04/01/14 – Greg Mitchell – The Scott Horton Show

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All right, y'all.
Welcome back to the show.
I'm Scott Horton.
This is my show, Scott Horton Show.
Let me tell you about Greg Mitchell, all right?
Greg Mitchell, he used to be the editor of Editor & Publisher, and right now he writes for The Nation Magazine, and he keeps a blog at gregmitchellwriter.blogspot.com.
It's called Pressing Issues.
Lots of great stuff there.
But then here's the real deal, is he's written a ton of books, including The Age of WikiLeaks, Dead Reckoning Executions in America, The Campaign of the Century, let's see here, Hiroshima in America, So Wrong for So Long, Atomic Cover-Up, and wait, there's one more, Hollywood Bomb, The Unmaking of the Most Important Movie Ever Made.
Yeah, it goes on like that, but especially I wanted to make sure and emphasize the ones discussing nuclear weapons, the use, American use of nuclear weapons at the end of World War II.
And then, so now he's got this series here at whowhatwhy.com.
Well, I want to know where and when too, but anyway, whowhatwhy.com, it's, well, it starts with how bombing Hiroshima got a Hollywood makeover, although that's kind of separate.
Then there's a three-part series about the hiding of the documentary films.
But all four articles here at whowhatwhy are really great and worth your time.
I hope you'll go look at them.
They're not too long either, or anything, you can go check them out and like them.
Welcome back to the show, Greg, how are you doing?
Always happy to be here, thank you.
Well, good, I'm very happy to have you here, and I really appreciate your attention to this subject, because it'll never not be important.
So, first of all, let's talk about how bombing Hiroshima got a Hollywood makeover, because as you kind of imply in some of the other ones, this is a big part of, you know, how history unfolded after the war.
Right.
Starting with the revision, halfway through the making of this MGM film, the beginning or the end.
Right.
Yeah, they, it was, it came out of the idea from the atomic scientists who turned against the bomb after it was used on civilians in Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
And MGM bought it and was, in the early stages of the script, was planning to make what might be called an anti-bomb epic.
It kind of showed the Hiroshima bombing in a bad light and gave warnings about the development of bigger and better bombs.
But halfway through, the Pentagon got to them, and then the Truman White House got to them, revised the script, pictured Truman himself was able to get the actor playing him fired, was unhappy with even the actor, let alone the script.
And so the movie ended up as kind of a goofy, you know, tribute to the bomb melodrama.
And what was seen to be, and it was really the first and only epic about the bomb coming from MGM, could have had a big impact.
And as you mentioned, I told the full story in my book, Hollywood Bomb, but it was also the first part of, you'll find it at the Who, What, Why, sort of a separate article from the three-part series that you mentioned.
Well, I'm going to go to the Pirate Bay right now and see if I can get it because it was released, right?
Yeah, it's shown on Viet Turner Classics at times.
I'm not sure if it's on DVD, but it shows up on TV from time to time.
And, you know, it was a Hollywood drama.
It's not a documentary.
So it didn't do well at the box office, which I guess was probably a good thing.
Right.
Yeah, I was actually happy when I saw, oh yeah, 1947.
Here it is.
Oh, it's got no seeds.
There's one torrent file, but it's got no seeds.
Anyway, well, let's see if we can find it somewhere online.
Oh, well, let's talk about some of the revisions then.
You say they started out and they were, was it just the script or they had already begun shooting and they were sent back to go and take out everything realistic?
Yeah, yeah.
They had the script circulated.
There was even, Ayn Rand had worked on a script for another studio and then they didn't want to have two, two movies going.
So they kind of incorporated some of her stuff.
That's all in my book as well.
And they, you know, it was a combination of editing the script.
And then even after it was shot, they had a screening in Washington for the White House and other officials just before it's released.
And even as late as just, you know, a couple months before it was to be released, you know, the White House and other people saw this and were just objected to the way it portrayed Truman sort of making his decision to use the bomb.
And they wanted it to underline all their, you know, all the reasons we've heard since about saving American lives.
And we had no choice.
And Japanese were never going to surrender.
And, you know, it saved a million American lives and so forth.
So they were rewriting right up to the end.
And like I said, they, they got the, the actor playing Truman fired.
They didn't, didn't like his attitude.
So they got another actor in who portrayed Truman in a more godlike way.
That was funny.
Yeah, you said, I love the way you write in here, the, the actor wrote some kind of smart Alec message back to the White House and said, Well, hey, posterity is not going to be kinder to you than me.
So you might as well help there, Mr. Commander in Chief.
