First Into Nagasaki (36 page)

All Weller’s dispatches have been “expanded” from a ready-for-telegram language which reporters of the day were accustomed to writing in directly. Due to the costs of sending stories from around the world back home—rates were calculated by the word—this compressed “cablese” removed all obvious words. Numbers, acronyms, and punctuations were spelled out.

I have worked from my father’s blue-ink carbon copies, typed on one side of each long, double-spaced page—smudged and often highly mildewed or even crumbling. The originals went to the Tokyo censors and disappeared.

Fortunately each dispatch was dated by the correspondent. Since it was obvious at the receiving end what year and month the article was written in, the more telling detail (especially in war) was at what hour a reporter actually was typing—meaning how up-to-date his information was, since a dispatch might sit in a cable office for days awaiting transmission. For example, in 1942 the entire (Allied) South Pacific only had two working cable routes, and one was the slow way around Africa; reporters nominally based in Australia while covering the war on New Guinea might queue up behind a logjam of four hundred coded government messages.

At the top of each dispatch Weller provided a number—say, 62300—which indicates (if one knows the month already) the sixth of September, at 2300 hours. Similarly, 100200 means the tenth of the month, at 2 a.m. In this way I have been able to order the stories accurately and reconstruct Weller’s movements around Kyushu.

To illustrate, here is the beginning of the eighth dispatch as typed in its original version, written at 1 a.m. on the morning of September 9:

press collect via rca

chicagonews newyork

nagasaki 90100 article to follow nagasakis hospitals stop atomic bombs peculiar quote disease unquote comma uncured because untreated and untreated because undiagnosed comma is still snatching away lives here stop men women children with no outward marks injury are dying daily in hospitals some after having walked around three or four weeks minimum thinking theyve escaped stop doctors here have every modern medicament but candidly confessed in talking to writer dash first allied observer reach nagasaki since surrender undash that answer to malady is beyond them stop their patients though skins whole are simply passing away under their eyes paragraph

This becomes:

The atomic bomb’s peculiar “disease,” uncured because it is untreated and untreated because it is undiagnosed, is still snatching away lives here. Men, women and children with no outward marks of injury are dying daily in hospitals, some after having walked around for three or four weeks thinking they have escaped. The doctors here have every modern medicament, but candidly confessed in talking to the writer—the first Allied observer to reach Nagasaki since the surrender—that the answer to the malady is beyond them. Their patients, though their skins are whole, are simply passing away under their eyes.

The Nagasaki dispatches, dated September 6–9, and the later ones dated September 20–25, are entirely intact and have not been trimmed in any way. I’m convinced Weller attempted to send other articles during those first few days; in “First into Nagasaki” he mentions (as does Harrison in his notes) examining a hillside outside the city where the most expensive Mitsubishi machinery was hidden, yet curiously there is no resulting dispatch.

From Harrison’s notes, written on September 8 as an official report, I’ve been able to answer several lingering questions about the entire journey. (The notes judiciously do not mention Weller’s impersonation of a colonel.) Harrison is more forthcoming about the general’s hospitality than Weller: “We were given a large beautiful home overlooking the bay where we had the entire house at our disposal plus servants who prepared our food, baths and sleeping accommodations. We bathed with buckets of hot and cold water. For supper we were served hot
sake
wine, lobster, soy beans and seaweed, whale meat, beef, rice and biscuits. We were hungry.”

On that second day (September 7) they made an extensive tour by car of the area damaged by the bomb—the ruined Mitsubishi factories that had produced steel fittings, ship parts, and electrical engines. At the one building not knocked down, the concrete Mitsubishi headquarters, they found former employees sitting around and, in one room, a line of boxes, each five inches square, containing the ashes of unknown dead. The employees encouraged Weller to photograph this altar. After visiting two POW camps as described in the dispatches, they found an American radio operator (mentioned above) whose B-29, carrying POW supplies, had crashed a few days earlier. He was the sole survivor, but could remember nothing and believed he was still on Saipan. He had not yet been told that his crewmates were dead.

