Global Research, November 04, 2019
Theme: History, Militarization and WMD
A couple of years ago an American writer
named Greg Mitchell wrote an informative book on the huge
cover-up orchestrated by the US government on the dropping of the first atomic
bomb on Japan, and the censorship of the first Hollywood movie on the subject.
(1) The government was in possession of much live film footage shot by the US
military of both Hiroshima and Nagasaki that Mitchell says would have shocked
viewers, with ghostlike ruins and babies with burned faces. He includes many of
these original photos in his book, and details the extensive efforts to hide
the facts and evidence of the use of the atomic bombs and the tapestry of lies
created after the fact to justify this atrocity and present it as a necessary
evil.
The Hollywood movie arose because the film
industry wanted to warn the people of the world about the coming dangers of a
nuclear arms race, Mitchell claiming the early scripts presented a shocking
picture that would definitely have provoked disarmament, but the
eventual Hollywood version of the official narrative was that the bomb was
absolutely necessary to end the war and save American lives.
He writes that as the scripts were increasingly
revised the bombing became not only justifiable but even admirable. Robert
Oppenheimer, the prominent Jewish physicist primarily responsible for the
development of the bomb, was assured that in the movie his character would
display “humility” and “a love of mankind”. But that’s not quite how it was.
“At the first successful detonation of an atomic bomb on July 16, 1945,
“Oppenheimer was beside himself at the spectacle. He shrieked, “I am become
Death, the Destroyer of worlds.” (2)
The movie script was further altered to show
American president Truman agonising over the decision when in truth he proudly
boasted that he never lost any sleep over it, and further wrote in a letter to
a critic, “I have no qualms about it whatever”. (3)
Hollywood had begun the creation of yet another
myth of American history. From Mitchell’s notes, even minor details in the
movie were altered to make the bombing appear justified. Nuclear radiation
fallout was dismissed as trivial, and fabricated scenes were inserted to depict
the American bombers as being heavily bombarded with flak (untrue) to make the
attack appear more courageous.
Claims were fabricated that the use of the atomic bombs would shorten the
war by a year, which was 100% false since the Japanese had already repeatedly
offered to surrender, as well as claims
that use of the atomic bomb would save at least half a million American lives,
also patently untrue. In fact, the bombings saved no American lives since it
was already abundantly clear that no invasion of Japan would be necessary to
effect a surrender, and in fact the prospect of a physical invasion was never
even on the table. But the bombings did needlessly claim at least an additional
nearly one million Japanese lives, even though Wikipedia states this at little
over 100,000.
Another myth created by Hollywood was that the
targets – Hiroshima and Nagasaki – had been chosen for their military value,
but in truth both were entirely civilian cities and were chosen only because
they hadn’t been bombed before and could clearly demonstrate the destructive
power of this new weapon.
The final movie was presented as “basically a
true story” to the countless Americans who saw it. The New York Times called it
a “creditable re-enactment”, and praised its handling of the moral issues of a
“necessary evil”. A popular news magazine praised its “aura of authenticity and
special historical significance”. And the “humanitarian bombing” of Hiroshima
entered American mythology as factual American history. But that’s not how it was.
Ellsworth Torrey Carrington, in “Reflections of a
Hiroshima Pilot” (4), quoted the second B-29 pilot as saying, “After the first
bomb was dropped, the atom bomb command was very fearful that Japan might
surrender before we could drop the second bomb, so our people worked around the
clock, 24-hours-a-day to avoid such a misfortune.” One of the greatest lies
fabricated for the movie was the story of US President Truman proclaiming that
prior to the actual bombings the US would drop leaflets over Japan to warn the
population of “what is coming” as a means to “save lives”. Harrison Brown, who
had worked on the bomb, called this fiction of warning leaflets “the most
horrible falsification of history”. Wikipedia, lying as always, tells us
“Various sources give conflicting information about when the last leaflets were
dropped on Hiroshima prior to the atomic bomb.” But in fact no leaflets were
dropped on Hiroshima prior to the bombing on August 6.
Hiroshima and Nagasaki were not the original
targets for the first atomic bombs. Maj. Gen. Leslie Groves is generally blamed
for the suggestion to bomb Kyoto, but it appears well-documented that it was
Bernard Baruch who persistently demanded Kyoto be destroyed because of its
cultural and historical value to the Japanese people, its destruction opening a
wound that would never heal. Henry Stimson, then US Secretary of War, refused
to accept Kyoto as a target for that same reason, but was over-ruled. However,
Kyoto was protected by Providence and a dense cloud cover that prevented the
American bombers from locating it with sufficient accuracy, leaving them to
proceed to their alternates.
