Globe and Mail Monday, June 20, 2005 Page A17

Censored Nagasaki reports published in Japan

By Kenji Hall

Tokyo -- An American journalist who sneaked into Nagasaki soon after the Japanese city was levelled by an American atomic bomb found a "wasteland of war" and victims moaning from the pain of radiation burns in downtown hospitals.

Censored 60 years ago by the United States military, George Weller's stories from the bombed city surfaced this month in a series of reports in the national Mainichi newspaper.

A woman at a hospital "lies moaning with a blackish mouth stiff as though with lockjaw and unable to utter clear words," her legs and arms covered with red spots, Mr. Weller wrote.

Others suffered from dangerously high fevers, drops in white and red blood cells, swelling in the throat, sores, vomiting, diarrhea, internal bleeding or loss of hair, his censored dispatch said, describing the then unknown effects of atomic radiation.

By hiring a Japanese rowboat, catching trains and later posing as a U.S. Army colonel, the award-winning reporter for the now-defunct Chicago Daily News slipped into Nagasaki in early September, 1945, Mainichi said -- about a month after the Aug. 9 bombing that killed 70,000 people.

In a Sept. 8 dispatch, Mr. Weller wrote of walking through the city -- a "wasteland of war" -- and finding evidence to back talk of radiation fallout in American news reports.

"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," he wrote.

The reportage about the unknown affliction Mr. Weller called "disease X" appeared in Mainichi in Japanese and on-line in English.

The United States dropped two atomic bombs -- the first on Hiroshima on Aug. 6 and the second three days later on Nagasaki, about 1,000 kilometres southwest of Tokyo. The twin bombings led to Japan's surrender on Aug. 15, 1945.

Mr. Weller, who died in 2002, was the first foreign journalist to set foot in the devastated city, which General Douglas MacArthur, head of the U.S. occupation in Japan, had designated off-limits to reporters, the newspaper said.

His son, Anthony, discovered carbon copies of his stories, running to about

25,000 words on 75 typed pages, along with more than two dozen photos, last summer at Mr. Weller's apartment in Rome, Mainichi said.

Anthony Weller, a novelist living in Annisquam, Mass., couldn't be reached for comment. He previously said he plans to publish his father's stories.

Although he skirted U.S. authorities to get into Nagasaki, Mr. Weller submitted his reports -- the first was dated Sept. 6 -- to the censors. The stories infuriated Gen. MacArthur, and he ordered them quashed. The originals were never returned.

Anthony Weller told Mainichi he thought wartime officials wanted to hush up stories about radiation sickness and feared his father's reports would sway American public opinion against building an arsenal of nuclear bombs. The first batch of stories was finished just as a delegation of American scientists was to visit the city to test for radiation.

Although thousands of burn victims died within a week of the attack, doctors were stumped by "this mysterious 'disease X,' " which sickened and was killing many Japanese as well as Allied soldiers freed from prison camps a month later.

Mr. Weller met a Japanese doctor and X-ray specialist who thought the bomb had showered the population with harmfully high levels of beta and gamma radiation. But nobody could say for sure.

"The atomic bomb's peculiar 'disease,' uncured because it is untreated and untreated because it is not diagnosed, is still snatching away lives here," Mr. Weller wrote.

Mr. Weller was 95 when he died in December, 2002. He won the Pulitzer Prize for an eyewitness account of an emergency appendectomy carried out by a pharmacist's mate on a Navy submarine underwater in the South China Sea. He also covered the French Indochina War in Southeast Asia and the Second World War in Europe.

Associated Press

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