#86 – The Aftermath Part 1

Cam & Ray's Cold War Podcast

* TRUMAN ANNOUNCES THE BOMB https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FN_UJJ9ObDs
* On August 6, 1945, the United States dropped an atomic bomb over the center of Hiroshima, killing at least 70,000 civilians 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.
* Mr. Akihiro Takahashi was 14 years old, when the bomb was dropped on Hiroshima.
* He was standing in line with other students of his junior high school, waiting for the morning meeting 1.4 km away from the center.
* “The heat was tremendous . And I felt like my body was burning all over. For my burning body the cold water of the river was as precious as the treasure. Then I left the river, and I walked along the railroad tracks in the direction of my home. On the way, I ran into an another friend of mine, Tokujiro Hatta. I wondered why the soles of his feet were badly burnt. It was unthinkable to get burned there. But it was undeniable fact the soles were peeling and red muscle was exposed. Even I myself was terribly burnt, I could not go home ignoring him. I made him crawl using his arms and knees. Next, I made him stand on his heels and I supported him. We walked heading toward my home repeating the two methods.”
* He was under medical treatment for about year and half.
* Eiko Taoka, then 21, was one of nearly 100 passengers said to have been on board a streetcar that had left Hiroshima Station at a little after 8:00 a.m. and was in a Hatchobori area, 750 m from ground zero, when the bomb fell. Taoka was heading for Funairi with her one year old son to secure wagon in preparation for her move out of the building which was to be evacuated. At 8:15, as the streetcar approached Hatchobori Station, an intense flash and blast engulfed the car, instantly setting it on fire. Taoka’s son died of radiation sickness on August 28.
* When we were near in Hatchobori and since I had been holding my son in my arms, the young woman in front of me said, ‘I will be getting off here. Please take this seat.’ We were just changing places when there was a strange smell and sound. It suddenly became dark and before I knew it, I had jumped outside…. I held [my son] firmly and looked down on him. He had been standing by the window and I think fragments of glass had pierced his head. His face was a mess because of the blood flowing from his head. But he looked at my face and smiled. His smile has remained glued in my memory. He did not comprehend what had happened. And so he looked at me and smiled at my face which was all bloody. I had plenty of milk which he drank all throughout that day. I think my child sucked the poison right out of my body. And soon after that he died. Yes, I think that he died for me.
* Ms. Akiko Takakura was 20 years old when the bomb fell. She was in the Bank of Hiroshima, 300 meters away from the hypocenter. Ms. Takakura miraculously escaped death despite over 100 lacerated wounds on her back. She is one of the few survivors who was within 300 meters of the hypocenter.
* Many people on the street were killed almost instantly. The fingertips of those dead bodies caught fire and the fire gradually spread over their entire bodies from their fingers. A light gray liquid dripped down their hands, scorching their fingers. I, I was so shocked to know that fingers and bodies could be burned and deformed like that. I just couldn’t believe it. It was horrible. And looking at it, it was more than painful for me to think how the fingers were burned, hands and fingers that would hold babies or turn pages, they just, they just burned away. For a few years after the A-bomb was dropped, I was terribly afraid of fire. I wasn’t even able to get close to fire because all my senses remembered how fearful and horrible the fire was, how hot the blaze was, and how hard it was to breathe the hot air. It was really hard to breathe. Maybe because the fire burned all the oxygen, I don’t know. I could not open my eyes enough because of the smoke, which was everywhere. Not only me but everyone felt the same. And my parts were covered with holes.
* On August 6, 1945, Yoshito Matsushige was 32 years old, living at home in Midori-cho, Hiroshima.
* His home was 1.7 miles away from ground zero, just outside of the 1.5 mile radius of the total destruction created by atomic blast effects.
* Miraculously, Matsushige was not seriously injured by the explosion.
* With one camera and two rolls of film with 24 possible exposures, he tried to photograph the immediate after effects of the bombing of Hiroshima.
* During the next ten hours, Matsushige was only able to click the shutter seven times.
* He said, “It was such a cruel sight that I couldn’t bring myself to press the shutter.”
