Hiroshima - Warning to the world

Wilfred Burchett's controversial journalism legacy

Hiroshima - Warning to the world "I write this as a warning to the world..." headlined London's Daily Express in 1945. The story was filed by Wilfred Burchett; the first Western journalist into Hiroshima - Japan after the atomic bomb explosion on 6th August, 1945. He would go on to be an always-controversial figure, reporting from the 'other side' in the Vietnam War and further communist conflicts.
What Burchett saw profoundly affected his life. In one hospital the patients wanted to kill him and he was forced to flee. Others begged him for a cure to the disease he christened 'Atomic Plague'. Burchett went on to report the communist side of the war in Vietnam, provoking such outrage in his native Australia that he was refused entry for 20 years. He finally died in 1983 in Bulgaria, spurned by the West. This film contains interviews and shocking archive footage of the utterly destroyed city of Hiroshima and hospitalised victims of the blast.


00:01:00 - Nuclear bomb over Hiroshima 1945
00:01:14 - US Battleship Missouri - troops returning from Japan
00:01:42 - Japanese countryside
00:01:44 - overview of Japanese train network in Tokyo
00:01:49 - close up of Japanese bullet train
00:03:22 - stark images of the devastating landscape of Hiroshima post nuclear bomb
00:03:55 - masked Japanese people walking around the devastated city
00:04:15 - surviving hospital on outskirts of city
00:04:18 - doctors treating badly injured victims of the Hiroshima bomb
00:05:36 - screaming Japanese child
00:07:03 - scenes of a Jubilant post war Australia - Jive dancing
00:07:15 - Australian cricket series after the end of Second World War (Bodyline)
00:07:21 - Ho Chi Minh rallying the Vietnamese revolutionaries after the war
00:07:24 - Young Vietnamese troops cheering and clapping for Ho Chi Minh
00:07:30 - Triumphant Royal procession through Australian capital
00:07:32 - Queen Elizabeth meeting Australian Premier after WW2
00:07:36 - US President meeting Australian PM
00:07:39 - Australian news footage - headline: ATOMIC MENACE
00:07:45 - Stalin appearing on news report ascending stairs to address crowds. Communism branded by reporter as 'a sinister menace'
00:07:50 - Stalin troops marching
00:07:54 - bustling, uncontrollable crowd at an Australian Communist Rally
00:08:08 - men loading trucks with boxes of leaflets at start of campaign in Australia to ban Atom bomb
00:08:21 - huge Communist rally in Australia
00:08:25 - close ups of white Australian at rally
00:08:30 - images of bombs and battleships firing
00:08:36 - Korean war footage
00:08:37 - American troops fighting in Korean countryside
00:09:23 - Displaced Korean civilians travelling with their belongings
00:09:25 - Korean women carrying bedraggled children
00:09:46 - winter in Korea
00:10:17 - Bomb being detonated
00:10:18 - Ho Ch Minh forces pictured in Vietnam
00:10:44 - troops marching through Vietnam
00:11:20 - US Jets landing on a ship at the start of the Vietnam war in 1963
00:11:29 - Australian troops marching in preparation for Vietnam war
00:11:48 - Vietnamese troops preparing for war
00:12:04 - Western journalist, Wilfred Burchett, meeting South Vietnamese troops
00:12:34 - bombing over Vietnam by US B52 bombers
00:12:38 - close-ups of the bombs being dropped over Vietnam
00:12:41 - overhead shots of the bombs going off all over Vietnamese countryside
00:12:49 - lethal Vietnamese traps prepared for US troops
00:12:54 - Vietnamese tunnel system used during the war, filled with men, women and children
00:13:48 - violent clashes between anti-war protesters and police on streets of Sydney and Melbourne during 1960s
00:16:37 - Vietnamese soldier and tank emerging from gates with Vietnamese flag when Vietnam emerged the victorious in 1975
00:17:53 - Burchett reporting in Cambodia - speaking to Cambodian civilians
00:18:03 - piles of the skeletons and skulls of the victims of Cambodian war
00:18:16 - Cambodian truck driver hit by random gunfire during war - covered in blood
FULL SYNOPSIS

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