Weller's War

by George Weller

  press collect via rca chicagonews newyork nagasaki 90100 article to follow nagasakis hospitals stop atomic bombs peculiar quote disease unquote comma uncured because untreated and untreated because undiagnosed comma is still snatching away lives here stop men women children with no outward marks injury are dying daily in hospitals some after having walked around three or four weeks minimum thinking theyve escaped stop doctors here have every modern medicament but candidly confessed in talking to writer dash first allied observer reach nagasaki since surrender undash that answer to malady is beyond them stop their patients though skins whole are simply passing away under their eyes

  This, when expanded, becomes:

  The atomic bomb's peculiar “disease,” uncured because it is untreated and untreated because it is undiagnosed, is 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 for three or four weeks thinking they have escaped. The doctors here have every modern medicament, but candidly confessed in talking to the writer—the first Allied observer to reach Nagasaki since the surrender—that the answer to the malady is beyond them. Their patients, though their skins are whole, are simply passing away under their eyes.

  In our era of instant electronic transmission it may be difficult to conceive of any blockage interrupting the smooth passage of news from reporter to editor. Yet the correspondents' version of World War II was only what the censors failed to stop. For any reporter who tried to defy censorship, there was always the threat of dire punishment: the withdrawal, in a war zone, of accreditation, without which a reporter could not function, leaving his newspaper, magazine, or radio network without a berth in an important dateline. Throughout the war, then, there was another war going on, all along, and it did not end with any treaty of surrender.

  In my father's archive I found a list, penned in 1945, of censored stories. It includes: “The B-26 squadron commander in northern Australia who in deadly seriousness ordered the officers of the entire squadron to grow moustaches and carry swagger sticks. I have a copy of that order, but I'm going to try it on our censors in the next war … In Tahiti, our lend-lease bicycles and trucks were on public sale—the admiral there, the largest physically in the U.S. navy, suppressed the story and would not see me … In Brazzaville, Governor-General Eboué—could not interview him because he was black—or I could interview him but not say he was black. …”

  The astute reader will enjoy watching Weller do his best to slip forbidden political analysis under the rug and out the other side. Unfortunately I have not been able to lay hands on the lost dispatch he wrote criticizing the Yalta Conference of February 1945, which MacArthur's determined censors blocked because he called it a defeat of the United States by Stalin. Late in life he wrote: “Wherever the censor's pencil falls on your copy, he is hurting you terribly. But he is also teaching you. Learn from the censor. Freud said it well—‘Wherever there is a repression, there is a neurosis.’ Follow that twinge. Find the unwelcome fact and give it a home. A censor knows exactly what he doesn't want you to write. Let him guide you.”

  Since American World War II reporters were often in generic military fatigues, they wore brass shoulder tabs that said War Correspondent and carried the assimilated rank of lieutenant—“a painful disparity,” Weller wrote, “with Italy's fascist forces, where they were splendid colonels with orderlies. Still, I could hardly expect MacArthur and his colonels to promote me. After all, I refused to promote them.”

  In the days before credit cards, each foreign correspondent carried a letter of credit for, say, $5,000, which was presented, on arrival in a new country, to a bank. The total would diminish as operating funds in the local currency were withdrawn. Gradually the letter of credit would have to be replaced, which presented other obstacles; a message from the accounting office of Weller's newspaper, written to him in Australia in May, stated that a letter of credit sent him in November had just been returned to them after “considerable traveling.” Due to bank regulations it could not be easily canceled, so off it went again to try to find him.

  For this work Weller earned an annual salary of $6,000, or $500 a month. His personal mail took two years to catch up to him.

  This volume represents about 10 percent of what Weller wrote from January 1941, when he arrived in Europe, until October 1945, just after he left Nagasaki. His output was prodigious despite challenging conditions; I have sifted every issue of the Chicago Daily News for his best published dispatches. And I have included a few “missing” ones, either killed by censors and never transmitted, or simply never published, which I found in his papers. Among these are what would have been the first graphic ground-level description of the results from the firebombing of Tokyo.

  Through 1943, the CDN provided the date on which each dispatch was filed (unless that was so far back it made the material look questionable). In 1944 the paper ceased this useful practice, so from then on in the book the date for a dispatch becomes the day it appeared. Multiple dates mean I have combined dispatches.

  The volume also contains a half-dozen longer pieces, written for magazine publication. Weller had an understanding with his editors that fuller articles could be handled by his literary agent, Harold Ober, if they did not fall within the CDN's confines. Written with details and gestures of style inappropriate for a daily paper, they add another dimension to the dispatches.

  The novelist in Weller is always present in his ability to put a scene before us through dialogue, describe a battle concisely, or summon up an elusive atmosphere, and throughout the war he wrote short stories. I have selected three. I have also included a few of his letters and even a soldiers' verse—Weller was a great collector of ragtag bits and pieces. As in the prior volume, there is a section of photos chosen from thousands in his archives (though he found the task annoying, the CDN insisted he carry a Leica, and use it). And pertinent documents are reproduced before each chapter—such as his Nazi travel papers, and an apology from a brutal Japanese POW camp commander.

