08/05/15 – Anthony Weller – The Scott Horton Show

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All right, y'all, welcome back to the show.
I'm Scott Horton.
It's my show, The Scott Horton Show.
Next up today is Anthony Weller.
He is the editor of First Into Nagasaki.
It was written by his father, George Weller, who was literally the first into Nagasaki after the nuclear attack 70 years ago.
Welcome to the show.
How are you doing, Anthony?
Thank you very much.
Good to have you back on the show.
It's been quite a while since we've talked.
Very important book here.
Your father, George Weller, was a reporter for the Chicago Daily News, correct?
That's right, for many, many years, for about four decades.
And I think, if I remember right, you told me before that he had covered World War II for quite a long time and all different theaters of battle leading up to before he was assigned to go to Japan.
Is that right?
Sure.
He started in Eastern Europe and Africa, then Singapore.
He was all over the map.
All right.
Now, so how did he get into Nagasaki after Truman nuked it?
Well, he was present at the surrender on the USS Missouri, where all the hundreds of journalists were forbidden by MacArthur to visit either nuclear site.
And he saw that there was a press junket down to an abandoned kamikaze base that was on the island of Kyushu, and he guessed correctly that Japanese railroads would still be functioning.
So he got flown down to this place called Kanoya, which was essentially a non-story on a little airstrip, an airstrip island, and he connived with some locals to take him over by boat at dawn the next day from Kanoya, the island, the mainland of Kyushu, and then he hopped a train for Nagasaki in secret, which took him a day, and on the way, he promoted himself from a rather bedraggled war correspondent to a U.S. colonel.
So he left the railroad station on the mainland near Kanoya as a rumble journalist and arrived in Nagasaki as Colonel Weller, so that was his strategy.
Yeah, you told a funny story before about, and it's in the book, I believe in the introduction where you describe how he kind of BS'd his way in and said, yeah, that's right, I'm Colonel Weller's son, and just kind of buffaloed the local American officers, kind of bullied them into letting him in without checking.
Well, he bullied the local Japanese officers when he got into Nagasaki, the U.S. military was nowhere to be seen.
Oh, I'm sorry, I was thinking that, I got the anecdote confused.
It was the Japanese that he said, you don't want to double check.
That's exactly right.
Right, yeah.
Well, and good enough for a good cause, for sure, and then so now we get to the subtitle of the book here, Anthony, and of course now I've got to click a thing to get it right.
It's first into Nagasaki, the censored eyewitness dispatches on post-atomic Japan and its prisoners of war, and that you edited your father's dispatches.
How many, I'm thinking now the book is, what, 300 pages or something, how many different dispatches, how much reporting did he actually do out of there that never saw the light of day until 2006?
Well, he had about one week in Nagasaki and then two weeks in the prison camps that were near Nagasaki.
The whole point was that MacArthur wanted it all kept secret, partly because he wanted to be in control of Japan with his eyes on the White House, partly because he didn't want the world to see that even though we were no longer at war with Japan, the Americans were not sending any medical help to either atomic site, and the best thing to do was to keep the press out.
And this MacArthur succeeded in doing so, all my dad's dispatches were duly sent to Tokyo by Japanese police envoys whom my father had enlisted, because remember, he was Colonel Weller, he was not only the highest ranking, but the only American officer who'd appeared since Japan's capitulation.
He was the first Yank they'd seen.
The Americans had bombed the hell out of them, and the only person they'd sent was my dad, who was trying to order them around.
So he was sending his daily reports, which were in fact articles, back to MacArthur's office in Tokyo to theoretically be stamped as approved and passed back to Chicago.
Now of course, MacArthur's office was throwing them into the nearest wastebasket, but that was the way it worked, and it was a different age, there was no way to bypass the censors, because then your newspaper would lose the all-important accreditation in a theater of war, meaning not only my dad, but no, Chicago Daily News reporter would be permitted there.
So that just wasn't feasible.
He remembers the Chicago Daily News now, but back then it had a bigger foreign service than even the New York Times.
It was syndicated in 60 papers around America, so they had a big stake.
There was simply no way my dad could sneak the articles back to Chicago, and there was also no way to do it anyway.
There weren't cell phones or internet back then.
So he was writing these dispatches.
He wrote enough to fill the book in about a three-week period, and MacArthur censored it all.
Right.
Now, we're in a commercial break right now, so would you like to take a break for a minute before we come back, or would you like to just go ahead and keep recording through?
No, that would be perfect.
Okay, great.
So hang tight right there.
I'll make a break.
Okay, great.
And we'll come back.
We'll be back at 47 minutes after.
Hey, Al Scott here.
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All right, y'all.
Welcome back.
I'm Scott Horton, and I'm talking with Anthony Weller.
He's the author of four novels, The Garden of the Peacocks, The Polish Lover, The Siege of Salt Cove, and The Land of Later On.
He also is the editor of two books of his father's war reporting for the Chicago Daily News, his father George Weller, First into Nagasaki, the Censored Eyewitness Dispatches on Post-Atomic Japan and its Prisoners of War, and Weller's War, a Legendary Foreign Correspondent Saga of World War II on Five Continents.
So we're talking about how his father, George, was in fact the first into Nagasaki, the first American, to go and see the consequences, interview the survivors, witness the onset of radiation sickness, and the rest.
So can you please tell us a little bit, Anthony, about what we'll find in this great book of your father's war reporting?
Well, you'll find his firsthand accounts of interviewing Japanese doctors who could see what was happening, but couldn't really understand it because, let's face it, nobody had seen it before.
Especially troublesome was how certain patients would seem perfectly fine, then they would do something innocuous like make a little cut in their finger while cutting a laminate bunch, and then they would just keep bleeding until they bled to death.
