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Music Alright y'all, welcome back to the show.
It's Antiwar Radio.
I'm Scott Horton, and I'm glad you stuck with me to the end of the third hour here.
I think you will be too.
Our next guest is Anthony Weller.
He is a writer, a novelist, a poet, a journalist, and a musician.
And he's the son of the legendary Pulitzer Prize winning Chicago Tribune, uh oh, I hope I got that right, reporter George Weller.
And he put together this book.
It just came out, I think, three, four years ago.
First Into Nagasaki.
The Censored Eyewitness Dispatches on Post-Atomic Japan and its Prisoners of War.
And on this day after the 65th anniversary of the American attack on Nagasaki, welcome to Antiwar Radio.
Anthony, how are you?
Very well, and thanks for having me.
Good to be back.
Well, it's very good to talk to you again on this most important issue.
And, well, jeez, I almost don't know where to begin.
There's so many important parts of this.
I guess, why don't you, first of all, just tell us a little bit about your dad.
And did I get the name of his newspaper right off the top of my head there, first of all?
And who he was and why it was he was the legendary Pulitzer Prize winning George Weller.
And then tell us about his involvement in covering World War II and how he ended up in Nagasaki.
Let's start there.
Well, you got it pretty close.
It's the Chicago Daily News, which was indeed bought up by the Tribune eventually.
It was an afternoon paper that went out of business in the 70s.
But back in the 30s and 40s, it had a better foreign staff than the New York Times and was syndicated in more papers.
It was syndicated in almost 80 papers.
So it was really sort of the place to be.
And my dad was born in 1907.
He'd been a novelist, published some books to great acclaim and not much money, and ended up in the beginning of World War II being invited by the Chicago Daily News to join their foreign staff.
And he'd had a really eventful war.
He'd started off in Eastern Europe when Hitler was first taking over Hungary and Yugoslavia and Greece.
He was arrested by the Gestapo, eventually was released after about six weeks, made his way down to Africa, covered the war in Africa, went to Singapore, covered the fall of Singapore, was on the last freighter out of that, got to Java, covered the fall of Java, was on the last sort of leaky island boat safely out of Java, and then covered the muddy hell of New Guinea for about a year and a half, as well as the other conflicts in the Pacific Islands.
So when he finally got to Japan for the surrender, he'd had quite a war.
Yeah, sure sounds like it.
Yeah.
All right, well, so now I hope this is one of the words that really jumped out at people in the title of this book, the censored eyewitness dispatches on post-atomic Japan.
In this book I'm holding in my hands here, First in Nagasaki, this is the first time that any of his journalism from 1945 ever made it into print.
Is that right?
No, that's absolutely right.
It's a really torturous story.
I mean, essentially what happened is my father, along with a few hundred other journalists, was present on the USS Missouri in Tokyo Bay on the 2nd of September for the signing of the peace treaty, the surrender by Japan.
And he naturally, like everybody else, assumed that he would simply be allowed to go down and look at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, where after all the war had been concluded, even if that wasn't what had really won the war.
And instead, MacArthur's officers told him and all the other journalists that this wasn't happening.
MacArthur was throwing a news blackout over not just those two atomic cities, but all of southern Japan, and that the journalists could go anywhere they wanted in northern Japan where really nothing had gone on.
But they couldn't go south.
And my father was one of two journalists who didn't swallow this.
The problem was a little complicated.
Not only was there no way to get down there because of MacArthur, and the U.S. Navy and Army hadn't gone down there.
They were taking their time.
But back then, rogue journalists like we have now didn't really exist.
If you bucked the system, not you, but your news organization would lose its accreditation, which was its sort of safe foothold in a news place.
So, you know, my dad was risking not just him, but the Chicago Daily News being kicked out of MacArthur's entire sphere, which was not just Japan, but all Southeast Asia at that point.
So he decided that he wasn't going to put up with this.
After all, the war was over.
Japan was no longer the enemy.
Four weeks had passed since the bomb.
So he signed up as the only correspondent to agree to a kind of non-story, which was a look at an abandoned kamikaze base way in the south on a little island.
And my father had seen the map and seen that the island was only a few hundred yards offshore.
So he went down as the only dutiful reporter, and he snuck away from his army handlers in the middle of the night.
And he paid a local guy to boat him across.
And then he made his way to the local train station.
And he spent a day getting by train up to Nagasaki and got off.
And like other journalists, he was wearing military fatigues.
