Repeat not the evil, let them rest in peace

[Violet_Crumble]

Wilfred Burchett, the maverick Australian journalist who defied US General Douglas MacArthur and eluded military authorities by travelling to the bombed Japanese city of Hiroshima, was totally unprepared for what he saw. His September 5, 1945 dispatch in the London Daily Express became the famous "warning to the world" that the nuclear age had dawned. Burchett, later vilified as a communist sympathiser for covering the wars in Korea and Vietnam from behind enemy lines, was the first western reporter to make it to the bombed city. His graphic description of the effects of radiation poisoning was derided by the occupation authorities.

"In Hiroshima, 30 days after the first atomic bomb destroyed the city and shook the world," Burchett's report began, "people are still dying, mysteriously and horribly - people who were uninjured in the cataclysm from an unknown something which I can only describe as the atomic plague . . . Hiroshima does not look like a bombed city. It looks as if a monster steamroller has passed over it and squashed it out of existence. I write these facts as dispassionately as I can in the hope that they will act as a warning to the world."

The devastation of Hiroshima and its aftermath eclipsed anything that Burchett had seen during his coverage of the Pacific war. By the end of the year, 140,000 people had died in Hiroshima either directly from the impact of the bomb or the radiation sickness that followed. The counterpoint to Burchett's account was provided by an "embedded" journalist, the New York Times science reporter, William L. Laurence, who had also been recruited to the Pentagon payroll. He witnessed atomic testing in the US and the bombing of Nagasaki from a US Air Force plane three days after the Hiroshima explosion. There was vengeance in his account. "Does one feel any pity or compassion for the poor devils about to die? Not when one thinks of Pearl Harbour and the Death March on Bataan," Laurence wrote. His 10-part series celebrated the advent of the atomic bomb and won him a Pulitzer Prize.


http://www.theage.com.au/news/editorial/repeat-not-the-evil-let-them-rest-in-peace/2005/07/30/1122144052015.html