The Asia-Pacific Journal | Japan Focus Volume 9 | Issue 31 | Number 4 | Article ID 3581 | Aug 08, 2011

1

The Great Hiroshima Cover-Up—And the Greatest Movie NeverMade　　大いなる広島隠蔽−−そして作られることのなかった最大の映画

Greg Mitchell

The Great Hiroshima Cover-Up—Andthe Greatest Movie Never Made

Greg Mitchell

Summary

This article introduces and draws on GregMitchell’s new book Atomic Cover-up. Two U.S.Soldiers, Hiroshima & Nagasaki, and TheG r e a t e s t M o v i e N e v e rMade. http://gregmitchellwriter.blogspot.com/This is a detective story that weaves theprofiles of two U.S. military officers, the atomicbombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and theofficial suppression of the most important filmfootage of the human consequences of thebombing, created by the American military anda Japanese newsreel team.

In the northwestern corner of the HiroshimaPeace Park, amid a quiet grove of trees, theearth suddenly swells. It is not much of amound — only about ten feet high and sixty feetacross. Unlike most mounds, however, this oneis hollow, and within it rests perhaps thegreatest concentration of human residue in theworld.

Grey clouds rising from sticks of incense hangin the air, spookily. Tourists do not dawdlehere. Visitors searching for the Peace Bell,directly ahead, or the Children’s Monument,down the path to the right, hurry past itwithout so much as a sideways glance. Still, ithas a strange beauty: a lump of earth (not quite

lush) topped by a small monument thatresembles the tip of a pagoda. On one side ofthe Memorial Mound the gray wooden fencehas a gate, and down five steps from the gate isa door. Visitors are usually not allowed throughthat door, but occasionally the city ofHiroshima honors a request from a foreignjournalist.

The Memorial Mound, Hiroshima

Inside the Mound the ceiling is low, the lightfluorescent. One has to stoop to stand. To theright and left, pine shelving lines the walls. Stacked neatly on the shelves, like cans of soupin a supermarket, are white porcelain canisterswith Japanese lettering on the front. On theday I visited, there were more than a thousandcans in all, explained Ohara Masami, a cityofficial. Each canister contained the ashes ofone person killed by the atomic bomb.

APJ | JF 9 | 31 | 4

2

Behind twin curtains on either side of an altarrest several dozen pine boxes, the size ofcaskets, stacked, unceremoniously, from floorto ceiling. They hold the ashes of about seventythousand unidentified victims of the bomb. If,in an instant, all of the residents of Wilmington,Delaware, or Santa Fe, New Mexico, werereduced to ashes, and those ashes carried awayto one repository, this is all the room theremains would require.

Most of those who died in Hiroshima werecremated quickly, partly to prevent anepidemic of disease. Others were efficientlyturned to ash by the atomic bomb itself, deathand cremation occurring in the same instant.Those reduced by human hands were crematedon makeshift altars at a temple that once stoodat the present site of the Mound, one-half milefrom the hypocenter of the atomic blast.

In 1946, an Army Air Force squad, ordered byGen. Douglas MacArthur to film the results ofthe massive U.S. aerial bombardment ofJapanese cities during World War II, filmed asolemn ceremony at the temple, capturing ayoung woman receiving a canister of ashesfrom a local official. Later that year, survivorsof the atomic bombing began contributingfunds to build a permanent vault at this siteand, in 1955, the Memorial Mound wascompleted. For several years the collection ofashes grew because remains of victims werestill being found. One especially poignant pilewas discovered at an elementary school.

The white cans on the shelves have stood herefor decades, unclaimed by family members orfriends. (In many cases, all of the victims’relatives and friends were killed by the bomb.)Every year local newspapers publish the list ofnames written on the cans, and every yearseveral canisters are finally claimed andtransferred to family burial sites. Most of theunclaimed cans (a total of just over 800 as of2010) will remain in the Mound in perpetuity,now that so many years have passed.

They are a chilling sight. The cans are brightwhite, like the flash in the sky over Hiroshimaat 8:15 a.m. on August 6, 1945. From allcorners of the city the ashes were collected: the remains of soldiers, physicians, housewives,infants. Unclaimed, they at least have thedignity of a private urn, an identity, a life (ifone were able to look into it) before death.

