First into Nagasaki
Subtitle: the censored eyewitness dispatches on post-atomic Japan and its prisoners of war
By: George Weller ; edited and with an essay by Anthony Weller ; foreword by Walter Cronkite.
Publisher: Crown Publishers; Crown
Published: 2007
Place of publication: New York, NY
Language: eng
Number of pages: 320
ISBN-13: 9780307342010
Description: 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.