Greg Mitchell's Blog, page 229

Meeting Roy Orbison

Folks, as some may know, I finished my first novel about a month ago (now with my agent) and today I am wrapping up a memoir of my many years at the legendary Crawdaddy, for nearly all of the 1970s.   It's, of course, a very personal look at the decade, from rock 'n roll to film,  politics and social protest.  Here's a small excerpt, about meeting Roy Orbison in 1974, more than a decade after I helped organize a local chapter of his fan club in junior high.
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Not sure how it happened, but it came to my attention at Crawdaddy that Roy had finally signed with a new label, Mercury, after ten years with faltering MGM, the label that had seemingly driven him off the rails after he signed a mega-deal with them (he even starred in a crappy movie) after “Pretty Woman.”  When I contacted Mercury’s publicity director, he told me Roy was going to Chicago to talk to the press about an upcoming “comeback” album.  Would I like to meet him there? 
     Naturally, I said yes.  What a story.  Back when he could still hit the highs, lick the lows and invigorate the in-betweens, Roy had sold 30 million records.  He helped keep rock alive in the early 1960s before the British invasion, and played top bill to the Beatles and Rolling Stones in England.  On the other hand, he’d lost his wife Claudette in a motorcycle accident—after he named a hit he wrote for the Everly Brothers after her—and two kids in a fire, and hadn’t been high on the charts in over ten years.
    In Chicago—my first trip there since surviving the ’68 Democratic convention and “police riot”—the publicist introduced me to a very polite Orbison, already in trademark sunglasses on a dark night,  at the hotel.  Then we drove off together in a limo to dine with Mercury execs and then hit a club show starring Ray Manzarek, the former keyboard hinge of the Doors.   It turned out that the “Caruso of rock” was incredibly soft-spoken. “Oh, isn’t that awful?” Roy asked incredulously, barely glancing at the old, wrinkled fan club photo that I produced out of my shoulder bag. Actually, he didn’t look all that different from the guy in the photo, except he’d put on a few pounds, was wearing shades instead of horn rims, and had combed his pompadour over his forehead, as if still paying homage to his friends, The Beatles.
    When we got to the restaurant, the P.R. guy pulled me aside and advised, “Keep it clean—they tell me he’s very religious. And don’t mention the accidents [involving his wife and kids].  They really destroyed him.”  The dinner took place on the 91st floor of the new John Hancock building.  Someone from Mercury pointed to a spitball on the ceiling, courtesy (he said) of another act on the label, Rod Stewart.  The menu was in French.  “I’m generally satisfied with cheeseburgers,” Roy revealed.
    Then it was off to a Gold Coast club called PBM for Manzarek and his loose, probably drunken, set.   Joining the entourage was speedy Danny Sugerman, a former rock writer who had managed the Doors after Jim Morrison’s death and was now writing lyrics for Manzarek.  (Danny would later do the same for Tom Petty on “American Girl,” pen a bestselling Doors bio, and marry Fawn Hall—yes, that Fawn Hall, of Oliver North fame). Roy chatted with one of the other members of our group about the cult Antonioni film, Zabriskie Point, which kind of surprised me. A cineaste? 
    In the ride back to the hotel, Roy said that his musical tastes these days ran to soft-rock or country, and mentioned Olivia Newton-John and Barbara Fairchild.  It was a long way from Jerry Lee Lewis. “Nobody fractures me,” he said.   He had recently attended a concert by his old buddy Elvis Presley in Tennessee, and “it was terrible.”  As for Roy, “Some of those old songs are bad, but we do them bad like they were.”  But he still sang “Crying” as if for the first time:  “I think the secret to my lasting success is that I’m not trying to be too clever, too progressive.”
    Over the next five minutes, Roy told wonderful anecdotes about his interactions with: Elvis, Buddy Holly, Johnny Cash, Paul McCartney, Ringo Starr, Bob Dylan.  How many others in the world could do that?   Sample:  He once made a backstage deal with the Rolling Stones in London before they came to the U.S.  He would sing his worst song, “Ooby Dooby,” from his early days, that night if they would do their worst song.  He kept his end of the bargain, they did not. “So to make up for it,” he added, “Mick gave me a silver cigarette case inscribed with Ooby Dooby.”  
    The cab ride was mercilessly cut short by our arrival at the hotel.  We made plans for meeting the next morning. It was only 11:15, but Roy argued, “I’ve got to go beddy-bye now if I’m going to be any good for you tomorrow.”

