For 64th Anniversary: The Great Hiroshima Cover-Up -- And the Nuclear Fallout for All of Us Today

[laststeamtrain]

Greg Mitchell
Posted: August 6, 2009 10:14 AM

For 64th Anniversary: The Great Hiroshima Cover-Up -- And the Nuclear Fallout for All of Us Today

In the weeks following the atomic attacks on Japan 64 years ago, and then for decades afterward, the United States engaged in airtight suppression of all film shot in Hiroshima and Nagasaki after the bombings. This included footage shot by U.S. military crews and Japanese newsreel teams. In addition, for many years, all but a handful of newspaper photographs were seized or prohibited.

The public did not see any of the newsreel footage for 25 years, and the U.S. military film remained hidden for nearly four decades. I first probed the coverup back in 1983 in Nuclear Times magazine (where I was editor), and developed it further in later articles and in my 1995 book with Robert Jay Lifton, Hiroshima in America and in a 2005 documentary Original Child Bomb.

As editor of Nuclear Times in the early 1980s, I met Herbert Sussan, one of the members of the U.S. military film crew, and Erik Barnouw, the famed documentarian who first showed some of the Japanese footage on American TV in 1970. In fact, that newsreel footage might have disappeared forever if the Japanese filmmakers had not hidden one print from the Americans in a ceiling.

The color U.S. military footage would remain hidden until the early 1980s, and has never been fully aired. It
rests today at the National Archives in College Park, Md., in the form of 90,000 feet of raw footage labeled #342 USAF. I have a VHS copy of all of it today.

When that footage finally emerged, I spoke with and corresponded with the man at the center of this drama: Lt. Col. (Ret.) Daniel A. McGovern, who directed the U.S. military film-makers in 1945-1946, managed the Japanese footage, and then kept watch on all of the top-secret material for decades.

"I always had the sense," McGovern told me, "that people in the Atomic Energy Commission were sorry we had dropped the bomb. The Air Force -- it was also sorry. I was told by people in the Pentagon that they didn't want those images out because they showed effects on man, woman and child....They didn't want the general public to know what their weapons had done -- at a time they were planning on more bomb tests. We didn't want the material out because...we were sorry for our sins."

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http://www.huffingtonpost.com/greg-mitchell/for-64th-anniversary-the_b_252752.html

[jody]

1. Thanks to FDR who ordered the project, to Truman who ordered the bomb be dropped and all who

participated in the development and operational use of the bomb to end WWII.

[lib_wit_it]

2. If we hadn't used it then, we would have used it later. We had to see what it did to know how

horrific it was. But, at the risk of being called a freeper (which happens every time anyone here makes any comment that could even be misconstrued as freeperish--but hey, OK, I don't want them here either), I'm not sure it's any more horrific than any of the other weapons of war we despise. How much further death and destruction would have come before WWII ended if we hadn't used it?

[jody]

4. Consider "The Invasion That Didn’t Happen" link below.

http://www.airforce-magazine.com/MagazineArchive/Pages/2009/June%202009/0609invasion.aspx

[caraher]

8. Or read the work of real historians

Air Force Magazine is scarcely a disinterested source, and the article linked is full of pejoratives like the following:

Today, a fierce argument still rages about what the casualty toll might have been if the Operation Downfall invasion had taken place. The answer is elusive. Wartime casualty estimates were based on inaccurate assumptions—usually low—about enemy strength. Postwar analysis has been severely distorted by academicians and activists on the American left seeking to prove that neither an invasion of Japan nor the atomic bomb was necessary to end the war.

The article bludgeons as "revisionists" all those who have re-evaluated the story in light of information that came to light only many years after the fact. Dismissing analysis in light of the facts made public after the 1940s by slapping the "left" label on them says a lot about the author's commitment to a fair analysis of the debate.

I fully agree that an invasion of even an enervated Japan after months of blockade would have been horrifically bloody, with a toll of Japanese dead that would have at least rivaled the deaths in the atomic bombings (to say nothing of the smaller number of Allied casualties). But we were scarcely down to using a weapon of last resort in August, months before the earliest possible invasion date and without making any effort to clarify what we would find acceptable surrender terms to a defeated nation.

Read the work on the subject by Gar Alperovitz. He addresses every important issue in exhaustive (indeed, mind-numbing!) detail in The Decision to Use the Atomic Bomb And the Architecture of an American Myth. I'm not saying he's right about everything, but I do think familiarity with his analysis is a prerequisite to understanding what really happened. There's a lot more to the decision than meets the eye!

[jody]

10. Or talk person to person with some of the people involved. n/t

[lib_wit_it]

14. I can't discern your position from that--involved on which side?

[jody]

16. Both. n/t

[caraher]

22. The principals are all dead

Those still alive today are the ones who had their lives at stake, but not the ones privy to what was happening behind the scenes. That's why historians are better sources at this point.

