Greg Mitchell - Antiwar.com Blog

He Took the Only Photos in Hiroshima on August 6

Reprinted with permission from Greg Mitchell’s newsletter Between Rock and a Hard Place.

It’s in vain to recall the past, unless it works some influence upon the present. ~ Charles Dickens

Yoshito Matsushige, a photographer for the Chugoku Shimbun newspaper in Hiroshima, took the only pictures in that city on August 6, 1945, that have surfaced since and confirmed as taken then.

On that day, Matsushige wandered around Hiroshima for ten hours, carrying one of the few cameras that survived the atomic bombing and two rolls of film with twenty-four possible exposures. This was no ordinary photo opportunity. He lined up one gripping shot after another but he could only push the shutter seven times. When he was done he returned to his home and developed the pictures in the most primitive way, since every dark room in the city, including his own, had been destroyed. Under a star-filled sky, with the landscape around him littered with collapsed homes and the center of Hiroshima still smoldering in the distance, he washed his film in a radiated creek and hung it out to dry on the burned branch of a tree.

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Trinity and the Parts Left Out of Oppenheimer

Reprinted with permission from Greg Mitchell’s substack Between Rock and a Hard Place.

Every year at this time I trace the final days leading to the first use of the atomic bomb against two cities, Hiroshima and Nagasaki, in August 1945. In this way the fateful, and in my view, tragic decisions made by President Truman, his advisers, and others, can be judged more clearly in “real time.” As some know, this is a subject that I have explored in hundreds of articles, thousands of posts, and in three books, since 1984: Hiroshima in America (with Robert Jay Lifton), Atomic Cover-up and my recent award-winner on the first atomic movie, The Beginning or the End. Now I’ve directed an award-winning documentary. Here’s today’s entry. You can still subscribe to this newsletter for free.

While most people trace the dawn of the nuclear era to August 6, 1945, and the dropping of the atomic bomb over the center of Hiroshima, it really began three weeks earlier, in the desert near Alamogordo, New Mexico, with the top-secret Trinity test. Its 79rd anniversary will be marked – or mourned today.

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My ‘Countdown to Hiroshima’ Begins – as First A-BombTest at Trinity Is Readied

Reprinted with permission from Greg Mitchell’s newsletter Oppenheimer: From Hiroshima to Hollywood.

Every year at this time I trace the final days leading up to the first (and so far only) use of the atomic bomb against cities, Hiroshima and Nagasaki, in August 1945. In this way the fateful, and in my view, tragic, decisions made by President Truman and his advisers, and the actions of scientists in Los Alamos and others, can be judged more clearly in “real time.”

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Nolan’s Oppenheimer Emerged One Year Ago: But What About First A-Bomb Movie?

Reprinted with permission from Greg Mitchell’s substack Between Rock and a Hard Place.

On this weekend exactly one year ago, I was invited with a few dozen others to the first screening in New York City of Christopher Nolan’s upcoming movie Oppenheimer. Nolan sat on a panel afterward and later socialized in the lobby of the mini-theater (in the basement of a midtown hotel). I had just launched my newsletter devoted to the movie, the issues raised and ignored in it, and Oppenheimer and his legacy (this sibling Substack is still going, where you can subscribe for free). Here is a piece I wrote back then published elsewhere, at Mother Jones. It is adapted from my book on the horrific first Hollywood movie on the making and use of the atomic bomb.

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Massacres, Then and Now

Reprinted with permission from Greg Mitchell’s newsletter Between Rock and a Hard Place.

On this holiday Monday: First, if you missed yesterday’s post, here are 15 varied songs marking the day. Next: My “Memorial Day Massacre,” which came out over PBS one year ago, airs today over WTTW in Chicago at 5:30 pm and 10:00 pm, and in many others cities today and the rest of this week. But it has also been streaming over PBS.org and PBS apps for free for quite some time – but that ends this coming Friday. So if you have not watched, here’s your “final” chance for maybe quite awhile. It’s 27 minutes long, and narrated by Josh Charles, with an assist from my old pal Studs Terkel.

As I have written in the past: It explores the murder of ten steel strikers and labor activists (most shot in the back) during a Memorial Day march in Chicago in 1937. And then, how the only film footage of the tragedy was suppressed until a muckraking reporter and crusading U.S. Senator brought it to light. Still, some movie theaters and distributors refused to air the newsreel. And no cops were punished. But it had significant influence, to this day, on labor movements in America.

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