http://www.alternet.org/mediaculture/23914/
Hiroshima Cover-up Exposed
By Greg Mitchell, Editor & Publisher. Posted August 4, 2005.
60-year-old footage from Hiroshima and Nagasaki -- suppressed and
nearly destroyed by the U.S. -- will finally be shown in America.
In the weeks following the atomic attacks on Japan almost 60 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.
The full story of this atomic cover-up is told fully for the first
time at Editor & Publisher, as the 60th anniversary of the atomic
bombings approaches later this week. Some of the long-suppressed
footage will be aired on television this Saturday.
Six weeks ago, E&P broke the story that articles written by famed
Chicago Daily News war correspondent George Weller about the effects
of the atomic bomb dropped on Nagasaki were finally published, in
Japan, almost six decades after they had been spiked by U.S.
officials. This drew national attention, but suppressing film footage
shot in Hiroshima and Nagasaki was even more significant, as this
country rushed into the nuclear age with its citizens having neither
a true understanding of the effects of the bomb on human beings, nor
why the atomic attacks drew condemnation around the world.
As editor of Nuclear Times magazine in the 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.
When that footage finally emerged, I corresponded and spoke with the
man at the center of this drama: Lt. Col. (Ret.) Daniel A. McGovern,
who directed the U.S. military filmmakers 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 [film] 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."
Sussan, meanwhile, struggled for years to get some of the American
footage aired on national TV, taking his request as high as President
Truman, Robert F. Kennedy and Edward R. Murrow, to no avail.
More recently, McGovern declared that Americans should have seen the
damage wrought by the bomb. "The main reason it was classified was
... because of the horror, the devastation," he said. Because the
footage shot in Hiroshima and Nagasaki was hidden for so long, the
atomic bombings quickly sank, unconfronted and unresolved, into the
deeper recesses of American awareness, as a costly nuclear arms race,
and nuclear proliferation, accelerated.
The atomic cover-up also reveals what can happen in any country that
carries out deadly attacks on civilians in any war and then keeps
images of what occurred from its own people.
Ten years ago, I co-authored (with Robert Jay Lifton) the book
"Hiroshima in America," and new material has emerged since. On Aug.
6, and on following days, the Sundance cable channel will air
"Original Child Bomb," a prize-winning documentary on which I worked.
The film includes some of the once-censored footage -- along with
home movies filmed by McGovern in Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
The Japanese newsreel footage
On Aug. 6, 1945, the United States dropped an atomic bomb over
Hiroshima, killing at least 70,000 instantly and perhaps 50,000 more
in the days and months to follow. Three days later, it exploded
another atomic bomb over Nagasaki, slightly off target, killing
40,000 immediately and dooming tens of thousands of others. Within
days, Japan had surrendered, and the U.S. readied plans for occupying
the defeated country -- and documenting the first atomic catastrophe.
But the Japanese also wanted to study it. Within days of the second
atomic attack, officials at the Tokyo-based newsreel company Nippon
Eigasha discussed shooting film in the two stricken cities. In early
September, just after the Japanese surrender, and as the American
occupation began, director Sueo Ito set off for Nagasaki. There his
crew filmed the utter destruction near ground zero and scenes in
hospitals of the badly burned and those suffering from the lingering
effects of radiation.
On Sept. 15, another crew headed for Hiroshima. When the first rushes
came back to Toyko, Akira Iwasaki, the chief producer, felt "every
frame burned into my brain," he later said.
At this point, the American public knew little about conditions in
the atomic cities beyond Japanese assertions that a mysterious
affliction was attacking many of those who survived the initial
blasts (claims that were largely taken to be propaganda). Newspaper
photographs of victims were non-existent, or censored. Life magazine
would later observe that for years "the world ... knew only the
physical facts of atomic destruction."
Tens of thousands of American GIs occupied the two cities. Because of
the alleged absence of residual radiation, no one was urged to take
precautions.
