First Into Nagasaki (32 page)

His first job after Harvard was as an actor in Max Reinhardt’s theater company in Vienna. Freelancing in Athens, Capri, and Dubrovnik, he wrote two novels (
Not to Eat, Not for Love
and
Clutch and Differential
) that were highly praised but made him little money. Throughout the 1930s he managed to publish both reportage and fiction regularly in
The New Yorker, Story,
the
Nation, Esquire,
and the
Atlantic
while getting a political education in the Balkans as a stringer for the
New York Times.

Barely solvent, once he joined the
Chicago Daily News—
leaving behind a wife and an eight-year-old daughter in the States—he had a nonstop war. From Lisbon to Belgrade to Bucharest he stayed one step ahead of the German army. He wrote the first eyewitness accounts of the airborne invasion of Crete. As the last reporter out of a burning Salonika (he escaped on a Greek fishing boat), he was soon captured by the Nazis in Athens and taken to Vienna and Berlin. Traded for a German journalist held by the Allies, he made his way through Spain and Portugal via Léopoldville (Kinshasa) to Brazzaville, Central Africa. There he did a famous interview with General de Gaulle, who used it to make military overtures to the Americans. After Churchill reacted angrily, de Gaulle scolded Weller for revealing the offer, trying hard but unable to fully deny having made it. (An account may be found in A. J. Liebling’s
The Road Back to Paris.
)

From there he followed the Belgian Congolese Army to the Sudan, where they attacked the Italians in the highlands of western Ethiopia. In Addis Ababa he interviewed Haile Selassie on his recovered throne, learned about the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, and was ordered by his editors to proceed east—via Cairo, Basra, Karachi, Calcutta, Rangoon—to Singapore.

For six weeks he covered the doomed British colony as the Malay Peninsula fell to the Japanese. He got on one of the final boats safely out of Singapore and spent the next weeks covering the collapse of Java, fleeing on the very last boat to escape under heavy strafing and bombardment in March, 1942. (
Time
referred to him as the “much machine-gunned George Weller.”)

On reaching Australia he sent out the first account of the epic Battle of the Java Sea (a disaster for the Allies) and rapidly wrote a now-classic book of war reportage,
Singapore Is Silent.
For the next year and a half, amid bouts of malaria, he covered the struggle for the Pacific islands: the Solomons, New Guinea, Samoa, Tonga, Fiji, the Cooks, the Gilberts, the Society Islands, and Australia. He even trained as a paratrooper, the first correspondent to do so, in order to understand the type of warfare he was writing about. During this time he received a 1943 Pulitzer Prize in foreign reporting for the story of an emergency appendectomy performed by a pharmacist’s mate while on a submarine in enemy waters.

En route back home in late 1943 for leave he wrote
Bases Overseas,
a controversial book proposing a global system of U.S. bases. (“The largest army, the largest navy, and the largest industrial plant in the world: such are the unthinking aims of strategically incurious minds . . . In a country dominated by this cult of production, the
where
of its conflicts are nothing.”) In the States, his divorce took up an unexpected amount of time and he was not able to return to the war until autumn of 1944; he couldn’t help feeling, professionally, that he’d missed the big story, the Allied invasion of Europe.

Hoping to get back to the Pacific and what he later called “the battles of the U.S. Navy versus MacArthur,” he returned the long way round: via Italy, where he was much hampered by British censorship; to the siege of Athens; through Palestine, Cyprus, Lebanon, Iraq, and Iran. In Burma Weller wrote his own analysis of Yalta, a story which MacArthur’s censors blocked because he called it a U.S. defeat by Stalin.

Weller later ran into the same blockade over a story about Corregidor, a Gibraltar in the mouth of Manila Bay. Many American servicemen had been killed or captured bravely trying to defend this U.S. base for six months in 1942. When it was finally taken back by MacArthur’s adroit paratroops in February 1945, thousands of enemy died in the tunnels atop the island. Weller, en route to Tokyo, visited Corregidor soon after Japan agreed to surrender, but ran afoul of a captain stiffly in charge of censorship.