The following morning the room-service waiter awakened Roy with a knock and we found him in the darkened room just out of the sack already decked out in his trademark shades.  Roy pulled the curtain open,  then puttered around in his green velvet robe, somewhat less mythic than the night before, the bulk of his body sitting incongruously on pale spindly legs, the diamond ring on the little finger of his right hand gleaming with past success.
    We talked over the table as he ate breakfast, starting with his childhood down in Wink, Texas,  later getting hooked up with Buddy Holly’s producer Norman Petty and then, via Johnny Cash, with the legendary Sun Records boss, Sam Phillips.   More anecdotes.  Buddy Holly was not “uppity.” The Everly Brothers passed on what would become his first giant hit, “Only the Lonely.”  Yes, “Crying” was based on a true story.  When he went to England to top a tour with the emerging Beatles for several weeks, who had not yet come to the U.S., he saw their placards all over town and asked, “What is this crap?” only to discover that John Lennon was standing right behind him.  (Roy, being Roy, had apologized profusely.) 
    Very shortly he grew so impressed with the Beatles—“not technically that good but they had a fresh look”—that he told them to get to America as soon as possible, despite their fears, predicting they’d go over great.  He even turned down a chance to handle their U.S. representation. Then he came home and told everyone, including Brian Wilson, gently, that the Beatles would be the biggest group in America in a few months (“I have the clippings to prove it”). 
    Well, I could have listened to this forever, but I was there to cover his latest comeback, so I asked about the new recording.  At the Mercury office I’d heard the first, countryish, single and, while “Sweet Mama Blue” was very pretty, it lacked  the sock of early Orbison—as if he was still battling to get The Voice back (he’d had some heart ailments).  Roy seemed pretty relaxed about it, perhaps more pleased with the record’s existence than the assurance of major success. And he had never stopped making money from sales and tours abroad, in any case. “I think I’ve got possibly 20 years of good singing and record-making left,” he advised.
    When he got back home, he asked his record company send me an original 78 rpm of “Ooby Dooby.”  Also:  He asked me to write the liner notes for his album (see upper left).  Done and done.
    As it turned out, “Sweet Mama Blue” did, in fact, bomb.  I interviewed Roy again over the phone and he said, “It’s already a hit record to me.  It’s done so much more than what I had done like two years ago. Hit records are important to me, and I don’t want this to sound like a cliché, but I’ve had my share of them.”  No kidding.  But was The Voice still there?  “You’ll have to put this nicely,” he pleaded, “because I’m not egotistical in any sense…the voice is ten times what it ever was.  The Orbison tag, the Big Sound, whatever you call it, it’s all still there.”
    A few months later I re-introduced Roy's old hits to my new friend Bruce Springsteen, which directly led (I am pretty certain) to his famous lyric, "Roy Orbison singing for the lonely" showing up on his Born to Run album. Even Bruce's vocals turned a bit more...Orbisonesque.
    It would take a few more years, but eventually, Roy would prove his voice was still there--with the Traveling Wilburys.

The Tragic 'Atomic Cover-up"

Sixty-eight years ago this week, the U.S. dropped two atomic bombs over two large Japanese cities, killing about 200,000 civilians and a few thousand troops.  Nine months later, a key member of a U.S. military film crew who shot the only color film footage documenting the atomic attack on  Hiroshima and Nagasaki lugged much of it home to the Pentagon.  It would then be suppressed by our own government for decades.

