The Day After Hiroshima: When the Atomic "Cover-Up" Began, 64 Years Ago

Yesterday, I explored the decades-long suppression of film footage of the the full effects of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki 64 years ago this week. But that censorship and cover-up of the full impact, and ramifications, of the new weapons began within hours of the first use.

On Aug. 6, 1945, President Harry S. Truman faced the task of telling the press, and the world, that America's crusade against fascism had culminated in exploding a revolutionary new weapon of extraordinary destructive power over a Japanese city.

It was vital that this event be understood as a reflection of dominant military power and at the same time consistent with American decency and concern for human life. Everyone involved in preparing the presidential statement sensed that the stakes were high, for this marked the unveiling of both the atomic bomb and the official narrative of Hiroshima.

When the astonishing news emerged that morning, exactly 64 years ago, it took the form of a routine press release, a little more than a thousand words long. President Truman was at sea a thousand miles away, returning from the Potsdam conference. Shortly before eleven o'clock, an information officer from the War Department arrived at the White House bearing bundles of press releases. A few minutes later, assistant press secretary Eben Ayers began reading the president's announcement to about a dozen members of the Washington press corps.

The atmosphere was so casual, and the statement so momentous, that the reporters had difficulty grasping it. "The thing didn't penetrate with most of them," Ayers later remarked. Finally, they rushed to call their editors, and at least one reporter found a disbeliever at the other end of the line. The first few sentences of the statement set the tone:

"Sixteen hours ago an American airplane dropped one bomb on Hiroshima, an important Japanese Army base. That bomb had more power than 20,000 tons of TNT. ...The Japanese began the war from the air at Pearl Harbor. They have been repaid many fold. ...It is an atomic bomb. It is a harnessing of the basic power of the universe."

Although details were modified at the last moment, Truman's four-page statement had been crafted with considerable care over many months. If use of the atomic bomb was inherent in its invention, an announcement of this sort was inevitable. Only the timing was in doubt.

From its very first words, however, the official narrative was built on a half-truth. Hiroshima did contain an important military base, used as a staging area for Southeast Asia. But the bomb had been aimed at the very center of a city of 350,000, a continuation of the American policy of bombing civilian populations in Japan to undermine the morale of the enemy.

There was something else missing: Because the president in his statement failed to mention radiation effects, which officials knew were horrendous, the imagery of just a bigger bomb would prevail in the press. Truman described the new weapon as "revolutionary" but only in regard to the destruction it could cause, failing to mention its most lethal new feature: radiation.

Many Americans first heard the news from the radio, which broadcast the text of Truman's statement shortly after its release. The afternoon papers quickly arrived with banner headlines: "Atom Bomb, World's Greatest, Hits Japs!" and "Japan City Blasted by Atomic Bomb." The Pentagon had released no pictures, so most of the newspapers relied on maps of Japan with Hiroshima circled.

By that evening, radio commentators were weighing in with observations that often transcended Truman's announcement, suggesting that the public imagination was outrunning the official story. Contrasting emotions of gratification and anxiety had already emerged. H.V. Kaltenhorn warned, "We must assume that with the passage of only a little time, an improved form of the new weapon we use today can be turned against us."

It wasn't until the following morning, Aug. 7, that the government's press offensive appeared, with the first detailed account of the making of the atomic bomb, and the Hiroshima mission. Nearly every U.S. newspaper carried all or parts of 14 separate press releases distributed by the Pentagon several hours after the president's announcement. They carried headlines such as: "Atom Bombs Made in 3 Hidden Cities" and "New Age Ushered."

Many of them written by one man: W.L. Laurence, a Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter for the New York Times, "embedded" with the atomic project. General Leslie Groves, military director of the Manhattan Project, would later reflect, with satisfaction, that "most newspapers published our releases in their entirety. This is one of the few times since government releases have become so common that this has been done."

The Truman announcement of the atomic bombing on Aug. 6, 1945, and the flood of material from the War Department, firmly established the nuclear narrative. It would not take long, however, for breaks in the official story to appear.

