Today marks the 70th anniversary of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima — followed three days later by the bombing of Nagasaki. While the world is now aware of the horrifying aftermath of these events, this wasn’t always the case. This is the first in a three-part series on the US’s decades-long deliberate effort to hide the true extent of the atom bombs’ mass devastation.
“A Hole in American History”
Dozens of hours of film footage shot in Hiroshima and Nagasaki in the fall and winter of 1945-1946 by an elite U.S. military unit was hidden for decades and almost no one could see it. The raw footage, in striking color, languished in obscurity. As the writer Mary McCarthy observed, the atomic bombing of Japan nearly fell into “a hole in human history.”