Contents
Title Page
Frontispiece
Epigraph
Foreword by Walter Cronkite
Map
Introduction by Anthony Weller
I First into Nagasaki (1966)
II Early Dispatches (September 6–9, 1945)
Nagasaki, Japan—Thursday, September 6, 1945—2300 hours
Nagasaki, Japan—Friday, September 7, 1945—2400 hours
Nagasaki, Japan—Saturday, September 8, 1945—0100 hours
Nagasaki, Japan—Saturday, September 8, 1945—0100 hours
Nagasaki, Japan—Saturday, September 8, 1945—0300 hours
Nagasaki, Japan—Saturday, September 8, 1945—2300 hours
Nagasaki, Japan—Sunday, September 9, 1945—0020 hours
Nagasaki, Japan—Sunday, September 9, 1945—0100 hours
III Among the POWs (September 10–20, 1945)
Omuta, Japan—Tuesday, September 11, 1945—1800 hours
Omuta, Japan—Tuesday, September 11, 1945—2200 hours
Omuta, Japan—Tuesday, September 11, 1945—2300 hours
Omuta, Japan—Wednesday, September 12, 1945—0100 hours
Omuta, Japan—Wednesday, September 12, 1945—0230 hours
‘The Japanese Little Theater Gives a Red Cross Benefit’
Omuta, Japan—Wednesday, September 12, 1945
Nagasaki, Japan—Wednesday, September 12, 1945—0130 hours
Omuta, Japan—Wednesday, September 12, 1945—1800 hours
Omuta, Japan—Wednesday, September 12, 1945—1800 hours
Omuta, Japan—Thursday, September 13, 1945—0100 hours
Omuta, Japan—Thursday, September 13, 1945—0200 hours
Omuta, Japan—Friday, September 14, 1945—1200 hours
Omuta, Japan—Saturday, September 15, 1945—0900 hours
‘The Japanese Was a Strange Jailer’
Izuka, Japan—Monday, September 17, 1945—1800 hours
Izuka, Japan—Tuesday, September 18, 1945—0900 hours
Izuka, Japan—Wednesday, September 19, 1945
Izuka, Japan—Thursday, September 20, 1945—0130 hours
IV Return to Nagasaki (September 20–25, 1945)
Nagasaki, Japan—Thursday, September 20, 1945
Nagasaki, Japan—Saturday, September 22, 1945—1200 hours
Nagasaki, Japan—Saturday, September 22, 1945
Nagasaki, Japan—Monday, September 24, 1945
Off Nagasaki, Japan—Tuesday, September 25, 1945—1500 hours
V The Two Robinson Crusoes of Wake Island (September 25, 1945)
VI The Death Cruise: Seven Weeks in Hell (September–October 1945)
VII The Weller Dispatches by Anthony Weller (2005)
Selected Reading
Acknowledgments
By George Weller
Copyright
It is through knowing the truth that the people discover their hidden will.
—George Weller Singapore Is Silent (1943)
Foreword
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 it was written by the first American reporter on the terrible scene.
George Weller’s dispatches from Nagasaki, just four weeks after the bombing, were censored and destroyed by General MacArthur. Weller salvaged his carbon copy but, in his subsequent travels to many corners of our troubled globe, the copy disappeared. His son, an honored writer in his own right, has only recently uncovered it and this book is the result.
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. Many major honors, including the Pulitzer Prize, attested to this quality.
Although not in Weller’s original report, this book by his son underlines the important historical note regarding General MacArthur’s total censorship of all dispatches from Nagasaki. We can only speculate as to his motive in imposing this total blackout to keep the United States and the rest of the world ignorant of the horrors of nuclear war. With those bombings, first of Hiroshima and then, in short order, Nagasaki, the Japanese sued for peace and the war was over. Why then such rigid, total censorship? Was it perhaps simply MacArthur’s swollen ego that led him to believe that the Pacific war was his alone to win? Or perhaps was it more complicated? Was there a hope in MacArthur’s headquarters and perhaps in Harry Truman’s White House that our victory (and, certainly, the American lives that had been saved) would overshadow and justify beyond condemnation the mass destruction and casualties we had caused?