At first, journalists had to follow where the Pentagon led. Wartime censorship remained in effect, and there was no way any reporter could reach Hiroshima for a look around. One of the few early stories that did not come directly from the military was a wire service report filed by a journalist traveling with the president on the Atlantic, returning from Europe. Approved by military censors, it went beyond, but not far beyond, the measured tone of the president's official statement. It depicted Truman, his voice "tense with excitement," personally informing his shipmates about the atomic attack. "The experiment," he announced, "has been an overwhelming success."

The sailors were said to be "uproarious" over the news. "I guess I'll get home sooner now," was a typical response. Nowhere in the story, however, was there a strong sense of Truman's reaction. Missing from this account was his exultant remark when the news of the bombing first reached the ship: "This is the greatest thing in history!"

On Aug. 7, military officials confirmed that Hiroshima had been devastated: at least 60% of the city wiped off the map. They offered no casualty estimates, emphasizing instead that the obliterated area housed major industrial targets. The Air Force provided the newspapers with an aerial photograph of Hiroshima. Significant targets were identified by name. For anyone paying close attention there was something troubling about this picture. Of the 30 targets, only four were specifically military in nature. "Industrial" sites consisted of three textile mills. (Indeed, a U.S. survey of the damage, not released to the press, found that residential areas bore the brunt of the bomb, with less than 10% of the city's manufacturing, transportation, and storage facilities damaged.)

On Guam, weaponeer William S. Parsons and Enola Gay pilot Paul Tibbets calmly answered reporters' questions, limiting their remarks to what they had observed after the bomb exploded. Asked how he felt about the people down below at the time of detonation, Parsons said that he experienced only relief that the bomb had worked and might be "worth so much in terms of shortening the war."

Almost without exception newspaper editorials endorsed the use of the bomb against Japan. Many of them sounded the theme of revenge first raised in the Truman announcement. Most of them emphasized that using the bomb was merely the logical culmination of war. "However much we deplore the necessity," the Washington Post observed, "a struggle to the death commits all combatants to inflicting a maximum amount of destruction on the enemy within the shortest span of time." The Post added that it was "unreservedly glad that science put this new weapon at our disposal before the end of the war."

Referring to American leaders, the Chicago Tribune commented: "Being merciless, they were merciful." A drawing in the same newspaper pictured a dove of peace flying over Japan, an atomic bomb in its beak.

Greg Mitchell is co-author, with Robert Jay Lifton, of "Hiroshima in America." His latest book is "Why Obama Won." He is editor of Editor & Publisher and has written about the atomic bombings since 1982.

 

 

Follow Greg Mitchell on Twitter: www.twitter.com/GregMitch

Comments

[pfc1369]

"War is cruelty. You cannot refine it."

William Techumsch Sherman

[LB14]

the Japanese government caused the deaths of their own people by declaring war on the US and by refusing to surrender before we dropped the bombs. We did not want conquest of their land, just their surrender. I put it those deaths on the leaders of Japan.

but I wonder if the US would have stayed neutral if Japan would not have attacked us? I somehow doubt it.

[Osusuki]

334 B-29s fire bombed Tokyo on March 9, 1945 killing an estimated 83,000 people, mostly civilians, and injuring 40,000 others. This was the first of several such raids on Tokyo which, by the end of May, reduced the home of 7,000,000 people to a smoking ruin which had ceased to exist as a city. In comparison, the Hiroshima police estimated in 1946 that one B-29, the Enola Gay, caused the deaths of 78,150 people with its first ever atomic attack. Now, you can say that the ease with which atomic destruction of civilian populations is achieved makes it the more horrendous act of the two, but from the point of view of the people at ground zero, the two are roughly equal--if anything, the three hour duration of the initial conventional fire raid on Tokyo, complete with melting people and boiling rivers, was the more horrifying of the two. Absent the advent of atomic weapons, General Curtis LeMay with the full backing of the US Government was prepared to conduct similar fire raids on every major population center in Japan until unconditional surrender was achieved. Absent the shock value of such destruction being achieved by a single aircraft, he probably would have been forced to. I'm not sure anyone knows for sure whether or not the atomic attacks were justified, but it is a fact that, without them, the suffering in Japan in the last days of 1945 would have been incalculably worse.

