Alright, my friends, welcome back to Chaos Radio 95.9 FM in Austin, Texas.
I'm your host, Scott Horton, and yesterday was the 62nd anniversary of Harry Truman's nuking of Nagasaki, and our first guest today is Anthony Weller.
He's an author and musician and son of Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter George Weller from the Chicago Daily News.
Last year he published a book of his father's long-lost dispatches from Nagasaki, written shortly after the dropping of the second atomic bomb there.
Welcome to the show, Anthony.
Thank you very much for having me.
Well, it's very good to talk to you, and yesterday, August 9th, was the anniversary, and every August I like to cover the atomic bombings of Japan at the end of the Second World War.
You know, I guess a couple of years ago I spoke with Greg Mitchell from editor and publisher, and he mentioned some long-lost film that was found hidden in a ceiling, and also talked about the discovery of your father's dispatches back then before they were published.
Why don't you tell me, first of all, how it was that these stories, these dispatches, were long lost in the first place, and then how did you find them?
Well, as you probably know, my father was a foreign correspondent for the Chicago Daily News who'd seen a great deal of the war from Europe to Africa to the fall of Singapore and the war in the Pacific, and he was one of several hundred correspondents who were on the deck of the battleship Missouri for the signing of the Treaty of Surrender with Japan on the 2nd of September in 1945, and right after the signing, he and all the other orders went to a meeting to figure out how they were going to spread out and see southern Japan, including the two clear sites, and to their consternation they were told that even though the war was over and Japan was no longer the enemy, they weren't going to be allowed anywhere south of Tokyo.
In fact, they weren't even going to be allowed into Tokyo to cover the incendiary bombings that had gone on there for months in the spring of 1945.
So they were all going to be ushered northward, away from where the war had been concluded.
And my father was curious about this.
He was, at this point, 38, he'd seen a lot of the war, and he'd suffered a huge amount of censorship at the hands of MacArthur throughout the war in the Pacific.
And so he decided that he simply was going to find another way.
And there was a plane heading south to the very southern tip of Kyushu, which is the southernmost island of Japan, taking some American soldiers there.
And my father realized that he was going to be allowed to hitch a ride on this plane, so he volunteered to do so, even though there was really nothing much interesting to cover.
And as soon as he got there, under cover of darkness, he slipped away from his army handlers and made his way by boat onto the mainland and then by a series of trains up to Nagasaki.
And he got to Nagasaki and presented himself to the Japanese major general as an American colonel.
Now, there were no American military there at the time, nobody had arrived.
And the general said, well, how do I know you're what you say you are?
You look pretty rumpled to me.
And my father said, look, if you don't believe I'm who I say I am, just call General MacArthur.
But I suggest before you make that call, you really think about the seriousness of your position.
And the general bowed to him and said, what can I do to help you?
And my father took it from there.
Let me skip ahead a lot.
And essentially, my father had three weeks in Nagasaki and in the nearby POW camps, sent several dozen dispatches up to MacArthur in Tokyo to be sent to the States, because there was simply no other way to do it in those days.
You had to get a pass by sensor stamp, or your newspaper could not run your story.
So there were no cell phones, there was just no other way for my father to do it.
So he was sending his stories up to Tokyo, and they were getting thrown in a wastebasket.
And then he eventually realized none of them were getting through.
He left Japan.
And in the course of a war-torn life from continent to continent, his own copies just went astray.
And after he died in 2002 at age 95 in Italy, I was fortunate enough in going through this tumultuous archive of his papers to find a crate with his original carbons in there.
And he had thought that they were lost before he died.
Yeah, he had thought they were lost for decades.
The story I always heard was not just the scoop that got away, but the papers that got away.
Right.
You know, I just was lucky to find them, and they were in pretty sad shape, and of course they weren't in any kind of order.
And they were all written in this weird telegram language that all the journalists back then were forced to use, because they sent their stories by telegram.
So you know, all the obvious words were removed from every sentence, and you had to kind of reconstitute every line.
And now you couldn't get this published in America, you had to go to Japan to have it published, is that right?