The morning of September 8 they were found by the two American doctors who had come down from Camp #3—survivors of the Bataan death march of 1942 to Camp O’Donnell, in the Philippines. These doctors confirmed that no one, neither prisoners nor Japanese camp officials, knew for certain where all the Allied POW camps were on Kyushu, or how many men were in them. Harrison suggests that Weller’s intention from the very start was to visit these unopened POW camps to the north after he saw Nagasaki. Though in his 1966 essay he was dismissive of all the unpolitical, look-Mom-I’m-free stories, he seems to have been aware that these prisoners would have seen both atomic bombs go off, and have dramatic sagas of their own.

For the entire afternoon until early evening they visited the civilian hospital, accompanied by the Dutch doctor who’d been a POW. “We visited two hospitals, interviewed a battery of civilian and military doctors and a professor at the local medical college.” That evening Harrison was asked by a Japanese his own impressions of the hospitals. “It had been hard to see,” he recounts, “but neither Weller nor I nor the Dutchman who went with us to the hospitals could feel remorse.”

The suggestion is that Harrison left Nagasaki on September 9 by train to somewhere where he could get a lift to Tokyo by military plane. Weller stuck around, ran into the press junket, and proceeded north to the prison camps at Omuta on September 10. My guess is that he got one of the general’s men to drive him up there and await his first dispatches, to carry onward to Tokyo. I also suspect that Weller wrote at length, in a now-lost dispatch, about the U.S. prisoners who survived in proximity to the blast, since he referred to this paradox so repeatedly for the next half century. From Chungking, China, perhaps late in 1945 or early in 1946, he wrote an article entitled “Bringing to Earth the Atomic Bomb,” published in October 1946 as “Atom-Bomb Myth Exploded” in a small magazine called
Progress Guide—
a would-be
Reader’s Digest,
apparently. (This implies that better markets turned the piece down.) It appears to echo material from that early dispatch which must have gone astray, concerning a prison camp right in Nagasaki:

At the end of a long line of iron girders of the several Mitsubishi factories in Nagasaki, pushed over at an angle as though with a great foot, there are the remains of an Allied prison camp. A prison camp under the bomb? Yes. And you see the severed water pipes—among the big copper vats of the food kitchen—still giving out pathetic upward streams from the earth, like clams on an alarmed sand flat.

     The Allied prisoners were not in their shelters. But were they all killed? They were not. Of about 200, only
four
were killed outright and four died later. Only about 40 were wounded, and all recovered with little more than simple first aid.

     The camp was ruined. Yet some men were out in the open, even, and were not killed. Some wore white garments. The light color threw off the gamma rays that killed so many people, and they were unharmed.

     Look at the signposts by the camp. One across the street that bore thin white letters on a thick blue background was burned till it looks like a piece of bacon. Another over here, black letters on a white background, has no mark that it was ever touched by the blast.

     Discount many of the deaths by the fact that the people were outdoors, open and vulnerable. Discount some more by the fact that many died of thermal burns, plain heat burns, not due to the heat of the bomb but to being caught in the odd fires afterward. The heat of the bomb, of course, killed many.

     I obtained the first anatomical reports of the effects of the gamma ray from two shivering doctors in the municipal hospital, with its floors covered with despairing family circles of the unmutilated but doomed. The gamma ray, one of the X-ray family, kills in three ways, all horrible.

     It reduces the red corpuscles. It reduces the white corpuscles. And last and most serious, it reduces the platelets: the precious small elements that give the blood its power of clotting.

     Reducing the reds means anemia. Reducing the whites means taking away the capacity to fight disease, for these are the disease-hunters. But reducing the platelets means that you die from a slight constriction of the throat, with just a few pimples on your legs. You die and they cut you open and your intestine is thick-choked with blood.

     All this is very terrible, especially because the long, bony hand can reach out many days after the explosion and summon you by the shoulder. You can walk around perfectly normally for a month, and then you get the touch that means you have been tapped for death.

