More Details on Spiking of First Report from Nagasaki

By: Greg Mitchell When you've been writing about one historical subject for what seems like a lifetime ? in my case, the aftermath of the atomic bombings, for 23 years ? it's rare that something truly new emerges to solve any mysteries. This happened, however, in mid-June when articles written by the first reporter to reach Nagasaki after the Aug. 9, 1945, attack were published for the first time. They had been spiked by Gen. Douglas MacArthur's censorship office back then, and apparently lost forever. Recently discovered, some were published in Japan on June 16; that night, I broke the story in this country. Now I've obtained some new material, straight from the source.

Here's one addition: The reporter, George Weller of the now-defunct Chicago Daily News, referred to MacArthur's "defiant and persistent censorship of the facts" in an unpublished magazine article in 1984. Why did MacArthur act that way? In Weller's view: "Jealous of the fact that 'his war' of four years had been won by two bombs prepared without his knowledge and dropped without his command, MacArthur determined to do his best to erase from history ? or at least blur as well as censorship could ? the important human lessons of radiation's effect on civil populations. MacArthur could not halt history or science, but he did his best to take the bloom off death by atomic radiation. ... Every one of my 25,000 words was killed by his censorship."

Of course, there was another reason for erasing these stories, and other articles, photos and films that offered an unvarnished view of the results of the bomb (the official U.S. policy for years): They threatened to bring the use of the bomb, and its future development, into question.

One of the great journalistic mysteries of our time was solved when carbon copies of Weller's articles were found in his disorganized archives two years ago by his son, Anthony Weller, following his death. Some of them were published, for the first time, last month by the Tokyo daily Mainichi Shimbun. Anthony, a novelist who lives near Gloucester, Mass., told me he hopes to put them and others together into a book.

The articles that finally appeared last month only covered Weller's first days in Nagasaki. He stayed in the area for about three weeks and, according to his son, some of his most gripping observations come from his visits to hospitals and former POW camps outside the city. Anthony told me, referring to this still-hidden material: "Much has to do with the effects of radiation on people, as observed meticulously by Japanese doctors. Also, the many accounts of the POWs who witnessed the bomb come down from very near and not so near ? including one group of 200 working in a plant, who sheltered in the slit trench; of that group only eight died (the eight who poked their heads out and saw the ray). Whereas all their fellow Japanese workers who did not get into the trenches were killed when it hit."

In this still-unseen material, George Weller recorded many additional POW accounts, including this one from Camp 25: Cpl. Stan Thompson of London, England, said the mushroom cloud appeared "as a glowing turbulent cloud expanding at the edges." He considered "it might be a new bomb, but felt it best not to express his opinion for fear of alarming the others."

The published articles, meanwhile, show that Weller took a wrenching turn, in the process anticipating the world's nuclear experience ever since (which is detailed in Hiroshima in America, the book I co-wrote with Robert Jay Lifton in 1995).

An early, triumphal article that Weller filed on Sept. 8, 1945, the day after he reached the city, hailed the effectiveness of the bomb as a military device. Later that day, after visiting two hospitals, and shaken by what he saw, he described a mysterious "Disease X" that was killing people who had survived the bombing in relatively good shape but were in pitiful condition four weeks later, some with legs and arms "speckled with tiny red spots in patches." These victims, many of them children, had "neither a burn nor a broken limb."

The following day he described the atomic bomb's "peculiar disease ... The doctors ... candidly confessed ... that the answer to the malady is beyond them." At one hospital, 200 of 343 who were admitted had died: "They are dead ? dead of atomic bomb ? and nobody knows why," Weller wrote.

In a later article, still unpublished, Weller revealed: "In the crowded hospitals there was no sign of the American doctors and nurses I somehow expected MacArthur would have allowed to come through. Yet the Japanese doctors were not resentful. MacArthur was acting as one of their generals would have done: punish."