Well, it's a little more complicated than that.
What I found was really kind of a mess.
And you know, I was finishing up a novel of my own at the time, and I wasn't sure kind of how to approach this, because I could see it was a lot of work.
And I pulled together a kind of version of some of the stories, some of the bomb stories, not any of the P.O.
W. stories, and tried to see if an American magazine was interested in them.
And they weren't really, and to be fair, they were looking at something that was somewhat chaotic, but at least to me it seemed pretty full of all kinds of explosive material of its own.
And remember, the existence of these stories was well known, I mean, Greg Mitchell, your guest, had written about them in his famous book, Hiroshima in America, they were well known to students of censorship of the press, it's just nobody had ever seen a page of them.
And so, essentially, some of the usual suspects of national magazines that might have been interested passed on this, and fortunately, a very alert Japanese correspondent for the Mainichi chain, a correspondent named Sumire Kunieda, saw in an interview with me about a book of mine that I'd finally found these.
And so she flew out to see me from Los Angeles, had a look at them, and her paper ran a long story about them as well as some excerpts.
And for those stories, she received the Japanese Pulitzer, and as soon as they hit, in Japanese and then in English on their website, essentially all hell broke loose, and I had the ABC and the BBC and NPR and everybody coming to talk to me about it.
And then the book was possible.
And now, well, for people just tuning in, I'm Scott Horton, this is Antiwar Radio, I'm talking with Anthony Weller, his father, George Weller, reporter for the Chicago Daily News, was the first American into Nagasaki approximately a month after the atomic bombing there.
And his son, Anthony, who's on the phone, found his long-lost dispatches that MacArthur had censored at the time, and has now published them in a book, which is called First Into Nagasaki, The Censored Eyewitness Dispatches on Post-Atomic Japan and Its Prisoners of War.
And I actually want to ask you a little bit about the prisoners of war, if I can, before we get too much into what he saw about the atomic bombing.
My great-uncle Bill was held as a prisoner of war by the Japanese and worked almost to death.
Where was this?
I actually don't know specifically where he was.
I don't think he was held at Nagasaki or anything like that, I don't know really, but I guess because it's part of my family history, I'd like to know a little bit about what you can tell me about what your father found at those POW camps.
Well, it was a very bizarre experience for him because he spent five, six days in Nagasaki writing up all he could see of the bomb's destruction and the dying in hospitals, and of course this was utterly unlike anything anybody had ever seen.
And then he sort of felt he'd done what he could, and he had a sneaking suspicion that his stories were not getting anywhere up in Tokyo.
He enlisted some Japanese military police, who of course believed he was a colonel, to ferry his stories up to Tokyo every day.
And so he decided to explore the Allied POW camps, which were within a 30, 40 mile radius of Nagasaki.
And he'd heard about these from speaking with some other American POWs who'd been held right in Nagasaki and actually had been about 300 yards from where the bomb went off and had not been killed because they ducked into a trench.
So he made his way north, and the first camp he came to, as it happened, was in a place called Omuta, and it was camp 17, and it actually was the largest POW camp in Japan, and had about 1,700 prisoners, Americans, Brits, Dutch, Australians.
And this was now about five weeks after the bombs had dropped, and these prisoners actually did not know the war was over.
Some of their guards had fled, but they weren't going to flee the camp themselves because they thought this might be a trap.
They'd been worked in these long, shut down coal mines that were terribly dangerous.
They'd been tortured, they'd been starved, they'd been beaten, they'd been through a whole list of horrible experiences for three and a half years.
And they were very weak, I mean, the death rates in POW camps in Japan were in time worse than they were in Germany.
Isn't that true?
I think I saw on the internet where you said that these men were people who'd been left behind at the Philippines.
They were men from the Bataan Death March.
Yeah, many of them were among sort of MacArthur's abandoned thousands in Corregidor in the Bataan Death March, but some of them had been brought from all over the Pacific.
