These people squatting before me had run around, salvaging, unworried, believing they were safe because they were unburned. Then, carelessly, they scratched a finger on broken glass, or bit off a hangnail. And they bled. And bled.
I thought that perhaps there was still some way that MacArthur could save some of these lives, if he was told what was going on. So, instead of smuggling out my news myself, I began writing the story of the anatomy of radiated man. I wrote it all—besides the sight of blistered Nagasaki—with no false compassion, but with full details of every organ: heart, kidneys, stomach, pancreas, lung, genitals, everything. I mixed it with single stories, the lives of people who now lived in urns.
There was something else MacArthur didn’t want known: right in the heart of Nagasaki, where a last black hulk still smoldered in the harbor, a hundred skinny American prisoners, now free, had actually been under the terrible light in the sky. When the bomb-bearing B-29 came over, they leaped in the slit trench surrounding the plant where they worked, and cowered flat. “Deep enough to put us in shadow,” they said. “That’s all you need.” Four failed to lie flat enough, and died. For MacArthur they had a message: “Tell Uncle Doug food drops aren’t enough.”
In four days I sent 25,000 words by the hands of the obliging kempeitai, the secret police, directly to MacArthur. I figured that, since his officer had not followed the kempeitai back and arrested me, he would be interested enough—I had won a Pulitzer Prize, the first in his command—to let them pass.
I was wrong. MacArthur could not halt history or science, but he did his best to take the bloom off death by atomic radiation. All my dispatches were suppressed. Every one of my 25,000 words was killed by MacArthur’s censorship, which went on afterward, month after month.
I relinquished my colonelcy, and began another enlistment in a war that is still unfinished.
Selected Reading
Due to the vast scope of the subject matter, what follows are merely a few suggestions for further reading which I found especially informative or helpful in the course of researching my father’s saga. (Many books are, alas, out of print.) There is, of course, no substitute for contemporary newspapers and magazines in acquiring the flavor of an era.
For a general background to the bomb, along with histories of World War II or the Manhattan Project, try Before the Fallout: From Marie Curie to Hiroshima by Diana Preston (New York, 2005). Also Hiroshima and Nagasaki: The Physical, Medical, and Social Effects of the Atomic Bombings (Japanese Committee report, New York, 1981). Ian Buruma’s The Wages of Guilt (New York, 1994) raises many other questions, fifty years on.
On the complex issue of how the bombs were dealt with by the press, the military, the U.S. and the Japanese governments, one starting point is the monumental Hiroshima in America by Robert Jay Lifton and Greg Mitchell (New York, 1995), a work with countless tributaries. Another is Living with the Bomb: American and Japanese Cultural Conflicts in the Nuclear Age, ed. by Laura Hein and Mark Selden (New York, 1997).
Monica Braw’s The Atomic Bomb Suppressed: American Censorship in Occupied Japan (New York, 1991) covers authoritatively the pawn-takes-pawn strategies which followed the surrender.
An account of Tex McCrary’s press junket may be found in Off the Record, ed. by Dickson Hartwell and Andrew A. Rooney (New York, 1953). One member, Bill Lawrence (“non-Atomic Bill”) published a memoir, Six Presidents, Too Many Wars (New York, 1972). The most penetrating junket dispatch sent from Hiroshima appears in Forward Positions: The War Correspondence of Homer Bigart (Arkansas, 1992).
Wilfred Burchett detailed his Hiroshima saga in at least three books: Democracy with a Tommygun (Melbourne, 1946), Passport (Melbourne & Sydney, 1969), and the posthumous Shadows of Hiroshima (London, 1983) as well as many articles and interviews over the years. Though occasionally contradictory in small details, each has its own revelations.
The skirmishes of censorship crop up in war correspondents’ memoirs like unscythable weeds. Cecil Brown’s Suez to Singapore (New York, 1942) is especially vivid. Hugh Baillie’s High Tension (New York, 1959) contains an eloquent portrait of MacArthur.
The epic work on the POWs is Gavan Daws’ Prisoners of the Japanese (New York, 1994), one of the greatest histories ever written about World War II; many other books are alive within it. I also recommend tracking down the personal memoirs, often self-published, of prisoners, among them notably The Remorseless Road by James McEwan (U.K., 1997) and Charles Balaza’s Life as an American Prisoner of War of the Japanese (New Jersey, 2002).
Gregory F. Michno’s Death on the Hellships (Annapolis, 2001) is the finest single work on the subject which I have found. Also in that category is Unjust Enrichment: How Japan’s Companies Built Post-war Fortunes Using American POWs by Linda Goetz Holmes (Pennsylvania, 2001). And, from W. L. “Atomic Bill” Laurence to the present, Beverly Ann Deepe Keever’s insightful News Zero: The New York Times and the Bomb (Maine, 2004).