Published one year ago, my  book and e-book:   Atomic Cover-Up:  Two U.S. Soldiers, Hiroshima & Nagasaki and The Greatest Movie Never Made (Sinclair Books).  This is a haunting account of how the shocking cover-up  extended to President Truman, other presidents and the U.S. media.   See brief video with some of the footage below.  David Friend of Vanity Fair calls it "a new work of revelatory scholarship and insight by Greg Mitchell that will speak to all of those concerned about the lessons of the nuclear age."

I interviewed the man who directed the U.S. filming and one of his top colleagues who tried for decades to get the footage released. 

Atomic Cover-up  takes a wide angle look at the use of the bomb in 1945--and its impact, other forms of official cover-up, and American opinion, right up to the present day.  You can buy the e-book edition for Kindle, all phones, Blackberry,  iPad, Macs and PCs (for just $3.99) via Amazon, and you do not need a Kindle.   Print edition also  available via Amazon.

And don't miss the wild Hollywood angle -- when the Truman White House censored the first major movie about The Bomb, from MGM, and even got the actor playing Truman fired!  It's the subject of my current e-book Hollywood Bomb. 

Why did the cover-up of the film footage matter?  While Americans were denied important truths about The Bomb -- filmed by their own military -- a costly nuclear arms race ensued, nuclear power became entrenched, and millions of Americans (and many soldiers) were exposed to dangerous levels of radiation in our own country.   Email me at:  epic1934@aol.com.   The video trailer below:

Welles Before He Raised 'Kane'

Amazing NYT story just posted by Dave Kehr on chance discovery--in Spain--of Orson Welles' long-lost first professional film, with the title (not supposed to be dirty, I imagine), Too Much Johnson.   It's now being restored, will screen abroad in October and then perhaps show up on the Web.   Stars longtime Welles colleague Joseph Cotten, plus Orson in old-age makeup where he looks like Charles Foster Kane.

Dylan Outtake, 1970

As we've noted, Columbia bringing out latest in its Dylan "official bootleg" series this month, which may prove to be its weakest, since it dates from his what-is-this-shit Self-Portrait era.  Here's the first tune and video they've released, an olde folk song sung in his adopted voice of that period.

What DIDN'T Happen on This Day in 1945--and the War Crime That Followed

By August 7, 1945, President Truman, while still at sea returning from Potsdam, had been fully briefed on the first atomic attack against a large city in Japan the day before.  In announcing it, he had labeled Hiroshima simply a "military base," but he knew better, and within hours of the blast he had been fully informed about the likely massive toll on civilians (probably 100,000), mainly women and children, as we had planned.  Despite this--and news that the Soviets, as planned, were about to enter the war against Japan--Truman did not order a delay in the use of the second atomic bomb to give Japan a chance to assess, reflect, and surrender.

After all, by this time, Truman (as recorded in his diary and by others) was well aware that the Japanese were hopelessly defeated and seeking terms of surrender--and he had, just two weeks earlier, written "Fini Japs" in his diary when he learned that the Russians would indeed attack around August 7.  Yet Truman, on this day, did nothing, and the second bomb rolled out, and would be used against Nagasaki, killing perhaps 90,000 more, only a couple hundred of them Japanese troops, on August 9.  That's why many who reluctantly support or at least are divided about the use of the bomb against Hiroshima consider Nagasaki a war crime--in fact, the worst one-day war crime in human history.

Below, a piece I wrote not long ago.
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Few journalists bother to visit Nagasaki, even though it is one of only two cities in the world to "meet the atomic bomb," as some of the survivors of that experience, 68 years ago this week, put it.  It remains the Second City, and "Fat Man" the forgotten bomb. No one in America ever wrote a bestselling book called Nagasaki, or made a film titled Nagasaki, Mon Amour. "We are an asterisk," Shinji Takahashi, a sociologist in Nagasaki, once told me, with a bitter smile. "The inferior A-Bomb city."

