APOCALYPSE ’45: Commemorating The Bomb and V-J Day 75 Years Later

It’s hard to fathom. It’s really been 75 years. 75 years since Little Boy and Fat Man were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Japan. 75 years since the war with Japan — and World War II as a whole — finally came to its end.

Erik Nelson‘s most recent documentary, Apocalypse ’45, is both a commemoration and an elegy, opening with a Japanese dirge sung by Itssei Nakagawa. He was 15 years old when he experienced the devastation of the bomb in Hiroshima firsthand. He’s the only face we see from the present.

For the rest of the time, Nelson opts to have the images speak for themselves. Taking stock of the resources at his disposal, it’s a tantalizing prospect for the documentarian (The Cold Blue). He was provided access to countless hours of color footage from The National Archives. The key comes in crafting a meaningful narrative and finding a way to present it with audio and visual context.

The various clapboards seen throughout are a signifier that these images have been curated but not manicured for the sake of the audience. However, it’s also true the juxtapositions often speak volumes. One indelible example involves a mud-caked soldier holding a pair of white bunnies in his arms.

What becomes immediately apparent is how we cannot consider the end of the war without considering how it ended, and where it began, for that matter. After Nakagawa’s recollections, we are also met with the euphoria in Honolulu, Hawaii with every sailor, woman, and child rolling down the street in bright-eyed celebration. It’s sublime. Particularly in color.

However, you cannot begin to separate these two events. These disparate chapters are a fine distillation of the documentary itself; how it can be gorgeous and revolting in equal turns. Because the footage is striking to see bursting out of the bounds of newsreel black and white and coming alive in front of us. But there are times where it also turns the stomach as we come to terms, quite vividly, with the war in all its many facets. The blood too runs brighter in color.

Making Sense of A Visual War

The film has a lot of varied footage, and it covers all kinds of territory. Veterans reminisce about their opinions of the Japanese as “the enemy.” They recount the sheer madness that beset them on Iwo Jima, and we are privy to one of the most iconic flag-raisings in American lore. Even in the aftermath, the victors had the undesirable task of picking up the obliterated bodies of dead brothers-in-arms.

Another facet of the war was in the air involving the firebombing campaigns over mainland Japan. One voice says matter-of-factly he didn’t mind killing because they were bad people. Still, another confesses to being heartsick because they were not killing soldiers, but normal, everyday people. These varying perspectives and fissures run all the way through, tied together fragilely by the same footage.

When the war started to shift and it became apparent Japan could not hold on, you began to have the prevalence of Kamikaze: pilots who willingly committed aerial suicide in order to inflict casualties on the enemy. In a keen bit of observation, one veteran notes the Japanese believed this act would send them to Heaven. From their viewpoint, it made sense.

Another man admits that there’s no joy and no glamor in killing someone: “I’m 94 years old and I’m going to be standing before God, and I’m going to be answering for that.” It’s a sobering admission as his voice audibly trembles. One of his contemporaries ruefully admits strafing at anything that moved including trains and water buffaloes. This was all in the name of total war. It becomes obvious you have all kinds.

Nelson mostly refrains from his own commentary. However, one telling anecdote notes all the newly-minted purple hearts that were warehoused after the atomic bomb was tested successfully. They were meant to cover the casualties predicted from a land invasion of Japan until they were deemed unnecessary. The onscreen text notes this cache of purple hearts has been enough to supply every subsequent American war to date.

The opinions on the atomic bomb are as wildly diverse as anything else. There are those indicating the Japanese should thank us for dropping the bomb and saving so many lives, and others suggest we should have never dropped it to begin with. The repercussions continue to hang over our heads while giving license to others to use similar tactics. To steal a phrase, if the genie is out of the bottle, you can’t get it back in.

Apocalypse ’45: Final Thoughts

John Ford feels like the poster boy for this picture — Nelson utilized some of his footage shot in the aftermath of Pearl Harbor — and he’s part of the reason I was drawn to this movie, knowing his record at Midway in particular. However, all told, this lasts only a couple minutes at most, and it’s actually Harry Mimura, who might have the most crucial contribution in the documentary.

He was a Japanese cinematographer who worked as an assistant in Hollywood to Gregg Toland and later with the likes of Akira Kurosawa. Right after the war, he was enlisted to document the hard, cold reality of the bomb’s impact on Hiroshima. His images are saved for us and seared into our minds. In this regard, his work would feature as a fine companion piece to John Hersey‘s empathetic portrait in the book Hiroshima from around that same time.

The project’s most moving moment has to be at the very end. It’s a fine epilogue as all the voices we’ve heard for much of the documentary are introduced to us for the first time, in the flesh. We get to see and appreciate all these men who served in the military when they were only young lads, and one of them lived through the bomb, now 75 years ago.

It’s a generous decision because the opinions we hear throughout — many of them terribly wide-ranging — are never attributed to an individual. No one is singled out and so we look at these faces with wonder rather than any amount of critique.  Whether or not you buy into “The Greatest Generation” as more than an advertising stunt, a lot did change after the war.

Apocalypse is, in many ways, a fitting commemoration for the vital fact it doesn’t choose sides. Time cannot necessarily heal all wounds; it can, however, give us a richer perspective blessed by more information and more points of view. We get a sense of the carnage, the insanity, and even the conflicting perspectives about the war itself.

But we can also marvel at these men. What a pleasure it is to see them in front of us. Because war is such a prickly thing to memorialize. Still, we must never forget. Hopefully, our histories can be ripe with a variety of narratives and an ample amount of empathy.

Apocalypse ’45 does a fine job of balancing these two realities — a desire to honor while still decrying the bloodshed — not unlike John Ford in many of his post-war pictures. Except, for every John Ford, there was also a Harry Mimura. This documentary reminds us we cannot consider one without the other. They’re both a part of the same story.

What are your thoughts on V-J Day and the dropping of the Atomic Bombs 75 years later? Please let us know in the comments below. 

Watch Apocalypse ’45