The #1 outright myth (as opposed to "thing that people might disagree on") regarding the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki is that the cities were warned about the impending attack. I see it come up again, and again, and again. (THREAD)
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Where do we get this idea from? It's a mixture of sources. The first is from the fact that there were leaflets warning about bombings dropped by the Allies. The main one of these that people know is the LeMay leaflet, which named cities that the US planned to attack.
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Replying to @wellerstein
Unmentioned is the 1947 docudrama "The Beginning or the End," which mentioned leaflets twice, including a character aboard the Enola Gay who says, "We've been dropping warning leaflets on them for ten days now That's ten days more warning than they gave us before Pearl Harbor."pic.twitter.com/51w2B5GjQv
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Replying to @AtomicAnalyst @wellerstein
Physicist Harrison Brown's review in
@BulletinAtomic generally praised the film as helpful in understanding "what atomic bombs are, what they can do …." But he called the leaflet claim "extremely dangerous" and the "most horrible falsification of history."https://books.google.com.au/books?id=_AsAAAAAMBAJ&pg=PA99#v=onepage&q&f=false …1 reply 2 retweets 4 likes -
Replying to @AtomicAnalyst @BulletinAtomic
A good point! I don't know how much that influenced the modern version of the myth (I see people cite the Truman Library and CIA websites for that), but it's probably part of the collective zeitgeist around it.
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And I think @GregMitch would note, Groves was heavily involved in the making of "The Beginning or the End" and vetoed a lot of (true) things that were in the script. If he *didn't* try to veto the leaflet part (or even approved it), that's pretty duplicitous.
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