The police chief of Hiroshima welcomed me eagerly as the first Allied correspondent to reach the city.

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.

As in all his subsequent dealings with France, Ho Chi Minh's demands were a model of modesty.

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.

The police chief of Hiroshima welcomed me eagerly as the first Allied correspondent to reach the city.

Hiroshima had a profound effect upon me.

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.