In May of 1945, several months before the atomic
bombs were ready, the self-named “Masters of the Universe” held a meeting at
the Palace Hotel in San Francisco to discuss the ending of the war in the
Pacific. The issue was that Japan was already suing for peace, and the
collective opinion of these gentlemen was, according to Edward Stettinius, then
Secretary of State, “We have already lost Germany. If Japan bows out, we will
not have a live population on which to test the bomb … our entire postwar
program depends on terrifying the world with the atomic bomb … we are hoping
for a million tally in Japan. But if they surrender, we won’t have anything.”
The advice of John Foster Dulles was “Then you have to keep them in the war
until the bomb is ready. That is no problem. Unconditional surrender.”
Stettinius replied, “They won’t agree to that. They are sworn to protect the
Emperor.” Dulles’ response: “Exactly. Keep Japan in the war another three
months, and we can use the bomb on their cities. We will end this war with the
naked fear of all the peoples of the world, who will then bow to our will.” (5)
A great many Americans today are fond of
justifying their nation’s use of nuclear weapons in Japan by telling us it
shortened the war, fully confident their moral superiority remains intact. But
in truth, the bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki mostly as a “once in
a lifetime chance” to witness the effects of nuclear blasts on a human
population. It is not widely known that the US dropped two different types of
bombs – uranium and plutonium – onto the two cities, these bombings being live
laboratory experiments to determine the differences in yield and effect between
the two. The US Department of Energy still lists these explosions as “tests”.
After the bombings, there was an almost obscene
eagerness on the part of the Americans to get to Hiroshima and Nagasaki to
‘examine and catalog’ the results of their new monstrosity. In reviewing the
reports of the American presence in these two cities after the blasts, one
cannot escape the conclusion that these so-called ‘scientists’ were almost as
giddy as schoolboys in viewing their masterpiece of war, and too morally
deformed to even consider the horror they had perpetrated.
When American forces entered and occupied the two
cities immediately after the bombings, their first order was a complete
black-out of information and a ban on the publication of any reports of the
destruction and its effects, maintaining a totally-controlled monopoly on
information. Japanese journalists and cameramen were prohibited from any
reporting, and threatened with court-martials and execution if they dared
disobey. All books and written accounts of the bombings and their aftermath
were censored and most often confiscated and destroyed by the Americans. Even
the need to give treatment to the victims was forbidden to be reported in
Japan, and consequently the Japanese had virtually no information of the
conditions. All physicians in Japan were forbidden to communicate with each
other or to exchange information on the human devastation. “Their records,
clinical research and other data were suppressed and confiscated. The US
military also confiscated all samples of damaged tissue, burned and irradiated
skin, blood and internal organs, from both dead and living victims.” All information was totally suppressed.
Further, US officials forced the Japanese
government to refuse any medical aid offered by the International Red Cross or
other agencies because, in the words of one author, “If the laboratory animal
were cured, it would be useless for scientific medical research”. The Americans
also did all possible to prevent any treatment being given to the victims.
Their stated policy was, “As far as medical aid is concerned, the less the
better”. Japanese doctors, dealing with humanity’s first nuclear holocaust,
were desperate to assist the victims and discover treatments or cures, but were
rebuffed by the Americans and forbidden to attempt treatment. The wounded
victims of history’s first nuclear explosions were true guinea pigs meant only
for observation.
There was another important but never-discussed
reason for the choice to drop atomic bombs. The Americans had been conducting
high-level bombing raids on Japan for some time and, in spite of great success,
were nevertheless disappointed in the overall results. We are familiar with the
Americans’ fire-bombing of Dresden in Germany and their apparent delight in the
results of that travesty, but American history has quietly buried, and
Americans have never had to confront, the fact that the US conducted a similar
and long-running campaign against Japan.
At a meeting on April 27, 1945, the so-called
“Target Committee” met at the Pentagon to discuss the list of prospective
Japanese cities for use of the atomic bomb. Tokyo was eliminated because, in
the words of the committee, it was “now practically all bombed and burned out
and is practically rubble with only the palace grounds left standing”. The
members further discussed the fact that there were few undamaged cities
remaining in Japan for a demonstration of the power of their new atomic weapon,
noting that their policy for a year had been one of “systematically [fire-]
bombing out [cities] with the prime purpose in mind of not leaving one stone
lying on the other.”
US General Curtis LeMay, one of history’s most
accomplished pathological killers, had learned of the fire-bombing of Dresden
and wanted to conduct his own genocide on a tapestry that offered far more
potential than a single German city. Accordingly, he conducted an intense
year-long campaign of extermination against the people of Japan. For an entire
year, the Americans waged a fire-bombing campaign that eventually included
nearly 100 Japanese cities, devastating Japan’s fragile wood-and-paper-constructed
communities. This campaign killed exponentially more civilians than we are told
about for Hiroshima and Nagasaki. This is the same Curtis LeMay who would boast
only a few years later that he had carpet-bombed and killed as much as 40% of
the civilian population of North Korea – for no reason whatever.
