[A-List] Hiroshima Film Cover-up Exposed

[Bill Totten <shimogamo@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

by Greg Mitchell

Editor & Publisher (August 03 2005)

In the weeks following the atomic attacks on Japan almost sixty 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 US 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 US
military film remained hidden for nearly four decades.

The full story of this atomic cover-up is told fully for the first time today at
E&P Online, as the sixtieth 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 US 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 US 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 US 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,
Maryland, 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: Lieutenant Colonel (Retired) Daniel A McGovern, who
directed the US 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 television, 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: A Half Century of Denial (Quill, 1996), and new material has emerged
since. On August 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 August 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 US 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 September 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 October 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 US General
Headquarters (GHQ). An order soon arrived banning all further filming. It was at
this point that Lieutenant Daniel McGovern took charge.


Shooting The US Military Footage

In early September, 1945, less than a month after the two bombs fell, Lieutenant
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
US 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 US air campaign in more than twenty 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 ten 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
nineteen reels, was sent off to the US 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
twenty years.

The following month, McGovern was abruptly ordered to return to the US. 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 thirty 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 General 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 identification 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 sixteen millimeter print and deposited it in the US 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 US 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 US 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
US 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 US 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 US, in fact, had
threatened to use nuclear weapons during the Cuban Missile Crisis and on other
occasions.

On September 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 sixteen 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 US 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 US 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, DC 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 for it, 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 US
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 September 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 US
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 fiftieth 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 August 6 and 7, it will debut on the
Sundance cable channel. After sixty 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.

gmitchell@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx

Greg Mitchell is the editor of E&P and former editor of Nuclear Times. He
co-authored (with Robert Jay Lifton) the book Hiroshima in America: A Half
Century of Denial (Quill, 1996) and served as adviser to the award-winning film
"Original Child Bomb".

Links referenced within this article:

The Embedded New York Times Reporter Who Brought Us the Atomic Age
http://www.editorandpublisher.com/eandp/search/article_display.jsp?vnu_content_id=1000980524

A Warning to the World
http://www.editorandpublisher.com/eandp/search/article_display.jsp?vnu_content_id=1000965825

A Great Nuclear-Age Mystery Solved
http://www.editorandpublisher.com/eandp/search/article_display.jsp?vnu_content_id=1000963439

War Photos We Must Never See Again
http://www.editorandpublisher.com/eandp/search/article_display.jsp?vnu_content_id=1000913455


Copyright 2005 VNU eMedia Inc. All rights reserved.

http://www.editorandpublisher.com/eandp/news/article_display.jsp?vnu_content_id=1001001583


Bill Totten     http://billtotten.blogspot.com/