GloucesterTimes.com, Gloucester, MA

The longer you can look back, the farther you can look forward." - Winston Churchill

One month after the United States dropped two atomic bombs on Japan, leading to its surrender in World War II, George Weller, a veteran war correspondent, sneaked into the bomb site at Nagasaki to become the first American to witness the devastation wrought by the nuclear attack.

For three weeks, the Pulitzer Prize-winning Weller wrote dispatches recounting the horrifying accounts of Allied prisoners of war who were eyewitnesses to the Nagasaki bombing and had survived years of torture and slave labor in Japanese camps.

He wrote harrowing stories about "Disease X," later determined to be radiation sickness, that killed hundreds in the weeks after the dropping of the atomic bombs.

The dispatches, which provide some of the most vivid and shocking descriptions of the bombings' aftermath, were thrown in the trash by censors for Gen. Douglas MacArthur, who wanted to control the release of information from postwar Japan.

Weller died brokenhearted at the age of 95 in 2002, believing he had lost forever the original blue carbon copies of the dispatches he carried out of Japan and misplaced in the ensuing years.

But months after his death, his son, Anthony Weller of Gloucester, found the decaying remnants of the work he had thought was lost forever. It was in his father's rustic home in Italy - only 20 feet from the man's desk.

Weller later found his father's photographs from Japan in the attic of the family's Gloucester home.

"His stories, had they been published, would have been both a political and a military nightmare," Weller said.

After a year of work to decipher and piece together the reports, Crown Publishers recently released Anthony Weller's 320-page book "First Into Nagasaki" with a foreword by Walter Cronkite, who called the elder Weller "one of our best war correspondents."

The George Weller story begins when the Harvard-educated Bostonian, working for the Chicago Daily News, plotted a way to get to Nagasaki, a place forbidden by MacArthur for journalists to travel.

"Journalists were offered several unimportant northern sites to visit, but my father was not interested in any of them. He ultimately chose to visit a kamikaze base because he saw that there was a nearby railroad line and if he could get to the mainland, he could get to Nagasaki," Weller said.

Dressed in Army fatigues worn by war correspondents, George Weller slipped away from the press junket. He paid a civilian to row him to the southern island of Kyushu, where Nagasaki is located. He took nearly a dozen trains, the only American traveling with thousands of war-weary Japanese civilians returning to Nagasaki.

He arrived on Sept. 6, 1945. When he was brought before the Japanese commander, Maj. Gen. Tanikoetjie, to explain his presence, Weller, then 38 and 6 feet tall, impersonated an American officer.

"He presented himself as Col. Weller. The general asked if he could confirm that. Weller suggested that the general call MacArthur, but also suggested that he should first seriously consider his position. The general simply bowed," Anthony Weller recounted during an interview at his Annisquam home.



A mosaic of stories



The new book is more than just the story of Nagasaki and nuclear weapons. It tells the tale of the POW camps and the "hellship voyage" of which some accounts were known though not in the detail of Weller's saga. The stories are almost unbelievable, like the one about the crazed Japanese commander who had a passion for American baseball. Instead of torture or beatings, the Japanese lieutenant pulled POWs, riddled with dysentery and flesh-eating ulcers, from their hospital beds to play baseball from dawn to dusk while the others worked in the coal mines as slave laborers.

James Bashleben, 89, of Arlington Heights, Ill., was one of those POWs in a camp across the bay from Nagasaki. Weighing 215 pounds before the war, he weighed 109 pounds at the war's end. Bashleben remembered George Weller well and how he marched right into the POW camp commander's office.

"He was the first person who came into our camp and that's when we found out the war was over and about the atomic bomb," Bashleben said in a telephone interview last week.

Bashleben was at work underground in a coal mine when the bomb exploded over Nagasaki on Aug. 9, 1945.

"The fellows above ground saw the bomb. We thought the (Japanese) had all their ammunition in one pile and (the Allies) hit it," he recalled. "It was strange because for all these years that we were prisoners and all the things we went through, we thought when the war was over that we'd take it out on them."

