>>15 60 Years Later, the Story as Lived in Nagasaki By LOUISE STORY Published: June 20, 2005 Initial American reports of the devastation caused by the use of an atomic bomb against Nagasaki, Japan, have finally been published, almost 60 years after they were first written.
Initial American reports of the devastation caused by the use of an atomic bomb against Nagasaki, Japan, have finally been published, almost 60 years after they were first written.
In September 1945, a few weeks after the war ended, George Weller, a correspondent for The Chicago Daily News (now defunct), sneaked into Nagasaki, an industrial city more than 600 miles southwest of Tokyo, ahead of American ground forces. He wrote dozens of articles detailing the effects of the atomic bomb dropped there on Aug. 9.
Mr. Weller sent his reports to Gen. Douglas A. MacArthur's censorship office in Tokyo, as he was required to do. Unknown to him for much of his stay in Nagasaki, the articles were never published.
Some of his observations appeared for the first time on Thursday in the Japanese daily Mainichi Shimbun and in English on the paper's Web site. His writing and photographs from Nagasaki were thought to have been lost for most of the last 60 years until his son, Anthony Weller, discovered them in his father's old apartment in Italy. Mr. Weller died in 2002.
The articles that appeared online were filed on Sept. 8 and 9, 1945, early in Mr. Weller's roughly three-week stay in Nagasaki. Written in the first person, they provide a raw account of the destruction and the sad confusion that survivors experienced as they watched their neighbors and members of their families die from radiation exposure.
When Mr. Weller arrived in Nagasaki on Sept. 6, 1945, the atomic bomb, he wrote, seemed "a tremendous, but not a peculiar weapon,"
"Nobody here in Nagasaki has yet been able to show that the bomb is different than any other, except in a broader flash and a more powerful knockout," his account said. (The first American use of a nuclear weapon occurred three days earlier, against Hiroshima.)
By telling those he encountered that he was an American colonel, Mr. Weller acquired an official guide, driver and place to stay. He also began to witness the bomb's different character and long-lasting effects.
"Several children, some burned and others unburned but with patches of hair falling out," a dispatch of his said, "are sitting with their mothers. Yesterday Japanese photographers took many pictures with them. About one in five is heavily bandaged," but none, he said, were "showing signs of pain."
"Some adults are in pain as they lie on mats," Mr. Weller wrote. "They moan softly. One woman caring for her husband, shows eyes dim with tears. It is a piteous scene and your official guide studies your face covertly to see if you are moved."
Mainichi Shimbun bought the articles from Mr. Weller's son, who hopes to publish the rest of them, about 25,000 words in all, in a book.
George Weller was already a well-known, sometimes swashbuckling, reporter before going to Nagasaki. He won a Pulitzer Prize in 1943 for an article about an emergency appendectomy performed on a submarine. He was detained for two months by the Gestapo in Europe and had many other narrow escapes during the war.
Anthony Weller, 47, said his father believed that his carbon copies of his Nagasaki articles, which were written in a telegraphic shorthand, had been lost.
"It was a source of enormous frustration to him," he said, "because obviously he was a celebrated war correspondent and he thought this was one of the biggest stories he had gotten."
Mr. Weller said his father was furious that the censors blocked his articles, which not only detailed Nagasaki's destruction but also included accounts from witnesses of the explosion - prisoners of war who had survived the explosion by burying themselves in trenches.
"All of this was kept from the American people who had a right to know," Anthony Weller said.
Greg Mitchell, the editor of Editor & Publisher, which first reported the publication of the articles, and an author with Robert Jay Lifton of "Hiroshima in America," said Mr. Weller's articles were of great historical importance.
"To me, it's one of the great historical spines of our times," Mr. Mitchell said. "For decades, the full picture of what the bomb did was kept from the people."
Correction: June 21, 2005, Tuesday:
An article in Business Day on Monday about the appearance of previously unpublished newspaper articles written in September 1945, on the devastation caused by the atomic bomb at Nagasaki, Japan, rendered a word incorrectly in a quotation from Greg Mitchell, the editor of Editor & Publisher, which first reported the development. He said, "To me, it's one of the great historical finds of our times" - not "spines of our times."
>Several children, some burned and others unburned but with patches of hair falling out 「子供は焼け死に、また他の焼け死ななかった子供たちも髪の毛が抜け落ちてしまっていた」 >Some adults are in pain as they lie on mats 「苦痛のために、救急マットに横たわる大人もいた」