But what of the seventy thousand behind thecurtains? The pine crates are marked withnames of sites where the human dust and bitsof bone were found — a factory or a school,perhaps, or a neighborhood crematory. Butbeyond that, the ashes are anonymous.Thousands may still grieve for these victims butthere is no dignity here. “They are all mixedtogether,” said Ohara, “and will never beseparated or identified.” Under a mound,behind two curtains, inside a few pine boxes:This is what became of one-quarter of the cityof Hiroshima on August 6, 1945.

* * *

In the weeks following the atomic attacks onJapan 66 years ago, and then for decadesafterward, the United States engaged inairtight suppression of all film shot inHiroshima and Nagasaki after the bombings.This included footage shot by U.S. militarycrews and Japanese newsreel teams. Inaddition, for many years, all but a handful ofnewspaper photographs were seized orprohibited not only in the United States, butalso in occupied Japan.

Meanwhile, the American public only got to seethe same black and white images: a mushroomcloud, battered buildings, a devastatedlandscape. The true human costs –a full airingof the bomb’s effects on people – were kepthidden. The writer Mary McCarthy declaredthat Hiroshima had already fallen into “a holein history.”

APJ | JF 9 | 31 | 4

3

Hiroshima survivors

The public did not see any of the newsreelfootage for 25 years, and the U.S. military filmremained hidden for more than three decades.In fact, the Japanese footage might havedisappeared forever if the newsreel team hadnot hidden one print from the Americans in aceiling. The color U.S. military footage was notshown anywhere until the early 1980s, and hasnever been fully aired. It rests today at theNational Archives in College Park, Md., in theform of 90,000 feet of raw footage labeled#342 USAF.

When that footage finally emerged, I spokewith and corresponded with the man at thecenter of this drama: Lt. Col. (Ret.) Daniel A.McGovern, who directed the U.S. military film-makers in 1945-1946, managed the Japanesefootage, and then kept watch on all of the top-secret material for decades. McGovernobserved that, "The main reason it wasclassified was...because of the horror, the

devastation." I also met and interviewed onetop member of his military crew, who hadfought for years to get the footage aired widelyin America, and interviewed some of thehibakusha who appear in the footage.

The Japanese Newsreel Footage

On August 6, 1945, the United States droppedan atomic bomb over the center of Hiroshima,killing at least 70,000 civilians instantly andperhaps 70,000 more in the months to follow.Three days later, it exploded another atomicbomb over Nagasaki , k i l l ing 40,000immediately and dooming tens of thousands ofothers. Within days, Japan had surrendered,and the U.S. readied plans to occupy thedefeated country -- and documenting the firstatomic catastrophe.

But the Japanese also wanted to study it.Within days of the second atomic attack,officials at the Tokyo-based newsreel companyNippon Eigasha discussed shooting film in thetwo stricken cities. In early September, justafter the Japanese surrender, and as theAmerican occupation began, director Ito Sueoset off for Nagasaki. There his crew filmed theutter destruction near ground zero and scenesin hospitals of the badly burned and thosesuffering from the lingering effects of radiation.

On Sept. 15, another crew headed forHiroshima. When the first rushes came back toTokyo, Iwasaki Akira, the chief producer (andwell-known film writer), felt "every frameburned into my brain," he later said.

At this point, the American public knew littleabout human conditions and radiation effects inthe atomic cities. Newspaper photographs ofv i c t i m s w e r e n o n - e x i s t e n t , o rcensored. Life magazine would later observethat for years "the world...knew only thephysical facts of atomic destruction."

On October 24, 1945, a Japanese cameraman inNagasaki was ordered to stop shooting by an

APJ | JF 9 | 31 | 4

4

American military policeman. His film, and thenthe rest of the 26,000 feet of Nippon Eisashafootage, was confiscated by the U.S. GeneralHeadquarters (GHQ). An order soon arrivedbanning all further filming. At this point Lt.Daniel McGovern took charge.

Shooting the U.S. Military Footage

In early September, 1945, less than a monthafter the two bombs fell, Lt. McGovern -- whoas a member of Hollywood's famed First MotionPicture Unit shot some of the footage forWilliam Wyler's "Memphis Belle" -- had becomeone of the first Americans to arrive inHiroshima and Nagasaki. He was a directorwith the U.S. Strategic Bombing Survey,organized by the Army the previous Novemberto study the effects of the air campaign againstGermany, and now Japan.