[jody]

24. I know "The principals are all dead". n/t

[Chulanowa]

5. As has been pointed out on numerous other threads...

Japan had already been putting out feelers for surrender as early as 1942, and was seriously trying to get talks going in 1944, early 1945. By these points Japan had already been defeated - their entire plan hinged around us being unable to retaliate after Pearl harbor, and the Japanese suffered nothing but steady loss as we moved across the Pacific. They knew they had lost after we took Midway.

However, we had two things on our mind.
1) Total revenge
and
2) Scaring the commies

The first meant we would accept nothing but total and unconditional surrender and freedom to mold Japan as we wanted. The second meant that we were going to use our Big Scary Bomb instead of the very effective conventional bombing we were already doing, in order to intimidate the Russians.

A land invasion of the Japanese Islands would have been bloody as all hell. It would have been an uncessesary waste, as well, because, as noted, the Japanese were already defeated and suing for peace. We used Fat man and Little Boy to force them into subjecting to a complete surrender, rather than surrender with Hirohito still on the throne.

[Butch350]

6. I guess that should justify it. The war was going to end without it.

[jody]

7. And it ended without people I know who were in theater or en-route having to invade Japan. n/t

[Politicalboi]

3. Doesn't this make it all better

"I always had the sense," McGovern told me, "that people in the Atomic Energy Commission were sorry we had dropped the bomb. The Air Force -- it was also sorry. I was told by people in the Pentagon that they didn't want those images out because they showed effects on man, woman and child....They didn't want the general public to know what their weapons had done -- at a time they were planning on more bomb tests. We didn't want the material out because...we were sorry for our sins."

They just didn't want to show us because they knew we'd be pissed. Because if we knew the full extent of what our weapons do, more people might not want us to build more. To a nation that was taught Duck and Cover. LOL! Yeah like that's gonna help. See the bombs couldn't have been that bad. Sorry my ass. Keep the game going.

[proteus_lives]

9. Hiroshima footage should be shown back-to-back with footage of the Rape of Nanking.

[jody]

11. Some ignore the Japanese troops tossing babies in the air to catch on their bayonets in Nanking. n/t

[bvar22]

13. And that justifies the dropping of Atomic Weapons on Japan?

The same logic was used by those who justified torturing Iraqis "because "Sadam tortured".

[jody]

15. No, it proves the Japanese military was ruthlessly immoral and willing to fight to the death

for their emperor.

[IndianaGreen]

17. And some ignore the American POWs vaporized by the A-bomb dropped on Hiroshima

Explain to me why the plutonium facility at Oak Ridge, Tennessee, was designed to produce enough plutonium to assemble thousands of bombs. We were clearly intending to use our atomic monopoly to impose our will on the postwar world.

[jody]

18. Good question re size of the three plants. It could be that no one had a good estimate of output

given that such a plant had never been built before.

[proteus_lives]

26. Yeah, we were looking to be leaders in the post-war age.

What's wrong with that?

Better us then Uncle Joe and Soviet Russia.

[IndianaGreen]

27. Except that freedom and democracy were mere slogans on our part

Our goal was to make the world safe for capitalism, at everyone's expense. And when things didn't go as planned, we would come up with a repackaged version of the old sales pitch such as making capitalism "work for everyone," as Raghuram Rajan and Luigi Zingales first proposed in 2004. Rajan and Zingales proposal included curbing the powers of domestic lobbies (environmentalists and unions), opening borders to unrestricted flow of goods and capital (let the transnationals pillage to their hearts contend), transferring assets to "efficient" owners (more privatization), and creating a new safety net (private social security accounts). Sounds familiar?

[proteus_lives]

28. Depends on how you look at it.

Our goal was to make the world safe for our system of government and economic policies. Which was democracy and capitalism with all it's positive and negative aspects.

It was still better then what the USSR had planned. Do you think Japan and Western Europe would have prospered under the totalitarian rule of the Soviets? Our Marshall Plan rebuilt Europe and we had Japan back on it's feet in less then ten years. While the Soviet plan was "Steal everything not nailed down and take it back to Russia. Then install puppet regimes." Do you really think that the Russians had any goals towards freedom and democracy? Sorry Charlie, Capitalism has it's flaws and it needs to be mixed with socialism to off-set any steps to unregulated systems. But that beats the hell of out a of communist dictatorship any day of the week.

[puebloknot]

21. Yes. nt

[Syntheto]

12. The main point in deliberations were...

... that all the powers that were thought of the bomb as a giant explosive device and weren't really considering the long-term effects of radiation; that was secondary. In fact, in the planning of Operation Coronet, the Invasion of the Japanese home Islands, there was a plan to drop three or four atomic bombs on the proposed landing beaches on the Southernmost island of Honshu to destroy any Japanese troops concentrations before sending in the Marines the next day. So many casualties had been taken during the Okinawa campaign, including civilian suicides and kamikazi boat, airplane and mass troop attacks that Truman was advised that American forces could expect 800,000 to a million casualties attacking the home islands.

