Even privately, Groves did not waver. In a late August telephone conversation with the director of clinical services at Oak Ridge Hospital in Tennessee, one of the Manhattan Project’s secret sites, Groves asserted his belief that Japanese reports of radiation illness were a play for sympathy and that the rising death tolls in Hiroshima and Nagasaki were the result of rescue workers finding more dead bodies in the weeks after the bombings. Neither his public nor his private opinion seemed to change when, on August 21, 1945, physicist Harry Daghlian became exposed to high levels of radiation during an accident while handling plutonium at Los Alamos. Daghlian experienced severe and agonizing radiation-related symptoms similar to those of the survivors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. He died twenty-five days later.
In late August and early September, Groves and other U.S. officials tried to quash public discussion on radiation effects—and its inherent challenge to the United States’ morality in using the bombs—with deflective claims about the lawfulness of the bombs’ use and their decisive role in ending the war. Groves also shifted focus to the scientific development of the bombs and emphasized Japan’s wartime atrocities. “The atomic bomb is not an inhuman weapon,” he stated in the New York Times. “I think our best answer to anyone who doubts this is that we did not start the war, and if they don’t like the way we ended it, to remember who started it.”
• • •
The disconnect between what was happening on the ground in Nagasaki and Hiroshima and what was being reported in the United States further intensified after the formal surrender ceremony on September 2 aboard the USS Missouri, anchored in Tokyo Bay. The Japanese media, free at last from Japan’s oppressive wartime censorship, was initially told that General Douglas MacArthur—the newly appointed Supreme Commander for the Allied Powers (SCAP) and head of the U.S. occupation in Japan—was a fervent advocate of freedom of the press. But as soon as MacArthur arrived in Japan, Japanese journalists and media organizations were required to abide by strict mandates, particularly regarding what they could not report—which ultimately included any details of the radiation effects in Nagasaki and Hiroshima. Two of Japan’s major media organizations were briefly suspended for breaching these guidelines in early September—the first, by criticizing the barbaric nature of the atomic bombs and suggesting that without them, Japan might have won the war; the second, by publishing a statement by a leading politician who called the atomic bombs a violation of international law and a war crime.
On September 18, General MacArthur issued an occupation press code, ending any final hope of press freedom in postwar Japan. Planned by U.S. officials prior to the end of the war, the comprehensive and exacting list of rules mandated that all Japanese news reports must be “truthful”—defined as containing no hint of editorial commentary, no “false or destructive criticism of the Allied Powers,” and no grievance against U.S. occupation forces. Major Japanese newspapers and other publications were placed under pre-censorship rules, requiring them to deliver originals of all articles and publications to the occupation censorship office for approval and return before they were printed. Japanese books, textbooks, films, and mail going into and out of the country were closely scrutinized and controlled. Moreover, no one could mention that censorship existed. As a consequence, all media coverage about the atomic bombings and their radiation effects suddenly stopped—and journalists could not say why.
Foreign reporters in Japan were also highly restricted, allowed to operate only after applying for and being granted SCAP accreditation. They were required to submit all reports to occupation censors for approval before their release. In an effort to maintain control over the atomic bomb story, the U.S. War Department sponsored one official, tightly regulated press junket to Hiroshima and Nagasaki in mid-September, after which foreign journalists were limited to escorted trips to POW camps in northern parts of the country.
Two reporters—one from the United States and one from Australia—managed to secretly make their way to Nagasaki and Hiroshima and report on what they saw. The Chicago Tribune’s George Weller saw his chance in early September, when the occupation press office offered a sanctioned press junket to southern Japan to view an airstrip being used to refuel U.S. planes traveling between Japan and Guam. After landing in a tiny town at the southern tip of Kyushu, Weller dodged his escort and found his way to a train station. Twenty-four hours and numerous local trains later, he reached the outskirts of Nagasaki. Posing as a U.S. colonel, Weller demanded to be taken to Nagasaki’s military headquarters, where a Japanese general believed his story and immediately provided him lodging, food, a vehicle, and two kempeitai (military police) daily to hand-carry his dispatches to Tokyo.
