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George Weller was a Pulitzer Prize--winning reporter who covered World War II across Europe, Africa, and Asia. At the war's end in September 1945, under General MacArthur's media blackout, correspondents were forbidden to enter both Nagasaki and Hiroshima. But instead of obediently staying with the press corps in northern Japan, Weller broke away. The intrepid newspaperman reached Nagasaki just weeks after the atomic bomb hit the city. Boldly presenting himself as a U.S. colonel to the Japanese military, Weller set out to explore the devastation.As Nagasaki's first outside observer, long before any American medical aid arrived, Weller witnessed the bomb's effects and wrote "the anatomy of radiated man." He interviewed doctors trying to cure those dying mysteriously from "Disease X." He typed far into every night, sending 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 the nearby Allied POW camps. From hundreds of prisoners he gathered accounts of watching the atomic explosions bring an end to years of torture and merciless labor in Japanese mines. Their dramatic testimonies sum up one of the least-known chapters of the war--but those stories, too, were silenced.It is a powerful experience, more than 60 years later, to walk with Weller through the smoldering ruins of Nagasaki, or hear the sagas of prisoners who have just learned that their torment is over, and watch one of the era's most battle-experienced reporters trying to accurately and unsentimentally convey to the American people scenes unlike anything he--or anyone else--knew. 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.Along with reports from the brutal POW camps, a stirring saga of the worst of the Japanese "hellships" which carried U.S. prisoners into murder and even cannibalism, and a trove of Weller's unseen photos, First into Nagasaki provides a moving, unparalleled look at the bomb that killed more than 70,000 people and ended WWII. Amid current disputes over the controlled embedding of journalists in war zones and a government's right to keep secrets, it reminds us how such courageous rogue reporting is still essential to learning the truth.From the Hardcover edition.
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1
First into Nagasaki: The Censored Eyewitness Dispatches on Post-Atomic Japan and Its Prisoners of War
January 2007, Blackstone Audiobooks
Audio CD
in English
0786161302 9780786161300
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2
First into Nagasaki: the censored eyewitness dispatches on post-atomic Japan and its prisoners of war
2007, Crown Publishers, Crown
in English
0307342018 9780307342010
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3
First Into Nagasaki: The Censored Eyewitness Dispatches on Post-Atomic Japan and Its Prisoners of War
December 31, 2007, Three Rivers Press
Paperback
in English
0307342026 9780307342027
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4
First into Nagasaki: The Censored Eyewitness Dispatches on Post-Atomic Japan And Its Prisoners of War
January 2007, Blackstone Audiobooks
MP3 CD
in English
- MP3 Una edition
0786173246 9780786173242
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5
First Into Nagasaki: The Censored Eyewitness Dispatches on Post-atomic Japan And Its Prisoners of War
December 26, 2006, Blackstone Audiobooks
Audio CD
in English
- Unabridged edition
0786165812 9780786165810
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6
First into Nagasaki: The Censored Eyewitness Dispatches on Post-Atomic Japan And Its Prisoners of War
December 26, 2006, Blackstone Audiobooks
Audio cassette
in English
- Unabridged edition
0786147156 9780786147151
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- Created April 29, 2008
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April 29, 2011 | Edited by OCLC Bot | Added OCLC numbers. |
August 9, 2010 | Edited by IdentifierBot | added LibraryThing ID |
April 14, 2010 | Edited by Open Library Bot | Linked existing covers to the edition. |
December 15, 2009 | Edited by WorkBot | link works |
April 29, 2008 | Created by an anonymous user | Imported from amazon.com record |