I also happen to believe that when the war in the European theater ended, and those guys, who had survived D-Day and the Battle of the Bulge were told they were now going to the Pacific to 'finish the job', a majority said "Not only No, but Fuck No! Send me to Leavenworth; at least I'll be alive. Here, take my Bronze star with you." I personally believe that the U. S. experienced a mutiny as extensive as any the French experienced in WWI at this point in time, and it had an effect on Truman's decision.

I've got a copy of the Atomic Bomb movie and it makes your skin crawl to see US soldiers walking through what remained of the blast sites in both Hiroshima and Nagasaki, within days of the events, clad only in their service uniforms, carrying clipboards and cameras to document the effects. Add that to the servicemen hunkering down in trenches (good ol' terra firma; the best protection), then clambering out to fight after tactical nukes were test fired through artillery pieces, the so-called 'Atomic Annie gun'. How many of these people died within ten years of various cancers and other health-related problems, like sterility?

Initially, the bombs were meant to be dropped on the Nazis, but nobody was under any illusions about the Soviet Union. WWIII could have come within weeks, if not days, of Hitler's suicide; the Reds were in force in Eastern Europe and the Allies were under intense pressure to demobilize. The demonstration of these weapons with their excellent B-19 delivery systems may have kept the Communists in check; and was also a factor in the decision-making process - so was the display of ruthlessness the Americans showed by using the weapons on civilian targets. One city, one airplane, one bomb. Stalin was the sort that understood that kind of math very well; Nagasaki could just as easily have been Minsk, Novgorod or Moscow itself.

I used to think it was the right decision to drop the bombs, because otherwise, the Japanese would have continued to be firebombed (the first wave set fire to the mostly wooden buildings; the second wave a half-hour later was meant to kill all the firemen and other emergency workers fighting the inferno). Then I thought it wasn't; not because of what actually happened, but because the whole picture wasn't out there, and the American public had no say so in deliberations. The things were detonated, and only then was the public was told about it, with appropriate spin.

The American public wasn't told that, from the beginning of development, a group of physicists theorized that such a weapon might create an unstoppable chain-reaction that would destroy the Earth and had argued strenuously against the Trinity detonation in New Mexico; the very first atomic explosion.

They weren't told about the radiation accidents that killed several technicians; about polluting the ground water in Hanford, Washington, or the atmospheric release of radioactive gases from unfiltered smokestacks there and in Oak Ridge, Tennessee.

Ironically, we today know more about the full spectrum effects of nuclear devices than 99.9% of the American (and world) public did in 1945; there just wasn't the same degree of freedom of speech and information available as we have today.

I don't think the bombs would have been dropped if those people then knew what we know today and had the same level of access to information. Do you?

[Lost Jaguar]

19. I've been researching...

...my late father's experiences in the Pacific as a rifle platoon leader in the Army. He left behind a great deal of memorabilia, including photos, orders, etc. I recently found a batch of letters he wrote to his big brother, my uncle, during the war. In later years, Dad didn't want to talk about the war, as it is with most combat veterans. He took many, many secrets to his grave. Only now have I begun to begin, to begin, to start, to understand what it was like. It is impossible to view it as the ones who lived through it did. I have been doing research for about a year now, in preparation for a book.

In his letters after the horrible battle of Okinawa, as his regiment began its plans for the invasion of "the Home Islands," he wrote his brother that, after surviving four previous campaigns, he was certain that his luck would no longer hold out. His words reflect a fatalism that I never knew he had as I was growing up. The War Dept., I have read, had so many Purple Hearts made for Operation Downfall that there was still enough left to give them out for Iraq!!

I remain ambivalent about this issue. There had already been thousands and thousands of Japanese civilians killed from the intensive bombings previous to Hiroshima. Napalm was literally rained down on some of their paper and wood cities. As noted by others above, projected casualties, both American and Japanese, vary widely but even the lowest figures are apocalyptic. Odds are that, if there had been an invasion, I would not exist today, at least not the person that I consider "me."

Another frightening thing I learned was that General Leslie Groves, the head of the Manhattan Project, had told Truman that he could have ready SEVEN additional bombs to be dropped unless the Japanese surrendered. One more for August, three in September, three more in October.

I only know that I am glad that the war ended when it did. The films should be released, and seen by all.

[puebloknot]

23. My father was readying for deployment to Japan, after fighting in Europe.

I live just down the road from Los Alamos. I am surrounded by allusions to this topic. Without the bomb, my father might not have survived the invasion of Japan.

I, too, am ambivalent. The bomb was a "Pandora's Box" from which we suffer still. But there is a need to see its creation in historical perspective. I agree with the other poster that The Rape of Nanking by Iris Chang (I don't know if it has been made into a film, and can't see how some of the horror *could* be filmed) is a good counterpoint to Hiroshima.

I have always been disturbed, however, by the fact that only three days elapsed before the dropping of the bomb on Nagasaki. I am disturbed by it all, but the rationale I have heard is that "they didn't surrender after Hiroshima."

When will we ever learn?

[jody]

25. See "4. Consider "The Invasion That Didn’t Happen" post above. n/t

[ShamelessHussy]

20. K&R