Enlightening- It certainly changed my understanding of WW II | First Into Nagasaki: The Censored Eyewitness...

A Stiff But Important Read | First Into Nagasaki: The Censored Eyewitness Dispatches on Post-Atomic Japan and Its Prisoners of War | George Weller, Anthony Weller

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	• First Into Nagasaki: The Censored Eyewitness Dispatches on Post-Atomic Japan and Its Prisoners of War George Weller, Anthony Weller Crown, 2006 - 336 pages average customer review:based on 15 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

Uncover the truth of MacArthur's post-war Japan.

Mr Weller's journey was remarkable in that so little is known about the witnesses and survivors of the atom bombs. His courage and determination to thwart MacArthur's press restrictions should be praised and followed as a journalistic template in the 21st century, in Iraq or anywhere secrecy is used to gag to blind the public to the consequences of our actions.

The striking conditions of the POW camps where prisoners were human shields and disposable slave labor is appaling. In Nagasaki the idea that "thick soled shoes" will block gamma rays and his skepticism of Japanese doctors and authorities, even the victims of the mysterious "sickness", is therefore obvious. Heinous war bred
numbing crimes on both sides.

My father arrived in Nagaskai harbor in September '45. He still refuses to discuss what he witnessed(as did Cindy Franks father in "My Father's Secret War")except for his recollections of resistance to the occupation by
the Black Dragon Society and the huge toll lost in disarming the minefields of the Sea of Japan. This book has
contributed to my understanding of and appreciation/discomfort in the use of the atom bombs. I probably wouldn't exist as Dad was part of the Navy's first wave of the proposed invasion.

Finding out about post-war Japan is like scything through a glacier, thank you Weller family for the clear light.

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Enlightening- It certainly changed my understanding of WW II

This book provides great first-person insight into the following:
-how were Allied prisoners treated by the Japanese in route to Japan and in the Japanese prison camps?
-what were the effects of the Nagasaki bomb on humans and on Nagasaki?
-what did survivors that were near the explosion see and experience?
-how did the Japanese people view the use of the atomic bomb immediately after it's use?
-what was/was not censored about WW II?

I often lose interest in a book and don't finish it (A.D.D. I suppose) but I read this book front to back. It's certain to alter your understanding of this topic.

Maybe it was good that this material was lost for so long and only now published. I think it enlightens those of us doing some soul-searching about the use of the atomic bombs on Japan by the United States; more so than if it were published 60 years ago. Read it and form your own opinions.

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A Stiff But Important Read

In the foreword, Walter Cronkite says: "This is an important book -- important and gripping." Somehow, categorizing a book as "important" has always struck me as a rather weak recommendation ... until now.

A gentleman I have known for years has told me often of his brother, a prisoner of the Japanese, beaten repeatedly in the coal mines of Japan. In fact, almost 50 years later, he lost a kidney as a direct result of those assaults. This book illustrates that I did not have even the foggiest idea until now of the intensity of base brutality in the coal mines of Baron Mitsui.

Although a better title may have been "The Censored Dispatches" or something similar, that takes absolutely nothing away from the power of this book. As a published historian, I have learned that there is no substitute for the firtshand account of someone who was actually there, and the immediacy of these dispatches, feverishly written over a few weeks, have the unmistakeable ring of on-the-spot authenticity as told by a skilled observer.

This is strong stuff, disturbing and hard to read. I found that setting the book aside from time to time helped me to be better able to stop and ponder the ramifications of these distant events in our days ...

* Is cansorship right or wrong? And who decides?
* When is harsh brutality right (whether in person or by a remote weapon)?
* When (if ever) is it right to make a "deal with the devil" for "the greater good" (such as leaving some wrongdoers go unpunished so that they might share their research or help the Allied cause -- i.e., Baron Mitsui died wealthy and at a comfortable old age)
* What other important things are we ignorant of because they were censored?
* How can we learn from the horrors of the past in our history-poor present?

This book is highly recommended as a window into an almost forgotten chapter of the past, one that we cannot afford to forget or ignore.

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Required reading

I was 13 at the time the Nagasaki bomb was detonated and have always wondered about it all. Even when I was in USAF Pilot Training classes 10 years later,the Classified training which covered these weapons was mostly "How it Works" but nothing memorable about what it does to humans or structures. Now 40 some years later I have a first hand account from someone who was there shortly after and talked to survivors.

A disturbing but beneficial bonus is the accounts of the Allied POW's tribulations while in Japanese hands. Those were awful times, at best.

And last but not least, the accounts of censorship during that time are eye-opening.

Highly recommended, especially to the historically deficit younger generations.

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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.

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