This total blackout, of course, depended on keeping reporters and photographers from the scene. George Weller was both reporter and photographer, and his daring and secret entry into Nagasaki just four weeks after the atomic attack threatened to destroy that hope. He wrote and photographed the still-smoldering and dying city and its dead and dying population. His 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 with a concocted, fictional version of the mass destruction and killing that man’s (read that “America’s”) newest weapon had bestowed on civilization.
Or possibly was it one of those vastly unreasonable hopes held in the American high commands that by imposing silence in the press they might protect longer the secrecy of our atomic arsenal?
Also delayed by MacArthur’s censorship were Weller’s dispatches from his visits to American prison camps within a forty-mile radius of Nagasaki. There he uncovered the Japanese military’s savage treatment of their American prisoners. Among those stories is that of a Japanese prison ship that once packed into the freighter’s hold 1,600 American prisoners. When the hold was finally opened 1,300 of the prisoners were dead—only 300 had survived.
There is so much in this volume that we never knew or have long forgotten. It comes at a time when our nation is again at war and our citizenry can only guess as to how thick are the blindfolds of censorship that distort the truth of our military engagements and our international commitments.
This volume of the last generation’s history is an important reminder, a warning to inspire civilian vigilance. Yes, indeed, this is an important book.
—WALTER CRONKITE
George Weller (r.) with Admiral Chester Nimitz on board the U.S.S. Missouri for the treaty signing, Tokyo Bay, September 2, 1945.
Introduction
On December 7, 1941, a Sunday morning, Japanese dive bombers launched a surprise attack on the U.S. base in Hawaii at Pearl Harbor, destroying much of America’s fleet in the Pacific. Within a week the United States was at war with the Axis powers: Japan, Germany, and Italy.
Within six months the Japanese controlled Malaya, Singapore, the Philippines, Formosa, the Netherlands East Indies, Indo-China, Burma, Korea, Thailand, and strategic Pacific islands like Guam and Wake. They also controlled large parts of China.
In the prior world war, the majority of the losses had been combatants—meaning civilians turned soldier. World War II made mass civilian deaths central to the equation of modern war, to force an enemy to capitulate. When it was over, civilian deaths (55 million) were more than double those of combatants (22 million).
Beginning near the end of 1944, the United States waged a punishing air assault against Japan. Its industrial areas were all heavily populated cities that were largely made of wood, ideal for incendiary bombs. For example, in a three-hour air raid on Tokyo in March 1945, sixteen square miles of the city were destroyed, a million people made homeless, a
hundred thousand torched to death—and nearly a fifth of the city’s industrial capacity obliterated. This was known as area bombing, and years of Japanese atrocities against civilians and soldiers all over the Pacific and across Asia were thought ample justification. Since Japan knew only the concept of “total war,” now it was receiving the same in return.
Throughout the war the atomic bomb was being developed with great determination and speed under President Franklin Roosevelt, who died in office in April 1945. He was succeeded by his vice president, Harry Truman.
Following Hitler’s suicide, in May 1945 Germany—what was left of Nazi Germany—signed an armistice with the Allies, ending World War II in Europe. Japan was now choosing to go it alone against the United States, Britain, Australia, and the Netherlands.
In late July the Allies issued the Potsdam Declaration, asking Japan for unconditional surrender. Japan, still in the political grip of its military, refused.
At this time there were around thirty-five thousand Allied prisoners of war being held in Japanese camps, under extremely harsh conditions.
On August 6, 1945—a Monday morning—after nearly four years of war with the Japanese, the United States dropped an atomic bomb code-named “Little Boy,” with a warhead of uranium 235, over the city of Hiroshima, on the island of Honshu. It killed about one hundred thousand people, mostly civilians, either that day or during the next few weeks.