And it's amazing to think that some of these men had survived three years in a Philippine prison camp, two months in a hell ship, a hole getting transported to there, worked in coal mines, come up out of the coal mines and seen both mushroom clouds explode and not known what on earth they were.
It's amazing what these guys went through.
And so my father essentially walked into camp and said to the commandant, look, the war's over, you know the war's over, you've got to let these men go.
And he spoke to the men and said, look, I'm not an officer, I have no authority to tell you what to do, but here's what I would do if I were you.
I would make my way south to the tip of Kyushu where there are planes landing American troops every day, and I'd just hitch a ride back to Okinawa.
And at that point the men started to leave.
So your father, George Weller, the journalist, actually opened up, basically freed these men from their prison camps.
Well, he opened up the largest of those camps, I mean he subsequently went to several others and encountered these rescue teams of American soldiers who were now starting to open them.
But I think what's most valuable about his dispatches there is he's getting the eyewitness memories from literally hundreds of POWs who've just heard that they're free men about what their imprisonment was like.
And there's really no other document that exists out there like that.
You know, it's that immediate.
And now all of these dispatches were censored by MacArthur as well?
Yeah, and it's kind of, I mean, I think that those were censored almost out of spite.
I mean, my dad and MacArthur had been at loggerheads for years now.
I mean, my dad had won the only Pulitzer of any correspondent under MacArthur, but MacArthur had been censoring him and all the others left and right.
And of course, you know, maybe there's a whole litany of reasons why the censorship would come down.
I mean, I don't know if that's the direction you want to take this in.
Well, let's go ahead and discuss what he found actually in Nagasaki and the results of the bombing and then I think that'll kind of make it evident why MacArthur didn't want anybody else to know.
Now, I've read quite a few excerpts on the internet, and I'm sorry I haven't gotten the book yet, but I definitely will.
But I guess his first dispatches kind of said, well, best I can tell, this was just a really big bomb and, you know, it sucks for you if you lived in Nagasaki, but that's the way things go, had to end the war.
And really, that was his impression of the atomic bomb at first, was that it was just a bomb, only really big.
Well, to put it into context, remember, our vision of the atomic bomb comes in large part from what happened in Hiroshima, which was a flat city that was just pulverized like as if a giant bulldozer had hit it.
That wasn't quite the experience in Nagasaki, Nagasaki is a hilly place.
And most of the damage came not from the bomb itself, because the hills sort of bounced the blast around like a basketball.
Most of the damage came from the fires that broke out as a result of the blast.
It was a wooden city, the bomb hit at lunch hour, there were lots of cooking fires in people's houses, and the whole city became this inferno.
So in a way, it was like a Dresden.
The other context to keep in mind is my father was seeing it four days after he'd gone all over Tokyo before MacArthur shut that down to reporters, and he'd written a long dispatch for the Chicago Daily News that wasn't censored, but which the paper never ran, about the incendiary fire bombings of Tokyo, which had gone for months.
And there was one night of those in March in which more people died, arguably, than at Hiroshima, and certainly more people died than at Nagasaki.
So when he was looking at it, he was seeing not a super bomb, he was seeing a bomb that had landed surgically and set off an enormous fire.
And so he wasn't seeing anything yet unusual.
And then by three days in, he's gone around to the hospitals and seen people dying from radiation poisoning.
The tenor of his dispatches changes because it becomes evident to him that he's seen something he's never seen before in any theater of war.
And it's pretty clear at this point that the military wasn't saying anything about radiation.
They were basically letting the impression stand that it was just a really big bomb, even though they must have known better by then.
They had known better from their earliest test of the bomb in New Mexico.
It was something quite different because a bunch of cows died because some clouds drifted in the wrong direction.
And there was, at that point, a really major effort underfoot to quiet all discussion of radiation.
And oddly, one of the things I discovered in researching this story was that I'm sure you know that there's an Australian journalist, Wilfred Burchette, who snuck into Hiroshima.
Right.
And he'd written a story that was very unlike the story that a whole plane load of American journalists who were flown into Hiroshima the same day as Burchette wrote.
They wrote, with only one exception, a series of stories discussing the power of this bomb, but leaving out the issue of radiation.