Yet in many ways, Nagasaki is the modern A-Bomb city, the city with perhaps the most meaning for us today. For one thing, when the plutonium bomb exploded above Nagasaki it made the uranium-type bomb dropped on Hiroshima obsolete.

And then there's this. "The rights and wrongs of Hiroshima are debatable," Telford Taylor, the chief prosecutor at the Nuremberg trials, once observed, "but I have never heard a plausible justification of Nagasaki" -- which he labeled a war crime. Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., who experienced the firebombing of Dresden at close hand, said much the same thing. "The most racist, nastiest act by this country, after human slavery, was the bombing of Nagasaki," he once said. "Not of Hiroshima, which might have had some military significance. But Nagasaki was purely blowing away yellow men, women, and children. I'm glad I'm not a scientist because I'd feel so guilty now."

A beautiful city dotted with palms largely built on terraces surrounding a deep harbor--the San Francisco of Japan -- Nagasaki has a rich, bloody history, as any reader of Shogun knows. Three centuries before Commodore Perry came to Japan, Nagasaki was the country's gateway to the west. The Portuguese and Dutch settled here in the 1500s. St. Francis Xavier established the first Catholic churches in the region in 1549, and Urakami, a suburb of Nagasaki, became the country's Catholic center. Thomas Glover, one of the first English traders here, supplied the modern rifles that helped defeat the Tokugawa Shogunate in the 19th century.

Glover's life served as a model for the story of Madame Butterfly, and Nagasaki is known in many parts of the world more for Butterfly than for the bomb. In Puccini's opera, Madame Butterfly, standing on the veranda of Glover's home overlooking the harbor (see left), sings, "One fine day, we'll see a thread of smoke arising.... " If she could have looked north from the Glover mansion, now Nagasaki's top tourist attraction, on August 9, 1945, she would have seen, two miles in the distance, a thread of smoke with a mushroom cap.

By 1945, Nagasaki had become a Mitsubishi company town, turning out ships and armaments for Japan's increasingly desperate war effort. Few Japanese soldiers were stationed here, and only about 250 of them would perish in the atomic bombing. It was still the Christian center in the country, with more than 10,000 Catholics among its 250,000 residents. Most of them lived in the outlying Urakami district, the poor part of town, where a magnificent cathedral seating 6000 had been built.

At 11:02 a.m. on August 9, 1945, "Fat Man" was detonated more than a mile off target, almost directly over the Urakami Cathedral, which was nearly leveled, killing dozens of worshippers waiting for confession. Concrete roads in the valley literally melted.

While Urakami suffered, the rest of the city caught a break. The bomb's blast boomed up the valley destroying everything in its path but didn't quite reach the congested harbor or scale the high ridge to the Nakashima valley. Some 35,000 perished instantly, with another 50,000 or more fated to die afterwards. The plutonium bomb hit with the force of 22 kilotons, almost double the uranium bomb's blast in Hiroshima.

If the bomb had exploded as planned, directly over the Mitsubishi shipyards, the death toll in Nagasaki would have made Hiroshima, in at least one important sense, the Second City. Nothing would have escaped, perhaps not even the most untroubled conscience half a world away.

Hard evidence to support a popular theory that the chance to "experiment" with the plutonium bomb was the major reason for the bombing of Nagasaki remains sketchy but still one wonders (especially when visiting the city, as I recount in my new book) about the overwhelming, and seemingly thoughtless, impulse to automatically use a second atomic bomb even more powerful than the first.

Criticism of the attack on Nagasaki has centered on the issue of why Truman did not step in and stop the second bomb after the success of the first to allow Japan a few more days to contemplate surrender before targeting another city for extinction. In addition, the U.S. knew that its ally, the Soviet Union, would join the war within hours, as previously agreed, and that the entrance of Japan's most hated enemy, as much as the Hiroshima bomb, would likely speed the surrender ("fini Japs" when the Russians declare war, Truman had predicted in his diary). If that happened, however, it might cost the U.S. in a wider Soviet claim on former Japanese conquests in Asia. So there was much to gain by getting the war over before the Russians advanced. Some historians have gone so far as state that the Nagasaki bomb was not the last shot of World War II but the first blow of the Cold War.