As he made plans to shoot the official Americanrecord, McGovern learned about the seizure ofthe Japanese footage. He felt it would be awaste to not take advantage of the newsreelfootage, noting in a letter to his superiors that"the conditions under which it was taken willnot be duplicated, until another atomic bomb isreleased under combat conditions."

McGovern proposed hiring some of theJapanese crew to shoot more footage and editand "caption" the material, so it would have"scientific value."

About the same time, McGovern was orderedby General Douglas MacArthur on January 1,1946 to document the results of the U.S. aircampaign in more than 20 Japanese cities. Hiscrew would shoot exclusively in color film,Kodachrome and Technicolor, rarely used atthe time even in Hollywood. McGovernassembled a crew of eleven. Third in commandwas a young lieutenant from New York namedHerbert Sussan.

The unit left Tokyo in a specially outfitted train,and made i t to Nagasaki . Their chief

cameramen was Harry Mimura (Mimura Akira),a Japanese photographer who in 1943 hadshot Sanshiro Sugata, the first feature film by athen-unknown Japanese director namedKurosawa Akira. (Mimura had spent severalyears in the U.S. before the war.)

U.S. military officers survey Hiroshima inthe wake of the bombing

The crew documented the physical effects ofthe bomb, including the ghostly shadows ofvaporized civilians burned into walls; but, mostchillingly, dozens of people in hospitals whohad survived (at least momentarily) and wereasked to display their burns, scars, and otherlingering effects for the camera as a warning,in vivid color, to the world.

March and April 1946 color footage ofHiroshima by Harry Mimura: Link.

The Suppression Begins

While all this was going on, the Japanesenewsreel team was completing its work ofediting and labeling their black and whitefootage into a rough cut of just under threehours. At this point, several members of theJapanese team took the courageous step ofordering from the lab a duplicate of the footagethey had shot before the Americans took over

APJ | JF 9 | 31 | 4

5

the project. Director Ito later said: "The four ofus agreed to be ready for 10 years of hard laborin case of being discovered." One incomplete,silent print would reside in a ceiling until theOccupation ended in 1952.

The negative of the finished Japanese film,nearly 15,000 feet of footage on 19 reels, wassent off to the U.S. in early May 1946. TheJapanese were also ordered to include in thisshipment all photographs and related material.The footage would be labeled SECRET and notemerge from the shadows for more than 20years. The following month, McGovern wasabruptly ordered to return to the U.S. Hehauled the 90,000 feet of his own color footage,on dozens of reels in huge footlockers, to thePentagon and turned it over to General OrvilAnderson. Locked up and declared “TopSecret”, it did not see the light of day for morethan 30 years.

McGovern would be charged with watchingover it. Fearful that his film might get "buried,"McGovern stayed on at the Pentagon as an aideto Gen. Anderson, who was fascinated by thefootage and had no qualms about showing it tothe American people. "He was that kind of man,he didn't give a damn what people thought,"McGovern told me. "He just wanted the storytold." Once they eyeballed the footage,however, most of the top brass didn't want itwidely shown and the Atomic EnergyCommission (AEC) was also opposed, accordingto McGovern. It did, however, commission fourtraining films.

In a March 3, 1947 memo, Francis E. Rundell, amajor in the Air Corps, explained that the filmwould be classified "secret." Particularlysensitive was the “footage taken at Hiroshimaand Nagasaki”. After the training films werecompleted, the status would be raised to "TopSecret" pending final classification by the AEC.The color footage was shipped to the Wright-Patterson base in Ohio. After cataloging it,McGovern placed it in a vault in the top secret

area. "Dan McGovern stayed with the film allthe time," Sussan later told me. "He told methey could not release the film [because] whatit showed was too horrible."

McGovern later explained it this way to me: The U.S. officials “wanted it buried…They werefearful because of the horror it contained.…because it showed effects on men, womenand children…They didn’t want that materialout because they were sorry for their sins—andbecause they were working on new nuclearweapons.”

