All right y'all welcome back to the show it's anti-war radio I'm scott horton and our first guest on the show today is greg mitchell He keeps the media fix blog at the nation.com.
He's got a blog of his own at greg mitchell writer dot blog spot dot com And uh, well, first of all, let me mention some of his books so wrong for so long bradley manning truth and consequences the age of wiki leaks and um hiroshima in america Uh in the mid 90s and uh the brand new one.
It's a ebook.
You can find all the links at Uh, the media fix blog or at greg mitchell writer dot blogspot.com Uh to uh atomic cover-up two u.s.
Soldiers hiroshima and nagasaki And the greatest movie never made welcome back to the show greg.
How are you doing?
Uh, happy to be here again Thank you.
I'm very happy to have you here.
Now.
Let me mention some of these articles, too Um at your blog you've been doing a countdown to the day and you've got a couple of great articles as well the great hiroshima cover-up um, and now uh There's also the great hiroshima cover-up at japan focus.org, which is a different take on it And which is in fact, I think where i'm going to want to start here in just a minute Uh, but I also want to mention a special report atomic film cover-up key footage from hiroshima buried for decades Uh countdown to hiroshima, uh, that's the uh, the blog entries there and uh Press censorship how the truth was hidden about nagasaki And of course if you just uh put in the names of either of those cities With the name greg mitchell into your favorite brand of search engine, you will find tons of great stuff going back years and years there Yes, that's true.
Yes.
Absolutely is uh, and good thing too because um your voice in the wilderness on this i'm not sure Why that should be so but it is that way.
Um But I think it's an extremely important topic and well I've been on it for about been on it for about 30 years now and uh, you know interest Uh comes and goes to the 50th anniversary in 1995.
There certainly was a lot of interest in it you know, there's been less since but uh I uh, I try to do my best, you know, the new book is Like I said, it's been almost 30 years in the making and in certain ways And fortunately it's getting getting quite a bit of attention and there's a I would particularly recommend a youtube video uh Which if you put in a comic cover up, you'll come to it right away.
It now has about 28 000 views and it was uh Controversial particularly a couple weeks ago or last week because google uh banned ads for it Uh for a while on the the rather comical uh Claim that it promoted violence When in fact, of course, it's it sort of is against the the greatest single act of violence in our history So, uh, it was it was a comical, uh comical a few days people protested far and wide and they they Eventually ended their ban Well, maybe you just had a friend in google that was trying to get you some publicity I guess it succeeded.
Thank you.
Yeah, they sure Did a good one for you there, um, all right, so let's start with this piece at japanfocus.org Uh the great hiroshima cover-up and the greatest movie never made Um, I didn't see this in any of the other pieces this discussion of the memorial mound in hiroshima So right seems a pretty good place to start the story of uh, The cover-up as you call it, right?
Well, uh the book is uh, it's mainly about the suppression of film all the film footage shot in hiroshima nagasaki in 1945 and 1946 shot by both japanese newsreel teams and the u.s military and then uh you know, it's kind of a different the whole book is sort of a different take because uh often the discussion of hiroshima comes down to You know certain historians who are critical the decision to use the bomb and then the veterans and their survivors who?
Always say, uh, you know They're the bomb had to be used and and this book is certainly the first of its kind because the main focus is on the Two u.s soldiers who actually shot the american footage Which was in vivid color?
Uh, and then campaigned or tried for decades to get it released, you know, they were horrified by what they saw So it's kind of the other side of the story the veterans and their their survivors who always Support the decision to use the bomb and here's two two u.s military officers who were actually there shot this footage And then tried to get it released uh, now that's most of the book the other part of the book is A little bit more in my my meditations.
You might say on hiroshima and I talk about my my lengthy visits to hiroshima and nagasaki uh, I met some of the survivors who were Filmed by these two u.s military officers Are actually in the footage and and survived Uh, so I interviewed them and did a lot of other things but what you're referring to is, uh, This memorial mound in hiroshima, which is actually a rather small mound and when you go inside it uh, if you're allowed you find in You know in plain pine caskets the ashes of An estimated 70 000 Uh people that are just in a few, you know, a dozen or a couple dozen, you know wooden caskets and so you know the point I make is uh this is You know, this is one quarter of the city of hiroshima and how it was reduced to ashes by the atomic bomb And hopefully it gives people uh, uh pause Yeah, well it gave me pause this morning, um You know This isn't a criticism You're trying to get your story out as many places as you can whatever and a little bit of these articles are kind of rewritten the same the same kind of points over and over, uh in a couple of places, but You know this one at japanfocus.com Has this whole thing describing in detail this memorial mound and you have a picture of it here You know, I can't quite tell in the picture, but it doesn't look like it's more than what five or six feet tall or something That's about that's about 10 feet tall and not 10 feet tall 30 feet across is all Yeah um, and then yeah to think that you could fit the corpses of 70 000 people in there and as you say Um, you know, they cremated as many bodies as they could as fast as they could Uh, you know in an attempt to prevent disease and that kind of thing But then again, there were a lot of bodies that were nothing but ash.
