Topic: Remembrance

The Hiroshima A-bomb blast photographed by the US military. Photo: EPA

For 64th anniversary: The great Hiroshima cover-Up -- and the nuclear fallout for all of us today
Greg Mitchell Huffington Post USA Augus 6, 2009

In the weeks following the atomic attacks on Japan 64 years ago, and then for decades afterward, the United States engaged in airtight suppression of all film shot in Hiroshima and Nagasaki after the bombings. This included footage shot by U.S. military crews and Japanese newsreel teams. In addition, for many years, all but a handful of newspaper photographs were seized or prohibited. The public did not see any of the newsreel footage for 25 years, and the U.S. military film remained hidden for nearly four decades. I first probed the coverup back in 1983 in Nuclear Times magazine (where I was editor), and developed it further in later articles and in my 1995 book with Robert Jay Lifton, Hiroshima in America and in a 2005 documentary Original Child Bomb. As editor of Nuclear Times in the early 1980s, I met Herbert Sussan, one of the members of the U.S. military film crew, and Erik Barnouw, the famed documentarian who first showed some of the Japanese footage on American TV in 1970. In fact, that newsreel footage might have disappeared forever if the Japanese filmmakers had not hidden one print from the Americans in a ceiling. The color U.S. military footage would remain hidden until the early 1980s, and has never been fully aired. It rests today at the National Archives in College Park, Md., in the form of 90,000 feet of raw footage labeled #342 USAF. I have a VHS copy of all of it today.

When that footage finally emerged, I spoke with and corresponded with the man at the center of this drama: Lt. Col. (Ret.) Daniel A. McGovern, who directed the U.S. military film-makers in 1945-1946, managed the Japanese footage, and then kept watch on all of the top-secret material for decades.
"I always had the sense," McGovern told me, "that people in the Atomic Energy Commission were sorry we had dropped the bomb. The Air Force -- it was also sorry. I was told by people in the Pentagon that they didn't want those [film] images out because they showed effects on man, woman and child....They didn't want the general public to know what their weapons had done -- at a time they were planning on more bomb tests. We didn't want the material out because...we were sorry for our sins." Sussan, meanwhile, struggled for years to get some of the American footage aired on national TV, taking his request as high as President Truman, Robert F. Kennedy and Edward R. Murrow, to no avail. More recently, McGovern declared that Americans should have seen the damage wrought by the bomb. "The main reason it was classified was...because of the horror, the devastation," he said. Because the footage shot in Hiroshima and Nagasaki was hidden for so long, the atomic bombings quickly sank, unconfronted and unresolved, into the deeper recesses of American awareness, as a costly nuclear arms race, and nuclear proliferation, accelerated.

In 2005, Editor & Publisher (where I am editor) broke the news that articles written by famed Chicago Daily News war correspondent George Weller about the effects of the atomic bomb dropped on Nagasaki were finally published, in Japan, almost six decades after they had been spiked by U.S. officials. But suppressing film footage shot in Hiroshima and Nagasaki was even more significant, as this country rushed into the nuclear age with its citizens having neither a true understanding of the effects of the bomb on human beings, nor why the atomic attacks drew condemnation around the world. The common view abroad, and among many U.S. historians, is that Russia's entry into the war (long scheduled and carried out on August 8) would have forced a Japanese surrender long before any U.S. invasion took place. Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower himself later said it was not necessary to hit Japan "with that awful thing." The atomic cover-up also reveals what can happen in any country that carries out deadly attacks on civilians in any war (such as Japan's policy in China in World War II) and then keeps images of what occurred from its own people. ...

Upwards of 40,000 Canadians served under a foreign flag in Vietnam. Many died there. Canadians are serving under that same foreign flag in Iraq and fighting for that flag in Afghanistan. They are dying there.

The History Channel is running an ad that offends us. It asks us to remember those who died for "what we take for granted." We believe the only way to honor those who have died--in wars, on picket lines, in political prisons, as a result of domestic violence or other variations of hatred, of malnutrition or freezing under a piece of cardboard--is to take nothing for granted. The price of liberty is eternal vigilence.