The prior high-altitude bombing attacks on
Japanese cities were considered by the Americans to be “ineffective”, so LeMay
shifted to night raids using incendiary explosives and ordered his bombers to
fly at very low altitudes (500 feet) to ensure destruction of Japan’s
vulnerable wood-and-paper buildings, and of course to ensure destruction of the
civilian population residing in them. It was his judgment that the night
attacks, blanket bombing raids on civilians, were an appropriate measure to
multiply both the destruction and the civilian terror. By that time, Japanese
air defenses were nonexistent and no useful military targets remained; the
Americans were simply “pacifying” a helpless civilian population.
In the most celebrated case, “Operation
Meetinghouse”, US bombers conducted a night raid on Tokyo that destroyed 50
square Kms of the city. The downtown Tokyo suburb of Shitamachi had been
targeted as the center of this raid because the area contained the highest
civilian population density of any city in the world at the time, with some
750,000 people living in the easily-flammable wood-frame buildings in that
district. LeMay wanted to conduct an “experiment” in the effects of firebombing
by setting ablaze this virtual paper city. Just after midnight, 334 massive
B-29 Superfortress bombers flying at an altitude of only 150 meters, carried
out an intense three-hour raid that dropped a half-million M-69 incendiary
bombs. These incendiary devices, as with Dresden, created an immense firestorm
fanned by winds of 50 Kms per hour that totally razed the Shitamachi district
and spread flames throughout the remainder of the city, destroying almost 50
square Kms of Tokyo.
The B-29 bombers for these extermination raids
were carrying a mixture of incendiary explosives that included napalm infused
with white phosphorus, perhaps the most vicious and immoral of all weapons ever
used on civilian populations, this contribution to humanity having been created
and developed by Harvard University. The incendiaries produced firestorms
similar to those in Hamburg, Germany, two years prior, and that in Dresden only
a month earlier. Temperatures on the ground in Tokyo reached 1,800 degrees in
some places. Survivors’ accounts tell of women running through the streets with
burning babies strapped to their backs, of people leaping into swimming pools
to try to escape the flames only to be boiled alive. In his book, “War Without
Mercy”, John Dower wrote “Canals boiled, metal melted and buildings and human
beings burst spontaneously into flames”. About 65% of Tokyo’s commercial area,
and about 20% of its industry, was destroyed. Almost 300,000 buildings burned
to the ground in Tokyo alone. This was the single deadliest air raid of the
Second World War. Few escaped the inferno.
There were widespread documented reports that
during the three hours of the attack there were such great blood-red mists and
an overwhelming stench of burning human flesh rising into the air and filling
the cockpits of the low-flying American bombers, that the crews were forced to
don their oxygen masks to keep them from vomiting. Such was the human carnage.
This was genocide by any measure, and yet the entire sordid mess has been
excised from all US history books. Gen. Douglas MacArthur’s aide, Brigadier
Gen. Bonner Fellers, called LeMay’s bombing of Tokyo “one of the most ruthless
and barbaric killings of noncombatants in all history”, but LeMay was proud of
his accomplishment in Japan, as he would later be in Korea, boasting that he
successfully “scorched and boiled and baked to death well over half a million
Japanese civilians, perhaps nearly a million”, in that one event in Tokyo
alone. After the success of this first attack, LeMay was determined to continue,
stating his intention to have Tokyo entirely “burned down – wiped right off the
map”, and proceeded to carry out his homicidal determination with repeated
fire-bombings covering an increasingly greater area of Japan. The incendiary
bombs ignited unimaginable firestorms in these cities, storms that created
updrafts so intense that the bombers were sometimes carried upwards to
altitudes of as much as 10,000 feet. These genocidal raids were so successful
that the US was running out of cities to bomb, Air Force executives complaining
that few remaining cities were worth the attention of even 50 bombers while
they could put up at least 450 at one time. “The totality of the devastation in
Japan was extraordinary, and this was matched by the near-totality of Japan’s
defencelessness.”
But Tokyo was only one of many cities fire-bombed
by LeMay and the Americans. In total, almost 100 Japanese cities and their
civilian populations suffered the same fate, about 40 of Japan’s major cities
experiencing destruction of 50% to almost 100%, and dozens of others between
25% and 50%, and leaving at least 30% of the Japanese population homeless by
the end of the war. This year-long orgy of hate and killing “brought the mass
incineration of civilians to a new level in a conflict already characterized by
unprecedented bloodshed”.