  The volume offers abridged versions of his three wartime books: Singapore Is Silent, “Luck to the Fighters!” and Bases Overseas. It is impossible to compress 350 pages into 65, but I have tried. In another sense, there are two other “books” implicit here. In 1941 he saw Greece fall, and in 1945 watched its liberation turn into civil war; he also spanned a year and a half in New Guinea, the only reporter to cover all its major campaigns.

  I have written brief introductions for each section. Some provide the story behind the chapter's adventures, some the basic political background presumably familiar to an average reader of the day. Obvious as it may sound, it is useful to recall that for much of the war Weller and his readers had no idea how it was going to end, nor how long that end would take.

  No doubt there are characterizations and expressions that will bother some readers, but they speak to the racial nature of this war. It is always problematic to try to inhabit the past, to enter its differences; to re-create its assumptions, all it took for granted—for we must first try to understand it on its own terms before we judge it on ours. It is no use reading a reporter's words from the past and trying to frog-march them into the present. The goal, while remembering what you know that he did not, is to ask yourself if he knew anything that you do not.

  I have chosen to maintain the spellings of place-names as used in the dispatches, rather than update them.

  I have abridged every dispatch while preserving the writing. Most frequently cut have been lists of soldiers' names, mentioned in a dispatch as a way of not just giving credit but letting their loved ones know where they were and that they were alive. Weller was a boots-in-the-mud reporter, able to talk to men of any rank, but considerations apply to a book that do not apply to a day's newspaper article. If I have offended anyone by removing those names, I apologize.

  No writer can second-guess posterity, which has its own hunger. Weller, like all serious correspondents, was well aware
of the responsibilities of a reporter—to accurately and unsentimentally convey the truth to his readership, for they deserved no less—and of his duty toward history. The American instinct to simplify all politics, to look for an unpolitical, emotional right or wrong no matter what and to avoid thinking, stymied him. He believed it was the reporter's duty not to simplify, and like many correspondents, he thought the political naïveté of his countrymen total. In Singapore Is Silent, written the year after the United States entered the war, he was blunt: “Asia is the kindergarten of American geopolitics, and the American people are the reluctant pupils who dislike the lessons they must learn, and have not yet understood that the old, simple life of play in the garden at home is gone forever.”

  As with many foreign correspondents, a globe-girdling life ultimately made it impossible for Weller ever to belong in America. Home became somewhere else. A dissatisfaction with the sleepiness of his country, and the habit of being overseas professionally, kept him away even while sharpening his skills of observation. In a letter to a friend sent from the Pacific in September 1942, he wrote:

  I never felt that it was more necessary than at present to have at least one ornery correspondent with a disputative Yankee mind on the scene. Everywhere I go in the world I marvel at the narrow margin by which the truth gets into print, when it does. My job, and doing it well, never seemed so important to me as now. Sometimes I get the old egotistical feeling that the pulse of things here beats for me and me alone. At least I can say one thing positively, and that is that I know more people on more widely separated parts of this front than any other newspaperman. I try not to stay anywhere very long. I have already made up my mind how I can serve my country best … The war correspondent job is the one where I fit—no medals, no promotions, but plenty of personal satisfaction.

  Over the years he witnessed as much death and destruction as the world has to offer, yet he never lost his unflagging humor, his sense of beauty or of the grandeur of human achievement.

  As Walter Cronkite wrote: “George Weller was not only one of our best war correspondents but he had that quality that imbued his copy with lasting importance. He wrote in the present tense but always with the recognition that he was writing the history of his time.” Our need to understand the past is not nearly as strong as the present's natural determination to erase it. My hope is that this book may delay that erasure and, in its precise evocation of war, even achieve a kind of timelessness.

  —Anthony Weller

  I

  Early European Dispatches

  Portugal, Spain, Rumania,

  Bulgaria, Yugoslavia

  When Weller stepped off the SS Excambion at Lisbon in January 1941—having left New York mid-December and written two dispatches on board, about the ship's barber and about fellow passenger Laurence Olivier, who took training as a Morse code operator—he hit the ground running. From neutral Portugal and the refugee situation coagulating Europe's borders, he moved on to Spain, which was suffering enforced food deprivations under Franco, then briefly on to Rome.

  Though the United States was still a year away from entering the conflict, Europe was already a year and a half into the war. Hitler had successfully invaded Poland in September 1939, with the Soviet Union's aid; then Denmark and Norway in April 1940; followed by Luxembourg, the Netherlands, and Belgium; then France, which surrendered in June. (When Churchill refused to surrender, Hitler began air attacks on Britain's bases and cities, with an eventual invasion in mind.) Such victories helped impel Fascist Italy, under Mussolini, to join forces with Nazi Germany. They, with Japan, would constitute the principal forces of the Axis.

