Films reveal original Ground Zero

[IndianaGreen]

For those that believe that nuclear weapons are legitimate weapons of war, turn to the Sundance Channel tonight to watch previously classified US film footage of the victims of the atomic bombings in Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

Films reveal original Ground Zero
Cable documentary to air footage from Hiroshima, Nagasaki
By Neely Tucker
The Washington Post
Updated: 2:00 a.m. ET Aug. 6, 2005

In the National Archives in College Park, the reels are numbered 11002 and 11003.

Shot by a U.S. Army Air Forces film crew in Hiroshima and Nagasaki in the months after the atomic bombs were dropped, the reels go from one deformed survivor to the next. Women with scalded faces. A man with melted ears. A boy with no skin on his back. A man with such horrific wounds his hands appear to be leprous.

The footage was immediately classified as "top secret" by the military and hidden for nearly three decades.

Images from "the 11000 series," as archivists refer to the 30 hours of footage shot by the crew of Lt. Col. Daniel A. McGovern, make a rare public appearance on television tonight, the 60th anniversary of the Hiroshima bombing. The footage, shot in hospitals and across Japan, forms the bulk of the postwar scenes in "Original Child Bomb," an hour-long film on cable's Sundance Channel. The documentary, drawing its title and antiwar message from a Thomas Merton poem about the A-bomb, debuts at 8 p.m. and repeats throughout the month.

"There are still parts of it I don't want to look at," says Holly Becker, the show's producer. "Certainly we didn't use the worst of what's possible there. . . . But the whole point of the film, of course, is to document the human cost of nuclear war."

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/8831030/

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[getmeouttahere]

1. And see "The Fog of War" to hear McNamara explain how....

the U.S. torched 100,000 Tokyo citizens in one night earlier in the war.

[Octafish]

4. Curtis LeMay was the "Brains" behind that operation.

LeMay also was one of the Joint Chiefs whose loyalty was in doubt in relation to President John F. Kennedy -- from the Bay of Pigs to the Cuban Missile Crisis to escalating the war in Vietnam. Later on, LeMay ran as an Independent George Wallace's running mate.

[dajoki]

6. same thing happened...

in Dresden, Germany.

[Generic Other]

2. Thanks IG for the head's up

May those who suffered so horribly all those years back be allowed to witness to us today. There is a reason why another generation vowed "Never again."

[HysteryDiagnosis]

3. How does a parent explain to their child why their skin is falling

off??? I'm sure there were no other options available at the time.

[HockeyMom]

5. Black outlines in the pavement

That was what I saw in one piece (History Channel?). They were totally disintegrated. It was horrible.

[Swede]

7. Their shadows were burned into the concrete too.

And these were bombs in the kilo tons. Imagine a megaton weapon going off.

[IndianaGreen]

8. American POWs died in the Hiroshima bombings

They too perished at what was essentially the first shot of the Cold War.

The US government went to great pains to suppress the truth about Hiroshima and Nagasaki from the American public and the world. Our beloved government wanted the American people to believe that we needed huge piles of atomic weapons to defend ourselves against the Osama bin Laden of that day, "godless communism." Selling this crap to the public would have been made difficult had the American people known the horrific truth about the effects of atomic weapons.

Anyone in here old enough to remember the "duck and cover" propaganda about what to do in case of atomic attack?

Whitewashing Hiroshima: The Uncritical Glorification of American Militarism
by Gary G. Kohls, MD

Back in 1995, the Smithsonian Institute was preparing an honest but aggressive display dealing with the 50th anniversary of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Amid much right-wing reactionary wrangling, from various ultrapatriotic veterans groups all the way up to the Newt Gringrich-dominated Congress, the Smithsonian was forced to eliminate that painful but historically important part of the story – the Japanese civilian perspective. So again we had another example of powerful politically conservative ultrapatriotic groups influencing public policy – and messing with history because they didn't have the courage to face up to unpleasant historical truths.

The historians did have a gun to their heads, of course, but in the mêlée, the media and the public overlooked a vital historical point. And that is this: The two bombs did not have to be used to end the war and there wouldn't have been a bloody American invasion of Japan. American intelligence, with the full knowledge of President Truman, was fully aware of Japan's desperate search for ways to honorably surrender weeks before the order was given for the American-led nuclear Holocaust that was Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

American intelligence data, revealed in the 1980s, show that a large-scale US invasion (planned for no sooner than November 1, 1945) would have been unnecessary. Japan was working on peace negotiations with the Allies through its Moscow ambassador in July of 1945. Truman knew of these developments because the US had broken the Japanese code years earlier, and all of Japan's military and diplomatic messages were being intercepted. On July 13, 1945, Foreign Minister Togo said: "Unconditional surrender (giving up all sovereignty) is the only obstacle to peace." Truman knew this, and the war could have ended by simply conceding a post-war figurehead position for the emperor, a leader regarded as a deity in Japan. That concession was refused by the US; the Japanese continued negotiating for peace; and the bombs were dropped. And, ironically, after the war, the emperor was allowed to remain in place. So what were the real reasons for 1) the refusal to accept Japan's offer of surrender and 2) the decision to proceed with the bombings?

Shortly after WWII, military analyst Hanson Baldwin wrote: "The Japanese, in a military sense, were in a hopeless strategic situation by the time the Potsdam demand for unconditional surrender was made on July 26, 1945." Admiral William Leahy, top military aide to President Truman, said in his war memoirs, I Was There: "It is my opinion that the use of this barbarous weapon at Hiroshima and Nagasaki was of no material assistance in our war against Japan. The Japanese were already defeated and ready to surrender because of the effective sea blockade and the successful bombing with conventional weapons. My own feeling is that in being the first to use it, we had adopted an ethical standard common to the barbarians of the Dark Ages." And General Dwight Eisenhower agreed.

http://www.lewrockwell.com/orig5/kohls1.html


Curator Shigeru Aratani, of the Hiroshima National Peace
Memorial Hall for the Atomic Bomb Victims, points at a photo
of Army Air Force Cpl. John Long Jr., top right, among other
victims at the memorial in Hiroshima, Japan.

Photo of American victim of Hiroshima bomb now included in memorial display

By Gary Schaefer / Associated Press

HIROSHIMA, Japan -- Near where the atomic bomb detonated over Hiroshima, the faces of the victims silently appear and fade on a wall of television monitors in a relentless display of the attack’s terrifying human toll.

Amid the thousands of faces, one stands apart: that of Cpl. John Long Jr., U.S. Army Air Force.

Long, who died in the blast while being held by the Japanese, last month became the first American serviceman to be enshrined at a memorial here, throwing light on the little-known story of U.S. prisoners of war who perished at Hiroshima.

“It shows how indiscriminate the slaughter was,” said Shigeru Aratani, a curator at the Hiroshima National Peace Memorial Hall for the Atomic Bomb Victims. “Enemies and friends, soldiers and civilians, women and children -- they were all killed.”

http://www.detnews.com/2004/nation/0402/15/nation-63775.htm