Having seen and described Japanese skulls from Buna to Myitkyina, I saw no harm in mentioning that there was one skull still underfoot in the exploded tunnels of the Rock. “You can’t mention that skull; it would allow the enemy to know we have not been able to bury their dead respectably,” said this unusually deft player. “But there is no enemy,” I said, a little wildly, perhaps. “Japan caved in early this month. Didn’t the news come through channels yet?” The censor, without replying, took a nice easy stance and thudded my Japanese skull into the corner wastebasket.

When Weller outsmarted MacArthur’s restrictions to reach Nagasaki, he had, at age thirty-eight, already witnessed a vast range of bloodshed and destruction. He was also fed up with battling press censorship. The fates of a number of colleagues—correspondents he’d known all over the world for a decade since he began this work—were particularly on his mind at war’s end.

V

Though Weller did not know this at the time, another independent Western journalist beat him into an atomic site: a colleague from the Pacific war, the Australian reporter Wilfred Burchett (1911–1983). Burchett made his way into Hiroshima on September 3. Without U.S. military interference or guidance, he saw what he had to see, and got out. Better, he got the story into London’s
Daily Express.
He succeeded precisely where Weller failed.

And just as Weller would be obsessed for the rest of his life with the three weeks he spent around Nagasaki and the pile of dispatches he wrote but failed to lay before the eyes of the world, Burchett would remain obsessed with the day he spent in Hiroshima, the repercussions of all he saw, and the lone dispatch he did send. In a peculiar way these two reporters, who had earlier crossed paths in New Guinea (and, nearly four decades after the bomb, managed to finally compare notes), are linked to a third, the
New York Times
science reporter William L. Laurence (1888–1977)—whom, I feel it is safe to say, neither regarded as a colleague.

All three are part of a story that may never be fully known: how the U.S. government was determined that the actual nature of the atomic bomb and its radiation not be allowed to explode over the American psyche.

Burchett had covered the war in the Pacific, and written favorably about the B-29 incendiary raids on Japanese cities. Like many journalists, he reached Tokyo two days before the
Missouri
treaty signing. The movements of the Allied press were already meticulously controlled. Determined to get the Hiroshima scoop, Burchett planned a series of feints. A U.S. Navy public relations officer in whom he confided, with no love lost for MacArthur and “delighted at the prospect of a correspondent accredited to the Navy getting into Hiroshima ahead of anyone accredited to the Army,” provided him with a month’s food supply, including beef—impossible to come by. A contact at Japan’s Domei news agency got him a ticket on the 6 a.m. train to Hiroshima, along with a note for their reporter, to accompany the food and plenty of cigarettes.

Very early the next morning, when a U.S. press officer came to wake up Burchett for the treaty signing, the Aussie was groaning on his bed with diarrhea, regrettably indisposed to join the hundreds of other correspondents.

After twenty hours jammed into a train with glowering, demobilized—but eventually drunken and friendly—Japanese soldiers eager to share his cigarettes, Burchett managed to reach Hiroshima late the next night. Though the war was over, he was arrested by station guards. At dawn he showed them his letter of introduction and his portable typewriter, and eventually Bin Nakamura of Domei and a woman translator were brought round. Nakamura agreed to help Burchett, relieved to learn that his own dispatches (the first from the city, for Nakamura had survived the bomb) were getting through. For days he’d been transmitting by Morse code on an apparatus which could send but not receive. Hiroshima was still out of radio and newspaper contact.

Nakamura and the translator took Burchett to one of the few buildings standing, the Fukuoka department store, where the city’s police had set up headquarters. The police debated shooting them all, but decided instead to provide a car and driver so that Burchett, whom they took for an American, could report on “what his people have done to us.” He visited one of the few makeshift hospitals, then sat on a chunk of rubble and typed out the story which the
Daily Express
would headline on September 5 as “The Atomic Plague,” with the subheading “I Write This As a Warning to the World.”

Like Weller, he arrived four weeks to the day since the bomb. Not surprisingly, their descriptions of the doomed in hospital wards are similar. But the estimates Burchett received from the Hiroshima doctors are much higher than Weller’s in Nagasaki: 53,000 dead, 30,000 others missing and presumed dead, with 100 more each day. “People are still dying, mysteriously and horribly—people who were uninjured in the cataclysm from an unknown something which I can only describe as the atomic plague . . . . Hiroshima does not look like a bombed city. It looks as if a monster steamroller has passed over it and squashed it out of existence.”