That's right because of the bombs themselves Yeah, very very efficient process we invented there reducing Flesh to ashes in a second and therefore Reducing the need for uh, you know cremation afterwards All right.
Now I want to let you tell the story of these men and their footage In uh, you know pretty good detail as much time as as we can devote to it here But I wanted to start with that part of the discussion with why exactly?
Uh, this was covered up I guess obvious reasons, but i'll let you elaborate Well, you know, I uh, I wrote a book as you mentioned in the mid 90s with robert J Lifton called erosion in america in which we talked about It basically starts with the day of the bomb and then it shows the american reaction and the decades since and um You know, this story sort of came near the beginning of that in in brief form, but uh, it was sort of part and parcel of uh us suppression and cover up And what we called shaping of the hiroshima narrative from the beginning even before the beginning with the truman's first statement About the bomb which was 66 years ago tomorrow when he released the statement and the initial statement Virtually the first sentence is we you know, we've bombed hiroshima a military base And of course, it was not a military base It had some military presence, but we basically dropped the bomb over the center of the city You know deliberately killing, uh, you know tens of thousands or more Um had nothing to do with it being a military base.
So there was a lie in virtually the first sentence of the nuclear age and uh this film Um, I mean the film and I did just as briefly as possible.
Basically the japanese newsreel team started filming black and white footage in the atomic cities Almost immediately and when the u.s.
Occupation arrived we seized all their footage And uh locked it up for for decades, um at the same time a few months later we sent The u.s.
Military team in there At the film color footage, which was very unusual at the time And so they spent spent many days in hiroshima nagasaki uh recording the damage and recording the damage to people and um And then this footage was also was deemed to you know, too horrible for the average person to see not because of Being squeamish, but that it really could show what the bomb could do.
It certainly detailed the radiation effects which People knew about but really hadn't seen much and uh, you know, the horrid burns the new new kind of burns and horrid injuries and Everything else we'll have to hold it right there as we go out to this break We'll pick it up on the other side, it's greg mitchell from the nation magazine their website author of atomic cover-up We'll be right back All right, y'all welcome back to the show It's anti-war radio I'm scott horton.
I'm talking with greg mitchell He's the author of atomic cover-up two u.s.
Soldiers hiroshima and nagasaki and the greatest movie never made Still hasn't been made And um greg right before the break, you know, unfortunate hard breaks thrown in here Uh, you were discussing uh, the reasons why the decisions were made Back in the 1940s at the end of the second world war uh to suppress the footage, uh shot by japanese and american military Uh officers, I think right, right well, um You know again, we did we that was we just fired the first shot of the nuclear age and we were uh Intent on developing more nuclear weapons, including the hydrogen bomb And we of course very quickly got into an arms race with the russians Uh, so we both wanted to build more bombs.
Uh, and of course we wanted to develop nuclear energy Uh, we wanted to keep a certain Let's say rosy glow around the whole Uh idea of nuclear whether it was nuclear weapons that might protect us or nuclear energy that might uh, Uh fuel power plants and and bring off supposedly all kinds of other amazing uh development um and uh You know also we didn't want we we wanted uh americans to believe we could survive a nuclear war after the russians got the bomb So it was important not to show them You only show them the bare minimum of what the bomb could do because they wanted we wanted americans to think If worse came to worse they could survive a nuclear attack those fallout shelters in the basement could work or the duck and cover Drills and the schools could work um, and of course finally some people, uh were felt guilty about it, you know, there were uh, Plenty of people like general eisenhower, for example Who uh thought we never should have used the weapon, uh, douglas macarthur was very ambivalent about it.
Uh, Admiral, leahy who was the chief of staff to truman was against it Uh, and there were even back then, uh many conservative, uh columnists uh who uh Were against the uh, you know, we're against the bombing.
So uh Over the years it developed into a hiroshima narrative that the use of the bomb was was it was necessary And that uh, yeah japanese died, but don't don't show it.
Don't tell us about it Uh, so I think you know, I could list about five different reasons why this this footage and other things were were suppressed for so long well um You know, I mean there there is only so much time and I want to give you time to tell other parts of the story As well, but I guess you know, the real point here is Uh, as you say in some of these articles there were really only what like three pictures uh of Hiroshima or nagasaki that the american people ever saw for years and years It wasn't until when the 1960s or even later that they saw anything, but right The bird's eye view of well, there's the mushroom cloud, right?
Right, right Yeah, three about really three individual photos with three types of photos, you know, the mushroom cloud that just the kind of devastated city uh and it was all um You know all in black and white and you know, so what we're talking about here is really an extraordinary cover-up I mean, this was a huge thing.
They they outright lied.
I mean You you're such a calm guy You know, it's probably a good idea to leave the overstatement part to me or whatever but You know what you're saying is they told the american people?
Yeah, it's a big bomb, but that's about it They they covered up the radiation effects.
