Embedded Files
At the National World War II museum in New Orleans, some of the most striking images are of the propagandistic posters used throughout the war to maintain antipathy against Japan, then a sworn enemy of the United States. Huge-mouthed, monstrous Japanese faces in particular stand out, beasts not worth much beyond a bomb and a cold shoulder. They stand as a reminder of the distortions of human empathy during conflict.
That type of visual distancing is common: wartime always begs for a discounting of the lives of enemies. But that’s not only accomplished through propaganda posters. The information that leaks back from the front lines, detailing the brutality and inhumanity, can undermine public support of the war effort. That problem goes away, though, if governments can control the flow of information. During World War II, the United States government did just that, screening press reports and suppressing information that might work against the United States’ perceived interests.
Below are some examples of this racist propaganda.
The process came into high relief at the end of the war, when, having declared victory over the Germans and its allies in Europe, the United States dropped two atomic bombs on Japan to force its surrender. On August 6, the U.S. dropped the first atomic bomb ever deployed in war on Hiroshima, in southern Japan. Three days later, it devastated Nagasaki with a second attack. On September 2, Japan officially signed documents ending the war.
General Douglas MacArthur, in charge of the United States forces in the Pacific theater, asked journalists to the signing of the surrender documents aboard the USS Missouri, and most of the hundreds of accredited Western journalists invited dutifully attended. Two intrepid journalists, though, slipped away to investigate the bombs’ effects.
The first, Australian journalist Wilfred Burchett, as he later recounted, heard about the atomic bombing of Hiroshima as he “shuffled along in the ‘chow line’ for lunch with fifty or so weary marines at a company cookhouse in Okinawa. [A] radio was spluttering away with no one paying attention to it as usual . . . I strained my ears to pick up a few snatches from the radio—enough to learn that the world’s first A-bomb had been dropped on a place called Hiroshima.”
Burchett boarded a train for 30-hour ride from northern Japan to Hiroshima, which once had been a city of 350,000 souls. There, he encountered a scene straight from hell — people with their skin melting off, vomiting blood, hair falling out, their bodies rotting.
His account, published on September 5, 1945, was headlined THE ATOMIC PLAGUE, and described radiation sickness. “In Hiroshima, thirty days after the first atomic bomb destroyed the city and shook the world,” he opened his piece, “people are still dying, mysteriously and horribly — people who were uninjured in the cataclysm from an unknown something which I can only describe as the atomic plague.”
He wrote:
Hiroshima does not look like a bombed city. It looks as if a monster steamroller has passed over it and squashed it out of existence. I write these facts as dispassionately as I can in the hope that they will act as a warning to the world… When you arrive in Hiroshima you can look around for twenty-five and perhaps thirty square miles. You can see hardly a building. It gives you an empty feeling in the stomach to see such man-made destruction.Of the blast victims themselves, Burchett recounted:
Of thousands of others, nearer the centre of the explosion, there was no trace. They vanished. The theory in Hiroshima is that the atomic heat was so great that they burned instantly to ashes–except that there were no ashes.The article’s publication, depicting misery on such a massive scale, caused a global stir. The United States government went into immediate damage control, dispatching a New York Times reporter on the government’s payroll to bomb-testing sites in New Mexico. There, the journalist, William Laurence, parroted the lie that radiation sickness was a fabrication.
Laurence painted Burchett as a patsy for the Japanese:
The Japanese are still continuing their propaganda aimed at creating the impression that we won the war unfairly, and thus attempting to create sympathy for themselves and milder terms . . . Thus, at the beginning, the Japanese described 'symptoms' that did not ring true.Meanwhile, the U.S. government also attacked Burchett. MacArthur ordered him expelled from Japan, although he later retracted the order, and Burchett’s camera was stolen while he was in a Tokyo hospital. Later, as he reported on wars in Vietnam and Korea, he was dogged by accusations of being a communist stooge.
(Wilfred Burchett, later, reporting from Vietnam)
Burchett’s account, at least, hit its mark before he was smeared. George Weller, of the Chicago Tribune, was not that lucky. He ventured, aboard rowboats and trains, into the aftermath of the bombing of Nagasaki, and found devastation similar to the kind Burchett had described.
Weller penned a mammoth 25,000-word piece on the city’s devastation, but rather than sending it home, he passed it along to the United States military censors for vetting. General MacArthur, having been burned by Burchett’s reporting, personally ordered the story killed and Weller’s manuscript was never returned to him. He later described his encounter with the military censors thus: “They won.”
More recently, the piece found new life, 60 years after it was penned, when Weller’s son came across a copy in his old man’s effects. It was published in a Japanese newspaper in 2005, and contained similar accounts of radiation sickness to Burchett’s: “The atomic bomb’s peculiar ‘disease,’ uncured because it is untreated and untreated because it is not diagnosed, is still snatching away lives here.”
Burchett’s piece contributed to the world’s understanding of atomic bombs, even as it invited personal attacks. Weller’s piece was equally horrifying, but, because he played by the rules—passing it along to American authorities—his work disappeared as if nothing had happened.
As for the New York Times journalist working as an American mouthpiece, the country’s foremost science writer at the time, he was rewarded with a Pulitzer.
