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In one of the most widely noted elisions, the film version of Michael Ondaatje’s “The English Patient” omits the book’s climactic scene in which news of the Hiroshima bombings comes in over the radio, destroying the fragile bonds between four strangers thrown together in Italy in the last months of the war: “One bomb. Even decades later, no major Hollywood film has ventured into that territory. But that film, made just a few years after the end of the war, not surprisingly focuses mostly on the pilot's sacrifices and doesn’t dwell on the victims of Hiroshima. Paul Tibbets, ends with the pilot’s feelings of remorse for the destruction he’s caused. The 1952 film “Above and Beyond,” a dramatization of the life of Enola Gay pilot Col. Truman censored a largely sympathetic 1946 Hollywood film about the men who made the bomb, “The Beginning or the End,” adding a scene justifying Truman’s decision to drop it. Hollywood, too, has not moved far beyond the official narrative of the immediate postwar era. One of them told a reporter for Knight-Ridder: "They want to stop the story when the bomb leaves the bomb bay.”
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Veterans' groups, backed by conservative politicians, mounted a fierce campaign against the exhibit - in particular the decision to include imagery demonstrating the impact of the bomb on civilians. In a comprehensive account of the controversy, which led to a series of still-debated compromises by the Smithsonian, the historian Michael Hogan writes that the museum’s curators were stunned by the request from some veterans to omit the atom bomb’s impact on Hiroshima from the story of the Enola Gay. The Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum planned to display for the first time the Enola Gay, the plane that dropped the bomb on Hiroshima, in an exhibit that connected it with the devastation wrought by the bomb. use of a weapon of mass destruction on a civilian population center reached its apotheosis in 1995, the 50th anniversary of the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
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might, free of any reckoning with the devastation wrought by that explosion. military refused to allow the footage to be released for decades, a story told by journalist Greg Mitchell in his book “Atomic Cover-Up.” Officials hoped that Americans’ collective memory of the bombings would end, Mitchell explains, with the image of the mushroom cloud - a demonstration of U.S. 6, 1945, there was a corresponding effort to forget. Hiroshima, however damaged, is alive again in rich, panoramic color as the camera pans across a denuded tree, a woman walking with her children among the ruins, a man bicycling on an empty street.Īs with nearly every other effort to remember what happened on Aug. military film crew wandered the streets of the shattered city, capturing the devastation wrought on the people who once lived there. The first memorialization of Hiroshima began just a few months after the bombs fell in August 1945.