I like that.
Yeah, it was it was sort of a classic to write that to Truman and Truman didn't really get it.
Truman thought it was the guy was writing a, you know, a nice note to him and everything.
He didn't get the sarcasm in it.
Yeah, well, anyway, we won't go too far off about Harry Truman, or we'll have to talk about the Ku Klux Klan and all of that.
But anyway, so, you know, I think it's really important the way you talk about in here, you go down the list of the suppression of facts, and the fabrications, the things that were added, especially things like the the B-29s were pelted with heavy flak, right?
It made their act of nuking this peaceful, demilitarized city full of women and children into some heroic act of self defense.
And it just goes to show really, when you go through this list here, all together the way you do and kind of bullet point format, just how guilty their conscience was, or at least that, you know, how afraid they were of some level of accountability if people really knew the truth about what it was that they had done.
Well, I've always felt I mean, two things.
I've written about this for over 30 years now.
And what's always driven me are two things.
One, if if we have nothing to be ashamed about, if this was such a slam dunk and right decision, you know, why have has the government gone and the media gone to such an extent for decades to kind of cover up the full story.
So that's number one.
Number two is that, you know, we still have first strike weapons.
And you know, some people like to say, never again.
And, you know, whatever happened the first time, we'll never use them again, we should never use them again.
But that's undercut by the fact that we continually defend the use of them the first time.
And we still have first strike weapons.
So if you can defend the use against Japan, which which was a, you know, somewhat unique, at least up to that period situation.
If you can continue to defend that, and also Nagasaki, which is even worse, surely you can defend using it today.
There's that precedent.
So those are the two things that have driven me you know, you mentioned I did write a book with Robert J. Lifton, Hiroshima in America, and then more on the subject of these films, I wrote a book called atomic cover up, which really tackles the story you just mentioned, plus the the documentary films that that I wrote about again this week, but atomic cover up is really about those that film footage.
Well, and you know, I think it was you probably that pointed me toward George Weller and his work first into Nagasaki.
And I interviewed his son all about it and all that kind of thing.
And so I mean, that's just another part of the story of the lengths that they went to to suppress this information.
You know, it's funny, from the get go.
I mean, from the get go from I was a kid in the Reagan years after detente, and when it was brinksmanship, again, kind of Cold War years, and the hippies put the day after on TV.
I mean, I saw that when I was in I don't know what third, fourth grade, something like that.
So I think I kind of grew up with a whole different idea about what a nuclear war might look like, then, you know, the Americans who had come before me who really didn't have much of a picture of Hiroshima other than a real far away shot of a mushroom cloud.
And that was about all they knew of.
Right.
Well, that's the story of the documentary footage is really how these the American military elite film crew, you know, went into Hiroshima and Nagasaki after the bombings and shot in color film, which is very unusual at the time, sort of the stark effects on people.
You know, we had seen the black and white photos of the the A-bomb dome and, you know, the rubble and all that kind of stuff.
But we hadn't seen really even black and white photos.
And here, these guys have had color footage of the effects on people, people dying of radiation disease, the terrible burns, so on and so forth.
And the fact that when you look carefully, you said, gee, nine out of 10 of these people are women and children, which we also wanted to obscure.
We wanted people to think we bombed, you know, a military base or, you know, they're at least men in factories, you know, as opposed to women and children.
So that footage was, of course, quite stark.
And really, the story I tell is how that footage was suppressed for literally for decades and really only, you know, came out, you know, started coming out about 20 years ago and, you know, why it was suppressed and how it was suppressed.
And also footage shot by Japanese newsreel team was confiscated by the U.S. and that was suppressed for decades.
Right.
Now, when we come back, I want to give you a chance to really talk about the stories of the suppression of those films and and what's in them and all that.
But I can't help but make sure before we got to this break to point out as I don't know why I'm not smart enough, Greg, to think of this myself.
For whatever reason, I had to plagiarize this from the great historian Ralph Rakow.
But Ralph Rakow said, you know what, let's go ahead and give them their numbers.
Oh, yeah.
Half a million American soldiers would have died if they'd had to invade Japan or whatever.
Well, never even mind.
Just take it for granted the condition of unconditional surrender and just take for granted their numbers of how many soldiers, G.I. s, would have died in trying to invade Japan.
Are you saying that if they had somehow been able to just send a force in to round up the women and children, the men, women and children of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and just machine gun them all in the town square like the German Gestapo, that in order to end the war, that that would have been OK?
Because that wasn't American rules of engagement in Europe whatsoever.
