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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 07 May 2025
Hiroshima had a profound effect upon me. Still does. My first reaction was personal relief that the bomb had ended the war. Frankly, I never thought I would live to see that end, the casualty rate among war correspondents in that area being what it was. My anger with the US was not at first, that they had used that weapon - although that anger came later. Once I got to Hiroshima, my feeling was that for the first time a weapon of mass destruction of civilians had been used. Was it justified? Could anything justify the extermination of civilians on such a scale? But the real anger was generated when the US military tried to cover up the effects of atomic radiation on civilians - and tried to shut me up. My emotional and intellectual response to Hiroshima was that the question of the social responsibility of a journalist was posed with greater urgency than ever.
The original version of this essay was first published in Ben Kiernan (ed.), Burchett Reporting the Other Side of the World 1939-1983, Quartet, London, 1986. That version has not been changed except to remove obscurities and infelicities of expression. In the Afterword I note several important subsequent developments in our knowledge of the events dealt with here, especially concerning the U.S. censorship of the radiation effects of the bombing. Joel Kovel, Gavan McCormack and Belinda Probert were particularly helpful in commenting on the original version, and I am grateful to Mark Selden for careful and productive editing of this version.
1. Letter to David Gourlay, 9 July 1980.
2. Shadows of Hiroshima, Verso, London, 1983, pp.8-9.
3. Burchett told the story of how he got to Hiroshima a number of times in published form. The first is in ‘Hiroshima: A Postscript’ in his Democracy with a Tommygun (F.W. Cheshire, Melbourne, 1946); again in his autobiographies Passport (Nelson, Melbourne, 1969) and At the Barricades (1980); and finally in Shadows of Hiroshima (Verso, London, 1983). The story of Burchett's trip to Hiroshima and back as told here is drawn from all three.
4. One other journalist also broke through official restrictions at the time and reached Nagasaki. George Weller of the Chicago Daily News avoided military public relations ‘hawks’ and reached Nagasaki by subterfuge on 6 September. The 25,000-word article he wrote on the basis of interviews with witnesses and medical workers was much more detailed than Burchett's. ‘As a loyal, disciplined member of the press corps, I sent the material to MacArthur's press headquarters for clearance and transmission … The paper … received nothing. MacArthur had “killed” the lot.’ (cited in At the Barricades, p.1l6.)
5. For the well-founded fears of the Emperor's circle see Pacific War Research Society, Japan's Longest Day, Kodansha International, Tokyo, 1980.
6. Passport, p.167. Burchett later quotes one of the remaining doctors as saying that they knew they were not dealing with an infection, but that use of these masks provided some comfort in the face of an otherwise incomprehensible experience.
7. Committee for the Compilation of Materials on Damage Caused by the Atomic Bombs in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Hiroshima and Nagasaki: the Physical Medical and Social Effects of the Atomic Bombings, Hutchinson, London, 1981, p.516.
8. Ibid., p.519.
9. Ibid., pp.130ff.
10. The piece that was published in the Daily Express on 6 September 1945 was slightly altered by an editor who thought ‘poor Peter [Burchett]’ had been overcome by the sights of the inferno, and who inserted some gratuitous paragraphs from the Science Editor. The article is reprinted in Shadows and in Harry Gordon (ed.), The Eyewitness History of Australia, Currey O'Neill, Melbourne, 1981, pp. 361-2.
11. Shadows, p. 4l.
12. Passport, p.173.
13. Hiroshima and Nagasaki, op.cit., p.15.
14. Passport, p.l72. In the various published versions of the story, Burchett repeatedly acknowledged the support he received from several of the veteran war correspondents in the official party who protested at this unprofessional behaviour.
15. Passport, pp.174-5. A contemporary account of Burchett's POW-camp exploits by Jim Vine was published in the Brisbane Courier- Mail, 11 September 1945, and reprinted in Gordon, op.cit., p.364. Burchett must have been the source. Burchett mentions encounters in the Kyoto-Tsuruga area and Kobe-Osaka. Vine places the liberated camps as two on the west coast of Honshu and three on the Inland Sea.
16. Shadows, pp.22-3.
17. Even as late as 1970 Burchett still accepted that initial explanation (Passport, p.176). Presumably his reassessment of the probable link between his own low white-blood. cell count and his exposure to residual radiation in Hiroshima began when he returned to Hiroshima for the first time a year later.
18. Shadows, p.9.
19. Farrell is reported in an article in the New York Times, 13 September 1945, p4 by W.H. Lawrence and datelined Tokyo; Groves's statement is reported by William L. Laurence in the NYT, 12 September 1945, pp. 1,4 in an article, datelined New Mexico, 9 September, delayed.
