Nagasaki 65 Years Later: A Look Back at the Censored Dispatches of
Pulitzer Prize-Winning Journalist George Weller
Today, we remember the US bombing of Nagasaki through the story of
Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist George Weller, the first reporter to
enter Nagasaki, defying General MacArthur’s ban on the press in
southern Japan. Weller worked for the Chicago Daily News and hired a
rowboat to get himself to Nagasaki. He wrote a 25,000-word report on
the horrors that he encountered. When he submitted his story to the
military censors, MacArthur personally ordered that the story be
killed, and the manuscript was never returned. Weller later summarized
his experience with the government censors, saying, "They won.
AMY GOODMAN: Sixty-five years ago today, the southern Japanese city of
Nagasaki was flattened by an atomic bomb dropped by the United States.
It happened three days after US planes dropped the first atomic bomb
on Hiroshima. Some 80,000 people were killed in Nagasaki in the
aftermath of the August 9th, 1945 bombing.
There was no US representative at Monday’s commemoration in Nagasaki,
although the Obama administration did send an envoy to the HIroshima
ceremony Friday for the very first time.
Today, we remember Nagasaki through the story of Pulitzer Prize-
winning journalist George Weller, the first reporter to enter
Nagasaki, defying General MacArthur’s ban on the press in southern
Japan. Weller worked for the Chicago Daily News and hired a rowboat to
get himself to Nagasaki. He wrote a 25,000-word report on the horrors
that he encountered. When he submitted his story to the military
censors, MacArthur personally ordered the story killed, and the
manuscript was never returned. Weller later summarized his experience
with the government censors, saying, "They won."
Well, five years ago, George Weller’s son Anthony discovered a copy of
the suppressed dispatches among his late father’s papers. George
Weller died in 2002. They’re now published as a book called First into
Nagasaki: The Censored Eyewitness Dispatches on Post-Atomic Japan and
Its Prisoners of War.
This is an excerpt of an interview Juan Gonzalez and I did with
Anthony Weller in 2005, shortly after he first discovered his late
father’s papers.
ANTHONY WELLER: Well, you know, my father had talked about this
situation ever since I can remember. He was deeply frustrated by it,
frustrated by the fact that these dispatches, written over a period of
three weeks, had been all censored, and also, of course, frustrated by
the fact that his own copies, which he believed to be the only copies,
and which I think are the only copies, somehow went astray amid the
tumult of a globetrotting war correspondent’s life. But you can
imagine, I’m sure, the sense of relief and vindication I felt when, in
going through a tumultuous room filled with his papers, I finally came
across the missing Nagasaki dispatches in a mildewed crate at the
bottom.
JUAN GONZALEZ: And what did he tell you years earlier about, one, his
interaction both with the military on the censorship, as well as how
his paper reacted, his own newspaper reacted, to the complete
censorship of his stories?
ANTHONY WELLER: Well, the newspaper, of course, was furious, as was
he, for the obvious reasons. They’d had this man who’d bucked
MacArthur’s orders, snuck over the mainland in a rowboat, taken trains
for two days, made his way up to Nagasaki, impersonated a US officer
by saying he was Colonel Weller, rather than a war correspondent, and
risked quite a bit to get the stories out. And then, of course,
because he was under the aegis of MacArthur’s censors, there was no
way that his newspaper could publish the articles. So there was
tremendous frustration, which lasted all his life. And, of course,
very rapidly the story became old news, because suddenly, you know,
the United States public was getting what they were supposed to get
about what the bomb sites were like, and my father had moved on to
other theaters of war, and the decades went by and he never came
across the stories. So, I think he would have and could have published
them twenty years ago, thirty years ago, had he been able to find
them, but he couldn’t.
AMY GOODMAN: Anthony Weller, your father wrote a devastating
description of what took place in Nagasaki. Can you share some of the
descriptions?
ANTHONY WELLER: Well, I think the thing that astonished him the most—I
mean, there were many things that he found astonishing. Remember, he
went in there four weeks, almost to the minute, after the bomb was
dropped, which was on the 6th of September in mid-morning, is when he
arrived. And he was struck, obviously, by several things—by the
physical appearance of the city, which was still smoldering here and
there, by the surgical precision of the bomb itself. Later, he was to
learn that, in fact, a great deal of damage had been done not just by
the bomb, but by the fires that erupted, because people were cooking
their midday meal when the bomb hit, and a number of wooden residences
just caught fire, and the fire spread. So, in a way, it was kind of
like a Dresden.
And as he went around the ruins of the city and rapidly began visiting
all the hospital facilities that still existed, I know he was struck
immediately, first by the absence of any American medical personnel
there—four weeks later, there were still no doctors or nurses—and
then, by the great precision and care with which the Japanese doctors
had already catalogued the effects of the bomb on individual organs of
the body.
And over the next few days, he was as astonished as the Japanese
doctors were, of course, by what he referred to in his reports as
"Disease X." It was perhaps not so astonishing to see some of the
scorches and burns that people had suffered, but to see people
apparently unblemished at all by the bomb, who had seemingly survived
intact, suddenly finding themselves feeling unwell and going to
hospital, sitting there on their cots surrounded by doctors and
relatives who could do nothing, and finding when he would go back the
next day that they had just died, or that, let’s say, a woman who had
come through unscathed making dinner for her husband and having the
misfortune to make a very small cut in her finger while peeling a
lemon, would just keep bleeding, and bleed to death, because the
platelets in her bloodstream had been so reduced that the blood
couldn’t clot anymore.
So there were case after case like this, and, in a way, I think my
father found them more poignant than the obvious destruction or the
obvious burn victims, because here was a whole team of Japanese
doctors, very able, very aware from long before the war had started
about the potentials of radiation, absolutely baffled. And he had a
wonderful phrase he used. He said the effects of the bomb uncured
because—excuse me, the effects of "Disease X," which is what they were
calling it, uncured because it is untreated, and untreated because it
is undiagnosed.
AMY GOODMAN: Anthony Weller is the son of George Weller, who was
writing for the Chicago Daily News. He submitted his story to the
military censors, reporting on that bombing of Nagasaki sixty-five
years ago today. But General MacArthur himself personally ordered the
story be killed and the manuscript never returned. It was ultimately
returned. Anthony Weller found his father’s transcript. His father
summarized his experience with government censors, saying, "They won."
http://www.democracynow.org/2010/8/9/nagasaki_65_years_later_a_look