Regular visitors know how we view the world. One reason is our intimacy with war and injustice. Major Michael Davis O'Donnell's injunction (reproduced below) expands to all those we have left behind and to those we never knew. Our vision surveys friend and foe. Our vision expands to include our grandchildren.

We believe God helps those who help themselves. We believe we are each other's keeper. We do not yet feel safe.

What I'm saying to you this morning is that communism forgets that life is individual. Capitalism forgets that life is social, and the kingdom of brotherhood is found neither in the thesis of communism nor the antithesis of capitalism but in a higher synthesis. It is found in a higher synthesis that combines the truths of both. Now, when I say question the whole society, it means ultimately coming to see that the problems of racism, the problem of economic exploitation, and the problem of war are all tied together. - Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.

"Everyone is so consumed with their own set of trials and tribulations these days--the son that lost a job, the daughter that lost a husband--the problems feel endless and everyone has their own story to tell. As my mother constantly says, “Kul wahid yihtajleh galub memdeshen”, or “every person [you listen to] requires a brand new heart”. - part of River's post yesterday on Baghdad Burning which ends:

"But, other than irate security guards, explosions in the capital, bombing in Tikrit, strikes in Nassriya over the security situation, a few assassinations, some abductions, car bombs, frightened humanitarian organizations, and exhausted people--everything is just rosy--*sigh*--Allah Kareem."

[Allah Kareem is Arabic for "God is generous". It is a phrase frequently used to dismiss beggars.]

"If you are able, save for them a place inside of you and save one backward glance when you are leaving for the places they can no longer go. Be not ashamed to say you loved them, though you may or may not have always. Take what they have taught you with their dying and keep it with your own. And in that time when men decide and feel safe to call the war insane, take one moment to embrace those gentle heroes you left behind."

Major Michael Davis O'Donnell
1 January 1970
Dak To, Vietnam
Listed as KIA February 7, 1978

Carrie West Times Colonist May 10, 2003


At midnight tonight, a secretive band of brothers will lay a wreath at Victoria's main cenotaph and bow their heads to the bugle's mournful Last Post.

These elderly men are the last members of a veterans' organization dating back 80 years. Dressed in tuxedos, they will stand in the cold night air to ensure they are the first to honour their fallen comrades on Remembrance Day. They call themselves Fourandex of Canada and membership is limited to veterans who saw the horrors of war first-hand -- those in the trenches, in combat planes and on fighting ships. ...



The group has another tradition. A Silent Tribute is read before dinner. The men stand while it is recited and raise their glasses at its conclusion:


Our surging battle lines must take their toll,

And cenotaphs are reared, and flowers are spread

Across the meadow and behind the knoll

O'er all those hallowed gardens of the dead.

Dead! Not to us, tho' all the world forget

That hideous travail of a nation's birth!

Your living memory is with us yet

Despite far scattered mounds of sacred earth,

And those of us -- so few -- who still remain

Cherish our scars -- sore guerdon of the years

And, in remembering, almost bless our pain

That tells of tribute paid in blood and tears.

And so, to you, we raise this silent glass --

And pledge ourselves to keep your memory bright,

And pray we too, when comes our time to pass

May look with fearless eyes into the night.

Official Legislature memorial marred by seige-mentality of Campbell coalition People have gathered across the country and throughout B.C., to commemorate the Montreal massacre. In 1989, 14 female engineering students were killed by a lone gunman at a university in Montreal. ... In Victoria, two dozen women [from the Status of Women Action Group] were barred by security guards from attending an official vigil in the rotunda of the legislature. About 70 people--government employees and invited guests-- attended the memorial. The Montreal Massacre

People have gathered across the country and throughout B.C., to commemorate the Montreal massacre. In 1989, 14 female engineering students were killed by a lone gunman at a university in Montreal. ... In Victoria, two dozen women [from the Status of Women Action Group] were barred by security guards from attending an official vigil in the rotunda of the legislature. About 70 people--government employees and invited guests-- were attending the memorial. The Montreal Massacre

German and Allied soldiers celebrate the 1914 Christmas truce in No Man's Land - this photograph was considered subversive and for many years, was censored.
On this day, in a world at war, we offer two snippets from two warriors of past wars.