20. Laurence, ibid.
21. Hiroshima and Nagasaki. p.504.
22. Ibid., pp. 73-9.
23. Ibid.
24. Ibid., p.243.
25. Ibid., p.270.
26. New York Times, 7 September 1945, p.7.
27. Hiroshima and Nagasaki. op.cit., p.616.
28. Ibid., p.l51.
29. Ibid., pp.l52-3
30. New York Times, 5 September 1945, cited in Shadows, op.cit., p.23.
31. Marlene J. Mayo, ‘Civil Censorship and Media Control in Early Occupied Japan: From Minimum to Stringent Surveillance’, Robert Wolfe (ed.), Americans as Proconsuls: United States Military Government in Germany and Japan, 1944-1952, Southern Illinois University Press, Carbondale, 1984, pp.292-3. Mayo's important new study of US censorship policy is based on declassified US official documents. However, she devotes no attention to the question of censorship of the effects of the atomic bombing.
32. Toshio Nishi, Unconditional Democracy: Education and Politics in Occupied Japan, 1945-1952, Hoover Institution Press, Stanford, 1982, pp.86-7.
33. New York Times, 18 September 1945.
34. Nishi, op.cit., p.87.
35. Ibid., p.88.
36. Mayo, op.cit., p.294
37. Nishi, op.cit., pp.88-9.
38. Ibid., p.101.
39. Ibid., p.102. Robert J. Lifton, Death in Life: the Survivors of Hiroshima, Weidenfeld and Nicholson. London, 1968, p.329.
40. Lifton, op.cit.
41. For the story of the poem (translated by Gavan McCormack) and its full text see Rokuro Hidaka, The Price of Affluence: Dilemmas of Contemporary Japan, Penguin Australia. Ringwood, 1985, pp.30-1. See also Lifton. op.cit. p.329. Hidaka reports Kurihara's subsequent critical reflections on the meaning of Hiroshima for Japan.
42. Hiroshima and Nagasaki, op.cit., p.510; Nishi, op.cit., p.102. The film was eventually returned in 1967 after a Japanese campaign, but even then could not be seen by the Japanese public, or the victims: ‘The Ministry of Education however, did not fully release the film to the public. reasoning that much of it would violate the privacy of those people who had been exposed to the bombs and that it contained too many cruel scenes.’ Ibid.
43. Hiroshima and Nagasaki, op.cit., p.14.
44. Ibid., p.l5.
45. ‘Visit to Hiroshima Proves It World's Most Damaged City’, New York Times, 5 September 1945, pp.1,4.
46. ‘Atom Bomb Killed Nagasaki Captives’. New York Times, 10 September 1945, pp.1,5.
47. Burchett - and the chroniclers of Hiroshima and Nagasaki - confuse the two New York Times reporters, W.H. Lawrence, the war correspondent in Hiroshima the same day as Burchett, and W.L. Laurence, the Manhattan Project publicist. In one passage, Burchett tries to work out how and why Laurence/Lawrence took so long to publish his Hiroshima account after visiting Hiroshima the same day as Burchett (Lawrence's report was in fact published the day before Burchett's), and why he moved backwards and forwards across the Pacific. That Burchett has confused the two is clear from pp.18-19 of Shadows, where the author of the New York Times article ‘No radioactivity in Hiroshima ruin’, datelined ‘Tokyo, 13 Sept.’ is given as W.H. Laurence (in the original Times by-line, W.H. Lawrence). The author of the article ‘US Atom Bomb Site Belies Tokyo Tales’, datelined ‘Atom Bomb Range. New Mexico, Sept. 9’ is correctly given as William L. Laurence. The chroniclers of Hiroshima and Nagasaki also note the presence at a press conference in Hiroshima on 3 September 1945 of ‘W.L. Laurence’ rather than W.H. Lawrence, (p.15). To make matters worse, Robert Lifton's discussion of W.L. Laurence and nuclearism refers to ‘William L. Lawrence’.
48. William L. Laurence, Dawn Over Zero, Alfred Knopf: New York, 1947, p.224.
49. ‘Atomic Bombing of Nagasaki Told by Flight Member’, New York Times, (9 Aug. delayed). 9 September 1945. pp.1, 35. The same material was later included in Dawn Over Zero.
50. ‘US Atom Bomb Site Belies Tokyo Tales’, New York Times, 12 September 1945, pp.1, 4.
51. The Broken Connection, Touchstone, New York, 1980, pp.371-6.
52. Democracy with a Tommygun, p.238. 53.Ibid., p.242.
54. Gene Gurney, ‘The Giant Pays Its Way’, in James F. Sunderman (ed.), World War in the Air: The Pacific, Watts, New York, 1962. p.249.
55. Ibid., p.258; see also, Wesley Frank Caven and James Lea Cate (eds.), The Army Air Forces in World War 2. Volume 5 - The Pacific: Matterhorn to Nagasaki, University of Chicago Press, Chicago and London, 1953.
56. Cited in John Costello, The Pacific War, Rawson, New York, 1981, p.551.
57. Kenneth Harrison, Road to Hiroshima, Rigby, Adelaide, 1983, pp.15, 267.
58. Michael Walzer, Just and Unjust Wars: an Argument with Historical Illustrations, Penguin, Harmondsworth, 1980, p.142.