On August 8 the Soviet Union declared war on Japan and launched an enormous, successful blitzkrieg against the 2 million Japanese soldiers occupying Manchuria.
A few hours later, on the morning of August 9, the United States exploded a second atomic bomb—this one code-named “Fat Man,” armed with a warhead of plutonium 239—over Nagasaki, a port city devoted to military industry on the island of Kyushu. It killed about forty thousand people that morning and throughout the coming month.
On August 14, after lengthy discussion with his cabinet, the Japanese emperor Hirohito agreed to surrender. The terms resembled those proposed several weeks earlier, except that it was understood the emperor would remain in power.
In Tokyo Bay on September 2, on the U.S. battleship Missouri, in front of hundreds of reporters arrived from around the world, the Japanese foreign minister signed a treaty of surrender with General Douglas MacArthur, now commander of all Allied forces in the Pacific.
My father, George Weller (1907–2002), one of the most experienced American World War II correspondents, was among those present. The war was over; the last chapter of his war was about to begin.
—ANTHONY WELLER
I
First into Nagasaki
(1966)
Whenever I see the word “Nagasaki,” a vision arises of the city when I entered it on September 6, 1945, as the first free westerner to do so after the end of the war. No other correspondent had yet evaded the authorities to reach either Hiroshima or Nagasaki. The effects of the atomic bombs were unknown except for the massive fact that they had terminated the war with two blows in three days. The world wanted to know what the bombs’ work looked like from below.*
I had just escaped the surveillance of General MacArthur’s censors, his public relations officers and his military police. MacArthur had placed all southern Japan off limits to the press. Slipping into forbidden Nagasaki, I felt like another Perry, entering a land where my presence itself was forbidden, a land that now had two Mikados, both omnipotent.
When I walked out of Nagasaki’s roofless railroad station, I saw a city frizzled like a baked apple, crusted black at the open core where the searing sun born at Alamogordo had split open the blue sky of midday. I saw the long, crumpled skeleton of the Mitsubishi electrical motor and ship fitting plant, a framework blasted clean of its flesh by the lazy-falling missile floating under a parachute.
What irony, I thought, in a war of competing velocities, that this slowest-borne of all weapons, falling at a speed little greater than my own descent when I took training as a paratrooper, should in the end out-destroy all the fleetest of the winged killers. The bomb of Nagasaki reversed the rule of war, getting there last and slowest but with the most, a terminal blow riding under a silk handkerchief.
Even now I see the scorched hills ringing the bottleneck of the port. Along the blistered boulevards the shadows of fallen telegraph poles were branded upright on buildings, the signature of the ray stamped in huge ideograms. I can never forget the hospitals where I heard from X-ray specialists the devouring effects of the ray on the human bloodstream and viscera, analyzed as impassively by the little men in white coats as if it had happened to someone else, not themselves. In the battered corridors of these hospitals, already eroded by man’s normal suffering, there was no sorrowful horde. The wards were filled. There was no private place left to die. Consequently the dying were sitting up crosslegged against the walls, holding sad little court with their families, answering their tender questions with the mild, consenting indifference of those whose future is cancelled.
I felt pity, but no remorse. The Japanese military had cured me of that. After years of unchallenged domination, they were bending a little under the first after-wind of the bombs, a national mistrust, almost contempt, for having led Japan into war. A few sought escape in hara-kiri. The majority blamed the enemy for using weapons that were “unfair.”
Had Japan got these weapons first, would they have been unfair, I asked? Was Pearl Harbor an act of Japanese chivalry? The crafty eyes under the peaked brown caps turned unblinking and blank.
In the harbor, I remember, there still burned the last altar kindled by the fireball. A small freighter, crisped like dry bacon down to the waterline, still smoked, glowed and puffed. She was a floating lamp, untended, with all her mooring ropes burned outward till the ends fell in the water. But her hot pink hawsers still held. Bobbing there among the debris-littered dark waters, she spread a light that flickered in eerie unison with the candles and kerosene lamps and little flashlights ashore.
