Survivors recall horrors of Hiroshima, Nagasaki

NEW YORK - It’s hard to imagine HBO’s disturbing documentary on survivors of the two atomic bombs dropped on Japan appearing on an American TV network 10 or 20 years after the event. Filmmaker Steve Okazaki tried — and failed — to make it for the 50th anniversary.

There’s apparently enough emotional scar tissue built up to allow HBO’s premiere of “White Light/Black Rain: The Destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki” on Monday (7:30 p.m. ET), exactly 62 years after the United States detonated the first-ever nuclear bomb over Hiroshima. The second, and so far last, atomic bomb was dropped three days later. It ended World War II.

Why is the time finally right?

“History is always worth recording and if there is a moment in history that hasn’t been recorded and you’re in a place where you have the resources, you should do it,” said Sheila Nevins, head of HBO’s documentary unit. She hopes it becomes a document of record shown in schools.

The uncomfortable footage of cities reduced to rubble and grotesquely deformed survivors has received relatively little circulation because — unlike the well-recorded Holocaust — this was something done by Americans, Nevins said.

HBO and Okazaki also felt the same urgency experienced by “The Greatest Generation” author Tom Brokaw and Ken Burns, maker of PBS’ epic series on World War II coming this fall. People who fought and survived World War II are dying quickly now, and soon there will be no more eyewitnesses.

The film is built on stories told by 14 survivors, with childrens’ pictures depicting the bombing and footage of the injured that was banned from the public for 25 years. The American-born Okazaki interviews crew members who dropped the bombs and wondered whether they would escape before their planes were engulfed in the mushroom cloud.

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