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VOLUME 1, ISSUE 25 | June 1 - 30, 2007
Nagasaki, September 7, 1945: The Medical Institute Hospital, 700 meters south of the bomb hypocenter. In the distance, center, is a prison; on the hill, right, a medical school.
Caught on Carbon
The Nagasaki story that Douglas MacArthur censored out of existence
By Jerry Tallmer
In his father’s house in San Felice Circeo, Italy – the house in which Chicago Daily News foreign correspondent George Weller closed out his life — there was a basement full of old trunks jam-packed with 60 years of written words, plus, says son Anthony, “an enormous room upstairs that was a sort of Sargasso Sea of boxes spilling over, piles of paper spilling over, crates spilling over — data on Balkan revolutions alongside old Italian phone books alongside reports on Soviet grain production.”
It was there, in that spacious junkyard-cum-treasure chest, that novelist Anthony Weller, after his father’s death in December 2002, hoped he might find some long-lost carbon-copy evidence “of what my father always bitterly felt was The Story That Got Away, and eventually, in June of 2003, I did find them there” – a whole bulging crateful of ancient carbons of George Weller’s dozens upon dozens of post-Nagasaki dispatches that, X’d out of existence by the Tokyo-based censorship freaks of Supreme Southwest Pacific Commander Douglas MacArthur, had never reached the Chicago Daily News or any other newspaper.
At 11:01 a.m. on Thursday, August 9, 1945, a U.S. Air Force B-29 had released an atomic bomb – the second in history – over the southern Japanese seaport city of Nagasaki. On September 2, aboard the U.S.S. Missouri in Tokyo Bay, World War II came to an end. Four days later, on September 6, 1945, George Weller became the “first free westerner,” as he put it, to enter and start filing dispatches from what remained of Nagasaki, having got there through bluff and guts that included posing as a U.S. Army colonel. He would four days later, on September 10, become the first American correspondent to enter and report on the brutal slave-labor POW camps the Japanese had set up and run in or in the vicinity of Nagasaki. It is the contents of that crate of carbons of George Weller’s lost dispatches (“moldy, mildewed, crumbling, but fully readable”) that, edited and transcribed by his son from WW II “cable-ese” (“which took forever”), have been put together in the absorbing First Into Nagasaki of which an all-too-short extract appears herewith.
September 11 or 12, 1945: George Weller, left, at Camp #17 with ex-prisoner U.S. Marine Sgt. Major James J. Jordan, who had also survived the Death Cruise.
What gives the whole subject even more of a one-to-one human touch is, in a long and graceful postscript that closes the book, 50-year-old Anthony Weller’s reconstruction of his Pulitzer Prize-winning father’s life and times, and that father’s frustration right into his 90s – his fury, really – over the story, the great scoop, that was strangled in its cradle. Here is the son’s physical description of the father:
A big, gusty man with extraordinary alive blue eyes and a powerful head suggesting steel-reinforced bone structure, Weller always seemed larger than a mere six feet. As someone who felt at home everywhere and went deep into what he called the secret history of each place, his reportorial gift was a mask of complete innocence that was misleading and trapped his subjects in unwitting revelations, followed by the question that went for their vitals.
“There was never a time when I didn’t know my father, even through I didn’t grow up with him; he was always off to a war in New Guinea or Africa or somewhere,” Anthony Weller said one recent afternoon by phone from what had once been his grandmother’s house, north of Boston. He was just about to leave for that other house — the one in Italy — where he would start working on a second book of his father’s war reports. “My father loved to tell me about his adventure of his getting into Nagasaki, but when I asked about the devastation he would say: ‘There’s no need to ask that … just yet.’ Of course he never stopped talking about MacArthur’s censorship of the story. He was furious, and really stayed furious, even at age 89.”
Why had George Weller, man of the world, been naïve enough to think those pieces could ever get through?
“I think he felt that when this reporting reaches Tokyo, even MacArthur – who had cause to be ashamed of having kept medical aid and other supplies from reaching the people of Japan – won’t dare suppress it. There were two George Wellers: the part of him that was determined to get there and get the story, and the other part that wanted to be a gentleman.”
The typescripts in that crate – blue characters on white second sheets – weren’t in any particular order. “When I came across a note of apology from a Japanese prison-camp commander,” says the son, “I knew I was on the right track.”
Anthony Weller doesn’t know what kind of typewriter his father used. “It’s one of the dozen questions I’d like to ask him.” The long-lost carbons in that crate were mildewed, disintegrating, brown with age, “but still afire with all they had to say.” What immediately follows is the most sorrowing sentence in the whole book: “For the last decades of his life they had been waiting twenty feet from where he sat, ever more faintly remembering.”
Jerry Tallmer, an editor of this magazine, on the morning of August 9, 1945, was on a B-24 on a bombing mission over Japan when the tail gunner screamed as, 135 miles to the south, the mushroom cloud of Nagasaki boiled up into a clear blue sky. Gg
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