Author: Greg Mitchell

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

This happened a few decades ago, but needs little updating today.

Approaching Hiroshima from the east on the bullet train from Tokyo, one can’t help feeling a certain morbid fascination along with considerable dread. After all, if it’s your first trip, you have never before set foot in a city completely destroyed by a single bomb that also spread radioactive debris over a wide area. On top of that, if you are an American, it was your country that did it.

Like others in my party, I had laughed and joked along the way, between attempts at fast-speed sightseeing. On a drizzly July day, Mt. Fuji was obscured by clouds and the view of Kyoto from the train platform was similarly murky. Unlike my fellow journalists, I’d seen Fuji and Kyoto before, during a 1976 trip, so I shook off the disappointment to concentrate on the unnerving notion of entering Hiroshima, as we hurtled west, finally in the bright sunshine of mid-afternoon.

Continue reading “When I First Entered Hiroshima”

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

The Man Who Knew Too Much

Three weeks after Japan’s emperor announced a surrender, on September 2, 1945, Australian war reporter Wilfred Burchett left Tokyo by train, intent on reaching distant Hiroshima before any of his journalistic colleagues, who were banned from taking such a trip by the American occupation chief, Gen. Douglas MacArthur. U.S. forces had just arrived in the Tokyo area several days earlier.

Burchett, who had written dispatches glorifying the firebombing of Japanese cities, was not primarily driven by a moral impulse, he was just looking for a scoop. The following morning, arriving in the distant city, or what remained of it, he encountered what he would describe as a “death-stricken alien planet.” He noticed a dank, sulfurous smell as he was taken directly to one of the few hospitals left standing. Its director felt certain that radiation sickness, far from being merely “propaganda” or a “hoax” as the United States (a view promoted by General Leslie R. Groves) was claiming, was very real. One in five patients was developing purple skin bruises, white cell counts had plunged for many, some were also losing their hair or simply expiring without any known injuries.

Continue reading “78 Years Ago Today: First Outsider Warns of ‘Atomic Plague’ in Hiroshima”

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

Seventy-eight years ago this week,  the first American troops landed at Yokohama, near Tokyo, with fifteen thousand pouring in within a few days, under the direction of Gen. Douglas MacArthur. Also arriving were forward elements of the U.S. Strategic Bombing Survey, which had been organized by the Army the previous November to study the effects of the air campaign against Germany and now shifted its sights to Japan.

The Japanese formally surrendered on the battleship Missouri on September 2. At this point, the American public knew little about conditions in the atomic cities, which are far from Tokyo, beyond Japanese assertions that a mysterious and deadly affliction was destroying many of those who survived the initial blasts (claims that were taken to be propaganda by Gen. Leslie Groves, among others, as we saw yesterday). No Westerners had arrived in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, few photographs circulated. The first Americans did not reach Hiroshima until September 3. They were beaten there by the Australian journalist Wilfred Burchett, who had already filed a story for the London Daily Express describing people dying from an “atomic plague.”   The first American to reach Nagasaki, George Weller, found that all of his dispatches were spiked by General MacArthur’s office in Tokyo.

Continue reading “American Soldiers Faced Radiation Dangers in Hiroshima and Nagasaki”

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

As I’ve noted in previous posts – and in my recent books Atomic Cover-up and The Beginning or the End–the U.S. after dropping the bombs over Hiroshima and Nagasaki was confronted with a unique publicity (not to mention, moral) problem.   Reports from Japan warned of a mysterious new disease afflicting survivors of the twin blasts.  Some in Japan were already dubbing it “radiation disease,” which was what Robert Oppenheimer some of our other bomb-makers privately expected (though unmentioned in the Christopher Nolan movie) – but still, officials and most in media in U.S. mocked the idea.  No one from the West had yet reached either city.

Seventy-eight years ago this week, however, one of the most horrific, if revealing, conversations of the nuclear era took place.

Continue reading “General Groves and the Radiation ‘Hoax’”

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

A couple weeks back, I revealed how Robert Oppenheimer, despite deep reservations about the script (“idiotic”) and its many falsehoods, signed a release for MGM in 1946 allowing them to portray him in the first movie about the Bomb, The Beginning or the End (coincidentally the title of my recent book about it).

Obtaining other permissions from key figures to be portrayed would remain a sticky problem for MGM, however. Christopher Nolan, for his new movie, luckily did not face any such obstacles.

Continue reading “When Oppenheimer Caved to Hollywood, While Einstein Resisted”

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

Seventy-seven years ago this week, an article by novelist and war reporter John Hersey (photo above), titled simply “Hiroshima,” occupied the entire feature section of the August 31, 1946, issue of The New Yorker.

Soon it would be hailed by many as one of the most important magazine stories of the century. Its impact, arriving at a time when few Americans had been exposed to the extent of the atomic bomb’s horrific and lingering effects on Japanese civilians, was immediate and profound. (I wrote about it twice here last week.)    Copies sold out within hours (Albert Einstein himself ordered a thousand); it was read in its entirely over nationwide radio.

Continue reading “Did Truman Ever Read John Hersey’s Hiroshima?”