Truman’s censorship in the States didn’t apply to Laurence, though. Starting September 26—the day Weller gave up on Nagasaki and set off by ship for Guam—the New York Times ran a ten-part series that Laurence had prepared for the government, detailing the scientific history of the bomb, praising the past and future of atomic power, and all but omitting any mention of radiation. The articles were vetted by the War Department, but the biblical allegories, the references to pioneer America and other mythologies, were pure Laurence. The series was then offered by the government, via the Times, free to papers around the country for reprint, and made into a free pamphlet for distribution in schools and to the entire public.
And the reward? Laurence’s Times salary was $150 a week. On loan to the U.S. government, he believed he would pocket a bit more by serving two masters. In 1977, the year he died, at age eighty-nine, he would claim he’d been diddled by both the War Department and the New York Times for his seventeen weeks of dual-salaried work. Expecting to more than double his income, he felt cheated out of just under $3,000 by the military and just over $2,000 by the newspaper. He wrote to the Times demanding the extra money; they refused. More than twenty years had passed, after all.
However, as a result of his work-for-hire stories on the atomic bomb, in 1946 Laurence did receive his second Pulitzer Prize and a commendation by the War Department. Those counted for something.
In Shadows of Hiroshima (1983), Burchett recalls a 1978 conversation:
In getting my report through I was more fortunate than a colleague, George Weller of the Chicago Daily News. I learned of what happened to his reports from Nagasaki only thirty-three years after the event. Passing through Paris where I was then based, he got my telephone number from a mutual friend and called to congratulate me . . . “But why now, after so many years?” I asked. “Because I’ve never had the chance of talking to you before,” he replied. “I greatly admired your feat, the more so because you succeeded in doing in Hiroshima what I failed to do in Nagasaki . . . I wrote a series of articles, totalling 25,000 words. As a loyal, disciplined member of the press corps, I sent the material to MacArthur’s press headquarters for clearance and transmission . . . Eventually I arrived in Guam with my leg in a plaster cast. I immediately looked for what I hoped would be congratulatory messages—or at least acknowledgment that my series had arrived. The paper had received nothing. MacArthur had ‘killed’ the lot. I had always been an enemy of MacArthur’s censorship. Now I think he decided to punish me.”
Weller, in a 1990 radio interview, praised Burchett for beating him in, and remembered the Aussie as “a very sharp and careful reporter whom I had known at the battle of Buna.” In his view, Burchett succeeded by
not being troubled by the qualms I was of putting MacArthur on the spot. He saw the chink in the censorship—that the U.S. Navy had been involved for the entire war in a struggle for power with General MacArthur—sometimes cooperating, sometimes not cooperating. It was a bitter pill that MacArthur, who fought a relatively tame war, was getting chief command of the entire Pacific, and censoring whatever he wished to. Burchett figured this out and said: I am sure, now that peace is here, that the Navy will allow me to see Hiroshima. And the Navy did not prevent it. He went in, wrote the story of Hiroshima—more deaths, if you will, than Nagasaki—and got his story out. I instead sent mine straight to MacArthur to force the decision on him. His censors stopped them on the grounds I was there illegitimately. They didn’t accept my idea that because peace had broken out, I had a right to report.
VI
“All censored information is fundamentally propaganda,” Weller wrote in Bases Overseas, published a year before the war ended. He was speaking from deep experience, and with nuclear prescience. In a never-published 1947 satirical article called “How to Become a Censor” that he managed through gritted teeth (the taste is bitter: “If you don’t get your chance in the next war, you may get it after the next war”) he points out censorship’s disastrous and overall effect on the public understanding of an event:
The moment when it could have been understood politically is missed, suppressed. The possibility of comprehension will never return again . . . And the porcelain men of history will pose forever in these lying attitudes.
The aim of well-timed censorship is to instill this simple idea: it probably never happened.
He adds that one of the most effective censors he knew spent the whole war perfecting a flawless sense of timing to be used only after Japan had surrendered. He was “trained in the MacArthur school of censorship”:
. . . a tall lean lieutenant-colonel, greyfaced and greyhaired, who smoothed out his swing on a whole series of stories of mine about Nagasaki. I went to the atomized port while the ruins were still smoking, when the only American alive—besides errant ex-prisoners—was a single survivor of a crashed B-29, who thought he was still on Saipan . . . I fed my stories by special messenger to the grey lieutenant-colonel in Tokyo. With one ashen shot after another he holed them into obscurity . . . The war was over, but he . . . kept right on playing my Nagasakis into the upper drawer of the “file and forget” until all were wasted. That was timing.
Twenty thousand skulls pulverized in an hour beside Nagasaki’s dour creek—who would believe them censorable today?
All this suggests that Weller knew his nemesis on MacArthur’s staff. It seems plausible; he had turned out several Tokyo stories prior to the treaty signing, and might’ve dealt with the man. Weller had already encountered his double in the Philippines, en route to Japan via Manila, then MacArthur’s headquarters. There the following dispatch was blocked, as Weller’s penciled scrawl indicates. It provides a preview, only a week after Japan had caved in, of MacArthur’s muzzling of the press as a fundamental technique.