* In addition, he was afraid the burned and battered people would be enraged if someone took their pictures.
* Matsushige could not develop the film right away but eventually did so after twenty days, in the open, at night, using a radioactive stream to rinse the photographs.
* Only five of the seven photographs were developable.
* His photos would be the only immediate record of the destruction at Hiroshima.
* A few weeks after the atomic bombing, the American military confiscated all of the post-bombing newspaper photographs and/or newsreel footage, but failed to confiscate many of the negatives.
* As a result, photographs from the Hiroshima atomic bombing were not published until the United States occupation of Japan ended in April 1952.
* The magazine Asahi Gurafu initially published Matsushige’s photographs in a special edition on August 6, 1952.
* “Hiroshima does not look like a bombed city. It looks as if a monster steamroller had passed over it and squashed it out of existence,” described Australian war correspondent Wilfred Burchett in his September 5, 1945 article “Atomic Plague” in the London Daily Express
* Burchett was the first Western journalist to enter Hiroshima after the bombing – Armed with a pistol, a typewriter and a Japanese phrasebook
* which is my plan for our trip to europe
* He travelled 400 miles from Tokyo alone and unarmed carrying rations for seven meals
* He was shocked by the devastation.
* Under the banner “I write this as a warning to the world”, Burchett described a city reduced to “reddish rubble” and people dying from an unknown “atomic plague”.
* At the time it was ignored by most Western newspapers.
* General MacArthur ordered him expelled from Japan, and his camera with photos of Hiroshima mysteriously vanished while he was in the hospital.
* U.S. officials accused Burchett of being influenced by Japanese propaganda.
* They scoffed at the notion of an atomic sickness.
* The U.S. military issued a press release right after the Hiroshima bombing that downplayed human casualties, instead emphasizing that the bombed area was the site of valuable industrial and military targets.
* I want to close out this episode by reading the entire article by Burchett.
* In Hiroshima, 30 days after the first atomic bomb destroyed the city and shook the world, people are still dying, mysteriously and horribly — people who were uninjured by the cataclysm — from an unknown something which I can only describe as atomic plague.
* Hiroshima does not look like a bombed city. It looks as if a monster steamroller had passed over it and squashed it out of existence. I write these facts as dispassionately as I can in the hope that they will act as a warning to the world. In this first testing ground of the atomic bomb I have seen the most terrible and frightening desolation in four years of war. It makes a blitzed Pacific island seem like an Eden. The damage is far greater than photographs can show.
* When you arrive in Hiroshima you can look around and for 25, perhaps 30, square miles you can hardly see a building. It gives you an empty feeling in the stomach to see such man-made devastation.
* I picked my way to a shack used as a temporary police headquarters in the middle of the vanished city. Looking south from there I could see about three miles of reddish rubble. That is all the atomic bomb left of dozens of blocks of city streets, of buildings, homes, factories and human beings.
* There is just nothing standing except about 20 factory chimneys — chimneys with no factories. I looked west. A group of half a dozen gutted buildings. And then again nothing.
* The police chief of Hiroshima welcomed me eagerly as the first Allied correspondent to reach the city. With the local manager of Domei, a leading Japanese news agency, he drove me through, or perhaps I should say over, the city. And he took me to hospitals where the victims of the bomb are still being treated.
* In these hospitals I found people who, when the bomb fell, suffered absolutely no injuries, but now are dying from the uncanny after-effects.
* For no apparent reason their health began to fail. They lost appetite. Their hair fell out. Bluish spots appeared on their bodies. And the bleeding began from the ears, nose and mouth.
* At first the doctors told me they thought these were the symptoms of general debility. They gave their patients Vitamin A injections. The results were horrible. The flesh started rotting away from the hole caused by the injection of the needle.
* And in every case the victim died.
* That is one of the after-effects of the first atomic bomb man ever dropped and I do not want to see any more examples of it. But in walking through the month-old rubble I found others.
* My nose detected a peculiar odour unlike anything I have ever smelled before. It is something like sulphur, but not quite. I could smell it when I passed a fire that was still smouldering, or at a spot where they were still recovering bodies from the wreckage. But I could also smell it where everything was still deserted.
