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

Carbon copies of his stories, running to about 25,000 words on 75 typed pages, along with more than two dozen photos, were discovered by his son, Anthony, last summer at Weller’s apartment in Rome, Italy, the Mainichi said.

Anthony Weller, a novelist living in Annisquam, Massachusetts, couldn’t be reached for comment. He plans to publish his father’s stories.

Though he skirted American authorities to get into Nagasaki, Weller submitted his reports — the first was dated September 6 — to the censors. The stories infuriated MacArthur so much he personally ordered that they be quashed, and the originals were never returned.

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

About 70,000 people were killed in the explosion.

In a September 8, 1945 dispatch, Weller walked through the city — a “wasteland of war” — and found evidence to back the talk of radiation fallout from American radio reports.

Though thousands of burn victims had died within a week after 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.

“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.

One 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. Others suffered from a dangerously high-temperature fever, a drop in white and red blood cells, swelling in the throat, sores, vomiting, diarrhea, internal bleeding or loss of hair.

The next day, he met a Japanese doctor and X-ray specialist who thought that 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,” Weller wrote.

Weller was 95 when he died in December 2002. He won the Pulitzer Prize, the most prestigious journalism honor in the United States, 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 World War II in Europe, as well as wrote stories from the Mideast, Africa, the Soviet Union and other parts of Asia.

Related Posts:

• No Related Posts

Short URL: http://www.veteranstoday.com/?p=604

The views expressed herein are the views of the author exclusively and not necessarily the views of VT or any other VT authors, affiliates, advertisers, sponsors or partners. Legal Notice

Posted by Veterans Today on Jun 19 2005, With 0 Reads, Filed under World War II. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

COMMENTS

To post, we ask that you login using Facebook, Yahoo, AOL, or Hotmail in the box below.
Don't have a social network account? Register and Login direct with VT and post.
Before you post, read our Comment Policy - Feedback