Inexplicably, US-supplied population statistics
suggest the death toll from all this incendiary bombing was virtually nil,
Japan’s pre-war population listed at 73 million and post-war at 72 million.
(Oct 1940 – 73.000 million; Oct 1945 – 71.999 Million). Wikipedia is one source
of these nonsense statistics, but there are many others. In any case, we need
only think. In addition to the usual casualties of war, a full year of intense
fire-bombing of almost 100 cities, with destruction rates averaging 50%, then
topped off with two atomic bombs, will produce casualties greater in number
than zero.
There have been some mass adjustments made to
Japan’s population statistics for the period immediately before and during
World War Two, since in comparisons of census figures, civic population numbers
and fatality counts, very little makes sense. The Americans, and the Japanese
at one point, claimed the death toll from the Tokyo fire-bombing at as little
as 35,000, which is prima facie nonsense since the Shitamachi area alone
contained more than twenty times this number and was destroyed so completely –
and so rapidly – the population could not possibly have escaped. I have taken
the trouble to extract from the Japanese government’s prior census figures by
city and, from this, the population of the city of Tokyo shows an almost 60%
reduction between 1940 and 1945, which is about what one would expect: Oct
1944: 6,558,161; Oct 1945: 2,777,010. These figures suggest a death toll of
almost four million, most of whom would have necessarily been direct victims of
the firebombing. The first fire-bombing destroyed about 50 square kilometers
(about 20 square miles) of Tokyo, but LeMay carried out many subsequent raids
on successive nights that finally brought the total devastated area of Tokyo to
more than 150 square kilometers or almost 60 square miles. With the fierce
winds of up to 100 mph created near the center of the firestorm and a total
inability to fight fires of this magnitude, and given that the relatively small
Shitamachi area alone contained about 750,000 people and constituted only about
10% of the area the Americans fire-bombed, death claims of 35,000 are
ridiculous.
From a comparison of widely published and
presumably accurate prior census figures available for 40 of Japan’s major
cities, the population differential between the two above dates produces a
reduction in total population of almost 50%, from about 19,750,000 to
10,500,000, which is again what would be expected and which indicates around
ten million deaths resulting primarily from the fire-bombing in these 40 cities
alone. Various historians and political scientists have offered different
explanations as to why both the Americans and the Japanese would have been
eager to mask the true casualty figures, but the reasons are mostly obvious.
The Americans were desperate to obliterate evidence of a great many of their
crimes during the Second World War, and they totally controlled the post-war
media in both Germany and Japan, eliminating public access to accurate
information. And, as with the Philippines, Indonesia, and other nations
victimised by US military massacres, the Americans destroyed and re-wrote those
nations’ history books to make the public ignorance permanent. Naturally, this
information has also evaporated from the historical record, the world no longer
aware that the US is one of the great book-burners and historical revisionists
of all time. I would remind you here of Indonesian historian Bonnie Triyana,
who wrote “Ours is an oblivious society. For nearly 50 years nobody has ever
taught us what really happened in 1965. Almost nobody knows that there were
millions killed”.
This exposure of buried history is unlikely to
reveal much sympathy for the Japanese, given their own savage and pathological
conduct during that same war, but this story is not about the Japanese; it is
about the Americans. It is yet one more revelation of American bloodlust, of
not only a willingness but an eagerness to deliberately target civilian
populations with an actual intent to either exterminate or at least savagely
deplete.
The fire-bombing of Japan is only one chapter of
a book written over more than 200 years. It was preceded by Germany and other
similar chapters and would soon be followed by Korea, Vietnam, Indonesia and
many others. For all of their history, the Americans have regularly engaged in
literal orgies of slaughter of civilian populations in circumstances entirely
bereft of cause, killing for the pleasure of killing. From the first landing of
European settlers in the New World, the invaders, led by Christopher Columbus,
exterminated 125 million people for the sheer joy of killing, making extinct
the entire Inca, Aztec and Maya civilisations as well as 90% of North American
aboriginals. Americans have carried on this tradition ever since, making the
world safe for democracy by exterminating its population.
*
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Larry Romanoff is a frequent
contributor to Global Research.
Notes
(1) Atomic Cover-Up; Greg Mitchell; https://www.amazon.com/ATOMIC-COVER-UP-Soldiers-Hiroshima-Nagasaki-ebook/dp/B005CKK9IG
(4) The Secret History of the Atomic Bomb; https://modernhistoryproject.org/mhp?Article=AtomicHistory
(5) Edward Reilly Stettinius Jr.; https://history.state.gov/departmenthistory/people/stettinius-edward-reilly
The original source of this article is Global
Research
Copyright © Larry
Romanoff, Global Research, 2019
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