France's most authoritative newspaper has been forced to admit that it was fooled by gruesome photographs, supposedly of the 1945 atomic attack on Hiroshima, which have stirred anti-American sentiment this week.

Le Monde devoted a page to a report on “Hiroshima: What the world never saw” last weekend. It recounted the discovery of “ten pictures hidden for more than 60 years by an American soldier which show for the first time the victims of the bomb dropped on the Japanese city on August 6, 1945”. It emerged however that the pictures, from the Hoover Institution of Stanford University, depicted the aftermath of a 1923 earthquake near Tokyo. They were immediately recognised by experts in Japan and the US.

By the time that the left-of-centre daily explained its mistake on Monday the blogosphere was thick with attacks on supposed US barbarity. “These photographs are not in the least surprising, knowing what the Americans are capable of doing in war; Vietnam and Iraq are examples,” said a typical comment on the site of Le Nouvel Observateur magazine.

Le Monde's presentation of the pictures invited disapproval. The photographs, found by Robert Capp, a soldier, and given in 1998 to the Californian Institution, offered a view of Hiroshima that had escaped US censorship, said Le Monde. The US media had been strangely silent on their discovery this year, it added. “The horror of the photographs again prompts the question: was the atomic bomb the only way of ending the Pacific war?”

Le Monde has two days blamed Hoover, a conservative academic institution, over the past two days because it had catalogued the Capp collection as “linked to the aftermath of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima”.

“If Le Monde was at fault for not seeking the opinion of experts in Japan, it could not have imagined that the Hoover Institution does not verify its archives,” the newspaper explained.

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