There are several books on the defense of Wake; none seem to mention the Robinson Crusoes. I particularly liked Wake Island: The Heroic Gallant Fight by Duane Schultz (New York, 1978).
—Anthony Weller
Acknowledgments
Quite a few people took part in rescuing this book.
If anyone deserves the most gratitude, it is probably Barbara Somers, who meticulously retyped the text of the original “cablese” dispatches into a “computerese” I could deal with. She was, I suspect, the first person to read some pages in sixty years—and though the material was often repellent or difficult to decipher on those smudged carbons, her undaunted labor made this book possible.
Photographer Kirk Williamson, a friend for decades with much experience at dealing with historical photographs, faced the problem of the hundred pictures my father took, which survive only on contact strips or as tiny prints. He not only saved them all from oblivion, he guided me through the process of putting them in their original, meaningful order. He also found a way to capture the reality of the paper archive itself, in all its decrepit glory.
Many thanks are due to Jeffrey Donovan, Tim Crawford, and David Deans, who each looked after my father in Italy throughout his declining years, which they made not only coherent for him and gratifying, but even comfortable; their loving companionship was an immeasurable gift. A handshake, too, for Jean-Pierre Darnis, who spent a couple of dusty days helping me search fruitlessly through steamer trunks containing moldy typescripts from all over the world.
It was James Crabtree who, in the mid-1970s, salvaged the crate of Japanese dispatches from a tumbledown stone shed in our garden at Kyrenia, in the Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus, brought them safely out of the rain, and stashed them under the stairs in Hope Cottage. There my father rediscovered them in 1977 then shipped them home to Italy, to be lost again amid the residue of innumerable wars.
Thanks also to my friend Patrick Thoze, who demonstrated how my father’s worn and shiny Leica, on which I’d given up hope, was still ready to work just as faithfully as it had at Nagasaki, half a century earlier.
Photographer Macduff Everton put me in touch with Peter Howe, who in turn kindly sent me to agent J. P. Pappis and his superb Polaris Images, who now handle worldwide rights on my father’s photos. Everyone at Polaris (especially the unflappable Meg Handler) has been tireless.
The following either answered difficult questions or steered me in the right direction: Simon Bourgin, Barbara Bruns, Dr. Janet Doran, Hans Herklots, Willis and Lee Hulings, Alen MacWeeney, Calvin Mitchell, Metin Münir, Emmett Thomas, Alan Weisman, and Michael Weller.
Sumire Kunieda of Mainichi (Tokyo) broke the story of the dispatches’ existence in a series of June 2005 articles, having seen them mentioned in a profile of me—connected with a recent novel—written for the Boston Globe by David Mehegan.
On Turkish Cyprus, Halil Batu, Allan Cavinder, Valérie Moniez, Richard Oldroyd, and Arman Ratip at different times helped extract parts of the story from my father; much gratitude in particular t
o journalist Bertil Wedin, whose long interview with him for Radio Bayrak on “Magazine North” in 1990 has been essential to me.
Bob Herguth Jr. and Monifa Thomas of the Chicago Sun-Times helped me to ascertain what little of my father’s reporting actually filtered through from Kyushu in 1945 to the now long-defunct Chicago Daily News. At the New York Public Library, researcher nonpareil David Smith attacked the same mystery from another direction.
Special thanks are due another old friend, Kevin Buckley. As editor of GEO and a war correspondent himself, he commissioned my father to write, late in life, an account of Nagasaki which (owing to the magazine’s untimely demise) never appeared. Beyond this, it was Kevin who first sent me out on writing assignments to the Middle East and Asia, and got me exploring that larger world. I owe him a lot.
Along with Kevin, the following comrades-in-arms helped with my essay: Geo Beach, Dan Connell, Barnaby Conrad III, Reuel Gerecht, Greg Gibson, and Eddie Lazarus. As always, I am indebted to them for perseverance, unending good humor, and much wisdom.
For me, one of the great rewards of the book has been the opportunity to make contact with the far-flung, close-knit world of former prisoners of war who still survive. This was in large part thanks to the omniscient Linda Dahl, who answered many of my questions and knew exactly to whom I should write. The following brave men were generous with their time and memories, no matter how painful those were: Karel Aster, Charlie Balaza, Jim Bashleben, Wesley C. Browning, Wayne Carringer, Bertram Freedman, Evans Garcia, Lou Goldbrum, Wes Injerd, Harold Kurvers, Joe Johnson, John Perkowski, Sol Schwartz, Leland Sims, Frank Stecklein, Donald Tapscott, Lester Tenney, and Joseph Vater.
