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First Into Nagasaki
The Censored Eyewitness Dispatches on Post-Atomic Japan and Its Prisoners of War
1 of 1 copy available
As Nagasaki’s first outside observer, long before any American medical aid arrived, Weller witnessed the bomb’s effects and wrote “the anatomy of radiated man.” He interviewed doctors trying to cure those dying mysteriously from “Disease X.” He typed far into every night, sending his forbidden dispatches back to MacArthur’s censors, assuming their importance would make them unstoppable. He was wrong: the U.S. government censored every word, and the dispatches vanished from history.
Weller also became the first to enter the nearby Allied POW camps. From hundreds of prisoners he gathered accounts of watching the atomic explosions bring an end to years of torture and merciless labor in Japanese mines. Their dramatic testimonies sum up one of the least-known chapters of the war—but those stories, too, were silenced.
It is a powerful experience, more than 60 years later, to walk with Weller through the smoldering ruins of Nagasaki, or hear the sagas of prisoners who have just learned that their torment is over, and watch one of the era’s most battle-experienced reporters trying to accurately and unsentimentally convey to the American people scenes unlike anything he—or anyone else—knew.
Weller died in 2002, believing it all lost forever. Months later, his son found a fragile copy in a crate of moldy papers. This historic body of work has never been published.
Along with reports from the brutal POW camps, a stirring saga of the worst of the Japanese “hellships” which carried U.S. prisoners into murder and even cannibalism, and a trove of Weller’s unseen photos, First into Nagasaki provides a moving, unparalleled look at the bomb that killed more than 70,000 people and ended WWII. Amid current disputes over the controlled embedding of journalists in war zones and a government’s right to keep secrets, it reminds us how such courageous rogue reporting is still essential to learning the truth.
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Creators
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Publisher
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Release date
December 26, 2006 -
Formats
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Kindle Book
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OverDrive Read
- ISBN: 9780307351616
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EPUB ebook
- ISBN: 9780307351616
- File size: 1400 KB
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Languages
- English
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Reviews
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October 9, 2006
George Weller, a Pulitzer Prize– winning war correspondent for the Chicago Daily News
, entered Nagasaki on September 6, 1945, four weeks after the atomic blast leveled the city. The first Westerner to tour the city's ruins, he talked with doctors at the makeshift hospitals and scoured the countryside in search of the POW camps scattered across southern Japan over several weeks. His eyewitness dispatches were intercepted and buried, however, by Gen. Douglas MacArthur's censors. Weller saved his carbons, but they disappeared in the hectic months after the war and remained lost for 60 years, until rediscovered after his death by his son Anthony, himself a journalist and a novelist (The Garden of the Peacocks
). Weller's dispatches from Nagasaki are riveting even at this late date, though they are only a small part of the book. His extensive interviews with POWs mostly reinforce what we already know about their brutal treatment. The book also offers an account of one of the so-called "death ships" that carried POWs from the Philippines to Japan, and a 1966 essay on Weller's experiences in Nagasaki. On balance, Weller's dispatches are a welcome addition to the historical record. -
Starred review from February 26, 2007
Rudnicki reads Weller's reports of life in the ravaged city of Nagasaki in the final moments of World War II with a quiet authority—one perfectly suitable for the veteran journalist's forceful, never-before-published testimony of the atomic bomb and its terrible destruction. Traveling through a defeated, battered Japan, Weller's dispatches—originally censored by Gen. Douglas MacArthur—reveal the results of a war of ceaseless brutality and its seemingly inevitable atomic finale. Weller meets ordinary Japanese brutalized by the war and explores a country only just emerging from its worst moments. Rudnicki carefully assesses each of Weller's words (collected by his son), preserving their gravity and their well-measured, colorful authority. His reading gives a punch and immediacy to Weller's solidly constructed first-person reports on the horrors of war. The result forcefully documents a superb war correspondent's eyewitness testimony. Simultaneous release with the Crown hardcover (Reviews, Oct. 9).
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