The Ground Zero They Didn't Want Us To See
Saturday July 16, 2005
The Guardian
One rainy night five years ago in Watertown, Massachusetts, a man was taking his dog for a walk. On the kerb, in front of a neighbour's house, there was a pile of rubbish - old mattresses, cardboard boxes, a few broken lamps. He caught sight of a vintage grey suitcase and opened it. The suitcase was stuffed full of black-and-white photographs, all curled and dirty and bent. He was surprised by the subject matter: devastated buildings, twisted girders, broken bridges, a few people standing about - panoramas of a destroyed city. He quickly closed the case and took it home. At his kitchen table, his inspection of the photographs confirmed what he had suspected. He was looking at the effects of the first use of the atomic bomb. It was Hiroshima.
There were 701 photographs in the suitcase. In a dispassionate style, they catalogue a devastated landscape: a place seared by a new form of warfare. Now, 60 years after the bombing of Hiroshima at the end of the second world war, the story of how the photographs came to be taken, and what has happened to them since, can be pieced together.
On August 6 1945, at 8.15am, a B-29 aircraft dropped a uranium bomb over the city of Hiroshima. Around 110,000 civilians and 20,000 military personnel are said to have died, many of them instantly vapourised in the heat of the blast or burned to death by the fireball that swept through the city. Thousands more would die from radiation sickness in the following months and years.
One of a team of US scientists who flew over the city 31 days after the blast told the New Yorker, "There was just one enormous, flat, rust-red scar, and no green or grey, because there were no roofs or vegetation left. I was pretty sure then that nothing I was going to see later would give me as much of a jolt."
That few photographs of the scene have been published is no accident. Just over a month after Japan surrendered, the US government imposed a strict code of censorship on the nation. It read, in part: "Nothing shall be printed which might, directly or by inference, disturb public tranquility." The government was ostensibly wary of the emotions of grief and anger that could be unleashed in Japan as a result of the circulation of images of the destroyed city; it was probably also concerned to keep the physical effects of its new and terrible weapon a secret. But this suppression of visual evidence served a third purpose as well; it helped - in Japan, in America and in the wider world - to inhibit any questioning of the decision to use the bomb in the first place.
Elsewhere, the camera had come into its own during the second world war. Images of Dresden after it was firebombed or London during the Blitz or the concentration camps of Bergen-Belsen and Auschwitz after their liberation form a powerful and haunting legacy of war's destructive impact. But think of Hiroshima and what comes to mind is the mushroom cloud. Awesome in its way, it is nonetheless an abstract image freed from human agency. The lack of visual evidence of the bomb's effect has helped us to forget its devastating impact. Hiroshima has become, as the novelist Mary McCarthy wrote in 1946, "a kind of hole in human history".
These images, taken during the weeks following the bombing, show a landscape that is eerily vacant and quiet. But why were they taken and by whom? The man who found the photographs, Don Levy, lives in Watertown on the outskirts of Boston - home to a military arsenal used for ballistics testing and nuclear research during the postwar years. Levy owns the Deluxe Town Diner. The lunch crowd is thinning out as we talk. "When I opened the suitcase that night," he says, "I knew what I was looking at almost right away. Some of the prints had 'Hiro', short for Hiroshima, written on their edges."
Daryl, his wife, joins us. "The thing that affects me most about the photographs," she says, "is what isn't there. The absences, like the photograph of the chalk marks of the feet on the bridge or the person who was wearing the coat that is all torn and burnt. And I hate to say it, but those twisted girders and ruins remind me of 9/11. People know what we did at Hiroshima, but we just don't want to think about it. I guess it's easier not to."
The photographs were in terrible shape when Levy found them - some were stuck together, others had been hole-punched and stuffed into binders. He filed them in archival sleeves and put them in storage. Years later, he mentioned the photographs to a customer who put him in touch with a New York gallery owner. An exhibition was mounted at Roth Horowitz in 2003 but, although it received some critical notice, the show was virtually ignored by the public.