So he presented himself to the local Japanese general in charge and said, I'm Colonel Weller, and I've been sent by MacArthur to inspect everything and see what the damage is like.
And the Japanese general said, you know, you don't look much like a colonel.
You look pretty rumpled.
How do I know you're who you say you are?
And my father said, well, if you don't believe me, go ahead and call MacArthur.
But before you call him, you better think about the seriousness of your position.
And at that point, the general bowed and gave him all the assistance he needed for a few days.
That is the coolest story right there.
That is what that's like, yeah, I don't know, a movie of a journalist, you know, going to such lengths.
I mean, that's really just incredible.
That's the kind of thing that Chuck Todd would never do in a million, billion years.
That's right.
And so he's there and he's got one of the two cars that are still running in Nagasaki, which has been hit by the atom bomb four weeks earlier.
And, I mean, there's the general's car and then his car.
And he's got an interpreter who's driving him around.
And he told the general that he needed somebody to drive his report every night up to Tokyo, presumably from MacArthur.
In fact, they were to go to MacArthur sensors.
And what was on my father's mind was that there was no U.S. Navy, no U.S. Army there.
Weeks had passed.
People were still dying of radiation poisoning in the hospitals.
But the Japanese doctors had analyzed everything.
And so my father's thought was, well, if MacArthur gets my report on what's really happening down here, he'll be compelled as a gentleman and a victor, you know, who's sort of humane in victory, to send down hospital workers and medical assistants.
I mean, after all, the U.S. had landed lots of people in Japan by then.
Yeah, well, and I guess MacArthur would rather pretend it wasn't happening than provide that medical assistance.
Right.
I'm sorry, Anthony, hold it right there.
We've got to go out to this break.
Everybody, it's Anthony Weller.
His father, George Weller, wrote a book worth of journalism about Nagasaki that never saw the light of day until this century.
Hang tight right there.
We'll find out more after this.
You can watch the LRN Studio Cam and chat with other listeners anytime at cam.lrn.fm.
That's cam.lrn.fm.
All right, y'all, welcome back to the show.
It's Antiwar Radio.
I'm Scott Horton.
I'm talking with Anthony Weller, his father.
Well, I guess wrote this book, in a sense, first into Nagasaki.
Anthony made it into a book.
His father wrote it as news stories, news articles back in 1945 about what some call the forgotten bombing.
I guess I didn't really realize, but the balance of coverage of the two atomic attacks is really skewed toward Hiroshima.
I guess, actually, the censorship of your father's work is probably a real big reason for that, huh, Anthony?
Yeah, that's part of it.
Part of it is that the Hiroshima bomb was first, and it was more destructive.
And it was more of a surprise.
And a lot of the historical debate cinders around whether the second one was necessary.
There's a lot of debate on both sides about that, and it doesn't split down the middle.
I mean, there are people who think Hiroshima was necessary, who don't think Nagasaki was.
There are people who think that the Japanese wouldn't have surrendered without Nagasaki.
Obviously, there are people who don't think either one was necessary, etc.
And there's a lot of evidence, in quotes, on both sides of all the arguments.
But in any case, Nagasaki was far fewer deaths, if you will, and largely due to topography.
Nagasaki is very hilly, so the blast got sort of bounced around, and a lot of the deaths occurred because buildings caught fire.
It didn't look like it had been steamrolled flat by this blast the way Hiroshima did.
So there are lots of reasons why it's sort of forgotten.
But I think you're absolutely right.
So anyway, what my father was doing was he was sending those dispatches up to MacArthur sensors, because he didn't really have a choice.
There weren't cell phones.
There was no way for him to get the stuff back to Chicago.
There was no way for his newspaper to publish it, even if a cell phone had dropped from the skies, without passing the sensors anyway.
So after about a week in Nagasaki, he moves on to the nearby Allied prisoner of war camps that are 35 miles away from Nagasaki.
And he finds literally hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of American, British, Dutch, and Australian POWs who have been in slave labor in the coal mines for several years, and have their own stories to tell, and have seen both blasts.
Some of them coming out of the mines saw the Hiroshima blast to the north.
Some saw the Nagasaki blast to the south.
They didn't really know what it was.
And when my father walked into their camp, they didn't even know the war was over.
And he walked in and went to the camp commander and said, look, you know the war is over.
I know the war is over.
Let's let these men leave.
And that's what happened.
But of course, these men had experienced the bomb blast from miles away.
My dad had also found in Nagasaki, a bunch of American POWs who'd been 200 meters from where the A-bomb went off and hadn't been hurt because they ducked into a trench.
