The current bosses are just like the old bosses … images of war and death that might undermine their war plans must be suppressed.
US Suppressed Footage of Hiroshima for Decades
ReutersWednesday 03 August 2005
Washington – As the world prepares to mark the 60th anniversary of the dropping of the first atomic bomb on Saturday, some American media experts see uncomfortable echoes between the suppression of images of death and destruction then and coverage of the war in Iraq today.
As author Greg Mitchell lays out in an article in Editor & Publisher this week, in the weeks following the atomic attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, U.S. authorities seized and suppressed film shot in the bombed cities by U.S. military crews and Japanese newsreel teams to prevent Americans from seeing the full extent of devastation wrought by the new weapons.
The piece in Editor & Publisher is chilling, yet also sadly familiar:
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.
Would we hear people on hate radio blithely calling for our military to “glass” other countries if we’d confronted what our weapons had done back at the end of World War II? Would we have pursued the same political course, the same headlong rush to build bigger and bigger weapons if we’d seen visual documentation of the human cost? I have memories of disconnected pictures, of ghostly devastation and some pictures of people with burns, but they were removed, somewhat clinical, and I remember the narration of those documentaries focusing on the aid offered to survivors. Those few images of the aftermath don’t apparently convey the full human cost.
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.
Shortly thereafter, the US Military moved to suppress the footage, as well as blank-and-white newsreels shot by a Japanese crew.
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.”
McGovern took care throughout his career to safeguard that film, afraid that it would be buried, that this valuable historical document would be lost within the bowels of military bureaucracy. He tried repeated to prise it loose, to get it shown in theaters or on PBS. Some footage was shown on the 25th Anniversary of the dropping of the Bombs, which must be the footage I remember seeing.
This record of the enormous devastation wrought by our fearsome weapons has slipped out slowly over the years since, usually timed to an anniversary (oh, how we love “celebrating” anniversaries). Time and distance remove a bit of the emotional connection. We tell ourselves the President Truman had to make the decisions to destroy Nagasaki and Hiroshima. I’m not here to debate that. What I do think we need to do, as a people who believe ourselves to be moral, is confront the truth of what we do. To look into that mirror and be HONEST with ourselves. Perhaps we’d be less likely as a people to elect blustering faux-cowboys who talk big while they expose others, both civilians and soldiers, to violent death and destruction if we confronted what they do in our name. Perhaps not.
The Republican Right likes to push the idea that a “squeamish” public, stirred up by the “liberal” media’s displays of war footage, are responsible for our loss in Vietnam. They like to push the idea that all we see now is “negative” stories from Iraq, a patently false idea in an age when flag-draped coffins are spirited in at O-dark-hundred with no cameras allowed. Iraqi civilian death and destruction are barely mentioned as numbers, let alone shown in the real, stark horror of the aftermath of five hundred pound bombs and napalm.
Perhaps they’re right, but I don’t think so. We know in our imaginations what our bombs do. Hollywood and the video game industry use CGI effects to intimate what rent and blistered flesh look like, but we can still distance ourselves from the reality of it. Can a people really call themselves civilized if they don’t confront what’s been done in their name? A country that used to celebrate lynchings and the mutilations of Indian men, women and children is plainly not a people squeamish about death. We are rather one that celebrates it, as long as we can convince ourselves that the dead somehow deserved it, for being lesser or the enemy or heathens.
The power of any art, and one of the most powerful things about film, is the way it can be used to help us look through someone else’s eyes. Documentary footage places us in another place, another time … helps us to see a glimpse of what it might be like if some terrible event is happening to US. It is no coincidence that one of the scenes most vilified by rightwing commentators in Fahrenheit 911 was the footage of Iraqi children playing before our bombs fell:
The real problem with the film the really offensive thing about it, is that in Fahrenheit 9/11, we — Americans from the President on down — are portrayed as the bad guys. If there’s something wrong about bin Laden it’s that his estranged family has ties with — cue the uh-oh music — the Bush family. Saddam? Nothing wrong with him. No mention of torture and terror and tyranny. Moore shows scenes of Baghdad before the invasion (read: liberation) and in his weltanschauung, it’s a place filled with nothing but happy, smiling, giggly, overjoyed Baghdadis. No pain and suffering there. No rape, murder, gassing, imprisoning, silencing of the citizens in these scenes.
It’s okay to show death and destruction, but only if it shows OUR side of the story, sayeth those on the right. A decapitation caused by shrapnel isn’t as bad as one caused by a sword stroke broadcast on the internet. What matters is WHO is doing the decapitation, and why. The body, however, is still headless. What is vital, as far as I’m concerned, is BOTH actions, for how else can we get the full picture of what is happening? When we draw our 21st Century high tech swords, shouldn’t we do it with sober knowledge and regard for what it is we do, what it is we ask our soldiers to do? They will live, or not, with the aftermath, the least we can do is witness honestly.
This Sunday Saturday, a documentary utilizing that long last footage from Japan will be shown on the Sundance Channel. It’s called Original Child Bomb, a film that premiered last year at the Tribeca Film Festival. We can pay witness from a distance now, but one can’t help but wonder what distant horrors our descendents will be seeing a half century from now, when a documentarian finally uncovers the evidence buried by this most secretive of Administrations.
Update [2005-8-4 20:49:48 by Madman in the Marketplace]: Description and schedule for Original Child Bomb from the Sundance Channel
ORIGINAL CHILD BOMB
Documentary
The human cost of nuclear proliferation is considered in this provocative and unconventional documentary from filmmaker Carey Schonegevel. Mixing archive footage, animation, eye-witness accounts and reflections from present-day American students, the legacy of the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki are considered in light of the United States’ current arsenal of more than 10,000 nuclear weapons and contemporary political rhetoric about “weapons of mass destruction.” Inspired by Thomas Merton’s 1962 poem with the same title. (2003) Color/B&W (57 mins)
August 06 2005 08:00 pm; August 09 2005 04:30 pm; August 14 2005 03:30 pm; August 19 2005 02:00 pm; August 24 2005 12:00 pm