Then, on Oct. 24, 1945, a Japanese cameraman in Nagasaki was ordered
to stop shooting by an American military policeman. His film, and
then the rest of the 26,000 feet of Nippon Eisasha footage, was
confiscated by the U.S. General Headquarters (GHQ). An order soon
arrived banning all further filming. It was at this point that Lt.
Daniel McGovern took charge.
Shooting the U.S. Military footage
In early September, 1945, less than a month after the two bombs fell,
Lt. McGovern -- who as a member of Hollywood's famed First Motion
Picture Unit shot some of the footage for William Wyler's "Memphis
Belle" -- had become one of the first Americans to arrive in
Hiroshima and Nagasaki. He was a director with the U.S. Strategic
Bombing Survey, organized by the Army the previous November to study
the effects of the air campaign against Germany, and now Japan.
As he made plans to shoot the official American record, McGovern
learned about the seizure of the Japanese footage. He felt it would
be a waste to not take advantage of the newsreel footage, noting in a
letter to his superiors that "the conditions under which it was taken
will not be duplicated, until another atomic bomb is released under
combat conditions."
McGovern proposed hiring some of the Japanese crew to edit and
"caption" the material, so it would have "scientific value." He took
charge of this effort in early January 1946, even as the Japanese
feared that, when they were done, they would never see even a scrap
of their film again.
At the same time, McGovern was ordered by General Douglas MacArthur
on January 1, 1946 to document the results of the U.S. air campaign
in more than 20 Japanese cities. His crew would shoot exclusively on
color film, Kodachrome and Technicolor, rarely used at the time even
in Hollywood. McGovern assembled a crew of eleven, including two
civilians. Third in command was a young lieutenant from New York
named Herbert Sussan.
The unit left Tokyo in a specially outfitted train, and made it to
Nagasaki. "Nothing and no one had prepared me for the devastation I
met there," Sussan later told me. "We were the only people with
adequate ability and equipment to make a record of this holocaust.
... I felt that if we did not capture this horror on film, no one
would ever really understand the dimensions of what had happened. At
that time people back home had not seen anything but black and white
pictures of blasted buildings or a mushroom cloud."
Along with the rest of McGovern's crew, Sussan documented the
physical effects of the bomb, including the ghostly shadows of
vaporized civilians burned into walls; and, most chillingly, dozens
of people in hospitals who had survived (at least momentarily) and
were asked to display their burns, scars, and other lingering effects
for the camera as a warning to the world.
At the Red Cross Hospital in Hiroshima, a Japanese physician traced
the hideous, bright red scars that covered several of the patients --
and then took off his white doctor's shirt and displayed his own
burns and cuts.
After sticking a camera on a rail car and building their own tracks
through the ruins, the Americans filmed hair-raising tracking shots
that could have been lifted right from a Hollywood movie. Their chief
cameramen was a Japanese man, Harry Mimura, who in 1943 had shot
"Sanshiro Sugata," the first feature film by a then-unknown Japanese
director named Akira Kurosawa.
The suppression begins
While all this was going on, the Japanese newsreel team was
completing its work of editing and labeling all their black & white
footage into a rough cut of just under three hours. At this point,
several members of Japanese team took the courageous step of ordering
from the lab a duplicate of the footage they had shot before the
Americans took over the project.
Director Ito later said: "The four of us agreed to be ready for 10
years of hard labor in the case of being discovered." One incomplete,
silent print would reside in a ceiling until the Occupation ended.
The negative of the finished Japanese film, nearly 15,000 feet of
footage on 19 reels, was sent off to the U.S. in early May 1946. The
Japanese were also ordered to include in this shipment all
photographs and related material. The footage would be labeled SECRET
and not emerge from the shadows for more than 20 years.
The following month, McGovern was abruptly ordered to return to the
U.S. He hauled the 90,000 feet of color footage, on dozens of reels
in huge footlockers, to the Pentagon and turned it over to General
Orvil Anderson. Locked up and declared top secret, it did not see the
light of day for more than 30 years.
McGovern would be charged with watching over it. Sussan would become
obsessed with finding it and getting it aired.
