59 Years Later: The Legacy of Hiroshima

By: Greg Mitchell Clearly, with publication on Sept. 5, 1945, of the first stories by American reporters who had briefly visited Hiroshima, U.S. officials had a public relations problem on their hands. The lid on Hiroshima was starting to come off.

On Sept. 5, General MacArthur ordered all American reporters out of Tokyo. Isolated and closely watched in nearby Yokohama, they would not be able to rush off on their own for Hiroshima and Nagasaki, as Wilfred Burchett had done earlier that week. Just as the order came down, however, a second reporter was making his way independently to one of the atomic cities.

After years of covering the Pacific war, George Weller of the Chicago Daily News had no use for what he later called "General MacArthur's censors, his public relations officers and his military police." Censorship, he felt, was prolonged "long after the slightest pretext for it existed," and he was appalled by "the conformists" of his own profession who went along with the guided tours of prison camps, "away from where the war had been decided a month before."

So, on Sept. 5, Weller jumped at a chance to cover the one officially approved story to the south -- a visit to a kamikaze base in Kyushu. Weller noted on a map that it was connected by railroad to Nagasaki.

The next day Weller shook off his Army escort at the kamikaze base, and slipped into Nagasaki. In many ways, his experience duplicated that of Wilfred Burchett in Hiroshima, except that he had the city to himself for three days, not one, before the junketing reporters arrived. But Weller made one mistake that Burchett avoided: He sent his lengthy report directly to MacArthur's headquarters in Tokyo for clearance.

This would be the last he ever saw of the story. It would never appear in print in any form, despite the fact that Weller felt rather dispassionate about (and indeed, endorsed) the atomic bombings. Weller had bluntly described the physical and medical effects of the Nagasaki bomb, however. By sending his story directly to the censorship office he felt he was giving the MacArthur command "the least possible excuse to hold up my research."

Weller would later summarize his experience in two words. Referring to MacArthur's censors, he wrote: "They won."

The Pentagon, meanwhile, had not yet issued to the press an estimate of Japanese casualties in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. An Air Force public-relations officer urged General Curtis LeMay to suppress any figures on civilians killed, as it would, he feared, "make us look like barbarians. ..." LeMay should release the figures "at the right time," he advised, and that time would be after the U.S. collected "atrocity stories about what Japs did to our B-29 crews when they were shot down." On Sept. 5, the same day that the first articles from Hiroshima appeared, Secretary of State James Byrnes released a report of more than 200 atrocities committed by the Japanese during the war.

A confluence of events on Sept. 9 suggests that American officials, right up to the White House, had indeed initiated a public-relations campaign to counter the first articles from Hiroshima.

The War Department, after weeks of delay, finally allowed The New York Times to publish the exultant first-person account of the Nagasaki bombing mission by embedded reporter W.L. Laurence. The same day, Laurence happened to be touring the Trinity test site with General Leslie Groves and physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer.

The top-secret area finally had been opened to journalists. Two weeks earlier, President Truman's secretary, Charles G. Ross, had sent a memo to the War Department urging the military to recruit a group of reporters to explore the test site. "This might be a good thing to do in view of continuing propaganda from Japan," Ross wrote.

Now General Groves was personally escorting some of the newsmen near ground zero. His driver, a young soldier named Patrick Stout, spent several minutes in the crater of the blast and was photographed, smiling.

Laurence's account of this visit (delayed three days due to a censorship review) disclosed quite frankly why he and thirty other journalists had been invited: to "give lie to" Japanese propaganda "that radiations were responsible for deaths even after" the Hiroshima attack, he wrote. General Groves had expressly asked the reporters to assist him in this effort, and they did not disappoint him. Geiger counters showed that surface radiation, after nearly two months, had "dwindled to a minute quantity, safe for continuous human habitation," Laurence asserted.

He did introduce one bit of contrary information: the reporters had been advised to wear canvas overshoes to protect against radiation burns.

But Laurence was keeping a lot to himself. Embedded with the Manhattan Project for months, he was the only reporter who knew about the fallout scare surrounding the Trinity test: scientists in jeeps chasing a radioactive cloud, Geiger counters clicking off the scale, a mule that became paralyzed.

Here was the nation's leading science reporter, severely compromised, not only unable but disinclined to reveal all he knew about the potential hazards of the most important scientific discovery of his time. The press tour, in fact, had "an oddly reassuring effect," The New York Times observed in an editorial.

Later, a scientist informed the young soldier, Patrick Stout, who stood in the crater during the press tour, that he had been exposed to dangerous levels of radioactivity. Twenty-two years later Stout became ill and was diagnosed with leukemia. The military, apparently acknowledging radiation as the cause, granted him "service-connected" disability compensation. Stout died in 1969.