The Japanese Footage Emerges

At the same time, McGovern was looking afterthe Japanese footage. Fearful that it might getlost forever in the military/governmentbureaucracy, he secretly made a 16 mm printand deposited it in the U.S. Air Force CentralFilm Depository at Wright-Patterson. There itremained out of sight, and generally out ofmind. On Sept. 12, 1967, the Air Forcetransferred the Japanese footage to theNational Archives Audio Visual Branch inWashington, with the film "not to be releasedwithout approval of DOD (Department ofDefense)."

Then, one morning in the summer of 1968, ErikBarnouw, author of landmark histories of filmand broadcasting, opened his mail to discover aclipping from a Tokyo newspaper sent by afriend. It indicated that the U.S. had finallyshipped to Japan a copy of black and whitenewsreel footage shot in Hiroshima andNagasaki. The Japanese had negotiated withthe State Department for its return. From thePentagon, Barnouw learned that the originalnitrate film had been quietly turned over to theNational Archives and went to take a look.Soon Barnouw realized that, despite itsmarginal film quality, "enough of the footagewas unforgettable in its implications, andhistoric in its importance, to warrantduplicating all of it ," he later wrote.

APJ | JF 9 | 31 | 4

6

Attempting to create a subtle, quiet, evenpoetic, black and white film, he and hisassociates cut it from 160 to 16 minutes, with amontage of human effects clustered near theend for impact. Barnouw arranged a screeningat the Museum of Modern Art in New York, andinvited the press. A throng turned out and satin respectful silence at its finish. "Hiroshima-Nagasaki 1945" proved to be a sketchy butquite moving document of the aftermath of thebombing, captured in grainy but often startlingblack and white images: shadows of objects orpeople burned into walls, ruins of schools,miles of razed landscape viewed from the roofof a building.

A clip from Hiroshima-Nagasaki 1945archival footage of Hiroshima and

Nagasaki victims

In the weeks ahead, however, none of the(then) three TV networks expressed interest inairing it. "Only NBC thought it might use thefilm," Barnouw later wrote, "if it could find a'news hook.' We dared not speculate what kindof event this might call for." But then an articleappeared in Parade magazine, and an editorialin the Boston Globe blasted the networks,saying that everyone in the country should seethis film: "Television has brought the sight ofwar into America's sitting rooms from Vietnam.Surely it can find 16 minutes of prime time toshow Americans what the first A-bombs, punyby today's weapons, did to people and property25 years ago." This at last pushed publictelevision into the void. What was then calledNational Educational Television (NET) agreedto show the documentary on August 3, 1970, tocoincide with the 25th anniversary of droppingthe bomb.

"I feel that classifying all of this filmed materialwas a misuse of the secrecy system since noneof it had any military or national securityaspect at all," Barnouw told me. "The reasonmust have been -- that if the public had seen itand Congressmen had seen it -- it would have

been much harder to appropriate money formore bombs."

The American Footage Comes Out

In 1979, Japanese antinuclear activists, led by aTokyo teacher named Iwakura Tsutomu (who Ilater interviewed), managed to track downhundreds of pictures of nuclear devastation inarchives and private collections and publishedthem in a popular book. In 1979 they mountedan exhibit at the United Nations in New York.There, by chance, Iwakura met Sussan, whotold him about the U.S. military footage.Iwakura visited the National Archives where hefound eighty reels of film, labeled #342 USA.About one-fifth of the footage covered theatomic cities. According to a shot list, reel#11010 included, for example: "School, deafand dumb, blast effect; damaged Commercialschool; demolished School, engineering;demolished.School; Shirayama elementary,demolished; blast effect Tenements,demolished."

The film had been quietly declassified a fewyears earlier, but no one in the outside worldknew it. Eventually 200,000 Japanese citizenscontributed half a million dollars enablingIwakura to buy a copy of the film. He thentraveled around Japan filming survivors whohad posed for Sussan and McGovern in 1946.Iwakura quickly completed a documentarycalled Prophecy and in late spring 1982arranged for a New York premiere. That fall asmall part of the McGovern/Sussan footageturned up for the first time in an American film,one of the sensations of the New York FilmFestival, called Dark Circle.

At the New York premiere at The Japan Society,which I attended, Herbert Sussan spoke. “Ihave waited so long for this moment,” he saidsoftly. “For years, all of my own efforts toobtain this unique footage to show theAmerican people have been frustrated. Thisfilm has been locked in vaults, declaredclassified and held away from the public. I am

APJ | JF 9 | 31 | 4

7

pleased that the world will finally see a smallbit of what the true reality of the nuclear agereally is.”