     How could you have avoided this? Very simply. At a great enough distance, two miles or so, white clothing will beat back the gamma. Stand beside a wall; have any masonry between you and the bomb; and you are as safe as underground.

     In the
shadow
of the gamma there is safety, not death.

Nagasaki is, of course, the neglected bomb, the one less written about; the name itself is not so charged as
Hiroshima.
Yet in several ways it is the more controversial bombing, and some historians who do not question the necessity of bombing the first question bombing the second. At the same time it seems far more fitting as a primary target, since the city was devoted to weapons manufacture; a great deal of Japan’s armaments were made here. The original plan had been for a gap between the bombs of five days, not three—the second was to have been dropped on August 11—but a forecast of bad weather for the week to come pushed the schedule forward, not back.

Meanwhile there were conflicting reports in the Japanese hierarchy. A prominent physicist who reached Hiroshima on August 8, having failed to fly down a day earlier, reported back that evening to the prime minister in Tokyo that it had been, indeed, an atomic bomb, with a force of twenty thousand tons of TNT. He overestimated; it was probably about three-quarters that. He was awestruck and horrified, but he was also contradicted by a patriotic field marshal who had survived the bomb in his nearby headquarters and let his superiors know that it was “not that powerful a weapon.”

During the day of August 8 the Soviet Union declared war against Japan, and during the night hurled a million and a half troops into Manchuria (now northeast China) against Japanese occupying forces, the Kwantung Army, which numbered close to 2 million. This tremendously powerful blitzkrieg meant Japan’s loss of a region rich in much-needed raw materials as well as their grip on every crucial city. It was underreported at the time, because of Hiroshima.

At around 11 a.m. on August 9, Nagasaki received its bomb, armed with man-made plutonium 239 and known as “Fat Man” to the B-29 crew.

It is problematic to calculate deaths in either nuclear site precisely, especially those from radiation over the decades. The immediate death toll in Nagasaki was perhaps around forty thousand, the total possibly about seventy thousand. (Different figures in both directions are available, depending on one’s source.) Nagasaki was not harmed as extensively as Hiroshima, largely due to topography. The death toll was lower by between a third and a half; parts of the city survived relatively intact.

Weller described it years later as “scorched and subdued but far from dead . . . there was a feeling of emptiness: streets empty of cars, sky empty of airplanes, a harbor empty of boats except one beached, slowly-burning junk that sent a mourning veil of black over the blackened docks and flattened warehouses. There were a few bicycles but generally it was a city of slow pedestrians, stunned and thoughtful . . . I climbed the hill, passing the unharmed homes of the well-to-do. As the panorama unfolded I could see the long black skeleton of the Mitsubishi aircraft and shipbuilding plant and the fields of ashes near it.” This is a long way from Burchett’s description of Hiroshima as a wasteland completely pulverized into dust and rubble.

Bureaucratically, once Truman ordered the first attack, the second was also put in motion. Kokura, with an army base—“a smaller city of greater military importance” according to Weller—was the preferred target on the morning of August 9, but it was covered with clouds. Thus Nagasaki experienced the plutonium bomb, developed at a specific extra cost of about $400 million.

No brief essay is the proper place to go into the peculiar psychology behind the manufacture and first use of an experimental weapon, which acquires increasing gravitational torque with time, especially during a costly war that has gone on for years and after a peace has already been made with one of two enemies (thereby inviting scrutiny from freshly budget-minded politicians). Whether one argues that it was right or wrong to drop the atomic bomb once, or twice, or at all, it is impossible on reading the history of the Manhattan Project not to conclude that short of an unexpected surrender from Japan, it was inevitable that it would be dropped.

Some have seen the Nagasaki bomb, politically, as the actual end of World War II; others as the commencement of an America-led Pax Atomica; still others (noting the timing with the USSR’s entry into the war with Japan) as the start of the Cold War. Although Truman’s secret news blackout may have done little specifically to sway any long-term discussion about the bomb, it had its desired effect. After Bill Lawrence, for example, no
New York Times
reporter visited Hiroshima for another five months.