I remember the first time I saw a photo of a survivor of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki atomic bombings. I was young, and I stared at that picture of a person’s melting skin and felt like it was something I could get into trouble for looking at. It was a powerful moment in my American history education. That came back to me vividly today when I read a piece in the Huffington Post by Greg Mitchell.

After the second bomb dropped, a Japanese company sent a film crew to document what was happening in the cities – the leveled ground, the dying. They were the only ones filming. If you were an American, you hadn’t seen a thing but a mushroom cloud. The news told you that we’d bombed the Japanese, and why we did it – ostensibly, to end the war.

But the U.S. military stepped in and banned the filming, taking what the Japanese had already recorded. Later, the military selected one of its own to head up a camera crew, Lt. Daniel McGovern, and document this campaign in Japan. They recorded every horror they saw.

What happened to that film, the footage we’d sent soldiers and civilians in to radiation-blasted cities to capture?