Over the next few weeks, Weller walked through the ruins of the city and witnessed firsthand the devastating effects of radiation on people’s bodies, which he referred to as Disease X. He spoke with Nagasaki physicians and heard their best analyses of the effects of radiation on the different organs of the body. He also met with POWs in the two Nagasaki camps, who plied him with questions regarding sports, world news, and Frank Sinatra. Every night, Weller typed his stories by lamplight, addressed the package to “Chief Censor, American Headquarters, Tokyo,” and handed them to the two military officers for delivery to Tokyo.
He never received a response. Years later, Weller found out that MacArthur’s censors, who could not have been happy with him for defying their rules, had rejected all of his reports. Three weeks after arriving in Nagasaki, Weller left on a U.S. hospital ship transporting POWs to Guam. He carried with him carbon copies of every page he had written, though these dispatches would become misplaced, lost to history for sixty years.
Australian journalist Wilfred Burchett, too, eluded MacArthur’s barriers to southern Japan. Just before the U.S. War Department’s press junket for U.S. journalists, Burchett made his way to Hiroshima and became the first foreign journalist to witness the obliterated city. Burchett’s first dispatch included graphic details of radiation-related illness and death—information that Groves had already adamantly denied. With the help of a Japanese and another Australian journalist, Burchett’s story evaded U.S. censors in Tokyo and was sent by Morse code directly to London. The piece was distributed worldwide and appeared on the front page of Britain’s Daily Express.
U.S. officials were outraged. When Burchett returned to Tokyo on September 7, he attended a press conference led by General Thomas Farrell—Groves’s deputy commanding general and chief of field operations of the Manhattan Project. Farrell was in Japan to confirm the safety of U.S. occupation troops about to enter Hiroshima and Nagasaki. According to Burchett, during the press conference Farrell adamantly refuted Burchett’s charges of radiation poisoning and insisted that what Burchett saw were injuries and burns from the bomb’s blast and heat. In a fierce public exchange, Burchett retorted that he had observed evidence of radiation effects, including fish that were dying when they entered a stream in the outskirts of the city. Farrell countered: “I’m afraid you’ve fallen victim to Japanese propaganda.”
• • •
Over the next week, General Farrell led a preliminary Manhattan Project investigation team to Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Contrary to some Japanese officials’ assessments, the U.S. scientists confirmed that although radiation levels were higher than normal at both cities’ hypocenter areas and in regions where black rain had fallen, the levels were low enough to be safe for U.S. occupation troops. The scientists stayed on to conduct further research, and additional teams from the U.S. Army, Navy, and Strategic Bombing Survey arrived in Nagasaki and Hiroshima to document the effects of the bomb’s blast, heat, and radiation as a means to support American nuclear weapons development and bolster U.S. civil defense measures against a potential atomic bomb attack. The outcomes of these studies were classified and barred from release.
Many Japanese scientists who were conducting their own investigations in Nagasaki and Hiroshima initially offered and were
later mandated to hand over their research to U.S. scientists. In some cases, they were ordered to give up their autonomy and work under the authority of a U.S. team. Some Japanese researchers, including Dr. Shirabe, were able to quietly continue their studies on atom bomb illnesses and mortality rates, though they could not publish their findings until after the occupation ended. In a policy of unmitigated appropriation, U.S. investigators seized bomb victims’ medical records, autopsy specimens, blood samples, and tissue biopsies from both cities and shipped them to the United States for further analysis.
American military police also arrested a Nippon Eiga-sha (Japanese Film Company) crew as it was documenting Nagasaki’s destruction and the impact of radiation exposure on survivors. All of the crew’s footage of both Nagasaki and Hiroshima was confiscated, but when the U.S. teams recognized the black-and-white film’s unparalleled value—impossible to duplicate “until another atomic bomb is released under combat conditions”—they ordered the Japanese filmmakers to complete their filming and edit the footage for submission to the United States. Pentagon officials screened the film in 1946 and denied its public release.
