First into Nagasaki : the censored eyewitness dispatches on post-atomic Japan and its prisoners of war /
George Weller ; edited and with an essay by Anthony Weller ; foreword by Walter Cronkite.
- 1st ed.
- New York : Crown Publishers, c2006.
- x, 320 p., [8] p. of plates : ill., map ; 25 cm.
Includes bibliographical references (p. 315-316).
First into Nagasaki (1966) -- Early dispatches (September 6-9, 1945) -- Among the POWs (September 10-20, 1945) -- Return to Nagasaki (September 20-25, 1945) -- The two Robinson Crusoes of Wake Island (September, 1945) -- The death cruise : seven weeks in hell (September-October 1945) -- The Weller dispatches by Anthony Weller (2005).
Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter Weller covered World War II across Europe, Africa, and Asia. At war's end, correspondents were forbidden to enter Nagasaki and Hiroshima, but Weller, presenting himself as a U.S. colonel, set out to explore the devastation. As Nagasaki's first outside observer, he witnessed the bomb's effects. He interviewed doctors trying to cure those dying mysteriously from "Disease X." He sent his forbidden dispatches back to MacArthur's censors, assuming their importance would make them unstoppable. He was wrong: the U.S. government censored every word, and the dispatches vanished from history. Weller also became the first to enter nearby POW camps. He gathered accounts from hundreds of Allied prisoners--but those too were silenced. Weller died in 2002, believing it all lost forever. Months later, his son found a fragile copy in a crate of moldy papers. This historic body of work has never been published.--From publisher description.
0307342018 9780307342010
2006011345
Prisoners of war--United States. Prisoners of war--Japan.