Whether this is true or not, there was no presidential directive specifically related to dropping the second bomb. The atomic weapons in the U.S. arsenal, according to the July 2, 1945 order, were to be used "as soon as made ready," and the second bomb was ready within three days of Hiroshima. Nagasaki was thus the first and only victim of automated atomic warfare.

In one further irony, Nagasaki was not even on the original target list for A-bombs but was added after Secretary of War Henry Stimson objected to Kyoto. He had visited Kyoto himself and felt that destroying Japan's cultural capital would turn the citizens against America in the aftermath. Just like that, tens of thousands in one city were spared and tens of thousands of others elsewhere were marked for death.

General Leslie Groves, upon learning of the Japanese surrender offer after the Nagasaki attack, decided that the "one-two" strategy had worked, but he was pleased to learn the second bomb had exploded off the mark, indicating "a smaller number of casualties than we had expected." But as historian Martin Sherwin has observed, "If Washington had maintained closer control over the scheduling of the atomic bomb raids the annihilation of Nagasaki could have been avoided." Truman and others simply did not care, or to be charitable, did not take care.

That's one reason the US suppressed all film footage shot in Nagasaki and Hiroshima for decades (which I probe in my book and ebook Atomic Cover-up).

After hearing of Nagasaki, however, Truman quickly ordered that no further bombs be used without his express permission, to give Japan a reasonable chance to surrender--one bomb, one city, and seventy thousand deaths too late. When they'd learned of the Hiroshima attack, the scientists at Los Alamos generally expressed satisfaction that their work had paid off. But many of them took Nagasaki quite badly. Some would later use the words "sick" or "nausea" to describe their reaction.

As months and then years passed, few Americans denounced as a moral wrong the targeting of entire cities for extermination. General Dwight D. Eisenhower, however, declared that we never should have hit Japan "with that awful thing." The left-wing writer Dwight MacDonald cited America's "decline to barbarism" for dropping "half-understood poisons" on a civilian population. His conservative counterpart, columnist and magazine editor David Lawrence, lashed out at the "so-called civilized side" in the war for dropping bombs on cities that kill hundreds of thousands of civilians.

However much we rejoice in victory, he wrote, "we shall not soon purge ourselves of the feeling of guilt which prevails among us.... What a precedent for the future we have furnished to other nations even less concerned than we with scruples or ideals! Surely we cannot be proud of what we have done. If we state our inner thoughts honestly, we are ashamed of it."

Greg Mitchell's books and ebooks include "Hollywood Bomb" and "Atomic Cover-Up: Two U.S. Soldiers, Hiroshima & Nagasaki, and The Greatest Movie Never Made." Email: epic1934@aol.com

World War III, Circa 1983

I missed this last week--revelations about speech drawn up for Queen Elizabeth in 1983 in the event of World War III sparked by then-hot (largely secret) nuclear crisis with the Soviets.   Marc Ambinder has links to that and long analysis of how close we came.  I was editing the U.S. leading antinuclear magazine at the times, Nuclear Times.   This week, as every year in early August (and in three books), I have focused here (see many posts yesterday) on the atomic bombings of Japan, the aftermath, cover-up and lessons, partly motivated by this very issue:  The U.S. set a precedent for using the bomb, and the media, political figures, and most Americans still defend that use today, easing the way for further use.  A line against using nuclear weapons against people has been drawn...in the sand...and the U.S. still has a first-use policy.

My Photo: August 6, Afternoon, Hiroshima

On the Ota River by the A-Bomb Dome, on an August 6, 1984.  The atomic bomb exploded directl overhead, very slightly off-target. Thousands of bodies once floated on this river.  Many came here on this day in 1945 to escape the heat and flames, and were boiled in the water.  I've posted half a dozen other personal accounts today at this blog.