Fearful that his film might get "buried," McGovern stayed on at the
Pentagon as an aide to Gen. Anderson, who was fascinated by the
footage and had no qualms about showing it to the American people.
"He was that kind of man, he didn't give a damn what people thought,"
McGovern told me. "He just wanted the story told."
In an article in his hometown Buffalo Evening News, McGovern said
that he hoped that "this epic will be made available to the American
public." He planned to call the edited movie "Japan in Defeat."
Once they eyeballed the footage, however, most of the top brass
didn't want it widely shown and the Atomic Energy Commission (AEC)
was also opposed, according to McGovern. It nixed a Warner Brothers
feature film project based on the footage that Anderson had
negotiated, while paying another studio about $80,000 to help make
four training films.
In a March 3, 1947 memo, Francis E. Rundell, a major in the Air
Corps, explained that the film would be classified "secret." This was
determined "after study of subject material, especially concerning
footage taken at Hiroshima and Nagasaki. It is believed that the
information contained in the films should be safeguarded until
cleared by the Atomic Energy Commission." After the training films
were completed, the status would be raised to "Top Secret" pending
final classification by the AEC.
The color footage was shipped to the Wright-Patterson base in Ohio.
McGovern went along after being told to put an I.D. number on the
film "and not let anyone touch it -- and that's the way it stayed,"
as he put it. After cataloging it, he placed it in a vault in the
top-secret area.
"Dan McGovern stayed with the film all the time," Sussan later said.
"He told me they could not release the film [because] what it showed
was too horrible."
Sussan wrote a letter to President Truman, suggesting that a film
based on the footage "would vividly and clearly reveal the
implications and effects of the weapons that confront us at this
serious moment in our history." A reply from a Truman aide threw cold
water on that idea, saying such a film would lack "wide public
appeal."
McGovern, meanwhile, continued to "babysit" the film, now at Norton
Air Force base in California. "It was never out of my control," he
said later, but he couldn't make a film out of it any more than
Sussan could (but unlike Herb, he at least knew where it was).
The Japanese footage emerges
At the same time, McGovern was looking after the Japanese footage.
Fearful that it might get lost forever in the military/government
bureaucracy, he secretly made a 16 mm print and deposited it in the
U.S. Air Force Central Film Depository at Wright-Patterson. There it
remained out of sight, and generally out of mind. (The original
negative and production materials remain missing, according to Abe
Mark Nornes, who teaches at the University of Michigan and has
researched the Japanese footage more than anyone.)
The Japanese government repeatedly asked the U.S. for the full
footage of what was known in that country as "the film of illusion,"
to no avail. A rare article about what it called this "sensitive"
dispute appeared in The New York Times on May 18, 1967, declaring
right in its headline that the film had been "Suppressed by U.S. for
22 Years." Surprisingly, it revealed that while some of the footage
was already in Japan (likely a reference to the film hidden in the
ceiling), the U.S. had put a "hold" on the Japanese using it -- even
though the American control of that country had ceased many years
earlier.
Despite rising nuclear fears in the 1960s, before and after the Cuban
Missile Crisis, few in the U.S. challenged the consensus view that
dropping the bomb on two Japanese cities was necessary. The United
States maintained its "first-use" nuclear policy: Under certain
circumstances it would strike first with the bomb and ask questions
later. In other words, there was no real taboo against using the
bomb. This notion of acceptability had started with Hiroshima. A firm
line against using nuclear weapons had been drawn--in the sand. The
U.S., in fact, had threatened to use nuclear weapons during the Cuban
Missile Crisis and on other occasions.
On Sept. 12, 1967, the Air Force transferred the Japanese footage to
the National Archives Audio Visual Branch in Washington, with the
film "not to be released without approval of DOD (Department of
Defense)."
Then, one morning in the summer of 1968, Erik Barnouw, author of
landmark histories of film and broadcasting, opened his mail to
discover a clipping from a Tokyo newspaper sent by a friend. It
indicated that the United States had finally shipped to Japan a copy
of black & white newsreel footage shot in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The
Japanese had negotiated with the State Department for its return.
