Nagasaki witness finally has his say

The mushroom cloud rises over Nagasaki after the atomic bomb was dropped on the city. Picture / Reuters

LONDON - The scenes that confronted the reporter George Weller would fill his dispatches with horror and stay with him for life. The first Western reporter into the bombed and off-limits city of Nagasaki in September 1945, Weller encountered sickness and suffering of a kind never seen before.

He described the cityscape though which he passed as a "wasteland of war".

But his unflinching reports, written a month after the atomic bomb was dropped, caught the eye of General Douglas MacArthur's US military censors. Concerned at the effect Weller's reporting would have on worldwide opinion as well as his subsequent political ambitions, the general ensured that nothing he filed from Nagasaki would be published.

Until now. Three years after Weller's death aged 95, and 60 years after the US dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, some of those first-hand dispatches have been published in a Japanese newspaper.

They provide a raw and unique insight into the bomb's devastation and the horrifying effect of radiation poisoning, known to the author of the reports and the bewildered doctors he spoke to simply as "Disease X".

In a report filed from Nagasaki on September 8, 1945, Weller wrote: "In swaybacked or flattened skeletons of the Mitsubishi arms plants is revealed what the atomic bomb can do to steel and stone, but what the riven atom can do against human flesh and bone lies hidden in two hospitals of downtown Nagasaki.

"Look at the pushed-in facade of the American consulate, three miles from the blast's centre, or the face of the Catholic cathedral, one mile in the other direction, torn down like gingerbread, and you can tell that the liberated atom spares nothing in the way."

Weller's remarkable dispatches might not have been discovered but for his son Anthony, also a writer and journalist, who was dealing with his father's belongings after his death in 2002. At his father's home in San Felice Circeo, Italy, Weller came across 75 typed pages of carbon-paper copies containing reports from the war in the Pacific. The reports ran to about 25,000 words.

The story of Weller's suppressed dispatches from the southern coastal city of Nagasaki - devastated by the 4.57 tonne "Fatman" nuclear device that was exploded at a height of 460m at 11.02am on August 9 - are made all the more remarkable for the effort it took him to get into the city. With Nagasaki and much of southern Japan placed off-limits by MacArthur, commander of the US forces, Weller, already a Pulitzer Prize winner with the now defunct Chicago Daily News, made his way to the distant island of Kyushu. There, he noticed that the town on the mainland - just a few hundred metres from the island - was connected to Nagasaki by railroad. Using a combination of boat, train and audacity he was able to get into Nagasaki several days before any other Western reporters.

Weller was not at the time particularly opposed to the atomic bomb. And his initial reports from Nagasaki suggested that he believed the atomic weapon had worked with a rare degree of precision.

He started one early dispatch by writing: "The atomic bomb may be classified as a weapon capable of being used indiscriminately, but its use in Nagasaki was selective and proper and as merciful as such a gigantic force could be expected."

He suggested that the death toll stood at no more than 24,000 and that this number (later shown to be more than 75,000, with another 75,000 injured and countless more left to die later from radiation sickness) was largely the result of poorly designed civilian air shelters and a refusal by the local authorities to take air-raid warnings seriously.

But as he travelled around Nagasaki, visiting hospitals filled with sick and dying people, witnessing the flattened city and talking to the baffled Japanese doctors unable to help so many of the sick, Weller became aware that something was terribly wrong.

He witnessed children with red blotches on their skin, people who had lost their hair, patients with blackened tongues, patients with lock-jaw. Doctors at one hospital told him that a month after the explosion, people were dying at a rate of 10 a day.

He noted that the doctors had performed precise assessments of the patients brought to them. Their hair had fallen out, they had skin haemorrhages, lip sores, diarrhoea, swelling of the throat. He wrote in another dispatch: "The atomic bomb's peculiar 'disease', uncured because it is untreated and untreated because it is not diagnosed, is still snatching away lives here.

"Men, women and children with no outward marks of injury are dying daily in hospitals, some after having walked around for three or four weeks thinking they have escaped. The doctors here have every modern medicament, but candidly confessed that the answer to the malady is beyond them. Their patients are all passing away under their eyes."

After his achievement of entering Nagasaki and acting as an eye-witness to the destruction, Weller's mistake was to send his reports to be approved by the military censor. Concerned about their potential effect on public opinion, MacArthur ordered that they be destroyed.

Indeed, at the same time as it was suppressing Weller's reports and denying similar reports filed from Hiroshima by the Australian reporter Wilfred Burchett, the Pentagon went to great lengths to persuade its own citizens that there was no danger of radiation poisoning.

William Laurance, a science reporter with the New York Times and - it later emerged - someone also paid by the White House as a "consultant", was among a group of reporters taken to the atomic testing site in New Mexico to demonstrate there was no lingering radiation.

Laurance was so liked by the military that he was even taken in the squadron of planes accompanying the B-29 bomber from Tinian Island near Guam, which dropped the Nagasaki bomb. In contrast to Weller's reports of suffering and sickness, Laurance described the bomb's explosion thus: "Awestruck, we watched it shoot upward like a meteor coming from the earth instead of from outer space, becoming ever more alive as it climbed skyward through the white clouds ... It was a living thing, a new species of being, born right before our incredulous eyes." Ironically, such reporting won Laurance himself a Pulitzer prize.

Gregg Mitchell, co-author of Hiroshima in America: A Half Century of Denial, said the story of Weller's suppressed dispatches was one of journalism's more considerable mysteries.

"It's different to Deep Throat, but in nuclear history and journalism history, [it is important]," he said. People have always wondered what was in those reports. For them to emerge intact solves it."

Weller's son said his father had believed his reports from Nagasaki would not be censored. He believed that during the three weeks he spent in Nagasaki he was there "as a witness".

"[The censors] did not want the US people to get a bad impression of the bombs, and that it was not MacArthur who had won the war but a bunch of scientists in New Mexico."

Indeed, the conclusion to one of his father's most moving dispatches relates to some of those very scientists, the effect of whose labours he had just witnessed, and who were about to arrive in the city to measure the radiation. "Twenty-five Americans are due to arrive September 11 to study the Nagasaki bombsite. Japanese hope they will bring a solution for Disease X."

Fallout

* Almost 200,000 people were killed in the nuclear attacks on Japan in 1945.

* "Little Boy" was exploded above Hiroshima at 8.15am on Monday, August 6.

* The "Fatman" device exploded above Nagasaki at 11.02am on August 9.

* Hundreds of thousands more people died or were affected in the aftermath of the attacks.

* The US dropped the bombs to end the war in the Pacific, which had threatened to continue until the allies reached Tokyo with a projected terrible loss of life on both sides.

* Japan surrendered six days after the Nagasaki attack.

- INDEPENDENT