Isn't that the most amazing thing?
Yeah, I mean, and so when you start listing reasons for MacArthur to censor all these articles, there are a whole bunch of them.
One, he's furious at my father.
One is that if Japanese are still dying from radiation poisoning, then maybe it means there's still sort of clouds of poison gas floating around as it happened in the July atomic test in New Mexico where a bunch of farmers' cows were killed miles away.
That would suggest that thousands of American POWs are at risk a month later, potentially, as are all the American soldiers coming in to open up Japan.
It also means that Truman nuked American soldiers.
And that the weapon is basically worthless except for genocide, because apparently a trench will protect you if you're in the right spot.
It's actually not that magical of a superweapon after all.
It's only good for killing kids with.
Well, I mean, it's good if, let's put it this way, it's not good if you duck into a trench that's eight feet high.
I mean, if you can survive from, what, 600 feet away by simply ducking into a trench, then clearly it's not entirely a superweapon, is it?
And then the other thing that happens about the censorship is, by the time my father gets to the POW camps, Truman himself sent a secret message to the heads of all media in America, print media, broadcast media, the works, asking them for reasons of national security not to publish anything about the atomic bomb.
So at that point, the only stuff in the press about the atomic bomb is being written by the science reporter for the New York Times, a guy named Bill Lawrence, who's known as Atomic Bill Lawrence, who was secretly in the pay of the War Department as well as the New York Times, and is writing articles about how the mushroom clouds take the shape of a Statue of Liberty.
And there's nothing else coming out for six months, MacArthur puts a censorship on any discussion of the atomic bomb in Japan, in Japan, mind you, until 49.
So all these dispatches of my father, as you suggested, just get lost.
They get destroyed by the censors.
My father loses them, he forgets he ever has them.
After he dies at age 95 in 2002, and I'm going through his papers, I found his copies.
And of course he never stopped talking about this stuff, but they didn't see the light of day until five years after he died, because I assembled it all.
Yeah, you just found it.
He thought it was all lost to the wind himself, and you found it in the attic after he died, right?
And that was when, in 2002 or something?
Yeah, no, I found it 30 feet from his desk in Italy.
I mean, it was in a pretty chaotic room.
As a reporter yourself, you know how chaotic our files can be.
And it was kind of an unbelievable room.
Nevertheless, there it all was.
And it was pretty sad for me that for decades, I'd heard this story, and he thought the biggest story of his life had been lost to history.
And it still upset him.
Well, yeah, that really is too bad.
But in the end, the legacy is still there.
I mean, you put it together.
Anybody can go out and get it.
It's at your library.
It's at Amazon.com.
It's at every bookstore, little, big, and medium-sized, everywhere in the country.
It's called First in Nagasaki.
Forgive me, it's been a few years since I read it now, but I remember in there that your dad basically went in there understanding that, well, it was a really big bomb.
I mean, ultimately, when we talk about kilotons and megatons, that's kilotons of TNT, equivalent explosive power.
That's what we're talking about is just how big of a blast it is.
But it's not just a big bomb.
It's got all this weird kind of science-y stuff to it.
And this is what your dad figured out after spending some time there was, wait a minute, there were people who survived the blast, okay, and now they're falling apart.
What's happening here?
And that was what he expected MacArthur to react in the right way to and do something about was that, wait a minute, there's an absolute horror show unfolding in front of my eyes, never mind the flattening of a city.
The survivors are dying now.
Disease X, he called it.
That's absolutely right.
You've got a great memory.
And in fact, my father had been covering the war with the Japanese for three years.
He didn't have any, as he once put it, he had pity for the victims, but not remorse for the bomb.
But he went in, and the first day or two of his dispatches, he's just seeing it as a pretty good surgical strike on a city that was basically a big arms factory.
And then when he goes into the hospitals and sees these people dying, because they've survived the bomb, they've survived the fires that the bomb started.
And then they were, let's say, peeling a lemon, and they accidentally cut their finger, and then they just stopped, started bleeding and bleeding and wouldn't stop bleeding.
He became immediately aware he was seeing something, you know, that even he had never seen.
It's an amazing story.
Right up there in the very top couple of most important stories of the entire 20th century.
Your father did a heroic job telling it, and you did a heroic job putting it out there for us to read.
And thank you, Anthony, and thank you for your time on the show, too.
Thank you.
All right, first into Nagasaki.
Anthony Weller, George Weller, go get it right now.
Please.
Thank you.
See you tomorrow.