Like Weller in Nagasaki, he pointed out that Hiroshima’s air-raid warning system had failed (the “all clear” had sounded) and people were not in their shelters when the bomb detonated. Decades later he would describe the attitude he found in the streets as “almost total apathy . . . a state of trauma.”

Nakamura that afternoon transmitted the dispatch to Tokyo, tapping it out “letter by letter on a Morse hand-set.” While Burchett was waiting in the rubble, who should arrive but the same junket of American pressmen, flown directly out of Washington and thus not answerable to MacArthur, who six days later (September 9) would surprise Weller in Nagasaki. Astonished to find an Aussie interloper—having been led all over the world for two months while promised the scoop of the century, learning they’d missed the actual bomb, and now expecting to be the very first reporters into Hiroshima—they were, as Burchett recalled, chagrined.

“‘Who the hell are you?’ asked one of the colonels, eyeing me with distaste bordering on hostility . . . ‘How long have you been here?’” Burchett’s request for a lift was refused, as was his plea that they at least get his article up to his colleague in Tokyo. (One correspondent, Homer Bigart, protested, to no avail.) Burchett does not specify if the colonel’s refusal came after he suggested they go see radiation victims in the hospital.

This junket was more elaborate than Burchett and Weller surmised: a lumbering elephant of newspaper and radio correspondents accompanied by still and newsreel photographers, with an unexpressed purpose. It included reporters from the AP, the United Press, NBC, CBS, ABC, the
New York Times,
and the
New York Herald Tribune.
Summoned to the Pentagon back in July, they were delivered into the hands of a guiding press relations officer, Lieutenant Colonel John “Tex” McCrary of the U.S. Army Air Corps, who promised (as Clark Lee of the International News Service recalled) the chance “to witness and report an earth-shaking event which would change the course of history.” (
What, another?
commented one wag.) Facilities included plush transport on two B-17 Flying Fortresses equipped with desks, lamps, long-range transmitters, and best of all, a CENSORED stamp that hung over McCrary’s desk. “Help yourself, guys,” he told them cheerfully. “You’re the censors on this show.”

The intention, naturally, was to make sure the bomb got portrayed as the U.S. government wished. From Washington they’d been flown to Florida, New York, and London; to Hamburg, Berlin, and Munich for fact-finding views of damaged cities; to Paris and Rome for several days so that (according to Lee) Tex could snuggle his “beautiful and athletic” wife, Jinx Falkenberg, on tour with the USO. Presumably Tex was not privy to the exact date when the bomb would be dropped. From there it was more time-wasting in Cairo and Casablanca while the journalists wondered when they might start satisfying editors back home who were paying their salaries and getting little in return. In Calcutta they read in the papers about their “world-shaking assignment . . . They were to have seen this historic and terrifying explosion—if they had reached Guam on time . . . . [but] love proved stronger than the atom bomb.”

Perhaps. Tex did get his charges into Hiroshima, which was part of the unstated goal of the mission: to report appropriately the bomb’s ability to demolish a city with one strike. Whether or not the junket members realized, a corollary purpose was to make it evident there was no dangerous radiation involved. That might be arguably too much like the use of, say, poison gas.

The junket landed twelve miles away, and drove to Hiroshima in two borrowed cars and a truck. They toured the ruins, walked across tracts so barren it was impossible to locate where streets had run, and spoke to doctors. Yet as Burchett recalled, “To one old acquaintance from some of the island-hopping campaigns, who asked for my impressions, I replied, ‘The real story is in the hospitals.’ He shrugged . . . fog was closing in and they were anxious to get back to their plane and take off while there was still visibility.” They ended up spending the night on the airfield.

A day earlier, in Tokyo, MacArthur had signed the peace treaty that was portrayed as “an unconditional surrender.” It was not; despite Japan’s wars on the Dutch East Indies, the Malay States, the Philippines, China, Korea, and the United States, Emperor Hirohito was allowed to remain in power. MacArthur immediately pronounced all southern Japan, including the atomic sites, off-limits to the press, as was firebombed Tokyo. Reporters would be sequestered in Yokohama, the nearby port. Besides (the brainwashing continued), the pre-atomic bombings had been so efficient that there was no reliable rail or road system southward. All principal bridges were supposedly out; no way to get anywhere. As one MacArthur spokesman flatly explained, “It is not military policy for correspondents to spearhead the occupation.”