And the whole point of their trip was to get them to write stories praising the bomb and not mentioning radiation.
There was only one journalist among them who talked about it in terms of poison gas.
However, Burchette, who was an Australian and who'd gone in by himself, rather the way my dad got into Nagasaki, was absolutely clear on what he'd seen, in part because he was being shown around by a Japanese journalist who'd been there the whole time.
So when my father is filing his dispatches a couple days later from Nagasaki by himself, they are arriving in Tokyo the very day that the U.S. Army is holding press conferences denouncing Burchette's reports of radiation.
So Burchette's been in Hiroshima for one day.
My father's been down in Nagasaki for several.
He's sending out report after report.
And so, on one level, they're contradicting all the stories that the government wants to spread about no danger from radiation.
At the same time, he's sending up stories where he's interviewed American POWs who all survived the bomb from 300 yards away, simply by getting into a trench.
So on some level, not only is there now this danger of radiation, which, of course, could be spreading to the POW camps miles away, but at the same time, it's not a superbomb.
You can survive it if you just can get down into a trench.
Right.
So it wasn't just censorship.
It was a cover-up.
Well, I mean, I think the way to think about it, at least as I see it, is that there was absolutely no motivation on anybody's part to publish my dad's dispatches, because there's nothing in them that's good news.
And the real scandal, of course, that made my father furious for decades was that here it is now.
By now, five weeks have passed since the bomb, nearly four weeks have passed since the Japanese surrender, and the Japanese are no longer our enemy.
And not only are the reporters not being allowed in, but no medical assistance has arrived at all.
So these people are dying, and of course, nobody knew then at that time that maybe nothing could be done to save the ones who'd received radiation poisoning, but there were no doctors or hospital ships or nurses or anybody there to help them.
And this made my father furious, and he felt that this was the scandal that MacArthur really wanted to keep quiet.
That America was not providing any medical care to the people.
Absolutely, because they were no longer the enemy.
Right.
Why shouldn't we be helping them?
And indeed, President Truman, four days after my father's first dispatches, circulated a secret memo to all the print and broadcast media in the United States, asking them as a favor not to talk about the atom bomb.
The only discussion of the atom bomb in the media for months afterward that was permitted was by Atomic Bill Lawrence, who I'm sure you've heard of, the New York Times science reporter who was being paid under the table by the Manhattan Project to write PR about the bomb.
Yeah, Amy Goodman and her brother just ran a great article in the Boston Globe about how the Pulitzer Prize committee ought to strip the New York Times and Mr. Lawrence of the Pulitzer that he won for his propaganda efforts at that time.
Sure, I mean, he actually wrote a speech for Truman announcing the bomb, and it was so insanely enthusiastic that even the White House said, we can't use this, this is over the top.
Yeah, and for Truman to find something to be over the top is quite a statement, I think.
Sure, no, absolutely, and I mean, you know, Lawrence was actually in the plane that one of the planes that dropped the bomb on Nagasaki, and he claimed that he saw a giant Statue of Liberty emerging from the mushroom clouds, but I mean, what's interesting in all this in a way is that if you look back at accounts of the press, right up into the early 70s, this relationship of Atomic Bill and the Times is seen as something to boast about, and it's only after Vietnam that accounts start to criticize it, and of course now it's seen as quite a large scandal.
Well, and you know, of course a big part of that is that after all this time and all these different historians going back, it's now clear that the Japanese had been trying to surrender for a long time.
They only wanted to keep their emperor, and we know now that Truman actually, after both atomic bombs, finally dropped the demand for unconditional surrender and agreed that they would be allowed to keep their emperor, so the whole argument that this was done to save American lives because we would have quote-unquote had to do a land invasion of Japan is just a bunch of bunk.
The only reason Truman wouldn't accept their surrender is because he wanted an opportunity to use his new bombs on them.
Well, I think it may be slightly more complicated than that to the degree that when you read the machinery of all this, it looks an awful lot like an extremely complicated contraption that's running down the hill, and without the Japanese actually saying, we surrender, nothing could have stopped it.
