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News :: Civil & Human Rights : Government Secrecy : International Relations : Media : Nukes |
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Nagasaki Bomb Story Gets Out, 60 Years On |
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by Kenji Hall
(No verified email address) |
20 Jun 2005
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About 70,000 people were killed in the Nagasaki blast. The writer's son told the Mainichi he thought wartime officials wanted to hush up stories about radiation sickness and feared his father's reports would sway American public opinion against building an arsenal of nuclear bombs. |
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This photo from the U.S. Signal Corps shows the devastation left after an atom bomb exploded over Nagasaki, Japan on August 9, 1945. (AP/U.S. Signal Corps)
Censored stories written by an American journalist who sneaked into Nagasaki soon after it was razed by a US atomic bomb have surfaced six decades later. They describe a "wasteland of war" and the city's radiation-sickened inhabitants.
The national Mainichi newspaper this month began serialising George Weller's stories and photographs for the first time since they were lost 60 years ago. After hiring a rowing boat, catching trains and later posing as a US army colonel, Weller, an award-winning reporter for the now-defunct Chicago Daily News, slipped into the devastated city in early September 1945.
It was about a month after the two A-bomb strikes - the first in Hiroshima and the second in Nagasaki - that led to Tokyo's surrender, ending the war. Weller, who died in 2002, was the first foreign journalist to set foot in the bombed city, which General Douglas MacArthur, head of the US occupation in Japan, had designated off-limits to reporters.
Carbon copies of Weller's stories, running to about 25,000 words, along with more than two dozen photos were discovered by his son, Anthony, last summer at Weller's apartment in Rome.
Though he skirted American authorities to get into Nagasaki, Weller submitted his reports to the censors. His stories infuriated Gen MacArthur so much that he ordered their suppression, and the originals were never returned.
About 70,000 people were killed in the Nagasaki blast. The writer's son told the Mainichi he thought wartime officials wanted to hush up stories about radiation sickness and feared his father's reports would sway American public opinion against building an arsenal of nuclear bombs.
The first batch of stories were finished just as a delegation of American scientists was to visit the city to test for radiation. In a September 8 1945 dispatch, Weller walked through the city - which he described as a "wasteland of war" - and found evidence to back the claims of radiation fallout being reported by American radio.
Though thousands of burn victims had died within a week of the attack, doctors were stumped by "this mysterious 'disease X' " that sickened and killed many Japanese as well as allied soldiers freed from prison camps a month later. One woman at a hospital "lies moaning with a blackish mouth stiff as though with lockjaw and unable to utter clear words", Weller wrote.
The next day, he met a Japanese doctor and X-ray specialist who thought the bomb had showered the population with harmfully high levels of beta and gamma radiation. But nobody could say for sure.
Weller was 95 when he died in December 2002 at his home in San Felice Circeo, Italy, south of Rome.
He won the Pulitzer journalism prize, and covered the French Indo-China war in south-east Asia as well as the second world war in Europe.
© Guardian Newspapers Limited 2005
http://www.guardian.co.uk/ |
Copyright by the author. All rights reserved. |