[Libertarian09]

Well said.

If any good came from the use of the bomb, its the civilian lives spared the horror of fire bombing and not the lives of combatants.

[PetrBuben]

I always wonder, wouldn't it have been enough to drop atomic bombs into the ocean, by the japanese shore, to coerce capitulation, but to spare the loss of human lives ?

[jqcitizen]

Many of the comments on this story, state the obvious. Why use an Atomic Bomb on innocent people?
Might be that, innocent people do not start wars, they only suffer the consequences.
It was not the citizens of Japan that attack Pearl Harbor any more than it was the German citizens desire to devise a nuclear bomb.
The 'Manhattan Project' might be considered, by some, as a way of destroying Japan. The lunatics in Europe had the technology to build the 'Bomb', just didn't do soon enough. Most of that part of the world was already in rubble, so why end WWII by deploying the bomb on the already finished AXIS?
War is never good. But, today, the countries of Japan and Germany are not interested in wars. I don't think the US citizens are either.

[DBrunoCMT]

I found this essay about Hiroshima and the Black experience on film very

interesting:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/daniel-bruno-sanz/bad-dreams-from-my-
grandf_b_2­50751.html

[tainoaz]

What about not detonating the bomb in the air for maximum radius of destruction and just letting the crater speak for it's power?

I would think 3 huge craters would have sent the message pretty clearly.

Just a thought.

[Tom Joad]

What's done is done. We can't take it back now. We can only work to ensure that it never happens again.

[LB14]

the dropping of the A bomb was a terrible thing, but an invasion of Japan would have led to far more casualties. A land battle in Japan probably would have been the largest bloodbath in the history of modern warfare.

[ShinjiIkari]

That's debatable. The number of averted American casualtoes grew in the telling after the bombing. See Mitchell & Lifton's "Hiroshima in America".

[Oralloy]

Before the bombing, the numbers from the Joint Chiefs of Staff predicted 1.2 million US casualties from the invasion.

Before the bombing, the military ordered half-a-million Purple Heart medals to cover expected casualties from the invasion.

(The military didn't have to order any Purple Heart medals for the Korean and Vietnam Wars because the combined casualties from those two wars was less than the supplies they ordered for the invasion of Japan.)

[Willow712]

I have read that the US has such strong Nationalism, that Japan was fearful we would want to take over their country too. We were moving west so fast, we had the Phillipines, we had Iwo Jima, we had Hawaii, we were heading west. So if indeed Japan feared our nationalism, then they at least had a reason, even if it wasn't logical.

[bdaved]

Iwo Jima was internationally recognized as a Japanese possession in 1876, was occupied by the United States Navy after 1945, and was returned to Japan in 1968.

[bdaved]

A lot of people try to interpret history in a way that completely condemns one group while wholly exonerating another. And then there are some people who interpret history in a way that condemns everybody. The truth is hardly so simple. As for me, it's 2009 and I don't feel the need to hate anybody over it.

[melmoid]

How convenient to revise history to suit ones own taste. I grew up during WWII. My parents and just about everyone else in the country were tired of losing friends and family, tired of rationing and tired of being afraid of tyranny. For Truman not to use the bombs would have been unthinkable at the time. The precedent for carpet bombing had already been set first by Hitler and later by the British who used nighttime incendiary bombing to flatten every major German city and then moved methodically down to smaller cities and towns many without any military value at all.

Nagasaki Bomb

With no gods about,
waste and desolation reign
as dead leaves pile up. -- Basho

Each work day, I drive in the desert
past the windowless walls,
the concrete monoliths,
canyon buildings containing inside
the idle workshops of plutonium alchemy,
the factories of the Nagasaki bomb.

The veterans say the bomb
saved their lives and freedom.

The pictures haunt me:
images burned into
Nagasaki streets
like Christ’s shroud,
the fissile photographic
plates of the bright instant,
the vapor of souls,
the hanging flags of burned skin,
the cancers and bleeding gums.