I mean, there was, I mean, the setup, I mean, you can also see that once they start imagining they're going to test a new weapon of war, it's very hard to stop that.
I mean, the original plans for one bomb, in fact, included the second.
So I guess if there had been better weather, the original plan was that the second bomb would be dropped five days after, not three days after the first.
But in fact, Truman's order for one was really a two-for-one offer.
So all the machinery was so single-minded at making this happen, at the same time that there was a Japanese major, I believe, who went down from Tokyo to inspect Hiroshima the day after the bomb dropped, and he reported to the emperor that it wasn't really so bad.
I mean, if he'd reported that, you know, the truth, then who knows, perhaps the Japanese would have absolutely thrown in the towel, not after Nagasaki, but after Hiroshima, and Nagasaki would have been spared.
But it's very sad to read all of that.
And you know, the question of whether the emperor should have been allowed to remain is also a complicated one, because for the Japanese, who regarded him as a kind of godhead, had ensured a sense of national exoneration for a war which was, after all, of their creation.
And I don't think that this has been, in the long run, profitable for the Japanese.
You know, Japanese now don't learn that anything in the Second World War wasn't their doing.
They simply learned that they were bombed mercilessly by the Americans.
And obviously the truth is a little more complicated than that.
Yeah, well, that's a good point, the kind of national vindication that came with being allowed to keep their emperor.
Right.
Right.
All right, now, let's get back a bit here to when your father first came to Nagasaki.
One of the things I read here was that the fires were still burning a month later when he arrived.
Yeah, that's right.
And now we mentioned how he didn't understand all the implications of the bomb at first.
He just wrote, you know, wow, this is a hell of a bomb, but that's about all.
Now I'd like to read a little bit here from, I guess this is one of the first dispatches, the first three or four or something, from Saturday, September 8, 1945, 2300 hours, in sway-backed or flattened skeletons of the Mitsubishi arms plant is revealed what Adam can do to steel and stone, but what the ribbon Adam can do against human flesh and bone lies hidden in two hospitals of downtown Nagasaki, statistics are variable and few records are kept, but it is ascertained that the chief municipal hospital had about 750 atomic patients until this week and lost by death, approximately 360, about 70% of the deaths have been from plane burns, but most of the patients who are gravely burned have now passed away.
And those on hand are rapidly curing.
Those not curing are people whose unhappy lot provides an aura of mystery around the atomic bombs effects.
They are victims of what Lieutenant Jacob Vink, Dutch medical officer and now allied commander of prison camp 14 at the mouth of the Nagasaki Harbor calls disease X.
Vink points out a woman on a yellow mat in the hospital who has just been brought in.
She fled the atomic area, but had returned to live.
She was well for three weeks, except for a small burn on her heel.
Now she lies moaning with a blackish mouth, stiff as though with lockjaw and unable to utter clear words.
Her exposed legs and arms are speckled with tiny red dots and patches and it goes on like this.
These are the people who survived the atomic bombing and then weeks later came down.
I think one of the, one of the excerpts I read talked about a woman who was in perfect health it seemed, but who had gotten a small cut on her finger making dinner for her husband and had never stopped bleeding and had bled to death from the small cut on her finger.
And I guess if you can just kind of fill in any more gaps about what your father saw in these hospitals and maybe if you can tell me what were the numbers total of people who died of the radiation after the bombing if you know.
Well you know you hear numbers in all kinds of directions.
What the number that seems certainly safe is that at Nagasaki about 70,000 died.
You know the original numbers my father was given were in the low 20s.
This was in the first week and those numbers had probably gone up to the high 20s by the time he leaves Nagasaki.
So this would now be, he leaves Nagasaki the 26th of September in the bomb and dropped the 9th of August.
So we're now what, six weeks after the dropping of the bomb, something like that, or seven weeks after the dropping of the bomb.
So that would suggest that 40,000 more died.
But he found one of the things that impressed him most and he, as he told me, tried his best to be an inquiring visitor, not a conquering visitor when he went to the makeshift hospitals.
