Atomic Cover-Up

[MUSIC] [MUSIC] I heard voices singing.

[MUSIC] And I looked at my sound man and I said, where is this coming from?

I thought I was hearing things, but he heard it too.

Coming from the ruins of the largest cathedral in the Far East.

People were singing for the holidays.

1945 in Nagasaki.

So we went up there and we backlit the area and put in a little dolly and moved the camera.

And I look out and see complete devastation.

[MUSIC] And here are the voices.

[MUSIC] [MUSIC] [MUSIC] [MUSIC] I was military, in for the duration.

In Tokyo, Colonel McCrary told me, Mac, we're just about finished now.

We're going down to the islands, Australia, over into China.

Where do you want to go home?

But I said, no, Colonel, I could go home, but there's a story that has to be told here about the Japanese people in defeat.

Even if I have to do this damn thing myself.

So I flew to a base outside Nagasaki with a group of newspaper reporters.

Later in October, I obtained enough camera equipment and film to start shooting the only color footage anyone ever shot there.

[MUSIC] First time I got into Nagasaki and saw the horror and the devastation, it was pathetic.

[MUSIC] You'd be going along streets that were in ruins and no buildings in sight.

Buildings crushed as if a massive anvil had fallen down and destroyed them.

[MUSIC] People were lying by the roadside like sick animals.

Going down through the city, following whatever road you could find, you'd see people in caves, in shelters, and what at one time was their home.

And some of them would be searching for picking up the remains of some family member.

[MUSIC] The poor children were really suffering.

They had a lost look staring at me as if to say, "Who are you?

What have you done?"

Being a cameraman, you can't be a tourist or a spectator.

You have to do your job.

You can't think about how bad it is.

But you know it's bad.

[MUSIC] What bothered me the most was at a school where hundreds died.

Sriyama school.

There were hundreds of bones and crushed skulls piled up, stacked up from the children, just laying in the corner.

[MUSIC] But I recall one day a group of young boys and girls came marching up the hillside, singing.

I can still see it.

A young girl was eating an apple, enjoying every single bit of it.

That at least made me feel good.

[MUSIC] Later arriving in Hiroshima, I learned that it was entirely different.

Nagasaki is hilly, and anything in the valley was destroyed by the blast.

Anything on the other side of the hill wasn't even touched.

In Hiroshima, the devastation was wider because it's all flat land.

There was nothing there to resist the blast, so it just spread out like a tidal wave.

[MUSIC] Hiroshima was the most barren place I have ever seen.

Everything was gone.

[MUSIC] The only thing left standing was the industrial hall, which has the famous large dome.

[MUSIC] That's still standing today.

But that was the epicenter, and right close to it was a hospital that was completely gone.

There were all sorts of odd things.

One thing that often struck me were the unusual shadows.

For example, a ladder on a building was transposed, and you could see the outline as a reversed image.

Same thing could be seen throughout the city.

It was characteristic of the atomic bomb, because the heat was so intense.

But, uh, there were all sorts of weird things.

I remembered the shadow on the granite steps of the bank where a man was seated at the time of the blast.

To recreate it visually, I had a person sitting there wearing similar clothes, and then had him stand up.

Now you could see the shadow where the earlier person, who was probably vaporized, was seated.

The strange part is there was a lot of misery, but I rarely saw anyone cry.

They took their pain with them.

There was a character about the Japanese people.

They were embarrassed to a certain degree about starting the war.

[Music] When I came back to Tokyo from Nagasaki, I went up to the Meiji Building.

My orders were almost running out.

I was introduced to General Orville Anderson, who was the military advisor to the U.S. Strategic Bombing Survey.

I told him what I had seen down in Nagasaki and Hiroshima.

Anderson said, "That story must be told before the grass turns green."

He said, "Anything you need, McGovern, just let me know."

So I got ready to finish what I had started the previous autumn, this time in 20 cities.

I hired an ace Japanese cameraman from a Tokyo studio who had shot films in Hollywood named Carrie Mamura.

Then there was a young lieutenant named Herbert Susson.

He was only 24 years old, but he had a background in writing and other skills.

I was glad to have him.

I was able to equip a special train.

We had five flat cars to carry jeeps, plus Pullman Sleepers and a dining car.

I had my own cook.

I wasn't doing too badly for a first lieutenant.

[Music] In January 1946, we arrived in Nagasaki first.

No one had prepared me for what we would see.

I was shocked by what came into view.

The tracks cut through miles of utter ruin.

The factories had been pushed down, as if by a giant hand.

I could not believe what one bomb, one little bomb could do.

From that moment, my life was changed forever.

[Music] After touring the city and seeing the condition of the survivors, we asked Washington if we could stay longer in Nagasaki and Hiroshima.

Documenting the survivors was not our initial orders, but now we set out to tell the full story, which Americans had been denied so far We ordered all the color film in the Pacific, which was still a rare thing.

We decided to film all the survivors we could find in Nagasaki hospitals.

We were the only people with the time and equipment to make a full record of this hidden holocaust, and the only ones shooting in color.

It was shocking to see glass shards from windows embedded in the walls, and blood still on the ceilings.

I felt if we did not capture this horror on film, no one would ever understand what had happened here.

I thought, if people could only see this, it would be the greatest argument for peace the world has ever seen.