The 'Double Hibakusha'--Bombed in Both Atomic Cities

When I was a kid, my best friend Paul, in his animated way, told me (more than once) the story of a Japanese man who supposedly arrived in Nagasaki one day and while walking along a road told a friend about the unearthly bright flash he had seen in the sky over Hiroshima just three days before. Then it appeared again and the man said, "Just like... that!"

Of course, I knew that Paul was making this up. It certainly never appeared in any of my school books. Imagine my surprise, many years later, when I learned, while visiting Japan, that the tale was basically true. A dozen or more Japanese men and women (the number is contested, because some were pretty distant from the blasts) are indeed considered "double hibakusha" -- survivors of both bombs.

I even got to interview one of them in Nagasaki.

Two atomic weapons have been used in wartime, and Kenshi Hirata, a diminutive, sad-faced accountant, experienced both of them.

When the bomb hit Hiroshima on August 6, 1945, Hirata was at work at the Mitsubishi shipyards two miles from ground zero. He escaped serious injury, but after wandering around the center of Hiroshima for two days, searching for his wife, he'd seen and smelled quite enough death. Somehow some trains were still running and he caught the first one leaving for his home town: Nagasaki. He carried with him the bones of his wife.

When it reached Nagasaki at 10:30 the following morning, he headed for home, a half-hour walk. His mother was relieved to see him, for she had heard that a new type of bomb had been used in Hiroshima. Hirata excitedly started describing the frightening white flash he had observed in the sky three days earlier -- when he saw it again through the front window about two miles away (so my friend's story was not so far off).

As one of the world's leading authorities on the effects of the atomic bomb, Hirata was a good man to have around the house. Grabbing his mother, he dove under a table as their windows blew in.

"The bomb that makes this white flash must be following my every step," Hirata thought afterward, as they cleaned up the broken glass. This time he did not go out and wander around the epicenter, his curiosity about new weapons that flash in the sky and blow out windows two miles away pretty much satisfied. He did not leave the house for weeks. "I did not want to see such sad, miserable sights again," he told me.

One had to appreciate the absurdity. Twice cursed or twice blessed? If you were A-bombed twice within three days, and survived, and went on to live a full, healthy life, would you consider yourself doubly unlucky or doubly lucky? "I felt so dishonored that I had to experience the atomic bomb twice," Hirata said, explaining why he had not talked about this until recently. "It's nothing to be boastful about. I could not talk to anyone about it because almost no one else met the bomb twice. So there was no one who could sympathize with me."

Greg Mitchell's new books and ebooks on this subject are Atomic Cover-up and Hollywood Bomb .

The Photog and the Flash

Yoshito Matsushige, a photographer for the Chugoku Shimbun, took the only pictures in Hiroshima on August 6, 1945, that have surfaced since. It was these five photos LIFE magazine published on September 29, 1952, hailing them as the "First Pictures - Atom Blasts Through Eyes of Victims," breaking the long media blackout on graphic images from Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

On August 6, 1945, Matsushige wandered around Hiroshima for ten hours, carrying one of the few cameras that survived the atomic bombing and two rolls of film with twenty-four possible exposures. This was no ordinary photo opportunity. He lined up one gripping shot after another but he could only push the shutter seven times. When he was done he returned to his home and developed the pictures in the most primitive way, since every dark room in the city, including his own, had been destroyed. Under a star-filled sky, with the landscape around him littered with collapsed homes and the center of Hiroshima still smoldering in the distance, he washed his film in a radiated creek and hung it out to dry on the burned branch of a tree.

