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French Paper Gets Hiroshima Photos Wrong
On Saturday, France's newspaper of record Le Monde published two previously unknown photographs of bodies in piles, labelling them with the headline, "Hiroshima: What the world never saw." An accompanying column claimed that "American censors covered up images of the victims."
The newspaper reported that secret photographs taken by a US soldier showed for the first time the aftermath of the atomic bomb attack on the Japanese city. This being France, events quickly took their course and newspaper comments pages and weblogs seethed with criticism of the wicked Americans.
Le Monde accused the US of censoring the images to cover up the horror of the Hiroshima bomb, and claimed that the photographs demanded the question was the atomic bomb "the only way to end the war in the Pacific?"
By Tuesday, however, the newspaper had made a humiliating climbdown and apology: The photos came not from archives of the Hiroshima bomb, but from the aftermath of a 1923 earthquake near Tokyo which killed 100,000 people.
Le Monde blames the US source of the photos, the conservative Hoover Institute based in Stanford University. The photos were donated to Hoover in 1998 by former soldier Robert Capp, who claimed to have found them in Hiroshima. Historian Sean Malloy came across the photographs in the archive and linked them to the bombing in a book published in March. When Hoover released the photos on May 5, Le Monde picked up on them "trusting the reputation of Stanford."
The Hoover Institute has since denied validating the photos, which were identified as likely images of the earthquake by emails from readers in the US and Japan, who compared them with similar images in the public domain.