From the Pentagon, Barnouw learned in 1968 that the original nitrate
film had been quietly turned over to the National Archives, so he
went to take a look. Soon Barnouw realized that, despite its marginal
film quality, "enough of the footage was unforgettable in its
implications, and historic in its importance, to warrant duplicating
all of it," he later wrote.
Attempting to create a subtle, quiet, even poetic, black and white
film, he and his associates cut it from 160 to 16 minutes, with a
montage of human effects clustered near the end for impact. Barnouw
arranged a screening at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, and
invited the press. A throng turned out and sat in respectful silence
at its finish. (One can only imagine what impact the color footage
with many more human effects would have had.) "Hiroshima-Nagasaki
1945" proved to be a sketchy but quite moving document of the
aftermath of the bombing, captured in grainy but often startling
black and white images: shadows of objects or people burned into
walls, ruins of schools, miles of razed landscape viewed from the
roof of a building.
In the weeks ahead, however, none of the (then) three TV networks
expressed interest in airing it. "Only NBC thought it might use the
film," Barnouw later wrote, "if it could find a 'news hook.' We dared
not speculate what kind of event this might call for." But then an
article appeared in Parade magazine, and an editorial in the Boston
Globe blasted the networks, saying that everyone in the country
should see this film: "Television has brought the sight of war into
America's sitting rooms from Vietnam. Surely it can find 16 minutes
of prime time to show Americans what the first A-bombs, puny by
today's weapons, did to people and property 25 years ago."
This at last pushed public television into the void. What was then
called National Educational Television (NET) agreed to show the
documentary on August 3, 1970, to coincide with the 25th anniversary
of dropping the bomb.
"I feel that classifying all of this filmed material was a misuse of
the secrecy system since none of it had any military or national
security aspect at all," Barnouw told me. "The reason must have
been--that if the public had seen it and Congressmen had seen it--it
would have been much harder to appropriate money for more bombs."
The American footage comes out
About a decade later, by pure chance, Herb Sussan would spark the
emergence of the American footage, ending its decades in the dark.
In the mid-1970s, Japanese antinuclear activists, led by a Tokyo
teacher named Tsutomu Iwakura, discovered that few pictures of the
aftermath of the atomic bombings existed in their country. Many had
been seized by the U.S. military after the war, they learned, and
taken out of Japan. The Japanese had as little visual exposure to the
true effects of the bomb as most Americans. Activists managed to
track down hundreds of pictures in archives and private collections
and published them in a popular book. In 1979 they mounted an exhibit
at the United Nations in New York.
There, by chance, Iwakura met Sussan, who told him about the U.S.
military footage.
Iwakura made a few calls and found that the color footage, recently
declassified, might be at the National Archives. A trip to
Washington, D.C. verified this. He found eighty reels of film,
labeled #342 USAF, with the reels numbered 11000 to 11079. About
one-fifth of the footage covered the atomic cities. According to a
shot list, reel #11010 included, for example: "School, deaf and dumb,
blast effect, damaged ... Commercial school demolished ... School,
engineering, demolished. ... School, Shirayama elementary,
demolished, blast effect ... Tenements, demolished."
The film had been quietly declassified a few years earlier, but no
one in the outside world knew it. An archivist there told me at the
time, "If no one knows about the film to ask forit, it's as closed as
when it was classified."
Eventually 200,000 Japanese citizens contributed half a million
dollars and Iwakura was able to buy the film. He then traveled around
Japan filming survivors who had posed for Sussan and McGovern in
1946. Iwakura quickly completed a documentary called "Prophecy" and
in late spring 1982 arranged for a New York premiere.
That fall a small part of the McGovern/Sussan footage turned up for
the first time in an American film, one of the sensations of the New
York Film Festival, called "Dark Circle." It's co-director, Chris
Beaver, told me, "No wonder the government didn't want us to see it.
I think they didn't want Americans to see themselves in that picture.