Manila, August 22, 1945—1830 hours
[Killed by censorship]
The iron curtain of censorship was clamped down today at MacArthur’s headquarters on all details regarding the coming occupation of Japanese-held territory. In the meantime, Tokyo Radio and the Domei news agency continued to pour forth a flow of purported details of how, when, and where all Japanese-held territory was destined to be occupied.
This curious situation of the vanquished announcing the details of a coming surrender which the victor grimly refuses either to confirm or to deny can be considered typical of the Pacific situation today. Whereas in Germany, British, American and Russian armies did their occupying first and their talking afterward, Japan seems to be—at least in the eye of MacArthur’s headquarters—just as much a problem in logistics and military secrecy after the “unconditional” surrender as before.
In some senses, this attitude of supersecrecy is undoubtedly justified. Never conquered before in her history, Japan is still a land of the unpredictable. But the paradox has arisen that while MacArthur’s planners have been forced to put most details of the forthcoming occupation in Japanese hands in order to insure their success, they cannot—for reasons which may well be good and sufficient—reveal them publicly.
Meantime, without hindrance or even rebuke, Japanese Radio continues broadcasting to the world that the first American party will land by plane at Atsuki Airdrome on the west side of Yokohama next Sunday, and that the main naval landing will occur on Tuesday at Yokosuka. Because—by reason of many imponderables—responsibility for security has shifted to the Japanese, the initiative for announcements is also theirs, causing some observers here to inquire: “Say, who’s surrendering here, anyway?”
[The rest of the dispatch is missing.]
Defying a censorship, even through timing, could damage a reporter. In the 1966 memoir “First into Nagasaki,” which opens this book, Weller writes: “At least I was not busted by my organization for bucking the system, like dour, funny Ed Kennedy, who was too early for Eisenhower with the signing of the armistice. Ed, who had covered the fall of Greece with me, had set up communications that were too good.”
Kennedy, the Associated Press burea
u chief in Paris, had—along with all the other reporters present at Germany’s surrender to the United States on May 7—promised Eisenhower he would wait until the Germans also surrendered to the Russians before he broke the news. Once the peace was broadcast to the German people at large, however, Kennedy figured any agreements were off, and he went ahead and broke the story to America via the AP. Kennedy stirred up the ire of his colleagues, lost his credentials, was sent home in professional disgrace, and wasn’t reaccredited by Eisenhower until 1947.
This wasn’t Kennedy’s first scrap; Weller had met up with him in 1941 in Egypt, “his Buster Keaton visage . . . concealing an expert newspaperman . . . Once, a year earlier, he had dressed himself up as an Arab and picketed a leading Cairo hotel, telling all questioners with sad nobility: ‘I am picketing this hotel in protest against the British censorship.’”
Part of Weller’s higher education had come in 1942 at Singapore, as one of the final correspondents to escape the island colony, which was being futilely portrayed by British information officers as impregnable long after Japanese characters were writ large, in blood, on the bomb-shattered walls. In Singapore Is Silent (1943) Weller devotes an entire chapter to censorship:
Nearly every ship that left southward was bombed. The air was completely in Japanese hands. Yet the censors still blue-pencilled “siege.” . . . After the causeway was blown, the troops having retreated across it, there was a conference in the pressroom at the Cathay [an office building] which would have made Noah Webster smile. “Can we refer now to the ‘siege of Singapore’ as having begun?” the correspondents wanted to know. The army’s strategist-lexicographer hesitated . . . it was a matter of hours, perhaps of minutes, before the very room in which the correspondents were sitting . . . would be under Japanese shellfire. But had Singapore’s siege begun? The military censor did not like to think so.
“I still don’t like that word,” he said. “I still don’t think it’s justified.”
There was a burst of expostulation.
“But surely you can’t deny that we are besieged,” said someone.
“Besieged, yes,” said the military censor, “but I object to the noun ‘siege.’”
“We cannot say that ‘the siege of Singapore has begun.’ Can we say that ‘Singapore is now besieged’?”
The censor nodded. “Yes, I will pass ‘besieged.’ But I still don’t like the word ‘siege.’”
At least one newspaperman who missed the conference and still could not seem to get the hang of this rule even after his colleagues patiently explained it to him, led his dispatch off with “The siege of Singapore has begun.” The next morning when the shells were dropping on the island, he received his censored carbon back, and it read “The besiegement of Singapore has begun.” Naturally “besiegement” was changed in London and New York back to “siege,” the cable editors reasonably considering that this was a time for plain language.