We decide to visit the town hall to look up the names of all the residents of the house outside which he found the pictures, starting when it was last sold in 2000 and going back to the 1950s. Back at his office in the diner, we Google the names on his computer and find a local phone number for the man who sold the house in 2000.
The voice on the other end of the line shakes with shock. "The photographs? Of Hiroshima? You have them? I thought they were in my basement! How did you get them?" After an explanation, he's still bemused. "This is wild! I must have thrown them out by accident when I was moving stuff out. I never would have purposefully gotten rid of those photographs. I've been carrying them around with me since 1972!"
Soon after, he rings us back to tell us he's found some more photos. "I'll come by the diner in an hour and show them to you." Marc Levitt, a man in his early 50s, arrives carrying a large cardboard folder. As he opens it, a musty smell of mould drifts up from 30 20x10 black-and-white prints, some of which are marked "Top Secret" and "Restricted". They are aerial reconnaissance photos, clearly labelled "Hiroshima", taken of the city before it was bombed.
Levitt bought the house in 1983, lived in it for a number of years with his wife, and then rented it out. In 2000 he sold up."I got the photos off a friend in the early 1970s, when I was living near New York. We had just graduated from college, and my friend was working as a house painter. I think he found them when he was working on a job. Anyway, they were lying around. I was haunted by them, kept looking at them." He goes on: "We see death and disaster all over TV, but these photographs are different, maybe because they are physical objects. They don't represent the horror, exactly, because there are no bodies. They're clinical. But the power of them is really intense. Why is that? I think it's because I can't help but place myself behind the lens. What was that guy feeling when he took the photos?" Levitt promises to try reaching his friend, with whom he hasn't been in contact for over 25 years, to see if he can learn anything more.
Japan surrendered to the Allies on August 14 1945. The next day Emperor Hirohito announced defeat. He urged his subjects to "endure the unendurable and bear the unbearable". The enemy had, he said, for the first time used "cruel bombs" to kill and maim ... and the heavy casualties were beyond measure.
On the same day, President Truman commissioned the United States Strategic Bombing Survey for the Pacific Theatre of War to quantify the effects of the two bombs in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. A Physical Damage Division was assembled, made up of 150 engineers, ordnance experts, interpreters, photographers and draftsmen. Among them were 17 representatives of the British Bombing Mission, mostly RAF officers.
During late October and November 1945, the members of the Physical Damage Division would fan out across the city, tracing blast paths, calibrating bomb damage and analysing the physical destruction of the city. As late as November they still stumbled across human skeletons. The team took photographs to document their findings. These are the prints that ended up in the garbage on a street in Massachusetts.
The few images of the city published in the US press at the time were mostly aerial shots or generic landscapes. The only other known photographs of post-bomb Hiroshima are by Yoshito Matsushige, a photographer who worked for the Chugoku newspaper. The day the bomb was dropped, Matsushige roamed the city for at least three hours. Later, when the American forces attempted to confiscate all photographs taken in Hiroshima since the bombing, Matsushige hid his negatives, made a few prints and slipped them to visiting US correspondents. Only five images taken on that day survived.
A week after I met Levitt, he is back on the phone. "I spoke with my friend last night," he says. "He didn't remember the photographs at all, but before hanging up I mentioned that they were probably government photographs. And then he remembered working on a house painting job where there'd been a fire and the family was getting rid of stuff. He spotted a wooden box with Japanese writing on it. And he remembered bringing the box home, to a house we were sharing at the time. Inside were the photographs. He still has the box and I guess I got the photographs."
Another week passes and an email arrives with photographs of a wooden box. On the front of the box, spelled out clearly, is the name Lt Robert L Corsbie. A check through War Department records reveals that Corsbie was a navy officer and a member of Physical Damage Division. He was in Hiroshima from October 8 until the end of November.
Twice abandoned, twice rescued, the photographs, like Hiroshima, are something we might like to discard, but can't.
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