---

Although he had been a doctor for years and had served in the South African War, it was impossible to get used to the suffering, the screams, and the blood here, and Major John McCrae (author of In Flanders Fields) had seen and heard enough in his dressing station to last him a lifetime. As a surgeon attached to the 1st Field Artillery Brigade, Major McCrae, who had joined the McGill faculty in 1900 after graduating from the University of Toronto, had spent seventeen days treating injured men -- Canadians, British, Indians, French, and Germans -- in the Ypres salient.

It had been an ordeal that he had hardly thought possible. McCrae later wrote of it:

"I wish I could embody on paper some of the varied sensations of that seventeen days... Seventeen days of Hades! At the end of the first day if anyone had told us we had to spend seventeen days there, we would have folded our hands and said it could not have been done." <hr width='50%' size=2 align=center>

John served in Vietnam for 11 months and seventeen days before being permanently disabled by his third wound. The author of the following poem, he was medically retired as a corporal in 1969.

John Musgrave, USMC Ret.,
Delta Co, 1st Bn, 9th Marine Reg,
3rd Marine Div,
Nam '67-'68

Monsoon


(Con Thien, Fall '67)

Rain.
Rain like you've never seen.
In fact, it's raining so hard you can't see.

It's been raining like this for nearly three weeks.
Your skin is drawn, puckered and white.
Your feet are swollen, rotten and bleeding
from emersion foot, inside your jungle boots.

You're cold.
You've never felt this cold before.
In fact, you're freezing your ass off.

Your roof is your steel helmet,
your walls the rubber poncho around your shoulders.

You're hungry.
All you think about is being warm and dry, and eating.
You've been scrounging in the old trash pit for discardcd
      C-rats.

No resupply.
Helicopters can't fly in this shit.
No helicopters, no food and, if you're wounded, no medevacs.

Your hole is full of water.
You have to bail it out several times a day with your helmet.
You stand in water, sit in water, sleep in water.

The sound of rain pounding on your helmet is driving
you crazy.

You're sick.
You have a cold with a deep painful cough.
You have diarrhea and the listening post tonight.

You're exhausted.
You sit in your hole in water up to your waist.
You piss in your pants, what difference does it make, and
      for a few seconds you feel warm.

You're a Marine.
What in hell did you expect?
Remember, In Case Of Rain
           The War Will Not
           Be Held In The
           Auditorium.

Yeah, no shit.

copyright © 1992 by John Musgrave, from his book "On Snipers, Laughter and Death: Vietnam Poems," all rights reserved.

"RJ-Nicola HowardSmall"Nichola Howard was out again this year selling poppies for the Legion. Last year she was their top poppy seller.

"PA-remembranceSmall"High school, middle school and elementary students collaborated in a moving tribute to veterans and a retrospective on the impact of two world wars during a ceremony last Friday at Gulf Islands Secondary School (GISS).

"JB-remembrance2Small"War veterans marched through Ganges on Saturday as part of the Island's Remembrance Day observances. A ceremony was held at the cenotaph in Centennial Park.

During the week leading up to Remembrance Day, the symbolic poppy and the phrase "Lest We Forget" were served up to us by WWII veterans on every street corner accross the country. We made our donations and went about our business. There have been so many wars, and we are a generation removed from that particular one. Phrases like "triumph of the human spirit" and "a testament to human resilience" are becoming meaningless with wear.

For Remembrance Day 2000, seven geographical features have been named to honour the courage and bravery displayed by nine British Columbians who gave their lives during the First and Second World Wars. Included in those seven are two Gulf Islands sites:

• McIntyre Point, on the southeast side of North Pender Island, named to remember Leading Cook Thomas James McIntyre, 32, from Victoria and Pender Island, who died when the minesweeper he was serving on, HMCS Esquimalt, was torpedoed and sunk Apr. 16, 1945, off Halifax Harbour. He survived the explosion but succumbed to exposure in the near freezing waters of the North Atlantic.
• Porter Bight, on the northeast side of Prevost Island, named to remember 21-year-old RCAF Flight Lieutenant John Edward Porter from Victoria, who was piloting a Lancaster bomber when it was shot down over France on Aug. 16, 1944.

(For the complete list, click on the headline of this news item.)