http://www.editorandpublisher.com/eandp/news/article_display.jsp?vnu_content_id=1003525696Last year, just before the 60th anniversary of the atomic attacks on Japan, E&P broke the story in the U.S. that the dispatches filed by a famed American reporter from Nagasaki -- but suppressed in 1945 -- were about to be published abroad. Now a book that contains all of the dispatches, and a lot more, has been published here this week.
The book is "First Into Nagasaki," published by Crown, edited by the man who found the original suppressed stories, Anthony Weller. It was his late father, George Weller, who had written the historic dispatches for the Chicago Daily News -- where they never appeared, thanks to Gen. Douglas MacArthur's censorship office.
Walter Cronkite provides an introduction for the volume, hailing it as a reminder of the need for press and civilian "vigilance" in a time of war. The book also contains Weller's groundbreaking reports on prison camps in Japan and a prison ship where 1,300 Americans died (unlike the Nagasaki reports, these articles were published by his paper, but often in censored form).
One of the great untold stories of the Nuclear Age is finally available in book form. What was in the censored, and then lost to the ages, newspaper articles filed by the first reporter to reach Nagasaki following the atomic attack on that city on Aug. 9, 1945?
Among other things, Weller was one of the first to describe the bomb's "peculiar disease." Referring to "Disease X," he revealed: "Men, women and children with no outward marks of injury are dying daily in hospitals, some after having walked around three or four weeks thinking they have escaped."