This was a result of the atomic effect on the blood's ability to clot.
Others felt some of what are now more familiar symptoms, where their stomachs would just feel heated up in some ways, if their insides were burning, then they would just die.
My father referred to this as disease X.
Now he had no sentimentality about it.
He'd been covering the war with the Japanese in the Pacific for several years, and he felt it was extraordinarily unfair, to say the least, that Americans were dying, not as old men in Key West, but as young men on the beaches of the Solomon Islands.
However, he could feel, as he put it, pity but no remorse.
And as he pointed out, even then, the fire bombings of Tokyo, which he had written about just the month before, had killed just as many people, if not more.
By the way, napalm was developed for those fire bombings, but nobody really writes about them.
He saw the atomic bomb as an extreme instrument of war.
But remember, Nagasaki was different, in many ways, from Hiroshima.
Hiroshima was steamrollered out of existence, because of the nature of Nagasaki.
It's not flat, but a series of hills.
There was a kind of fireball that bounced like a basketball from hill to hill, starting fires all over the place.
It could not be put out, because all the houses were wood.
Like Hiroshima, and all clear it sounded, in the air raid warning sirens, so people were going about their daily business, which was making lunch at home.
So the bomb exploded overhead, and hundreds and hundreds of little fires were started in this wooden town, caught fire.
Does that make sense?
Yeah, it's the tragic legacy of the whole thing.
You know, Ralph Rako, the historian, asks, Well, if the Americans had sent in the Marines to round up all the men, women, and children of Nagasaki, and just machine gunned them all to death, like the German Gestapo would have done, would that have been okay?
In order to force their government to capitulate.
And I don't think most people would say that it would be okay, to machine gun all their men, women, and children.
But somehow dropping a bomb on them from the air, and killing 100,000 at once, and as you say, in fires later that day, and the radiation sickness, somehow that seems cleaner, and somehow okay.
Because it's just one blow, instead of hundreds and hundreds of thousands of bullets having to be fired, I guess.
But anyway, I guess I understand what you're saying about your father's point of view at the time was widely shared, that, you know, they, you know, overall had it coming.
Although, you know, I'm not so sure that really applies, when they is a town full of civilians with no military assets, other than a POW base, right?
Doesn't your dad write about the American POWs there who survived the nuking?
Well, there were a number of POW camps.
Nearby Minagasaki was a pretty flourishing armaments town.
There was a submarine factory within it.
And you could argue, as many historians have, that part of the Japanese strategy was to place its armaments complexes in the heart of the city, so that the question of attacking military targets would be all wrapped up with the question of doing harm to civilians.
The great legacy of World War II, unfortunately, is that civilians in Europe and Asia became targets for the first time.
That's the real innovation, if you will, of World War II over World War I.
The days of marching armies out to occupy trenches and kill tens of thousands of men to advance five feet were now over.
Now you could bomb cities and do a lot more damage that way.
It's pretty sad, I'm afraid.
But that's the legacy of World War II.
And it seems important, if I remember right, in the book, Anthony, you talk about how the cover-up of and the suppression and censorship of your father's work, for one example, and there was other footage that was taken and other films and different parts of the story, but that ultimately the censorship overall really led to worse deaths for many of the victims of the radiation sickness, the disease X, as your father termed it.
Because if people had known, then Red Cross would have come, done something, give them a little bit of morphine as they die, or whatever.
I don't know if they could have made too much difference, but it seems like certainly they didn't make things better by keeping the results a secret.
Of course not, and the important lesson is that all censorship is fundamentally propaganda, and the moment when something could have been understood is now lost forever and will never return.
So I think what my father felt was that the American people deserved to know what had been done.
And they were not given that opportunity.
You know, one thing he said in another book was that it's through knowing the truth that the people discover their hidden will.
Asia was the kindergarten of American geopolitics.
It's where Americans had the chance to grow up and learn that the simple life of playing in the mud in the garden was gone forever.
And there was their chance to grow up.
And the Americans didn't grow up, did they?
Not until Vietnam was there.
The beginning of manhood or adulthood, the beginning of reality, the beginning of an education.
So he felt very angry that his dispatches were silenced, and indeed he died, believe him, lost forever.
Yeah, that's right.
I forgot that part of the story, that it wasn't until after he died that you found them in the attic.
And he had forgotten, I guess, that he had kept copies.
Absolutely.
And indeed, I found them purely by chance.
And of course, I knew what they were.
But a Japanese film crew had visited me only six months earlier to do a whole documentary about this very story.
And I was forced to tell them that indeed they hadn't come to light in 55 years.
And the maker of the documentary had been down to the War Office, not the War Office, the National Archives, in Washington to see if the copies might have survived there.
But they had not.
MacArthur had very efficiently destroyed them.
So that was that, and then I found them by accident.
Well, it's sure a good thing you did.
It's a great story about how you found them, and of course a very important story told in the book.
And I want to thank you for coming back on the show to talk about it with us again, Anthony.
I want to thank you for remembering.
Seventy years is a long time.
Well, as you said, it's among the most important of lessons to be learned here from this story.
I couldn't agree more.
All right, everybody.
That is Anthony Weller.
He is the editor of First Into Nagasaki, the censored eyewitness dispatches on post-atomic Japan and its prisoners of war.
The dispatches for the Chicago Daily News, censored dispatches for the Chicago Daily News by his Pulitzer Prize winning father, George Weller.
And also Weller's war legendary foreign correspondence saga of World War II on five continents.
And a handful of novels, too.
Check out his website at anthonyweller.com.
And that's it for the show.
Thanks, everybody.
See you tomorrow.
And hey, once you do, add me as a friend on there at scotthorton.liberty.me.
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