He goes on to describe several partial censorships. One is how news gets delayed until the official version catches up to reporters. (“It is difficult to mention the military, naval, and RAF censors temperately. They held the correspondents’ noses fast to the grindstone of the communiqués, even when the communiqués were two to three days behind the facts.”) He also points out how a rigid system ordains what a correspondent turns out, knowing that certain ideas are forbidden. (“The newspaperman’s malady is to accept all the inhibitions of a bad censorship and to discourage himself by precensoring his own work.”) Another constant danger is “the staff of robot censors,” who can be ferocious, “cut an entire leading paragraph off a narrative and then send it 10,000 miles away to enter the newspaper office headless, its whole opening statement of topic, place, and circumstances amputated.”
Though it may be difficult, in our era of instantaneous electronic transmission, to conceive of any blockage interrupting the channel of news from reporter to editor—save by a more cunning censorship on the part of a government—it is illuminating to remind ourselves that the correspondents’ version of World War II was, in a sense, only what the censors failed to stop.
And 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 news organization without a berth in an important dateline. Thus in Singapore, to control American press criticism, the British disaccredited E. R. Noderer of the Chicago Tribune and Cecil Brown of CBS, Newsweek, and Life. Both men were compelled to leave; it radically altered their careers. Regarding Brown, “a strong hint was dropped that he was being punished for matter which he submitted and which was censored, but whose very submission indicated that he was not disposed as he should have been.”
Weller concludes:
Military censorship always ends by being political . . . A censorship is supposed to keep political criticism under control. Is there any point at which a correspondent would be hauled before the authorities for being too optimistic . . . by filing a dispatch that outbuttered the most complacent greasers of public opinion[?] . . . Words, words, words. But these were words to remember. Those tiresome discussions in the Cathay involved the principles for which people were offering all they had, blood and sweat, tears and toil . . . In one way the American and British peoples were fighting to be informed. They did not want to be fooled. They wanted to hear the truth. They could take it.
It is through knowing the truth that the people discover their hidden will.
Throughout the war, then, there was another war going on, all along, and it did not end with any treaty of surrender.
So why were virtually all of Weller’s 1945 dispatches from Japan censored? Surely the prison camp stories would’ve played well back home, building the case against a brutal enemy—even if the Nagasaki reports each contained a dangerous radiation all their own, the unpredictable half-life of truth. Difficult as it may be to parse MacArthur’s motivations, it’s also hard to think of one good reason why the U.S. government might’ve wanted to encourage any correspondents outside their guidance to venture into the nuclear sites. After Burchett, Weller was unknowingly sending his dispatches into a hornets’ nest in Tokyo, where he hadn’t a prayer of success. And after Truman’s confidential memorandum, one week into Weller’s odyssey, anything that got through the censors would’ve still probably been silenced back home.
Weller always maintained that since MacArthur was determined to be known as the vanquisher of Japan (despite denials of presidential ambition), he did not want to promote the bombs’ success at the cost of his own, having already been upstaged by a troupe of scientists in New Mexico.
Likewise, a candid report on the radiation suffering in the Nagasaki hospitals, contradicting U.S. government assurances, could only embarrass MacArthur before the American people, since even a month after the bomb he had failed, as supreme commander, to provide medical assistance to the devastated scene. Nor would there be any such aid in Nagasaki until six weeks had passed; and it would come via the Navy, not thanks to MacArthur. That, for Weller, remained the great shame of the whole event, and the largest humiliation of all buried in the killed dispatches.
Besides the public relations headache that there had been American and Allied POWs directly beneath the Nagasaki bomb, the fact that most of them avoided atomic incineration simply by ducking into a shallow trench was not a military secret anyone wanted exposed. The bomb was an all-powerful, divine weapon; W. L. Laurence had said so.
There was yet another reason. Weller had been MacArthur’s nemesis ever since the correspondent escaped from Singapore and Java to Australia in early 1942, and came under the iron hand of censorship while reporting the struggle up the Pacific islands. The general would have taken Weller’s entry into Nagasaki as a personal affront as much as a defiance of his authority.
Already, a year earlier, in Bases Overseas, Weller had written: “Political censorship under MacArthur’s command was strict, the officially expressed view of his headquarters being
that a war correspondent was not entitled to inform the American public of matters of controversial nature . . .”
He then quotes a letter received from one of MacArthur’s censors:
We believe that a correspondent has a certain duty towards the Commander of the Forces whom he represents, and it is the Commander-in-Chief’s desire that nothing of a political nature be released as coming from his staff of correspondents, and nothing that may be in any way criticizing the efforts of any Commander of any of the Allied nations.
“What the United States badly needs,” Weller concludes, “is a long cold bath of reality.”
Tantalizingly absent from the files is an exchange of cables which must have taken place between Weller and his Chicago Daily News editor over the strange silences between September 5—the date on his Kanoya dispatches—and when he reached Guam seven weeks later. Once he learned his worst fears had been realized, he would’ve had to describe the enormous scoops that got away, and explain the most damning censorship he had suffered in the entire war. It is not so surprising I found no trace of these cables, or the home-office replies, anywhere in the archive. They must have hurt deeply.
First Into Nagasaki Page 28