Author: Greg Mitchell

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

The letter addressed to Mrs. Donna Owen arrived at her oceanfront Santa Monica home on October 28, 1945. The return address on the envelope revealed that it came from her beloved high school chemistry teacher back in Denison, Iowa, when she lived on a farm and was still known as Donna Belle Mullenger. She had stayed in touch with handsome young Ed Tompkins for a few years after graduation, but then he suddenly vanished, without explanation, and had not responded to any of her letters.

This seemed odd. Tompkins (above with Donna and his fateful 1945 letter) had deeply influenced her outlook on life a decade earlier when she was an aimless sophomore, after he gifted her a copy of the popular Dale Carnegie self-help book How to Win Friends and Influence People. In short order her grades soared, she secured the lead role in the high school play (Ayn Rand’s The Night of January 16), and she was voted Campus Queen.

Continue reading “78 Years Before Oppenheimer: When Donna Reed Inspired the First Atomic Bomb Movie”

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

In Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer, we do not witness the twin, tragic, missions to Hiroshima and Nagasaki…the usual images of B-29s in flight, pilots in command and bombardiers finding their targets, and bombs away. (And, of course, no sign of what then happened on the ground). We never do meet the two pilots.

But I did. In fact, I wonder if I am the only person who chatted with both of the pilots as well as dozens of Japanese survivors of the payloads they carried.

Continue reading “Missing in Oppenheimer: The Pilots Who Dropped His Bomb”

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

Yesterday’s post on the first article from Hiroshima here. You can still subscribe to this newsletter for free.

One of the great mysteries of the Nuclear Age was solved less than twenty years ago: What was in the censored, and then lost to the ages, newspaper articles filed by the first reporter to reach Nagasaki following the atomic attack on that city on August 9, 1945?

The reporter was George Weller (upper right), the distinguished correspondent for the now-defunct Chicago Daily News. His startling dispatches from Nagasaki, which could have affected public opinion on the future of the bomb, never emerged from General Douglas MacArthur’s censorship office in Tokyo.

Continue reading “Historic Stories From Nagasaki: Suppressed by US, Then Missing for 58 Years”

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

Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer is still going strong at the box office, returning to the #2 spot, after one week in third place, still behind heavy Mattel Barbie but now up to $264 million gross just in USA.

Press coverage continues constant, including new praise and firm complaints (often in the same article). Here’s one hit, from Stars & Stripes no less, claiming the film really underplays the role of female scientists on bomb project.

Continue reading “When First Foreign Reporter Arrived In Hiroshima – and Then Got Kicked Out of Japan”

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

Seventy-eight years ago this week, President Harry S Truman exulted when he heard the first report that the atomic bomb he had ordered dropped over Hiroshima by a B-29 bomber had exploded as planned and on target, most likely devastating most of this large city. Truman was on the ocean, returning to Washington from the Potsdam Conference in Germany, where he had secured Joseph Stalin’s promise to declare war on Japan around August 10. An article in the press the day after the first atomic attack depicted Truman, his voice “tense with excitement,” personally informing his shipmates about the atomic attack. “The experiment,” he announced, “has been an overwhelming success.”

Missing from this account was Truman’s burst of triumphalism when the news of the bombing first reached the ship: “This is the greatest thing in history!”

Continue reading “Did Truman Ever Express Regrets for Atomic Bombings?”

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

On this date in 1945, the day after the the Nagasaki bomb:

MEMORANDUM TO: Chief of Staff.

The next bomb of the implosion type had been scheduled to be ready for delivery on the target on the first good weather after 24 August 1945. We have gained 4 days in manufacture and expect to ship from New Mexico on 12 or 13 August the final components. Providing there are no unforeseen difficulties in manufacture, in transportation to the theatre or after arrival in the theatre, the bomb should be ready for delivery on the first suitable weather after 17 or 18 August.
L. R. Groves,
Major General, USA

Continue reading “The Japanese Man Who Was A-Bombed Twice”