Tuesday, August 28, 2012

Hiroshima

Watched The Forgotten Bomb last night, and I continue to discover that America did some fucked up things. The documentary about Agent Orange is equally disturbing.
They're both on Netflix, so if you want an unpleasant reality-check and history lesson, have at it.

This is equally screwed-up, but animated!

Letter from LIFE magazine’s photographer Bernard Hoffman 
regarding the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima. September, 1945:

From: Bernard Hoffman - War Correspondent, c/o PHO, USASTAF, APO 234 c/o Postmaster, San Francisco.
To: Wilson Hicks - Life Magazine, 9 Rockefeller Plaza, New York City, (20) New York.
Sub: Captions and Research on Hiroshima

"We saw Hiroshima today - or what little is left of it. We were so shocked with what we saw that most of us felt like weeping; not out of sympathy for the Japs, but because we were so shocked and revolted by this new and terrible form of destruction. Compared to Hiroshima, Berlin, Hamburg, Cologne, are practically untouched. What was formerly Japan’s most modern, most westernized city, is now nothing more than a two foot layer of twisted tin and rubble. As you stand in the middle of this four and one-tenths square miles of flattened ruin, gaunt, blackened, twisted, trees give the picture of Hiroshima its only source of elevation. Only ten, steel-framed buildings still stand - but there is nothing left of them too. They’re just blackened hollow shells; and like everything else in Hiroshima, they’re twisted. The sickly-sweet smell of death is everywhere, a putrid reminder of the 30,000 people who are still missing. On Aug 20th, two weeks after the explosion, Hiroshima had 33,000 counted dead. 13,950 had been seriously wounded. 43,500 had received wounds not thought serious, until they began to die mysteriously from slight burns and wounds not ordinarily fatal. On Sept 1st, the death toll had reached 53,000. According to Hirokuni Dazai, Prefecture of Thought Police, the death toll is expected to exceed 80,000."

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