On this day in 1945, the United States dropped the ‘Little Boy’ nuclear bomb on Hiroshima, Japan
. 140,000 people were killed in Hiroshima by the end of 1945.
Militarily, the move was pointless as Imperial Japan’s military machine was close to finished, and Soviet leader Joseph Stalin was about to send the Red Army juggernaut to open a second front against Japan. Instead, the bomb was dropped to justify the billions spent on the Manhattan Project and to frighten the Soviet Union.
After Hiroshima was wiped off the map and the population began to suffer the effects of radiation, the United States covered up the destruction and the hell that had been created. Officials would downplay the number of civilian casualties in the two cities and dispute as “propaganda” reports from Japan of extreme suffering caused by “radiation disease.”
George Weller of the Chicago Daily News, began filing graphic reports on the human cost of the bombing. His stories would be quashed by the censorship office and would not become public for 60 years.
The US censorship office under General Douglas MacArthur prohibited all reporting and photography by Japanese journalists. The US military seized all historic newsreel footage shot days after the bombing, this footage would disappear forever. The US then ordered the same Japanese film crew to shoot a documentary, which would be labelled as Top Secret and buried in the archives for the next two and a half decades. The more graphic colour footage shot by the US military would be classified for the next 3 decades.
President Harry Truman, and all successive US Presidents have failed to even apologise for the horrors that unfolded after the nuclear weapons were used on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
. 140,000 people were killed in Hiroshima by the end of 1945.
Militarily, the move was pointless as Imperial Japan’s military machine was close to finished, and Soviet leader Joseph Stalin was about to send the Red Army juggernaut to open a second front against Japan. Instead, the bomb was dropped to justify the billions spent on the Manhattan Project and to frighten the Soviet Union.
After Hiroshima was wiped off the map and the population began to suffer the effects of radiation, the United States covered up the destruction and the hell that had been created. Officials would downplay the number of civilian casualties in the two cities and dispute as “propaganda” reports from Japan of extreme suffering caused by “radiation disease.”
George Weller of the Chicago Daily News, began filing graphic reports on the human cost of the bombing. His stories would be quashed by the censorship office and would not become public for 60 years.
The US censorship office under General Douglas MacArthur prohibited all reporting and photography by Japanese journalists. The US military seized all historic newsreel footage shot days after the bombing, this footage would disappear forever. The US then ordered the same Japanese film crew to shoot a documentary, which would be labelled as Top Secret and buried in the archives for the next two and a half decades. The more graphic colour footage shot by the US military would be classified for the next 3 decades.
President Harry Truman, and all successive US Presidents have failed to even apologise for the horrors that unfolded after the nuclear weapons were used on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.Tweet vertalen
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