The Hanford walls
are not inscribed
with the names of veterans,
or the children of Nagasaki,
the Bill of Rights,
a poem by Basho or E=mc2.
Only canyon buildings
with water stains
visited by tumbleweeds.

Hanford Nuclear Reservation

[gorgonopsid]

Thanks for your post. I offer this equation: war = atrocity.

[Eamon]

One perspective that is missing in the analysis of why the A-Bomb was used is what message we were trying to send Russia. The war in Europe had been over for 3 months and it was obvious our shakey alliance with Russia was falling apart. Gen. Patton wanted to continue the war against Russia. German officers thought they would join Americans in turning their guns against the Russians. It was obvious for months, perhaps longer, to American officials that Russia was planning on keeping most of Eastern Europe. The Truman Administration wanted to send a message to Russia that we were more powerful than they and that they should bend to our will. It was a tool of intimidation and negotiation and was pointed at Russia. We bombed Nagasaki to show that we had more than one bomb and probably more than that. It also proved to Stalin (don't forget that his name meant "steel") that we were ruthless and "steely," enough to use it. No discussion of Hiroshima and Nagasaki is complete with out including post-war global politics.

[jhamm1]

Not quite, although you are correct in implying that the Russians proved a key factor in why the atomic bomb was dropped, in that we wanted Japan to capitulate to us before they could to Russia, simply because the latter case scenario would involve not only Japan, but the entire province of Southeast Asia falling into Soviet hands, thus yielding us little room to negotiate at least a stalement in terms of placing limitations on Soviet expansionism.

[useyourbrain]

What's sad in all of this is that the bomb could have been demonstrated to the Japanese in other ways. The bombing of Nagasaki was even more horrendous. All told probably over 500,000 were killed immediately or from radiation afterwards. We targeted civilian populations, as we did in Germany (remember Dresden), and as we did in Cambodia. These were all civilian targets = terrorism. We do not have clean hands.

[Oralloy]

Not even half that. The A-bombs didn't kill more than 250,000 and probably didn't knoll more than 200,000.

And no, we aimed for military targets.

Hiroshima was a major military center filled with tens of thousands of soldiers.

Nagasaki was an industrial center with huge weapons factories.

Our target at Dresden was the railyards (a legitimate target) and we had nothing to do with the UK's firestorm that killed so many civilians.

[Oralloy]

No discussion of Hiroshima and Nagasaki is complete without pointing out the reality that the bombs were dropped to make Japan surrender. Any effect on Russia was only a fringe benefit.

[Gasparilla]

It's always presented as poor misunderstood Japan looking to surrender. They did want to surrender, but on their terms. Could we have blockaded Japan for months or even years? Yes, but it's unlikely the American people were in the mood for that after 4 years of all out war. Many of the Japanese actually tried to dismiss the first bomb as an aberration. The bombings were the thing that ended the war. Unfortunate, but everything else is Monday morning quarterbacking.

[bdaved]

The position of the United States government was that unconditional surrender was worth all the American, Commonwealth, Chinese and Japanese lives it would take to achieve it. To criticize Japanese intransigence while accepting American intransigence is less than objective, especially considering that ultimately, the Japanese were granted, at the very least, what had been their most important condition for surrender. I'm not about to judge whether the decision to drop the bombs was right or wrong, but I don't accept that it was the only real choice.

[Oralloy]

Setting aside for a moment the fact that Japan didn't ask to surrender until AFTER both A-bombs had been dropped, we never granted the guarantee for the Emperor that they asked for.

The surrender terms gave us the power to depose the Emperor if we wanted to.

[GardenerNorCal]

There's nothing that can justify unleashing that sort of force upon the world. I wish there was something more than apologize that I could do.

[wallyone]

If our military had had to invade Japan and suffer moderate to severe deaths and the public had learned that we had the bomb and failed to use it, Truman would have been forever vilified. And rightfully so. Especially by the widows and orphans and mothers of the casualties. I am eternally grateful that my father came back to us from WWII.

[MFS001]

Exactly