First Into Nagasaki; The Censored Eyewitness Dispatches on Post-Atomic Japan and Its Prisoners of War
New York: Crown Publishers, 2006. First American Edition [stated], First printing [stated]. Hardcover. x, [6], 320, Illustrated endpapers. Illustrations. Map. Footnotes. Selected Reading. Foreword by Walter Cronkite. George Anthony Weller (July 13, 1907 – December 19, 2002) was an American novelist, playwright, and journalist for The New York Times and Chicago Daily News. He won a 1943 Pulitzer Prize as a Daily News war correspondent. After the United States dropped an atomic bomb on Nagasaki, he violated the press blackout imposed on reporters, and explored the devastation caused by the bombing. He also was the first to enter the nearby Allied prisoner of war camps. Weller's reports from Nagasaki after its August 1945 nuclear bombing were censored by the U.S. military and not published in full until a book edited by his son in 2006. In 1946, Weller covered the 1946 Greek war against partisan guerrillas. For many years he covered the Balkans, Mideast and Africa from Rome, where he headed the Daily News bureau until retiring from the newspaper in 1975. In the foreword to his Weller's final book, First Into Nagasaki, published posthumously in 2006, Walter Cronkite wrote: This is an important book—important and gripping. For the first time in print we can read the details of the nuclear bombardment of Nagasaki, Japan, as written by the first American reporter on the terrible scene ... [George Weller's] reports, so long delayed but now salvaged by his son, at last have saved our history from the military censorship that would have preferred to have time to sanitize the ghastly details ... Also delayed by MacArthur's censorship were Weller's dispatches from his visits to American prison camps [w]here he uncovered the Japanese military's savage treatment of their American prisoners ... There is so much in this volume that we never knew or have long forgotten. This volume of the last generation's history is an important reminder, a warning to inspire civilian vigilance.
Derived from a Kirkus review: Some 60 years after their suppression by military censorship, a Pulitzer Prize correspondent’s lost Nagasaki files remain potentially explosive. Working from smudged carbons, long presumed lost but found after his father’s death, Anthony Weller has recreated, edited and annotated a body of reports that retain the capacity to shock the American public and foment controversy. They offer a grimly graphic picture of devastation fresh from the Kyushu city where the second atomic bomb detonated in war had effectively ended one, but with curious—even provocative—details of the blast’s effect and effectiveness. For example, hundreds of American prisoners exposed to the fireball at and near Ground Zero survived with no ill effects by lying flat in a simple slit trench. Also captured are vast firsthand details of inhumane treatment inflicted on American POWs by both Japanese military and civilian authorities. Principally at issue: Why were almost all of George Weller’s dispatches, filed weeks after Japan had agreed to surrender, blacked out by military censors under General Douglas MacArthur? Author father and editor son weave a range of intriguing possibilities, including the plausible desire to keep any and all details surrounding the War’s ultimate secret weapon under wraps, as well as quelling inflammatory recriminations that might complicate a smooth postwar reconstruction. The senior Weller, however, died convinced that MacArthur was obsessed with keeping his personal Pacific victory intact, and that he didn’t want to share credit with a weapon engineered and delivered without his knowledge or assent; and, even more damning, that he covered up his administration’s failure to deliver necessary medical supplies and treatment for weeks after the blast, thus accounting for a substantial portion of up to 40,000 Nagasaki dead. A stark confrontation, but also rich in evocative anecdotal material that recalls the war in the Pacific with amazing immediacy. Condition: Very good / Very good.
Keywords: George Weller, Nagasaki, Atomic Bomb, POW's, Bombardment, Journalists, Eyewitness; War Correspondent, Prisoners of War, Douglas MacArthur, Omuta, Izuka
ISBN: 0307342018
[Book #79449]
Price: $50.00