He found that the Japanese doctors who were very alert and very expert, he'd already catalogued all the effects of the ray on the various organs of the dead.
And the big effect that really did not account for the bulk of the deaths at that moment, the bulk of the deaths at that moment were from fires.
But in time, the bulk of the deaths from radiation were a result of the death of the platelets, which is the element in the blood that allows it to clot.
And so there were innumerable instances like the woman you described there, where a simple cut just kept them bleeding and bleeding and bleeding.
And interestingly enough, my father in Tokyo, before he even snuck away from MacArthur's handlers, had interviewed some friends of famous Japanese actors and actresses who were – an actor and an actress – who were in Hiroshima, who survived the bombing, thought they were fine, went to Tokyo, and then one of them felt his insides were burning out.
And then the woman had, I believe, cut herself and she did not stop bleeding.
And that dispatch was actually passed by censors, but again, not published by the newspaper.
So there was another kind of censorship that was sort of an unwitting censorship that wanted to hear not about how the war had been won, but wanted to hear about the peace that was coming along.
So in any event, my father saw this endlessly, and I think that was part of the medical outrage I discussed that, of course, he didn't know at the time, nobody knew whether there might be some way of stopping the death of these platelets, it was like a leak in a boat.
If there was a way to stop it, then maybe you could save an awful lot of people.
But there weren't any doctors on hand then.
And do we know now, is there a way to treat someone who's been blasted by gamma rays?
I don't think there's anything to be done about the platelets.
I don't think there's anything to be done about the platelets.
And of course, these days, you know, all the atomic discussions that lean on the horrors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki are kind of missing the point.
I mean, present-day nuclear weapons, you know, just don't have much resemblance to these.
Oh, right.
I mean, these were, what, Nagasaki was 10 kilotons or something?
I think it's 15, but these are pop guns compared to what they do now.
Yeah, that's right.
They have hydrogen bombs now that could kill Houston in one shot.
Right, yeah.
They're really not very similar, unfortunately.
Well, don't worry, though, because we have a whole new generation of usable tactical nuclear weapons so that our DoD can find places where it's okay to go ahead and start nuking people again.
Got to get rid of that nuclear taboo, you understand.
Well, you can imagine my relief.
Yeah, exactly.
Now, there were a bunch of pictures, too, right?
Your father had a photographer with him who had taken hundreds of pictures.
No, it actually wasn't like that.
He, like many other writing journalists, was made by his newspaper to carry a little light along with it.
My father was no photographer, but he was often in situations where there was no photographer.
And I had never ever heard from him about the existence of any photos.
All he ever talked about was, as he would put it, I lost my war at Nagasaki.
And all I ever heard about was the dispatches that got destroyed and then lost.
And when this Japanese journalist was coming out to interview me back in 2004 or 2005 about having found these, she said, are there any pictures?
And I said, no, there are no pictures.
My father wasn't a photographer.
And then I went rummaging around, and of course, I found about 100 photographs that he'd taken.
They're probably 25 or 30 are actually superb pictures, and the book contains the best of them, I think.
They're pictures of Nagasaki looking pummeled and the POWs looking starved.
And it's pretty dramatic material, I think.
Pictures from inside the hospitals as well?
No, there are no pictures in the hospitals.
I think it felt wrong to him to do that.
In all his descriptions in the dispatches, he speaks of the scenes in the hospitals as piteous and dignified.
And I think he felt it would be wrong to photograph there.
So they're mostly photographs of the destruction in Nagasaki and of the actual camps.
And now, I guess I found on the internet your afterword to the book.
And in there, you talk about how your father, George Weller, would often mention the firebombing of Tokyo in comparison to Nagasaki.
And you make the very important point that he wasn't trying to downplay Nagasaki.
He was just trying to point out that, hey, let's not forget the humanitarian catastrophe that is Tokyo as well, whether they use nukes or not.
Yeah, I think it upset him terribly that the atomic bomb rapidly became a kind of cliché, a kind of superbomb, and nothing could stop.
