bombs played a minor role in the Japanese surrender and the reasoning into their use (“at the time”) is so twisted that explicit condemnation eventually feels redundant to the facts.

Richard Overy began his statement about the destruction of Hiroshima by telling us that “The bomb worked just as it was supposed to.” He meant this in purely physical terms, but taken in a broader meaning few who read Rain of Ruin will find themselves in agreement with the assertion. Still, at best, this is a serviceable and readable little work of history with flashes of stark worthwhile prose; at worst it is negligent, counterproductive, and lacking in courage. If this were not an anniversary year, we would find ourselves asking what the point of it is, but that probably explains it. As a start, any reader would be better served by Paul Ham’s Hiroshima Nagasaki and find greater moral force in John Hersey’s classic Hiroshima.

David Murphy holds a Masters of Finance from the University of Minnesota.