General Farrell’s reports to General Groves and numerous U.S. studies confirmed that horrific radiation illnesses and deaths were caused by initial radiation exposure from the bombings, but when Farrell returned to the United States, he, along with Groves and others, persisted in minimizing the illnesses and deaths from both initial and residual radiation exposure. “The Japanese claim that people died from radiations [sic],” Groves said in a New York Times article. “If this is true, the number was very small.”
To prove his point that residual radiation levels were safe in Nagasaki and Hiroshima, Groves invited a group of reporters to witness ongoing readings of low radiation levels at the Trinity test bomb site in Alamogordo, New Mexico. In a strange contradiction, however, the journalists entering the site were required to put on white canvas coverings over their shoes “to make certain that some of the radioactive material still present in the ground might not stick to our soles,” one of them wrote. Without addressing this inconsistency, Groves again justified the bombings, telling the journalists, “While many people were killed, many lives were saved, particularly American lives.”
A September 15 confidential memo from the U.S. War Department to American media outlets provided a final blow to open reporting on the bombs’ radiation effects. The memo requested that all reports about the atomic bombs—particularly reports that included scientific or technical details—be approved by the War Department prior to publication in order to protect the military secrecy of the bomb. Typical of the era, U.S. media organizations complied almost uniformly, printing the government’s press releases as they were written, with little question or opposition.
In combination with censorship of the Japanese media, most reports about the human impact of the bombs were effectively suspended in both Japan and the United States. Later that year, General Groves testified before the U.S. Senate that death from high-dose radiation exposure is “without undue suffering” and “a very pleasant way to die.”
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Nagano’s younger sister, Kuniko, died from radiation toxicity on September 10. She was thirteen years old.
After the emperor’s August 15 surrender proclamation, Nagano’s father had decided to evacuate his family to the small village of Obama, his hometown on the Shimabara Peninsula. The next morning, Nagano, Kuniko, and their parents had left their air raid shelter, pressed through the destroyed Urakami Valley, and exited the city. Nagano’s mother held the rice bowl with Sei-chan’s ashes close to her chest. On unpaved roads, they had walked in silence twenty-one miles to the east along the edge of Tachibana Bay, then south for another fourteen miles to the village of Obama. “We may have slept,” Nagano said, “but I don’t remember. It was such a wretched time that there were no words to be spoken.”
A distant great-aunt of Nagano’s father had taken them in. As the family settled into their new residence, Kuniko was still so terrified of another atomic bombing that every time an airplane flew overhead, she hid under the bedcovers, shivering and crying—inconsolable even as Nagano and her family reassured her that the war was over and no more bombs would be dropped.
In early September, just as horror stories were arriving from Nagasaki about illness and death from the bomb’s radiation, Kuniko became ill with the telltale symptoms. Nagano was consumed with grief and confusion. “After the bomb, she seemed fine,” she said. “During the whole time we were walking to Obama, she didn’t complain even once—she didn’t say she was tired or anything—so I never thought for a moment, even in my wildest imagination, that she would die. But then she completely lost her hair, her gums bled, and big purple spots appeared on her body. She got a fever, vomited blood, had blood in her stool, and she was in so much pain.
“I begged God to save her,” Nagano remembered. “I prayed to let me die in her place. But she died anyway. She writhed in agony for a week, and then she died.”
Nagano blamed herself for Sei-chan’s and Kuniko’s deaths. “I had done a horrible thing,” she said. “They didn’t want to come home from my grandparents’ house earlier that year, but I brought them home anyway. I really wanted to die,” she remembered, unable to control her tears. “I still think I should have died instead of them.”