  The value of Weller's earliest dispatches lies in their portrait of the fall of the Balkans—far more complex and personal than any summary can suggest, from the collaboration with Germany of Bulgaria and Rumania (whose oil fields were so crucial to Hitler) to early atrocities against Jews. Here, too, are hints of the coming invasion of Russia (June 1941), and the diplomatic dithering of the British prior to their wholehearted defense of Greece.

  RED TAPE BARS REFUGEE ROAD TO U.S. HAVENS

  Creative Exiles in Lisbon Wait for Papers That Come Too Late

  Lisbon, Portugal—January 11, 1941

  Traffic on the “underground railroad” from France through Spain and Portugal to the United States—operated seamlessly through the autumn by American rescue committees trying to save European intellectuals—is virtually at a standstill. This is due partly to increasingly stringent war conditions and partly to the indiscretions of some of its most distinguished “passengers.”

  Americans here and in France, working day and night to save men and women whose artistic and creative achievements entitle them to sanctuary in the United States, find the jungle of red tape separating refugee-choked Marseille from Lisbon's wharves growing gradually more impenetrable. The last group of seven persons to leave France was imprisoned at Figueras, forty miles from the border. Two are now charged with espionage and none of the others, though released several days ago, have yet reached here.

  These refugees do not resemble the fur-coated fugitives, both foreign and American, who sit upon piles of smart luggage in the anteroom of the United States consulate here, calmly waiting for the overworked vice-consuls to arrange passports and steamer or clipper accommodations. These are mostly drab little people with thin overcoats and papier-mâché suitcases—not important enough to be known in America but just sufficiently interesting to rate inclusion upon secret police lists of the authoritarian states. Few in numbers, they are minor rather than major artists. The more famous refugees who entrained on the “underground” earlier have soaped the rails by talking freely of their experiences upon their arrival in New York.

  The authorities of all countries concerned agree that, to function successfully, the railroad must not be underground but above board: an American-administered organization unattached to any political party or faith, openly aiding non-revolutionary persons across boundaries to countries already willing to accept them.

  While the control of entrance into the United States has been governed by the strictest consular standards, in intermediate countries the wartime conditions—varying from regular to chaotic—have impelled refugees occasionally to use irregular methods in crossing frontiers. Such means, regarded now as normal wartime procedure, had been employed only to get the fugitives through unfriendly countries to where their legitimate papers would be valid.

  Several prominent creative artists safely settled in America, including a well-known German novelist, were so elated over their escapes that they dramatized mildly adventurous details for the benefit of Manhattan ship reporters in a manner now reacting painfully upon colleagues still marooned in France.

  While conditions of rescue work change almost hourly, the chief difficulties are two: (1) the unexplained reluctance of the French authorities to grant exit visas to guests whom they regard with the most open disfavor, and (2) the fact that Spain is becoming an ever-deepening gulf where the committees are unable to gain adequate representation. A Portuguese transit visa, good for one month, and a Spanish, valid for a fortnight, must be secured before France will even examine the United States document which replaces a passport for denationalized wanderers.

  Usually the exit visa from France must be passed by a German or Italian armistice commissioner, or both. Frequently visas expire before exit is approved and the melancholy fugue of bureaucracy must be started over again from the beginning. Almost no one of military age is allowed to move, and that term is subject to the widest wartime definition.

  The “railroad's” traffic also is hampered by communication difficulties, since only diplomats and others specially authorized can telephone to France. Telegraphic exchange through French censorship usually takes four days, while five weeks often elapse before letters containing indispensable documents sift through the Spanish and French censorships.

  It is estimated that about a hundred intellectuals, with their America
n documents approved, are trying vainly to get exit visas from French, German and Italian authorities in Marseille.

  MILLIONS OF SPANIARDS GROW THINNER AS

  BRITISH BLOCKADE GETS TIGHTER; FAMINE NEAR

  Barcelona, Spain—January 15, 1941

  When Federico Vega, a common Spanish dockworker, arose from bed one morning this week, stepped into his single pair of work pants and tightened his belt, his pants sagged down disconsolately from his muscular hips. With a whispered oath Federico unbuckled the belt, drew out his clasp knife and stabbed a fresh hole in the heavy leather. The new punch is about three quarters of an inch beyond the last hole, forced a fortnight before Christmas.

  Federico is getting thinner as the British blockade is getting tighter. It is a blockade directly around his belly; since July his belt has gained so many new holes that it looks as though it possessed several different owners. Four times since July he has amended his belt to fit his shrinking silhouette. Federico's government is sympathetic to the Axis, but his gastric juices are in rebellion.

  Like millions of other Spaniards, Federico's face and figure have changed in the last six months. His cheeks, which were rosy and full, have become sunken and pale. His black eyes have lost their sparkle and his small paunch, which aided rather than impeded his heavy work, has now disappeared. He is leaner, quieter and more easily fatigued. Federico is suffering from Europe's commonest ailment this winter—undernourishment.

  In good times Señora Vega was able to give her husband at least one big loaf of bread daily. Today, by standing in line every morning from darkness at 7 until 9:30 or later, in the bitterest weather Spain has known in years, she can provide them each a single piece of bread weighing two and one half ounces, or about the size of a Parker House roll.