Is that what would be all right would be to round them all up and machine gun them all to death?
Or for some reason, it's OK if you blast them, all the kingdom come in a moment with some fission.
Somehow that's like painless or and more justifiable or allowable.
But of course, when you put it that way, then the answer has to be absolutely not that Truman was as bad as a Nazi to do what he did.
Yeah, well, what I just briefly I know you want to go to a break is I want to one of the real turning points for me in this whole subject was when I went to Hiroshima in 1984.
And first day I was there, I was taken up to a hill to overlook.
All right.
Hold it right there, everybody.
It's the great Greg Mitchell.
And we're talking about his series at who what why dot com about the nuking of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
We'll be right back after this.
Oh, follow him on Twitter, Greg Mitch.
Hey, I'll sky here.
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All right, y'all.
Welcome back to the show.
I'm Scott Horton.
This is my show, Scott Horton Show.
I'm talking with Greg Mitchell.
He wrote this three part series, plus one about a movie to the Hollywood movie.
They're all about the suppression of the film evidence of the American nuclear attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August of 1945.
And I'm sorry about that break there, Greg.
You were saying what?
OK, well, just quickly, I was on my first day in Hiroshima.
I went there to pick it up on picking up on this hill to look out over the city that the modern city get a little sense of geography there.
And you saw this enormous city as it was in 1945 in this dome surrounded by hills on three sides.
And it was very easy to then look out and imagine this new weapon being detonated right in the center above that city in this like the top of a dome and with the hills around it.
And and even before the attack, one of the reasons for attacking Hiroshima was that these hills would create a focusing effect, as they put it, which would direct the power of the bomb back on the city for for greater extermination.
And, you know, it was just easy that that image of looking out and someone deliberately set off a weapon deliberately at the center of this over the center of the city to kill everyone within this from hill from one hill to another, you know, deliberately.
And so that kind of an image you kind of sticks with you.
And that partly inspired the work I've done since then.
Yeah, well, Truman himself was asked at one point years later, well, why didn't you nuke three cities or something?
Because it took him one extra day to surrender, I guess.
And he said, Well, you know, we considered it, but the thought of all those women and babies.
So at the end of the day, he really was willing to admit that, yeah, he had murdered hundreds of 1000s of women and babies.
And it was, but you know, a few 100,000 more of them.
Why that was just too much, you know?
Well, that was, you know, the footage that we talked about that was suppressed afterwards.
This was, I mean, I talked to both the director of that the US military project and sort of his chief staffer on it.
I talked interviewed both of them.
And they, you know, they both said that basically, contrary to what many people are told, a lot of the people in the running the US military running the top officials in the US did feel guilty about it did realize, perhaps, in retrospect, that this possibly could have been avoided.
And, and so they, they wanted to hide this, and they wanted to hide the fact that we wanted to build a bigger bomb, which we did with the hydrogen bomb.
We wanted to test these weapons in the Pacific and then in the US.
And of course, growing up in the 50s and 60s, I was subjected to to fall out like everyone else.
So they had to kind of sell the bomb, they had to sell bigger and better bombs, they had to sell the testing of the bomb, they had to sell the getting an arsenal in the 10s of 1000s for, you know, to going forward.
So there was a lot of reasons to try to make Hiroshima and Nagasaki go away, or at least seem like a cut and dried slam dunk kind of kind of decision.
Yeah, and then and you talk about and it's believable to me, certainly because of the lack of contrary information coming out that even though so few people saw that original Hollywood movie about it, that that more or less became the official history.
Anyway, all the tropes about just how desperate and necessary it was, and all of that.
There really was no competing information out there, right?
Like, I don't know, maybe if you asked a commie or something, actual pro Soviet or something.
Other than that, there was no contrary information for anybody to really complain about.
Well, that's right.
I mean, I, in, in, in my, in my atomic cover up book, I talk about how that it wasn't just films, they also suppressed photographs.
Even in Japan, they didn't have access to photographs about what happened to them until the late 1970s.
They, you know, started a nationwide movement to raise money to buy photos and and some of the film footage from the National Archives in the US.
And they published big, big books and so forth.
But until the late 1970s, the Japanese themselves had very little photographic record of what had happened because the photos and the negatives and the film footage were all seized by the US and disappeared.
Right now, I guess now only some of this has been released, but never just the reels of all the raw footage of the color and the black or white, right?
Just little pieces.
They're now, they're now declassified.
They're at the, in the National Archives in, in Maryland.
People have had access, really, the filmmakers didn't really know about it till when I was editor of Nuclear Times in the early 1980s.