Five of the seven images had survived, and they are all the world will ever know of what Hiroshima looked like on that day. Only Matsushige knows what the seventeen photos he didn't take would have looked like. Even more graphic film footage, remained hidden for decades (as I probe in my new book Atomic Cover-up ).
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Two of his pictures have been widely reprinted in magazines and books. In one, a ragged line of bomb victims sit along the side of Miyuki Bridge, two miles from ground zero, legs folded to their chests. It's hard to tell if it is torn clothing or skin that hangs from them in tatters. No one cries out. They simply stare at what lies across the bridge: a tornado of flame and smoke rushing toward the suburbs. The second picture is a tighter version of the first, focusing on a policeman and a few school girls standing in the center.

All of the figures in the two photos have their backs to the photographer and are staring at the approaching holocaust. Although many in these images no doubt died later, neither of these pictures shows a single corpse. Yet the two photos capture the horror of the atomic bombing better than any panoramic image of twisted buildings and rubble (and so, like the film footage, they had to be suppressed in America for many years). Perhaps that is because the people in Matsushige's pictures are feeling more than the lingering effects of the blast -- they are still experiencing the bomb itself. "Little Boy" has not yet finished with them or their city. The terror evident in the way the victims are standing or sitting in these grainy black and white photographs says more about the human response to the monstrous unknown than any Hollywood recreation.

And because the photographer has the same perspective as his victims we see what they see. We are on that road to Hiroshima, three hours after the bomb fell, staring into the black whirlwind.

The pictures are so affecting because ever since that day, all of us have, in a sense, been standing on that road to Hiroshima, alive but anxious, and peering into the distance at the smoke and firestorm.

When Matsushige, then retired came to meet me in an eighth-floor conference room at his old newspaper -- a small man, dapper in white shoes -- he explained that he could not take more photos that day because "it was so atrocious" and he was afraid burned and battered people "would be enraged if someone took their picture." He tried to capture more images but he could not "muster the courage" to press the shutter.

A few weeks later, the American military confiscated all of the post-bomb prints, just as they seized the Japanese newsreel footage, "but they didn't ask for the negatives," Matsushige said, grinning like a cat. These were the pictures that caused a stir worldwide when they appeared in Life seven years later.  No photographic images of Nagasaki taken on August 9 have survived.  And the U.S. suppressed film footage shot by our own military for decades.

"Sometimes I think I should have gathered my courage and taken more photos, but at other times I feel I did all I could do," he added. "I could not endure taking any more pictures that day. It was too heartbreaking." With that, Matsushige packed up his belongings, bowed deeply, and left the room, vibrant in straw hat, blue suit and bright white shoes, carrying in his arms a portfolio of pictures that are utterly unique, and must remain so.

Greg Mitchell's new book and e-book  is ""Atomic Cover-Up: Two U.S. Soldiers, Hiroshima & Nagasaki, and The Greatest Movie Never Made (Sinclair Books).

The Hiroshima Tile

After I visited Hiroshima for more than two weeks in 1984 (and also Nagasaki) on a journalism grant I returned home with enough material, and inspiration, to write dozens of articles, and two books, over the following decades.  I also came home with a very tangible, haunting, artifact, given to me by one of my hosts:  a piece of a stone tile that once lined one of several branches of the Ota River that cuts through Hiroshima.  It had been in place there on August 6, 1945, and survived the atomic bombing--but was burned black on most of one side (indeed, the other side is unmarked).

That's a photo of it, still in my possession, at left.  Imagine the level of heat required to burn stone in this way. Then imagine deliberately exploding a new weapon, which also emitted deadly rays of radiation, directly over the center of a large city populated largely by women and children.

It's particularly haunting if you know that the rivers played a key role in the immediate aftermath of the atomic bombing, as tens of thousands staggered there seeking comfort, only to end up boiled to death or simply succumbing to their wounds or radiation.  Thousands of bodies would bob on the river for days.  The tile, like so many of the victims, was burned black, an anonymous object like all the rest, only it cannot feel pain, and recall it.

Greg Mitchell's book Atomic Cover-up on the U.S. suppressing for decades film footage shot in Hiroshima and Nagasaki by our military film crew.