They went to extraordinary lengths to keep the american people from seeing Uh the truth of of what had happened to the people of hiroshima and nagasaki for a long long time Yeah, well, I mean they didn't they didn't totally cover up the radiation effects They they covered up for for a while and then at the people then came to know.
Yeah, there was Uh, the radiation had this effect people's hair fell out and people would die eventually, but they certainly downplayed it and certainly Didn't show any images that might make people think about it Uh, and I guess that's the point, you know, I know it's some people say well We knew about the bomb and the bomb was covered and the fact that these people died and so forth It was not a secret But it's quite different particularly in the case of the american footage that I I mainly focus on this was color very sharp Vivid color footage that was not seen by any americans until the 1980s Almost 40 years later and even today If you stop people and say Have you seen any color footage of hiroshima?
Nine out of ten people will say no even though maybe they have maybe they've seen snippets of it here and there But the fact is, you know, you stop and pause and say yeah Virtually every image i've ever seen of hiroshima is you know black and white photo black and white footage of some kind uh, and of course color footage has a whole different other impact and also There was more of a focus in this footage on the damage to people not building So all the american coverage has been the damage to buildings and not the people so Uh, no matter how you feel about it, you know, you have to keep the focus on on people here And uh, and I guess that was the point of the uh of the cover-up well, and It's funny.
I forget which article it was where you mentioned and I was too young for this I don't remember that reagan ronald reagan in the 1980s was trying to argue that nuclear war was survivable And this is in an era of tens of thousands of thermonuclear weapons, right?
Dan Elford has written about this at truth dig that in a in any kind of real nuclear war between america and russia You're looking at hardcore forest fires and nuclear winters and the complete and total disruption of crops everywhere on earth And the quiet possible extinction of the human species, right, you know, yeah Well, that was an idea that's correspond helps spawn the great anti-nuclear movement of the 1980s that I was I was a part of back then uh, you know, there's even um Uh another angle in the book that that people might find amazing was When I talk about the greatest movie never made it's partly about an mgm movie That was going to be the first epic movie about the bomb in 1946 It was it was inspired by the scientist.
It was going to have warned about the future of nuclear power.
It was going to Basically hint that the bombing of Hiroshima was wrong And it was coming out of mgm and was supposed to be a blockbuster and then the white house intervened and uh You know sense basically censored the movie the movie ended up it's called the beginning or the end Uh, you can find my articles about it online I even have the trailer for it Uh the beginning or the end and uh when it came out It was a complete opposite it it hailed the bombing it hailed the future of nuclear energy and truman was so involved he even got the Actor who played him in the original movie replaced and so i've got some some uh Correspondence between truman and the actor who he got fired and I mean, it's it's just an absolutely amazing story that's you know, that's Different from the rest, but I would really recommend people check out the article or check out the book for this the great hollywood cover-up Yeah, um again, it's greg mitchell from the nation magazine And if you look at his article the great hiroshima cover-up at the nation.com Right now, uh on his blog the media fix blog You can find the embedded youtube or just go to youtube or google video or whatever and search for atomic cover-up And you can see some of this color footage from it's both hiroshima and nagasaki greg, right?
Yep and uh Yeah, no little kids in the room when you look I mean, I don't know maybe 10 and up or something Nothing more than that.
I mean there's it's an important lesson of history.
That's got to be seen but it's really horrible And uh, you can definitely see why the war department didn't want uh, you know, everybody discussing this You know what?
It really looked like over there at their uh, you know kitchen tables here in the u.s Yeah, well, it's an important story I mean that's why every year I have to kind of keep coming back to it because uh, Uh, you know the lessons as I mean, I I could have called the book from hiroshima to fukushima uh, and you know, we we just did even this week they had the japanese power plant they found that the Radiation levels had hit record highs and now you have a drive in japan to ban nuclear power there You have a drive in germany that I believe that the leader of the country has vowed to uh, End or get away from nuclear power there.
So these truths about radiation about the you know, the threat of this Um 66 years later, we're still learning about we're still getting concerned about so I think it is important to go back to look at why these truths were kept from us for so long well, you know when I was a kid was you know at the in the reagan era and I saw the day after was probably some of the first stuff I ever learned about nuclear weapons was the you know completely the other spin in terms of uh, Of propaganda from from the different sides and whatever but it's just absolutely amazing to me every single day that The uh nuclear weapons issue is just not an issue in the american society whatsoever.
I mean here the soviet union Could not possibly be on the march now, right?
It's been a generation since they brought their troops back behind the euro mountains It would seem like it would be the first priority of the american people to abolish hydrogen bombs How can we leave these things laying around and even reagan was for it?
Right eventually eventually with his famous Talk with gorbachev where he proposed abolishing nuclear weapons So right and if only he hadn't been fooled into believing in the efficacy of the missile shield And stuck by that.
That's right.
He could have got it done.
That's right All right.
Well, anyway, thank you so much for your time on the show and your great work on this issue Greg, I appreciate it greg michael anytime