59. B.H. Liddell Hart, The Revolution in Warfare, Faber and Faber, London, 1946, pp. 67, 74. 60. New York Times, 8 August 1945, p.1.
61. Reported in ‘Fears of “Atomic” Wars in US’, Herald, Melbourne, 9 August 1945, p.2.
62. See, for example, P.M.S. Blackett, Fear, War and the Bomb, McGraw-Hill, New York, 1949. In one of Clio's little ironies, the leader of the bombing survey in Japan, was Paul Nitze, a leading nuclear advocate for the Committee on the Present Danger forty years later.
63. Cited by Peter Pringle and William Arkin in SlOP: Nuclear War from the Inside, Sphere, London, 1983, p.28.
64. John Berger, ‘Hiroshima - a portrait of evil’, New Society, 6 August 1981, p.222.
65. Wilfred Burchett, letter to David Gourlay, 9 July 1980. Notes to Afterword
66. Ben Kiernan (ed.), Burchett: Reporting the Other Side of the World 1939-1983, Quartet, London, 1986.
67. See Paul Bracken, “The Second Nuclear Age: How Much Has Changed, How Much Remains the Same?” (2002), Nautilus Institute Global Scenarios Workshop 2004: Who Will Stop Nuclear Next Use, April 27-28, 2004. http://www.nautilus.org/gps/scenarios/paper.html, and Patrick Morgan, Deterrence Now, Cambridge U.P., 2003.
68. See Joel Kovel, Against the State of Nuclear Terror, Southend Press, 1984.
69. Our knowledge of Burchett's life and work will be greatly enriched by to soon-to-be published works. Tom Heenan's critical biography, originally a Monash University History Department PhD, The Life of Wilfred Burchett, is to be published by Melbourne University Press. And a consolidated and definitive edition of Burchett's various memoirs edited by his son, George Burchett, and Nick Shimmin, as Memoirs of a Rebel Journalist: The Autobiography of Wilfred Burchett (860 pp.) is due from University of New South Wales Press in October 2005..
70. Gavan McCormack, “Korea: Burchett's Thirty years’ War”, in Kiernan, Burchett, op.cit. p.205.
71. David G. Marr, “Burchett on Vietnam”, in Kiernan, Burchett, op.cit. pp.235-6.
72. “Tomgram: Dahr Jamail on living in two worlds”; and John Martinkus, Travels In American Iraq, (Black Inc., Melbourne, 2004). http://www.tomdispatch.com/index.mhtml?pid=2619
73. See Greg Mitchell and Robert J. Lifton, Hiroshima in America: Fifty Years of Denial, Putnam, 1995, and the demand by Amy Goodman and David Goodman to rescind Laurence's Pulitzer: “Hiroshima Cover-up: How the War Department's Timesman Won a Pulitzer”, Common Dreams News Center, August 10, 2005, http://www.commondreams.org/views04/0810-01.htm.
74. Weller's much longer account confirms Burchett's impressions, referring to the effects of radiation as “Disease X”. The first of Weller's reports is published in English by the Mainichi Daily News, June 2 9, 2005, at http://www.editorandpublisher.com/eandp/search/article_display.jsp?vnu_content_id=1000963439. For two detailed accounts see Greg Mitchell, “SPECIAL REPORT: A Great Nuclear- Age Mystery Solved”, Editor and Publisher, June 1 6, 2 005, http://www.editorandpublisher.com/eandp/search/article_display.jsp?vnu_content_id=1000963 439 and Mark Selden, “Nagasaki 1945: While Independents were Scorned, Embed Won Pulitzer, Japan Focus, July 7, 2005. http://japanfocus.org/article.asp?id=325
75. Greg Mitchell, “SPECIAL REPORT: Hiroshima Film Cover-Up Exposed”, Editor and Publisher, August 3, 2 005. http://www.editorandpublisher.com/eandp/news/article_display.jsp?vnu_content_id=10010015 83.
76. See Mitchell and Lifton, op.cit.; Michael Hogan, ed., Hiroshima in History and Memory. Cambridge U.P., 1996; John Dower, War Without Mercy: Race and Power in the Pacific War, Pantheon; Laura Hein and Mark Selden, eds., Living With the Bomb: American and Japanese Cultural Conflicts in the Nuclear Age, M.E. Sharpe, 1997. The Nuclear Education Project by Peter Kuznick and Mark Selden on Japan Focus provides a comprehensive listing of relevant studies in English: http://japanfocus.org/category.asp?id=66.
77. Translated by Richard Minear in Sadako Kurihara, When We Say Hiroshima: Selected Poems, Michigan Monograph in Japanese Studies 23, University of Michigan Press, 1998. See also his translation of “Hiroshima and the Emperor's New Clothes” in his “Kurihara Sadako, 1913 - 2005”, Japan Focus, March 15, 2005. http://japanfocus.org/article.asp?id=237
78. John Berger, ‘Hiroshima - a portrait of evil’, New Society, 6 August 1981, p.222.
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