* They believe it is given off by the poisonous gas still issuing from the earth soaked with radioactivity released by the split uranium atom.
* And so the people of Hiroshima today are walking through the forlorn desolation of their once proud city with gauze masks over their mouths and noses. It probably does not help them physically. But it helps them mentally.
* From the moment that this devastation was loosed upon Hiroshima the people who survived have hated the white man. It is a hate the intensity of which is almost as frightening as the bomb itself.
* The counted dead number 53,000. Another 30,000 are missing, which means “certainly dead”. In the day I have stayed in Hiroshima – and this is nearly a month after the bombing – 100 people have died from its effects.
* They were some of the 13,000 seriously injured by the explosion. They have been dying at the rate of 100 a day. And they will probably all die. Another 40,000 were slightly injured.
* These casualties might not have been as high except for a tragic mistake. The authorities thought this was just another routine Super-Fort raid. The plane flew over the target and dropped the parachute which carried the bomb to its explosion point.
* Many people had suffered only a slight cut from a falling splinter of brick or steel. They should have recovered quickly. But they did not. They developed an acute sickness. Their gums began to bleed. And then they vomited blood. And finally they died.
* The American plane passed out of sight. The all-clear was sounded and the people of Hiroshima came out from their shelters. Almost a minute later the bomb reached the 2,000 foot altitude at which it was timed to explode – at the moment when nearly everyone in Hiroshima was in the streets.
* Hundreds upon hundreds of the dead were so badly burned in the terrific heat generated by the bomb that it was not even possible to tell whether they were men or women, old or young.
* Of thousands of others, nearer the centre of the explosion, there was no trace. They vanished. The theory in Hiroshima is that the atomic heat was so great that they burned instantly to ashes – except that there were no ashes.
* If you could see what is left of Hiroshima you would think that London had not been touched by bombs.
* The Imperial Palace, once an imposing building, is a heap of rubble three feet high, and there is one piece of wall. Roof, floors and everything else is dust.
* Hiroshima has one intact building – the Bank of Japan. This in a city which at the start of the war had a population of 310,000.
* Almost every Japanese scientist has visited Hiroshima in the past three weeks to try to find a way of relieving the people’s suffering. Now they themselves have become sufferers.
* For the first fortnight after the bomb dropped they found they could not stay long in the fallen city. They had dizzy spells and headaches. Then minor insect bites developed into great swellings which would not heal. Their health steadily deteriorated.
* Then they found another extraordinary effect of the new terror from the skies.
* Many people had suffered only a slight cut from a falling splinter of brick or steel. They should have recovered quickly. But they did not. They developed an acute sickness. Their gums began to bleed. And then they vomited blood. And finally they died.
* All these phenomena, they told me, were due to the radio-activity released by the atomic bomb’s explosion of the uranium atom.
* They found that the water had been poisoned by chemical reaction. Even today every drop of water consumed in Hiroshima comes from other cities. The people of Hiroshima are still afraid.
* The scientists told me they have noted a great difference between the effect of the bombs in Hiroshima and in Nagasaki.
* Hiroshima is in perfectly flat delta country. Nagasaki is hilly. When the bomb dropped on Hiroshima the weather was bad, and a big rainstorm developed soon afterwards.
* And so they believe that the uranium radiation was driven into the earth and that, because so many are still falling sick and dying, it is still the cause of this man-made plague.
* At Nagasaki, on the other hand, the weather was perfect, and scientists believe that this allowed the radio-activity to dissipate into the atmosphere more rapidly. In addition, the force of the bomb’s explosion was, to a large extent, expended into the sea, where only fish were killed.
* To support this theory, the scientists point out to the fact that, in Nagasaki, death came swiftly, suddenly, and that there have been no after-effects such as those that Hiroshima is still suffering.

* We went to great lengths to explain the road to the decision to use the bomb on Japan.
* But listen to how it was presented to American children
* TRUMAN CLIP showing the propaganda fed to Americans https://youtu.be/Hxk3qS2TQ8?t=2m3s
* But the decision to drop the bombs is just one aspect of the start of the nuclear arms race that was hidden from Americans.