When Kuniko died, Nagano’s older brother came home from the Omura army base where he had been stationed, and her grandparents traveled to Obama from southern Kyushu—a family gathering that hadn’t been possible when Sei-chan died. Her parents bought a kotsutsubo (ceramic urn) for Kuniko’s ashes and a second one for Sei-chan’s, finally giving him a dignified resting place. Her mother was hospitalized with radiation-related symptoms but recovered within a month. For years, Nagano could not comprehend or accept the selective nature of radiation exposure: Kuniko had died an agonizing death, while her mother—“who was in the same house at the same time as my sister”—lived for fifty more years.
Nagano with her family, early 1945, prior to her older brother’s departure for military service. From left to right: Nagano’s mother, Nagano’s older brother (standing in back), Seiji, Nagano’s father, Nagano, and Kuniko. (Courtesy of Nagano Etsuko)
Nagano’s father returned to Nagasaki to resume his job at the Mitsubishi Electric factory south of the harbor. He lived in a single men’s dormitory and went back to see his family once a month when he received his small paycheck. Nagano’s mother cried every day and barely spoke to Nagano. At seventeen, Nagano had lost her siblings, her home, and now her mother. As she began her new life in Obama, she struggled to survive in what felt like an endless state of emotional isolation.
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Autumn arrived in Nagasaki, bringing cooler days and nights. After early teams of American soldiers swept Nagasaki Bay for underwater mines dropped by the United States in the final year of the war, U.S. military ships arrived in Nagasaki in mid-September to evacuate Allied prisoners of war. POWs poured into the city from camps across Kyushu. “It was an eerie experience travelling down the Nagasaki valley,” an Australian soldier remembered. “Not a sound. No birds. Not even a lizard. Just brown, treeless soil like cocoa, no grass, and twisted girderwork.”
The POWs were processed at the port in assembly-line fashion: first coffee and doughnuts, then showers, delousing, and brief medical inspections. Those who were seriously injured, malnourished, or ill with tuberculosis, infections, ulcers, or other conditions were carried out to the Sanctuary and the Haven, two fully equipped hospital ships anchored in Nagasaki Bay. Everyone else received new underwear, socks, fatigues, and toiletry supplies. The men had their first full meal in months or years—fried chicken, spaghetti, corn bread, and cake—and danced with nurses to a band playing “Two O’Clock Jump.” After a movie, they slept in beds lined up on the ships’ decks. Within two weeks, over nine thousand POWs, along with many foreign monks, priests, nuns, and miss
ionaries who had been interned on Kyushu, sailed out of Nagasaki harbor to Allied-held ports across Asia, where they transferred to ships and planes that carried them to their home countries across the globe.
On September 23, U.S. occupation troops arrived in Nagasaki Bay. The marines on board were dressed in full combat gear, including bayonets and guns, to meet possible Japanese resistance. As their ships lumbered closer to land, the men were overwhelmed by the putrid smell of the city. They passed abandoned Japanese ships in the harbor and could see the tangled steel skeleton of a Mitsubishi factory. Rudi Bohlmann, a soldier from South Dakota, recalled the young orphaned boys who helped moor the ships to the docks and devoured the apples and oranges the soldiers dropped down to them. “They were just starved to death and had sores,” he remembered. “Eyes were all mattered and running, their ears sort of dripping with matter. The sides of their mouth was all festered [sic].”
The victors met no opposition as they landed on their former enemy’s shores. The first U.S. troops to disembark divided into small groups and left in jeeps and trucks every hour for short tours of the city. They were stunned and rendered speechless by the grisly scenes before them, brought on by a single bomb. The Urakami Valley had vanished from existence, corpses were burning on cremation pyres, skulls and bones were piled on the ground, and people were walking through the ruins with beleaguered and empty expressions—“going nowhere, it seems,” remembered Keith Lynch, a sailor from Nebraska. “Just walking.” In a letter to his parents the next day, he wrote that he saw “a sight I hope my children, if I am so fortunate, will never have to see, hear of, or ever think of. It was horrible and when you get to thinking, unbelievable. . . . Such a thing as I saw yesterday cannot be described in words. You have to see it and I hope no one ever has to see such a thing again.”
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