Sussan recalled entering Nagasaki from thenorth. The train the film crew was ridingbisected miles of utter ruin. “On the hills to theright we saw the remains of an elementaryschool and a technical school, each pusheddown by the detonation of the blast.” Then theypassed a medical college and the remains ofthe largest Catholic cathedral in the Far East(the bomb had killed many of the parishioners).“Nothing and no one had prepared me for thedevastation I met there,” he said. “I have neverlost my memories of those days.” He was in therare position of being able to do somethingabout it, however. “I felt that if we did notcapture this horror on film, no one would everreally understand the dimensions of what hadhappened. At that time most people back homehad not seen anything but black and whitepictures of blasted buildings or a mushroomcloud.”

His crew documented the physical effects,including the ghostly shadows of vaporizedobjects, flowers and humans burned into walls.They filmed survivors at Red Cross and militaryhospitals, many of them badly injured or slowlyexpiring from radiation disease. Two youngAmerican doctors, nicknamed Dr. Kildare andDr. Gillespie, had saved hundreds of lives withburn therapy and massive doses of antibiotics.

One of their patients was a boy kept in a bathof liquid penicillin, his entire back aflame, hewas the worst burn case the Americans hadseen. “I shuddered when the lights were turnedon to film him,” Sussan said. “None of usexpected him to l ive, but the doctorspersisted.” Indeed, the boy, TaniguchiSumiteru, somehow survived (I’ve interviewedhim three times) -- and today remains one ofthe leading hibakusha political activists inJapan.

Then the crew moved on to Hiroshima. Againhe filmed the unimaginable physical and humanwreckage. When he returned to Tokyo, he toldwriter John Hersey about a group of friars whohad a sanctuary near the city. One of them,Reverend Tanimoto Kiyoshi, became the centralfigure in Hersey’s epic New Yorker piece, andclassic book Hiroshima, a few months later.Sussan’s footage would never see the light ofday, however, instead labeled top-secret andshut away for decades.

The black and white footage shot by a Japanesecrew and seized and suppressed by the USgovernment, and the color footage by theAmerican team together provide the mostpowerful evidence of the human consequencesof the atomic bombs that in important waysdefine our era. Now, if imperfectly, it ispossible to gain access to, and reflect on, thedestructive potential of nuclear weapons forour time.

Video trailer for Mitchell’s “Atomic Cover-Up” book, including some of the

suppressed footage

Greg Mitchell is the author of twelve booksincluding several on nuclear weapons andnuclear war. The former editor of Editor andPublisher, he currently blogs for The Nation onthe media and politics, and, since April 2010,on WikiLeaks. From 2002 to 2009 he was the

APJ | JF 9 | 31 | 4

8

editor of Editor & Publisher (E&P), whichcovers the news and newspaper industry. Hisrecent books include Atomic Cover-Up: TwoU.S. Soldiers, Hiroshim & Nagasaki, and theGreatest Movie Never Made and The Age ofWikileaks: From Collateral Murder toCablegate (and Beyond). With Robert J. Lifton,he wrote Hiroshima in America.His blog, andinformation about ordering the paperback ofAtomic Coverup is here.

Recommended citation: Greg Mitchell, "TheGreat Hiroshima Cover-Up—And the GreatestMovie Never Made," The Asia-Pacific JournalVol 9, Issue 31 No 4, August 1, 2011.

Articles on related subjects

• Ōishi Matashichi and Richard Falk, The Daythe Sun Rose in the West. Bikini, the Lucky

Dragon and I

• Robert Jacobs, Whole Earth or No Earth: TheOrigin of the Whole Earth Icon in the Ashes ofHiroshima and Nagasaki

• N a k a z a w a K e i j i , H i r o s h i m a : T h eAutobiography of Barefoot Gen

• Yuki TANAKA, War and Peace in the Art ofTezuka Osama: The Humanism of His EpicManga

• Howard Zinn, Hiroshima: Breaking theSilence

• elin O’hara slavick, Hiroshima: A VisualRecord

• John O’Brian, The Nuclear Family of Man