I was amazed by the total cooperation of nearly every patient.

I told them that if they allowed this filming, the world would see what had been hidden, and hopefully this tragedy would never happen again.

Many of them, of course, died after we filmed them.

They had massive infections, or suffered horribly from radiation sickness.

I didn't even know what radiation was until then.

The worst case of all, a boy of 16, Tanaguchi, who was kept alive in a bath of penicillin.

Only raw flesh on his back could be seen.

I shuddered when our hotlights were turned on him.

No one expected him to live, but the doctors persisted.

Even though he asked them to let him die and end his misery.

Then we left for Hiroshima.

There, our cameraman, Harry Mimura, who was a true artist, would find unusual and striking scenes to film.

I often went out with him, as McGovern sometimes returned to Tokyo.

[Music] For days I had to work with Americans who had dropped the bomb and film Japanese victims who had the same skin color as me and spoke the very same language.

But the cameraman must face up to whatever he films, however horrible.

It struck me that this film record would someday in some way come to serve a purpose.

[Music] We came to admire the truly heroic and terribly overworked doctors and nurses at the Red Cross Hospital in Hiroshima.

So we were happy to film a ceremony there welcoming a new class of badly needed young nurses.

[Music] After finishing in Hiroshima and the other cities we headed back to Tokyo.

Most of our footage had been sent to Hollywood for processing.

On June 14th I got an order from General Anderson directing us to return to Washington at once.

I had hand carried to the US the negative and a print of the Japanese black and white film.

I asked General Anderson if it might be possible for a public release of all this material.

Possibly through Hollywood.

Warner Brothers was already interested.

Arrangements were made to screen the Japanese film for the Army, Navy, the Atomic Energy Commission plus intelligence people.

After the screening I was told that this material could not be released to the news media nor to the general public.

I was told the material will be classified secret.

[Music] In the meantime what happened to my color footage?

I got into the lab at the Pentagon and processed the material and got prints made.

[Music] But the only thank you I got was from General Anderson.

Nobody else cared.

I was told by people in the Pentagon that hell no, a damn no.

They didn't want those images out because they showed effects on man, women and child.

They didn't want the public to know what their weapons had done at a time when they were planning on more bombs In the meantime all of the footage was transferred to the Air Force Depository at Wright Patterson Air Force Base in Ohio.

And I ended up there to catalog it.

[Music] When I came back to the US I had a hard time processing what I'd seen in Japan.

So later in 1946 I put together a book of photos and submitted it to General Anderson and to President Truman.

[Music] Of course I wanted to make a film or TV program based on our footage to warn the world about these weapons.

The American public still had only seen the bombs effects and photos of rubble not people and all in grainy black and white.

I was disappointed to learn that our footage was classified and I did not even know where it was stored.

In 1950 I wrote the White House but an aide to President Truman said the Air Force had determined that the footage was too scientific and lacked quote, "wide public appeal or information value."

Was it already too late?

We had invented the hydrogen bomb and the arms race with the Russians was hot.

I talked to Edward R. Murrow, a star at CBS, and he said he'd look into it.

But then he told me he should not get involved.

He didn't give me his reasons.

When I got to NBC I tried the two anchors, Huntley and Brinkley, but that also went nowhere and still the public had not seen any color images.

I was just an individual.

I didn't have an organization behind me and I had a growing family.

But in 1962 I talked to Robert F. Kennedy who was consulted on a TV series but his office would not or could not get the film declassified.

Then, in a bit of good luck, after I went to Screen Gems to work, they launched a series in 1964 on President Truman's key decisions My wife and I had lunch with Truman a couple of times in New York.

He said he wasn't even aware of the footage, but he would check on it.

He discovered the same thing.

It allegedly could not be declassified.

Finally, I learned that my old boss, Dan McGovern, had been keeping track of all the footage the entire time.

I went to Norton Air Force Base in California around 1970 and he directed me to a card catalog which indicated the footage was still classified.

Then, another stroke of luck.

Around 1980 I read that an exhibit of newly discovered photos from Adam Baum Japan was opening at the United Nations near my apartment.

I was shocked when I saw stills from the footage we had shot.

When I alerted the Japanese organizer, he went home and started a grassroots movement to purchase all of our color footage from the National Archives.

I didn't even know it had been declassified years earlier, in a routine move.

The Japanese made the first films using the footage.

One of them was narrated by Jane Fonda.

By the time I found out that my footage was available, I was suffering from lymphoma.

My doctor said it might have been caused by radiation exposure in Japan.

But I spoke out strongly for the growing anti-nuclear movement.

Soon, I was invited to Hiroshima.

I met a woman named Numata we had filmed in 1946 and she remembered me.

Amazingly, I learned that the boy Taneguchi we had filmed had survived, grown to an adult, married and had children, and was now a leading anti-nuclear activist.

Until then, Americans still had not been allowed to see any color footage from the atomic cities.

But now, I was happy to see images I had shot being used in many films, though only in brief excerpts.

I will never know if our footage and the Japanese film might have made the world safer from nuclear weapons if it had been shown to the public instead of buried for so many years.

I believe that if anyone today u modern nuclear weapons many times more powerful than the ones used against Japan, the world is over.

To hear official speak of limited nuclear war is horrendous.

Nuclear war instead represents the end of everything.