[Mb-civic] Hiroshima and Nagasaki, The Original Ground Zero - Washington Post

[William Swiggard]

<>Hiroshima and Nagasaki, The Original Ground Zero
Cable Documentary Shows Rare Film of the Days After Aug. 6, 1945

By Neely Tucker
Washington Post Staff Writer
Saturday, August 6, 2005; Page C01

In the National Archives in College Park, the reels are numbered 11002 
and 11003.

Shot by a U.S. Army Air Forces film crew in Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 
the months after the atomic bombs were dropped, the reels go from one 
deformed survivor to the next. Women with scalded faces. A man with 
melted ears. A boy with no skin on his back. A man with such horrific 
wounds his hands appear to be leprous.

The footage was immediately classified as "top secret" by the military 
and hidden for nearly three decades.

Images from "the 11000 series," as archivists refer to the 30 hours of 
footage shot by the crew of Lt. Col. Daniel A. McGovern, make a rare 
public appearance on television tonight, the 60th anniversary of the 
Hiroshima bombing. The footage, shot in hospitals and across Japan, 
forms the bulk of the postwar scenes in "Original Child Bomb," an 
hour-long film on cable's Sundance Channel. The documentary, drawing its 
title and antiwar message from a Thomas Merton poem about the A-bomb, 
debuts at 8 p.m. and repeats throughout the month.

<>"There are still parts of it I don't want to look at," says Holly 
Becker, the show's producer. "Certainly we didn't use the worst of 
what's possible there. . . . But the whole point of the film, of course, 
is to document the human cost of nuclear war."

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/08/05/AR2005080501648.html 

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