The Bombing of Nagasaki, Part One
On August 9, 1945, Charles Levy captured an iconic photo with his own camera because the official cameraman forgot his parachute.
In the early morning of August 9, 1945, American physicist Robert Serber was on board the Big Stink waiting for takeoff. The Big Stink was the camera plane on the mission to bomb Nagasaki: its sole purpose to document the attack. The pilot, Major James Hopkins, called for a parachute check — they were one short.
“I didn't know the drill, and the supply sergeant probably had neglected to give me one when he gave me a lot of other junk,” Serber wrote in his 1998 memoir, Peace and War. “The pilot ordered me put off the plane. That was truly idiotic: he forgot that he wasn't on a joy ride, the plane was supposed to have a mission. The mission was to take pictures, and I was the only one aboard who knew how to run the camera.”
The aptly-named Big Stink took off without Serber, leaving him at the end of the runway in the darkness.
Thankfully for Maj. Hopkins, a bombardier aboard The Great Artiste, Charles Levy, brought along his personal camera (a 4x5 field camera, probably a Graflex).
Levy described what he saw in a 1998 interview with Kenneth Baldridge, “The first thing that I saw; looking down at this plume--from the top looking down. Look like that there was something alive, like it was breathing, like it was sighing. lt was like all the colors of the rainbow. Red, green, black, purple, orange, every color you could imagine! lt just seemed to be boiling like a pot of coffee, the grounds just boiling away. That color was not alive. That color was death.”
The military released that versions version the military released that was published around the world. Here’s how it appeared in The New York Times on August 12 and in the August 20 edition of LIFE magazine.
Another line from Serber’s memoir that struck me: “That wasn't the only sin that pilot (Maj. Hopkins) committed that night. He missed the rendezvous over the coast of Japan, and while the other two planes were down at Nagasaki he was up at Kokura, a couple of hundred miles away. He flew down to Nagasaki in time to see the mushroom cloud and the only picture we got was taken by his tail gunner with a snapshot camera.”
If that’s the case, then some of the photos circulating of the Nagasaki mushroom cloud may have been taken by Martin Murray, the tail gunner assigned to the Big Stink. Given the quality (not 4x5) and the higher altitude at which these two photos were taken (39,000 feet instead of 30,000), I believe these two were taken by Murray.
The military's incompetence extended to motion pictures of Nagasaki, just as it did with stills. If it weren’t for a civilian, American physicist Harold Agnew, there wouldn’t be footage of the attack.
Agnew wasn’t allowed to fly on The Great Artiste so he gave his personal movie camera — this time loaded with color film — to Sgt. Walter Goodman, who filmed the billowing mushroom cloud.
This is the same Harold Agnew that gave his Bell & Howell to Sgt. Albert Dehart to film the Hiroshima attack. So without Agnew, there would be no moving pictures of the murder of hundreds of thousands of people.
Agnew is pictured here on the right, holding a plutonium core that’s been scratched out of the picture. Why? Well, after the war, the FBI showed up at Agnew’s home in Chicago, believing he had kept kept top-secret photos. He showed them this photo:
“I wanted the picture so they agreed if I scratched out the ‘thing’ I could keep the slide,” Agnew said.1
Nearly 75,000 people were killed in Nagasaki. On August 15, 145, Japan formally surrendered.
Rachel Fermi and Esther Samra, Picturing the Bomb (New York: Harry N. Abrams, Inc., 1995), 174.
A great article. Thank you.
There area lot of typo errors. There are words and phrases repeated in several sentences. The most graphic error is the date at the end of the article. Someone was either hasty or forgot to proofread before publishing.
Ken