The first feature I assigned was on the subject.
And, and then filmmakers started flooding the National Archives with requests.
It really was that hardly anyone knew this footage existed until then.
And so over the years, bits and pieces, small amounts of footage, I've even worked on a film that used some of the footage.
But there's never been a full documentary on the story.
I'd be happy to participate if anyone wants to do that.
There's never been a full documentary on kind of the story behind the story of this footage.
There's never been a full documentary airing, you know, large parts of the footage.
So that's still yet to be done.
But, but, you know, small, small bits of this color footage has have shown up in different films.
And, you know, maybe even some of the listeners have seen it.
Any color footage of the aftermath of the atomic bomb or the victims has to have come from this footage.
It's the only record of it.
And it was the only thing in color.
And now, is this the one that was hidden in the ceiling?
Well, that was the Jap, yeah, the Japanese newsreel teams had shot, you know, shot footage even before the Americans got there.
And, and that was the black and white footage that ended up becoming the movie Hiroshima and Nagasaki 1945.
Right.
And they were forced to turn over...
I have trouble keeping track of which footage is which.
Right.
They were forced to turn over the footage, but they kept made a copy and kept, kept the copy or part of it, I guess, a small part of it in a, in a ceiling.
And then years later, they dug that out and were able to look at some of that.
But that was just a small part of what they had.
And can you tell us the story of this guy, Sussan, Herbert Sussan?
Yeah, he was sort of the person who got me involved in this, again, over 30 years ago.
He, you know, he was one of the chief people on the US military team.
He was, he came back from the war, became a pioneering director, producer and director at CBS in the early, early days of television.
And he was haunted by what he'd seen.
And he wanted to get this footage out.
And he approached everyone from Bob Truman himself, to Bobby Kennedy, to Edward R. Murrow, to try to get this footage shown on TV or made into movies or whatever.
And he couldn't, they wouldn't even help him find it.
You know, it was a great mystery what had happened to it.
And so he, he tried for decades.
And then he's the one who happened to run into the Japanese activist at the UN in the late 1970s at an exhibit of some of the, the stills from the, from the film.
And he said, you know what, I, I shot that, some of that footage.
And so the Japanese then discovered, oh, there's this film exists out here.
And he led them then to the, to the film at the National Archives and, and sort of the rest of the rest of history.
But he was sort of the key person.
He then died a few days, a few years later from lymphoma, which some people have connected to exposure to radiation in the, in the atomic cities.
Oh, man.
So now on the, this series, again, it's a three-part series at who, what, why, by Greg Mitchell here, and you have some of the color footage.
And I think you have also YouTube of, oh, no, it's just a bit.
I'm sorry.
I thought it was the whole thing of Hiroshima, Nagasaki, 1945.
Do you know where people can find at least, you know, the, the best versions, longest versions of all these online anywhere?
Well, I, you know, if you go to, I mean, first of all, there, I have a trailer for my book.
If you, if you just put in atomic cover up at YouTube, this will come up as the first thing.
It's been, been quite popular.
It shows some of the color footage.
So, you know, two or three minutes, you'll get to see what we're talking about here.
So if you just search atomic cover up at YouTube, you will find that.
If you put in Hiroshima color footage at YouTube, you'll find at least one and possibly more eight or nine minute excerpts from the original footage.
So you get to see it at kind of a length.
It's a very small part of it.
If you put in Hiroshima, Nagasaki, 1945, you'll, you can find the full version of the 15 minute film that was eventually made by Eric Barnow around 1970 from the Japanese footage.
So there are ways to see parts of this.
You know, YouTube is your friend.
And so that, that's what I'd recommend.
The Who, What, Why series has some, has, has a couple of videos embedded in that with the stories also.
There's even on YouTube, just quickly, there's a, one of the things that internally, depending on did, was they made a couple of training, what they call training films.
They took, they took some of the footage of black and white footage and made these training films to show to soldiers who were going to march under the mushroom cloud in the, you know, in our tests in Nevada.
So it wasn't to warn people about radiation or the bomb.
It was to prepare our soldiers for going to war with the bomb.
So you can find one, at least one of them on YouTube, but they were not released to the public.
Those were, those were strictly for the military.
Yeah.
I saw one where they're standing right under a air to air nuclear missile that was to be used against Russian bombers and they're standing right under it bragging about how great it is.
Anyway, I'm sorry.
We're out of time.
Thanks so much.
Greg Mitchell, who, what, why.com everybody in the nation.
Thanks, Greg.
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