Dispatches from Nagasaki revealed

Last year, just before the 60th anniversary of the atomic attacks on Japan, Editor & Publisher broke the story in the US that the dispatches filed by a famed US reporter from Nagasaki–but suppressed in 1945–were about to be published abroad. Now a book that contains all of the dispatches, and a lot more, has been published here this week. The book is "First Into Nagasaki," published by Crown, edited by the man who found the original suppressed stories, Anthony Weller. It was his late father, George Weller, who had written the historic dispatches for the Chicago Daily News–where they never appeared, thanks to Gen. Douglas MacArthur's censorship office. Walter Cronkite provides an introduction for the volume, hailing it as a reminder of the need for press and civilian "vigilance" in a time of war. The book also contains Weller's groundbreaking reports on prison camps in Japan and a prison ship where 1,300 US soldiers died (unlike the Nagasaki reports, these articles were published by his paper, but often in censored form). One of the great untold stories of the Nuclear Age is finally available in book form. What was in the censored, and then lost to the ages, newspaper articles filed by the first reporter to reach Nagasaki following the atomic attack on that city on Aug. 9, 1945? Among other things, Weller was one of the first to describe the bomb's "peculiar disease." Referring to "Disease X," he revealed: "Men, women and children with no outward marks of injury are dying daily in hospitals, some after having walked around three or four weeks thinking they have escaped." Weller was a distinguished correspondent for the now-defunct Chicago Daily News. His startling dispatches from Nagasaki, which could have affected public opinion on the future of the bomb, never emerged from Gen. MacArthur's office in Tokyo. Carbon copies were found just three years ago when his son discovered them after the reporter's death. The articles, now published in the book, reveal a remarkable and wrenching turn in Weller's view of the aftermath of the bombing, which anticipates the profound unease in our nuclear experience ever since. "It was remarkable to see that shifting perspective," Anthony Weller told E&P. An early article that George Weller filed, on Sept. 8, 1945–two days after he reached the city–hailed the "effectiveness of the bomb as a military device," as his son describes it, and makes no mention of the bomb's special, radiation-producing properties. But later that day, after visiting two hospitals and shaken by what he saw, he described a mysterious "Disease X" that was killing people who had seemed to survive the bombing in relatively good shape. A month after the atomic inferno, they were passing away pitifully, some with legs and arms "speckled with tiny red spots in patches." The following day he again described the atomic bomb's "peculiar disease" and reported that the leading local X-ray specialist was convinced that "these people are simply suffering" from the bomb's unknown radiation effects. Anthony Weller, a novelist and musician who lives near Gloucester, Mass., told E&P last year that it was one of great disappointments of his father's life that these stories, "a real coup," were killed by MacArthur who, George Weller felt, "wanted all the credit for winning the war, not some scientists back in New Mexico." Others have suggested that the real reason for the censorship was the United States did not want the world to learn about the morally troubling radiation effects for two reasons: It did not want questions raised about the use of the weapon in 1945, or its wide-scale development in the coming years. In fact, an official "coverup" of much of this information–involving print accounts, photographs and film footage–continued for years, even, in some cases, decades. "Clearly," Anthony Weller said of his father's reports, "they would have supplied an eyewitness account at a moment when the American people badly needed one."