But when Weller came out of the office accompanied by the Japanese officer and interpreter, the POWs only listened.

"They had a big wooden table that they got up on and the camp commander through the interpreter said the war was over and there was a surrender in which they laid out their arms in favor of a great nation," Bashleben said. "We were lined up on one side of the table and the Japanese on the other side. But we just stood there stunned. There was no physical reaction toward them at that point."

George Weller, who covered wars for more than half a century on five continents, served as a model for the next generation of reporters.

"He was an icon of that generation of foreign correspondents that I was just getting to know and many who I later got to know in Vietnam," said Kevin Buckley, who covered Vietnam for Newsweek magazine from 1968 to 1972. "He was a famous foreign correspondent with an outstanding reputation for being intrepid, tireless and smart. He knew things. He was well-informed and that was George's reputation. As the book shows, George was independent of the kind of herd mentality that affects so many of our colleagues, especially with large stories."

Lost and found

Anthony Weller knew that his father believed the dispatches he filed about Nagasaki existed even though they went astray.

"It broke his heart that he didn't find them," Weller said. But their discovery was due to a practical matter when he needed to repair his late father's house in Italy and clean out some rooms prior to the work being done.

"There were tantalizing trunks in the basement full of papers from places like Syria, Paraguay and China. I kept thinking they're in here. But they weren't and I was beginning to give up hope," the son said.

Then he began rummaging in his father's office.

He let out a yelp when he uncovered the fragile documents in one of the last piles to be removed from the office.

"I was looking at chaos that I knew was historically important," he said.

But the full story of his father's reporting unfolded only after the dispatches were decoded and deciphered from the shorthand-like writing style in which they were originally sent. Far more information was contained in the elder Weller's work than either his son or the book publisher anticipated. For the first time, the story now will reach the American audience for which it was intended.

The complete story of the horrors aboard a Japanese prison ship appears in a chapter titled "The Death Cruise. Seven Weeks in Hell."

The chapter describes how 1,600 American POWs, who survived three years in a Philippine prison camp, were reduced to 300 while traveling in an unmarked merchant ship to Japan.

The first to die were those who suffocated when crushed into a hold so tight only those in the front had enough air to breathe. The story becomes darker with men dying from starvation and friendly fire from an Allied submarine whose crew did not know the ship contained the POWs. There are stories of insanity, cannibalism and even vampirism.

While writing the book, Anthony Weller became tapped into a network of POWs who met his father.

"I heard from an 85-year-old man who remembered my dad coming into the camp and I had just read about this man's torture as a POW and he didn't know that I knew. It was very poignant," Weller said.

Weller, an author and musician, initially tried to interest magazine editors in the story, but to no avail.

A Japanese scoop

Sumire Kunieda of Tokyo's Mainichi newspaper first broke the story of Weller's discovery of his father's dispatches in June 2005. She later won the Vaughn-Ueda International Journalist Prize.

The Tokyo newspaper was preparing a series of stories for the 60th anniversary of the atomic bombings. Kunieda, based in Los Angeles, had heard about the missing Weller papers and followed up on the story.

"No one really expected them to materialize. When I called (Anthony Weller) I didn't expect to hear that he found the dispatches," she said in an interview from California.

She arrived on Weller's doorstep within 24 hours asking for an interview.

Japanese readers were eager to read the Mainichi stories, Kunieda said.

"The atomic bomb is a touchy issue in some ways for both countries. On both sides, there was a blackout and censorship, which killed all stories and prohibited Japanese newspapers from covering anything related to the A-bomb," she said. "I think the most astonishing aspect of Anthony Weller's book is that it is revealing of the consequences of censorship and war propaganda. These lessons are still important today. If we as reporters didn't record the history as an eyewitness, the information would be gone forever and people wouldn't know the reality of that time, or worse, some people may deny it happened."

After Kunieda's story was published, the news broke around the globe and Anthony Weller was besieged with interview requests by international news organizations. He then began choosing a publisher, many of whom were already calling Weller's agent.

A few days ago, Weller sealed a deal with Mainichi to publish the book in Japanese.