Here is Wilfred Burchett’s piece in full:
The Atomic Plague‘I Write This as a Warning to the World’Doctors Fall as They WorkPoison gas fear: All wear masksThe Daily Express5 September 1945Express Staff Reporter Peter Burchett [sic] was the first Allied staff reporter to enter the atom-bomb city. He travelled 400 miles from Tokyo alone and unarmed carrying rations for seven meals—food is almost unobtainable in Japan—a black umbrella, and a typewriter.Here is his story from—HIROSHIMA, Tuesday.In Hiroshima, 30 days after the first atomic bomb destroyed the city and shook the world, people are still dying, mysteriously and horribly–people who were uninjured by the cataclysm–from an unknown something which I can only describe as atomic plague.Hiroshima does not look like a bombed city. It looks as if a monster steamroller had passed over it and squashed it out of existence. I write these facts as dispassionately as I can in the hope that they will act as a warning to the world. In this first testing ground of the atomic bomb I have seen the most terrible and frightening desolation in four years of war. It makes a blitzed Pacific island seem like an Eden. The damage is far greater than photographs can show.When you arrive in Hiroshima you can look around and for 25, perhaps 30, square miles you can hardly see a building. It gives you an empty feeling in the stomach to see such man-made devastation.I picked my way to a shack [sic] used as a temporary police headquarters in the middle of the vanished city. Looking south from there I could see about three miles of reddish rubble. That is all the atomic bomb left of dozens of blocks of city streets, of buildings, homes, factories and human beings.STILL THEY FALLThere is just nothing standing except about 20 factory chimneys–chimneys with no factories. I looked west. A group of half a dozen gutted buildings. And then again nothing.The police chief of Hiroshima welcomed me eagerly as the first Allied correspondent to reach the city. With the local manager of Domei, a leading Japanese news agency, he drove me through, or perhaps I should say over, the city. And he took me to hospitals where the victims of the bomb are still being treated.And in every case the victim died.In these hospitals I found people who, when the bomb fell, suffered absolutely no injuries, but now are dying from the uncanny after-effects.For no apparent reason their health began to fail. They lost appetite. Their hair fell out. Bluish spots appeared on their bodies. And the bleeding began from the ears, nose and mouth.At first the doctors told me they thought these were the symptoms of general debility. They gave their patients Vitamin A injections. The results were horrible. The flesh started rotting away from the hole caused by the injection of the needle.That is one of the after-effects of the first atomic bomb man ever dropped and I do not want to see any more examples of it. But in walking through the month-old rubble I found others.THE SULPHUR SMELLMy nose detected a peculiar odour unlike anything I have ever smelled before. It is something like sulphur, but not quite. I could smell it when I passed a fire that was still smouldering, or at a spot where they were still recovering bodies from the wreckage. But I could also smell it where everything was still deserted.They believe it is given off by the poisonous gas still issuing from the earth soaked with radioactivity released by the split uranium atom.And so the people of Hiroshima today are walking through the forlorn desolation of their once proud city with gauze masks over their mouths and noses. It probably does not help them physically. But it helps them mentally.From the moment that this devastation was loosed upon Hiroshima the people who survived have hated the white man. It is a hate the intensity of which is almost as frightening as the bomb itself.‘ALL CLEAR WENT’The counted dead number 53,000. Another 30,000 are missing, which means ‘certainly dead’. In the day I have stayed in Hiroshima–and this is nearly a month after the bombing–100 people have died from its effects.They were some of the 13,000 seriously injured by the explosion. They have been dying at the rate of 100 a day. And they will probably all die. Another 40,000 were slightly injured.These casualties might not have been as high except for a tragic mistake. The authorities thought this was just another routine Super-Fort raid. The plane flew over the target and dropped the parachute which carried the bomb to its explosion point.The American plane passed out of sight. The all-clear was sounded and the people of Hiroshima came out from their shelters. Almost a minute later the bomb reached the 2,000 foot altitude at which it was timed to explode–at the moment when nearly everyone in Hiroshima was in the streets.Hundreds upon hundreds of the dead were so badly burned in the terrific heat generated by the bomb that it was not even possible to tell whether they were men or women, old or young.Of thousands of others, nearer the centre of the explosion, there was no trace. They vanished. The theory in Hiroshima is that the atomic heat was so great that they burned instantly to ashes–except that there were no ashes.If you could see what is left of Hiroshima you would think that London had not been touched by bombs.HEAP OF RUBBLEThe Imperial Palace, once an imposing building, is a heap of rubble three feet high, and there is one piece of wall. Roof, floors and everything else is dust.Hiroshima has one intact building–the Bank of Japan. This in a city which at the start of the war had a population of 310,000.Almost every Japanese scientist has visited Hiroshima in the past three weeks to try to find a way of relieving the people’s suffering. Now they themselves have become sufferers.For the first fortnight after the bomb dropped they found they could not stay long in the fallen city. They had dizzy spells and headaches. Then minor insect bites developed into great swellings which would not heal. Their health steadily deteriorated.Then they found another extraordinary effect of the new terror from the skies.Many people had suffered only a slight cut from a falling splinter of brick or steel. They should have recovered quickly. But they did not. They developed an acute sickness. Their gums began to bleed.And then they vomited blood. And finally they died.All these phenomena, they told me, were due to the radio-activity released by the atomic bomb’s explosion of the uranium atom.WATER POISONEDThey found that the water had been poisoned by chemical reaction. Even today every drop of water consumed in Hiroshima comes from other cities. The people of Hiroshima are still afraid.The scientists told me they have noted a great difference between the effect of the bombs in Hiroshima and in Nagasaki.Hiroshima is in perfectly flat delta country. Nagasaki is hilly. When the bomb dropped on Hiroshima the weather was bad, and a big rainstorm developed soon afterwards.And so they believe that the uranium radiation was driven into the earth and that, because so many are still falling sick and dying, it is still the cause of this man-made plague.At Nagasaki, on the other hand, the weather was perfect, and scientists believe that this allowed the radioactivity to dissipate into the atmosphere more rapidly. In addition, the force of the bomb’s explosion was, to a large extent, expended into the sea, where only fish were killed.To support this theory, the scientists point to the fact that, in Nagasaki, death came swiftly, suddenly, and that there have been no after-effects such as those that Hiroshima is still suffering. 
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