[UPDATED] The true horrors of Hiroshima

UPDATE:  Via Andrew Sullivan, apparently questions have been raised about the authenticity of the photographs referred to in my post below:

NOTE: The Robert L. Capp collection at the Hoover Institution Archives at Stanford University  contains ten photographs purportedly showing the immediate aftermath of the Hiroshima bombing. Mr. Capp was assigned to the occupation forces outside Hiroshima after World War II. According to to Mr. Capp's oral history (available along with the photographs in the Robert L. Capp collection), he found these photos among rolls of undeveloped film in a cave outside of Hiroshima. Since making these photographs publicly available, I have received reliable proof that several of these photos are actually of the 1923 Kanto earthquake. While I cannot speak for the entire collection, this evidence raises grave doubts about all of the photos and strongly suggests that the identification provided by the Hoover Archives is incorrect. I take full responsibility for my own failure to take additional steps to verify that the original archival designation was correct. I have removed the photographs, sent a correction to my publisher, and forwarded all evidence that I have received casting doubt on the photos directly to the Hoover Archives so that they can conduct their own investigation. Should that investigation shed any light on the circumstances surrounding the Capp collection, I will make that information available here.

Le Monde has an article up about the story here - it's in French, but you can translate the page here at the Babelfish web site.

I apologize for allowing myself to get taken in by an apparent act of deception, and worse, for allowing my readers to be taken in as well.  I am leaving my original post intact, because I think that the points I raised about war being sanitized for popular consumption are valid, but the photographs should be disregarded.

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For the most part, as Americans our experience of the ravages of World War II has been limited to the atrocities committed by the Nazis and their allies.  We've seen the corpses of genocide victims laying in trenches and piles, and the emaciated survivors being liberated from concentration camps.  But most of us have little experience with the horrors that were wrought by our side, in cities like Dresden and Tokyo and Hamburg; even many of us who know that such things were done by Americans during the war aren't really aware of the scale of these disasters in terms of lives lost and physical destruction, and few of us have seen images that really come close to conveying the suffering and death in a way that truly resonates with us as observers.  Like our current war in Iraq, and like so many wars that we have participated in throughout this nation's history, World War II has been sanitized for popular consumption, to make it more palatable.  That may be one of the reasons that Saving Private Ryan and the Band of Brothers miniseries had such a powerful effect on the people who viewed them - when we think of World War II, we're used to the mental picture of guys like John Wayne in clean uniforms, not to the sight of a soldier walking around in a daze on the beach at Normandy, carrying his freshly detached arm as if it were a piece of his equipment that he had dropped.

Perhaps no better example exists of the way that we have sanitized World War II in the popular mindset than that of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki at the end of the war.  We may have seen images here and there of destroyed buildings and even an isolated few of the victims, but for the most part we've been sheltered from the full brunt of what happened in these two cities.  But now, the Hoover Institution Archives has released a series of photographs from the aftermath of the Hiroshima bombing that give us a harsh dose of the suffering that was unleashed on that city:

The Robert L. Capp collection at the Hoover Institution Archives contains ten never-before-published photographs illustrating the immediate aftermath of the Hiroshima bombing. These photographs, taken by an unknown Japanese photographer, were found in 1945 among rolls of undeveloped film in a cave outside Hiroshima by U.S. serviceman Robert L. Capp, who was attached to the occupation forces. Unlike most photos of the Hiroshima bombing, these dramatically convey the human as well as material destruction unleashed by the atomic bomb. Mr. Capp donated them to the Hoover Archives in 1998 with the provision that they not be reproduced until 2008. Three of these photographs are reproduced in Atomic Tragedy with the permission of the Capp family. Now that the restriction is no longer in force, the entire set is available below.

Here's one of the photographs:

A full-sized copy of this picture, and the rest of the collection, can be found here.

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(via Andrew Sullivan)