In some cases, pertinent recollections found me from across several generations, thanks to descendants for whom the stories remain powerful: Alan Boyd, Jim Burnett, Scott Dood, Margaret Garcia, John Jensen, Kathryn Jones-Lucas, Tony Martinez, Michael Murray, Frank A. Nederhand, and R. Bruce Smith.
Jim Erickson very helpfully shared his knowledge of the hellships.
At Crown, I am grateful for the support of my editor, Luke Dempsey, his assistant, Lindsey Moore, and my publisher, Steve Ross: their enthusiasm for this project has never wavered. I also wish to thank Walter Cronkite—among many other distinctions, one of our last surviving correspondents from World War II—who was kind enough to offer his strong and timely foreword.
I have been fortunate to have Henry Dunow as my literary agent and close friend since 1989; the crucial balance between those roles, thanks to him, has been central to a bond I value enormously. (At his New York headquarters, Rolph Blythe unknotted a myriad of problems.) My literary agents in London and Tokyo—Daniela Petracco, Sarah Nundy, Andrew Nurnberg, and Asako Kawachi—provided helpful suggestions as well as representation, and read many versions of the material without complaint.
If I have inadvertently misspelled anyone’s name in deciphering the original dispatches, I would very much like to correct it for subsequent editions.
My father would, I know, wish me to thank the community of San Felice Circeo for many kindnesses during his final decades.
Lastly, it is my wife, Kylée Smith, who saw me through the short but intense odyssey of this book. She was much loved by my father and much moved by how, as the years went on, the past seemed more and more to slip from his grasp. Six months after his death, she ran up his stairs in Italy to share my wonderment at seeing these dispatches spread out on the floor when I found them. Her constant support and counsel are incalculable.
BY GEORGE WELLER
NOVELS
Not to Eat, Not for Love
Clutch and Differential
The Crack in the Column
HISTORY
Singapore Is Silent
Bases Overseas
First into Nagasaki
TRANSLATION
(as Michael Wharf)
Fontamara, by Ignazio Silone
BY ANTHONY WELLER
NOVELS
The Garden of the Peacocks
The Polish Lover
The Siege of Salt Cove
TRAVEL
Days and Nights on the Grand Trunk Road: Calcutta to Khyber
FOOTNOTES
* See closing essay, pp. 252–269 and p. 277. Weller wrote the present piece for a 1967 anthology of reporters’ memoirs.
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* Two mornings later, in fact. (Sept. 4)
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* One or two days, in fact.
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* Twenty-eight days, in fact; Weller miscounted.
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* A giant, greenish-black statue of an idealized Mitsui miner, towering in the prison yard above the buildings.
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* Ensign George K. Petritz actually survived the sinking of the Oryoku Maru. All the men aboard assumed that he had drowned, but he managed to swim to shore and escape. See “The Death Cruise: Seven Weeks in Hell,” later in this volume.
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* Also spelled Takao. Present-day Kao-hsiung on Taiwan. See “The Death Cruise.”
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* The PBY brought the news that a relief force was en route and would arrive on the 24th, when 350 civilian workers would be taken off Wake. Meanwhile, Major Walter Bayler, commanding officer, was ordered to leave on the PBY.
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* Scotty and Fred nicknamed their hideouts after prominent hotels: the Waldorf Astoria, the Mark Hopkins.
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* Actually 7,362 tons. The cargo included General MacArthur’s Packard.
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* In fact they were taken by a death squad led by Corporal Kazutane to a cemetery, where all were bayoneted and decapitated.
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*No. 1 was really the Brazil Moru; No. 2 was the Enoura Maru.
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* John Hersey’s Hiroshima, published in the United States late in 1946, would not appear in Japan until more than two years had passed, and only after much protest from the Authors League of America.
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Copyright © 2006 by Anthony Weller
All photographs by George Weller, copyright © 2005 by Anthony Weller/Polaris Images.
All rights reserved.
Published in the United States by Crown Publishers, an imprint of the Crown Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.
www.crownpublishing.com
CROWN is a trademark and the Crown colophon is a registered trademark of Random House, Inc.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Weller, George, 1907–2002
First into Nagasaki: the censored eyewitness dispatches on post-atomic
Japan and its prisoners of war / George Weller. 1. Nagasaki-shi (Japan)—History—Bombardment, 1945. 2. Prisoners of war—United States. 3. Prisoners of war—Japan. I. Title.
D767.25.N3W45 2006
940.54′252244—dc22 2006011345
eISBN: 978-0-307-35161-6
v3.0
First Into Nagasaki Page 33