It's one thing to know about that and another thing to see it."
Despite this exposure, not a single story had yet appeared in an
American newspaper about the shooting of the footage, its suppression
or release. And Sussan was now ill with a form of lymphoma doctors
had found in soldiers exposed to radiation in atomic tests during the
1950s -- or in Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
In late 1982, editing Nuclear Times, I met Sussan and Erik Barnouw --
and talked on several occasions with Daniel McGovern, out in
Northridge, California. "It would make a fine documentary even
today," McGovern said of the color footage. "Wouldn't it be wonderful
to have a movie of the burning of Atlanta?"
After he hauled the footage back to the Pentagon, McGovern said, he
was told that under no circumstances would the footage be released
for outside use. "They were fearful of it being circulated," McGovern
said. He confirmed that the color footage, like the black and white,
had been declassified over time, taking it from top secret to "for
public release" (but only if the public knew about it and asked for
it).
Still, the question of precisely why the footage remained secret for
so long lingered. Here McGovern added his considerable voice. "The
main reason it was classified was...because of the horror, the
devastation," he said. "The medical effects were pretty gory. ... The
attitude was: do not show any medical effects. Don't make people
sick."
But who was behind this? "I always had the sense," McGovern answered,
"that people in the AEC were sorry they 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. But the AEC, they were the ones that stopped it from
coming out. They had power of God over everybody," he declared. "If
it had anything to do with nukes, they had to see it. They were the
ones who destroyed a lot of film and pictures of the first U.S.
nuclear tests after the war."
Even so, McGovern believed, his footage might have surfaced "if
someone had grabbed the ball and run with it but the AEC did not want
it released."
As "Dark Circle" director Chris Beaver had said, "With the government
trying to sell the public on a new civil defense program and Reagan
arguing that a nuclear war is survivable, this footage could be
awfully bad publicity."
Today
In the summer of 1984, I made my own pilgrimage to the atomic cities,
to walk in the footsteps of Dan McGovern and Herb Sussan, and meet
some of the people they filmed in 1946. By then, the McGovern/ Sussan
footage had turned up in several new documentaries. On Sept. 2, 1985,
however, Herb Sussan passed away. His final request to his children:
Would they scatter his ashes at ground zero in Hiroshima?
In the mid-1990s, researching "Hiroshima in America," a book I would
write with Robert Jay Lifton, I discovered the deeper context for
suppression of the U.S. Army film: it was part of a broad effort to
suppress a wide range of material related to the atomic bombings,
including photographs, newspaper reports on radiation effects,
information about the decision to drop the bomb, even a Hollywood
movie.
The 50th anniversary of the bombing drew extensive print and
television coverage -- and wide use of excerpts from the
McGovern/Sussan footage--but no strong shift in American attitudes on
the use of the bomb.
Then, in 2003, as adviser to a documentary film, "Original Child
Bomb," I urged director Carey Schonegevel to draw on the atomic
footage as much as possible. She not only did so but also obtained
from McGovern's son copies of home movies he had shot in Japan while
shooting the official film.
"Original Child Bomb" went on to debut at the 2004 Tribeca Film
Festival, win a major documentary award, and this week, on Aug. 6 and
7, it will debut on the Sundance cable channel. After 60 years at
least a small portion of that footage will finally reach part of the
American public in the unflinching and powerful form its creators
intended. Only then will the Americans who see it be able to fully
judge for themselves what McGovern and Sussan were trying to
accomplish in shooting the film, why the authorities felt they had to
suppress it, and what impact their footage, if widely aired, might
have had on the nuclear arms race -- and the nuclear proliferation
that plagues, and endangers, us today.
_______________________________________________
Biofuel mailing list
Biofuel@sustainablelists.org
http://sustainablelists.org/mailman/listinfo/biofuel_sustainablelists.org
Biofuel at Journey to Forever:
http://journeytoforever.org/biofuel.html
Search the combined Biofuel and Biofuels-biz list archives (50,000 messages):
http://www.mail-archive.com/biofuel@sustainablelists.org/