* The other aspect was the destruction the bombs caused.
* Within weeks of the bombings, Tokyo-based newsreel company Nippon Eigasha sent Japanese camera crews to Hiroshima and Nagasaki to shoot footage of the devastation and its victims.
* 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 U.S. General Headquarters (GHQ).
* That film, The Effects of the Atomic Bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, is aptly known in Japan as the maboroshi, or “phantom,” film.
* From the very beginning, the way the atomic bombing of Japan was presented to the American public was a carefully handled PR issue.
* 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).
* George Weller of the Chicago Daily News, who won a 1943 Pulitzer Prize as a Daily News war correspondent, slipped into Nagasaki and wrote a 25,000-word story on the nightmare that he found there.
* Then he made a crucial error: He submitted the piece to military censors.
* His newspaper never even received his story.
* As Weller later summarized his experience with MacArthur’s censors, “They won.”
* His notes from his trip were finally published posthumously by his son in a book called First Into Nagasaki – in 2006.
* BTW – can you guess what he won his Pulitzer for?
* He wrote an article where he interviewed crew members who were eyewitnesses to an emergency appendectomy performed in a submarine, partly with a tea strainer and spoons.
* 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.
* in early 1946 a special U.S. military unit shot twenty hours of film footage, in blazing color, in Hiroshima and Nagasaki
* 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 footage was hidden for decades and almost no one could see it
* no one outside military, official or archival circles saw any of it.
* The 90,000 feet of color film – enough for 30 full-length movies – was classified as top secret for 30 years.
* For decades all that most Americans saw of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were the same black-and-white images: a mushroom cloud, a panorama of emptiness, a battered building topped with the skeleton of a dome – all devoid of people.
* On the morning of 9 August 1945, 16-year-old Sumiteru Taniguchi was 1,800 metres (5,900 ft) from the hypocenter of the bomb that exploded over Nagasaki, delivering mail on his bicycle without a shirt on due to the warm summer weather, when “Fat Man” exploded in the sky.
* The bomb’s heat flash heavily injured Taniguchi with near instant burns resulting, but the blast that arrived afterward did not cause any severe injuries to him, as he clung to the ground while buildings were blown down around him.
* Heavy burns melted skin from his back and left arm, but Taniguchi states that he did not bleed or feel any pain due to the nerve endings being burned away.
* Tired and disoriented, he walked over to a nearby munitions plant, where a female survivor assisted in cutting off loose portions of skin and rubbed machine oil on his damaged arm.
* Come nightfall Taniguchi was carried to a hill to rest, where he was surrounded by confused and thirsty survivors.
* The next morning everyone but Taniguchi was dead.
* During the next two days rescue teams passed by without noticing him, as he was too weak to muster a call for help.
* He was found 2 days later.
* He was eventually taken to Omura Navy Hospital, where he spent the next 21 months lying on his stomach due to the severe burns on his back.
* And you can see photos and film of that – from the American crew that were there in 1946.
* It’s not a pretty sight.
* Imagine a guy whose entire back has had the skin removed.
* The film was finally released to the public in 1982, in a documentary called Prophecy, made by the Japanese, during the height of anti-nuclear demonstrations.
* 200,000 Japanese citizens contributed half a million dollars and Iwakura was able to buy footage from the USG to make the film.
* The guy who made it, Iwakura, traveled around Japan filming survivors who had posed for the original U.S. film crew in 1946.
* One of the Americans who shot this footage in 1946 was Herbet Sussan.
* He ended up becoming director of special programs for NBC, supervising 250 special telecasts.
* And he spent a lot of his life trying to get his footage released.
* He took his request to Truman, Robert F. Kennedy and Edward R. Murrow.
* None of them could – or would – help him get it released.
* Meanwhile – when US servicemen returned from Japan, many of them suffered from strange rashes and sores.
* Years later some were afflicted with disease (such as thyroid problems and leukemia) or cancer (such as multiple myeloma or the form of lymphoma that Sussan himself had) associated with radiation exposure.

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