I felt I had a right to be in Nagasaki, closed or not. Four weeks after the two bombs, with no riots or resistance in Japan, it seemed reasonable that MacArthur should lift his snuffer from the two cities. There was a sort of reason for delay, but it had nothing to do with the public’s right to know. As something to fall back upon in the event of the failure of the bombs, MacArthur’s planners had arranged that the Japanese archipelago was to be invaded in one-two time, first the northern islands and the Tokyo-Yokohama area, and then the south, with the two atomic cities. Japan’s surrender made little difference. An incredible six weeks was announced as the interval before the southern islands were to be occupied. MacArthur had fought a slow, cautious, methodical war, taking no chances with his postwar target, the presidency. His peacemaking was its twin, with censorship prolonged after victory long after the slightest pretext for it existed.
After submitting to the censors of the MacArthur command ever since I had escaped from Java in March, 1942, I felt I could not take much more. I remembered how his censors, perhaps eager not to offend or alarm the White House, killed a dispatch I wrote criticizing Roosevelt’s defeat by Stalin at Yalta. With security no longer in question, I was not going to be stifled again. But I was not unaware that in planning to slip into an atomic city first, I was also risking repudiation by the conformists in my own profession. Four years earlier they had ceased bucking the communiqué-fed hamburger grinder, and they disliked—while perhaps secretly admiring—anybody who kept on trying to report the war, to make the public think as well as feel.
My plan of extrusion formed itself a few hours after we all sat on the gun turrets of the Missouri, watching Japan surrender to MacArthur and Nimitz. This measured rite over—almost wrecked by a Russian photographer in Lenin cap who was chased around like Harpo Marx—the correspondents were summoned ashore to a press conference. The war was ended, as we had reported, but the censorship was not. There was no chance, therefore, to ask from Tokyo why the Kurile Islands, regular patrol grounds of the U.S.
Pacific Fleet, were to be handed to Russia. What the command wanted covered was the prison camps of northern Japan. The dam was to be opened to one last orgy of home town stories, more mindless and more alike than the slow molasses drippings of four years of sloppy, apolitical, dear-mom war. Everything had been arranged: destroyers and planes were to take the correspondents north. North, north, north, away from where the war had been decided a month before.
Once, in midwar, I had been able to escape the darkrooms of the four main theaters of war by going home and running off a book called Bases Overseas, claiming for the United States a worldwide network of small strong points where her men had died and her treasure been expended. I did not feel that the right way to end this war was to be herded north, away from Hiroshima and Nagasaki, to chew more fodder about what-beasts-the-Japs-are and Jimmy-looks-skinnier-today. Only a few days before, but after the Mikado’s surrender, a Saturday Evening Post writer who wore colonel’s leaves refused to pass my story about the 503rd Paratroops on Corregidor, my old outfit, that revealed there were still Japanese bodies un-buried in the tunnels. “That’s contrary to the Geneva Convention, and might make the Japs cancel their surrender,” he said . . . . The American psychological grasp of the Japanese was shallow.
I listened as the chief conducting officer, rod in hand, pointed out on a map the prison camps where the newsmen were to be allowed to land and play savior. “Southern Japan remains closed. However, there is a little place down here”—he pointed to the southern end of Kyushu—“where their navy had a kamikaze base. Anybody interested in the divine wind?”
“Geisha schools next door?” asked a jaded voice.
“Nuh-uh. And the pilots are all in the stockade, I’m afraid.” Ah, no interviews, then. Enemy personnel, minimize glorification of.
“What happened to their planes?” asked a hopeful photographer.
“Not much left after the flyboys worked ’em over. But we do have the strip working again. That’s a story in itself.” Nobody seemed to agree. For Stripes, perhaps. SUICIDE STRIP OPERATIVE—ENGINEERS IN OVERNIGHT MIRACLE. Full of bewildering unit numbers, and ten terse words from the colonel.
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