"Silent Night" in Nagasaki: Christmas 1945

Singing in the ruins of the largest Catholic cathedral in the Far East, destroyed by our Atomic Bomb.

Greg Mitchell is the author of a dozen books, including “Hiroshima in America,” “Atomic Cover-up” (on sale now for $1.99 as an ebook) and the recent award-winning “The Beginning or the End: How Hollywood—and America—Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb.” He has directed three documentary films since 2021 for PBS (including “Atomic Cover-up”) . He has written about the atomic bombings for over forty years. You can subscribe to this newsletter for free.

Decades before I started work on my award-winning documentary “Atomic Cover-up” in 2020, I had heard of the alleged episode: Japanese survivors of the second U.S. atomic bomb gathering in the ruins of the Urakami Cathedral—the largest in the Far East—in Nagasaki at Christmas to celebrate Christmas with songs such as “Silent Night.” I never expected to find a record of it, but ultimately, I did secure it and used it for the haunting opening of my film.

You can now watch the short version of my film (27 minutes) for free everywhere at the PBS site or any PBS apps, or the full 52 minutes for free via Kanopy if you have any sort of library card. But you can just click below now and watch that 90-second “Silent Night” segment below in this clip. Narration by my friend, the great Dennis Predovic.

»»NOTE: The companion book for the film is on pre-holiday sale for just $1.99 in its ebook form, also titled “Atomic Cover-up,” updated this year with more than a dozen pages of material related to the release of “Oppenheimer.”