4:13 AM PDT, June 19, 2005 latimes.com
After 6 Decades, Report on A-Bomb Found
By KENJI HALL, Associated Press Writer
TOKYO -- The censored stories written by an American journalist who sneaked into a southern Japanese city soon after it was leveled by a U.S. atomic bomb have surfaced six decades later.
They offer an unflinching account about the "wasteland of war" and its radiation-sickened inhabitants.
The national Mainichi newspaper this month began serializing George Weller's stories and photographs from Nagasaki, about 614 miles southwest of Tokyo, for the first time since they were rejected by U.S. military censors and lost 60 years ago.
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Though he skirted American authorities to get into Nagasaki, Weller submitted his reports -- the first was dated Sept. 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.
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http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/world/wire/sns-ap-japan-nagasaki-a-bomb,1,4667176.story?coll=sns-ap-world-headlines(Free registration is required)
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~From the Mainichi Daily News:
American's censored Nagasaki A-bomb report unearthed after 60 years
LOS ANGELES -- A controversial report and photos a Pulitzer Prize-winning American journalist produced on the aftermath of the 1945 atomic bombing of Nagasaki have been unearthed almost 60 years after U.S. military censors forbade their publication, the Mainichi has learned.
The late George Weller was the first foreign reporter to reach Nagasaki after it was subjected to an atomic attack on Aug. 9, 1945, but Occupation censors refused to allow the publication of his stories and photos that told of conditions in the city and the pain suffered by those with radiation sickness.
The U.S. government at the time wanted to play down the effects radiation had on health and feared that Weller's story would affect American public opinion and it possibly affected development of a nuclear arms race.
Weller died aged 95 in 2002. His son, Anthony, a writer from Massachusetts, found the stories and pictures last summer in the Rome apartment where his father had lived during the last few years of his life.
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http://mdn.mainichi.co.jp/news/20050617p2a00m0dm001001c.html
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