And of course, he'd seen that, in fact, quite a few things could stop it.
That if you ducked into a trench, you could be three football fields away and emerge unscathed.
That if you were dropping it on hilly terrain rather than the flat plain of Hiroshima, that its effect was radically diminished.
I mean, the destruction in Nagasaki would have been pretty minimal if, A, the Japanese had observed their own air raid warning system, and B, if the city were not made of wood.
So it annoyed him that this kind of caricature abstained, and also that nobody mentioned the incendiary firebombing.
For him, that was more destructive than Nagasaki.
One night in Tokyo certainly killed 120,000 people, just fried them on a platter, as he so poignantly put it.
And for people to talk about the atomic bomb and not even mention what these conventional weapons could do seemed to him absurd, and a weird kind of self-flattering myopia.
I mean, remember the firebombings went on for months and never made it into the press.
I mean, my father's dispatch, and I'm sure other people's dispatches about him, didn't get mentioned at all, but that's why MacArthur immediately shepherded all the correspondents who'd arrived for the surrender out of Tokyo and forbade them to go into Tokyo.
I think probably to this day, people, most Americans don't know about the firebombing of Tokyo.
The censorship has lasted.
Sure, sure.
Well, I think there's very little in that story that people want to know about.
You know, from the firebombings to the atom bombs to the POW camps, which are horribly brutal.
You notice that the Nazi POW camps have entered the kind of cinema mythology, but the Japanese POW camps, which were seven times deadlier, have not.
The hellships are virtually unknown, and the war trials are virtually unknown.
And the fact that the Japanese carried out biological experiments just like the Nazis, and that MacArthur enabled a lot of those scientists to come to America and become pharmaceutical magnates, all that is, and traded their freedom for the secret of their experiments in case we needed help with tortures of prisoners in the future.
All this stuff is unknown.
Now, see, I knew about bringing in Nazi scientists and stuff.
You're telling me they brought in Japanese torture experts as well.
Well there was a whole unit called Unit 731 that was based in Manchuria that carried out biological experiments, every bit as grisly as anything the Nazis thought up.
But after the war, MacArthur felt that their discoveries might be of some use to us in the future.
And so they were allowed to go free in exchange for what they learned.
God, talk about becoming your enemy, huh?
Well, it's just, you know, there's very little about the Japanese war and any side of it that's really known in a clear-minded way here, or certainly in Japan.
Anthony Weller, son of George Weller, the first American reporter into Nagasaki after the atomic bombing.
From all your experience with this, growing up with this, finding your father's long-lost dispatches, what to you are the most important lessons of the nuking of Nagasaki for people to take away from this?
Well, you know, I can't pretend to be an expert in the nuclear side of things.
My side of it, of course, is very personal.
I found his dispatches, which meant the world to him and which he thought lost, and I managed to save them.
For me, the lesson in my father's story is the importance that a rogue reporter can have.
You know, he wrote in different places that all censorship is fundamentally propaganda, and that all military propaganda ends up by being political, eventually.
And that's what we have.
It's not difficult to transpose the lessons of that to the present.
And I think the means of censorship today are different.
They're cell phones.
You can't stop a story, but you can stop access to a story, and that's the way it's done today.
And I think that's why Walter Cronkite in the foreword to my dad's book was, it pains to point out that these are the lessons we need to take away from this saga.
Yeah, well, very important, and particularly now when, as you say, there's cell phones everywhere and wide open access to information, yet still we see that the lie carries the day.
Sure, and if you can't get into a place, you can't get the story out.
And also, if journalists are not the bulldogs that they ought to be, then it can take several years for the story to get out.
Right, long past the point when it really mattered.
Yeah, absolutely.
All right, everybody, Anthony Weller, he's an author and musician, son of George Weller, the Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter for the Chicago Daily News.
The book is First Into Nagasaki, The Censored Eyewitness Dispatches on Post-Atomic Japan and its Prisoners of War.
His website is anthonyweller.com.
Thanks very much for your time today, sir, appreciate it.
Thank you so much for having me.
