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SPECIAL REPORT: A Great Nuclear-Age Mystery Solved
By Greg Mitchell, Editor & Publisher,
June 16, 2005 11:45 PM ET
NEW YORK - One of the great mysteries of the Nuclear Age was
solved today: 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?
The reporter was George Weller, the distinguished correspondent for the
now-defunct Chicago Daily News. His startling dispatches from Nagasaki, which
might have affected public opinion on the future of the bomb, never emerged
from General Douglas MacArthur's censorship office in Tokyo. Carbon copies
were found just two years ago when his son, who talked to E&P from Italy
today, discovered them after the reporter's death.
Four of them were published today for the first time by the Tokyo daily
Mainichi Shimbun, which purchased them from Anthony Weller. He told E&P
he hopes to put them and others together into a book. The articles published in Japan today
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 says.
The first article that George Weller filed, on Sept. 8, 1945 -- the day after
he reached the city, before any other journalist -- 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 who lives near Gloucester, Mass., told E&P
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. "Clearly," says Anthony Weller,
"they would have supplied an eyewitness account at a moment when the
American people badly needed one."
How did George Weller get the scoop-that-wasn't?
After years of covering the Pacific war, Weller arrived in Japan with the
first wave of reporters and military in early September. He had already won a
Pulitzer for his reporting in 1943. Appalled by MacArthur's censors, and
"the conformists" in his profession who went along with strict
press restrictions, he made his way, with permission, to the distant island
of Kyushu to visit a former kamikaze base. But he noted that it was connected
by railroad to Nagasaki. Pretending he was "a major or colonel," as
his son put it, he slipped into the city about three days before any of his
colleagues, and just after Wilfred Burchett had filed his first report from
Hiroshima.
Once arrived, Weller toured the city, the aid stations, the former POW camps,
and wrote numerous stories within days. According to his son, he managed to
send the articles to Tokyo, not by wire, but by hand, and felt "that the
sheer volume and importance of the stories would mean they would be
respected" by MacArthur and his censors.
Although Weller did not express any outward disapproval of the use of the
bomb, these stories -- and others he filed in the following two weeks from
the vicinity -- would never see the light of the day, and the reporter lost
track of his carbons. He would later summarize the experience wit the
censorship office in two words: "They won."
In the years that followed, Weller continued his journalism career, winning a
George Polk award and other honors and covering many other conflicts. Neither
the carbons nor the originals ever surfaced, before he passed away in 2002 at
the age of 95. It was then that his son made a full search of the wildly
disorganized "archives" at his father's home in Italy, and in 2003
found the carbons just a few feet from his dad's desk.
And what a find: roughly 75 pages of stories, on fading brownish paper, that
covered not only his first atomic dispatches but gripping accounts by
prisoners of war, some of whom described watching the bomb go off on that
fateful morning. Remarkably, Andrew also found a couple dozen photos his
father had snapped in Nagasaki.
Anthony Weller says he attempted to package the material as a book or a major
magazine piece in the States, but after a slow response, sold a partial
package to Mainichi Shimbun, one of the largest-circulation newspapers in the
world.
In the first article published today by the Japanese paper, the first words
from Weller were: "The atomic bomb may be classified as a weapon capable
of being used indiscriminately, but its use in Nagasaki was selective and
proper and as merciful as such a gigantic force could be expected to
be." Weller described himself as "the first visitor to inspect the
ruins."
He suggested about 24,000 may have died but he attributed the high numbers to
"inadequate" air raid shelters and the "total failure" of
the air warning system. He declared that the bomb was "a tremendous, but
not a peculiar weapon," and said he spent hours in the ruins without
apparent ill effects. He did note, with some regret, that a hospital and an
American mission college were destroyed, but pointed out that to spare them
would have also meant sparing munitions plants.
In his second story that day, however, following his hospital visits, he
would describe "Disease X," and victims, who have "neither a
burn or a broken limb," wasting away with "blackish" mouths
and red spots, and small children who "have lost some hair."
A third piece, sent to MacArthur the following day, reported the disease
"still snatching away lives here. 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. "The doctors ... candidly
confessed ... that the answer to the malady is beyond them." At one
hospital, 200 of 343 admitted had died: "They are dead -- dead of atomic
bomb -- and nobody knows why."
He closed this account with: "Twenty-five Americans are due to arrive
Sept. 11 to study the Nagasaki bomb site. Japanese hope they will bring a
solution for Disease X."
Greg Mitchell ([EMAIL PROTECTED])
is editor of E&P and co-author, with Robert Jay Lifton, of
"Hiroshima in America," and other books.
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