What do You think about First Into Nagasaki: The Censored Eyewitness Dispatches On Post-Atomic Japan And Its Prisoners Of War (2015)?
An amazing book to read (or listen to - I would recommend listening). There are several books mixed into one here since the genesis is censored and then lost reports of George Weller from Japan after World War II. The immediacy of the war that comes from news reports is very different from even the best historical reports of the war. Emotions are raw and events just happened so there is no healing time or historical context. It was an important book for me to read since my only experience with the war for US soldiers is from afar; I have more contemporary accounts of the bomb from a Japanese point of view but none from the US soldier view.
—Diane
A classic bit of reporting from World War II, the original dispatches of which were destroyed by General MacArthur's censors in Tokyo, George Weller snuck into Nagasaki in September, 1945 to record the bomb damage and aftermath and get eyewitness testimony to the second atomic bomb blast. Although later casualty reports were exaggerated, the real thing was horrible enough. The carbon copies of these dispatches were only discovered by Weller's son among his personal papers in 2005, and were never published during Weller's lifetime. He did write a short, truncated version of the events in 1966, and they are also included in this book.
—David Bales
George Weller was the first Western journalist to go to Nagasaki, only a month after the atomic bomb was dropped and the war in the Pacific ended. This book is a collection of pieces he did based on that visit, and his time spent with American and British soldiers previously held in Japanese prison camps. Weller was a correspondent for an American paper, but though the war was over, news articles from Japan were still censored; none of Weller's copy, sent faithfully back to Tokyo, was ever released in to the press.My mental rating of this book went up and down while I was reading it, and as I went on, I had to attribute that to both my current place in history, and the structure of the book, rather than the contents. This book is divided into four sections: Weller's observations of Nagasaki after the bomb, his conversations with POWs held in the Nagasaki area, the transcript of a diary kept by one of two American soldiers who hid on Wake Island in the first days of WWII and evaded Japanese capture for a time, and his piece on the Death Cruise, one of the last and worst transports of POWs transferred into Japan for captivity.The first section of the book is Weller's description of post-bomb Nagasaki, and of the Disease X which killed people a week or a month after the bomb itself. At the time, this was a shocking story, and the primary source of the censorship of Weller - the US military was denying that there was any 'atomic' effect of the bomb, and the description of Disease X flew in the face of those assertions. For me, this was the section of the book which suffered both from my knowledge, and my ignorance. We now know the dangers of radiation sickness, and the impact of the bombing that Weller could not have seen at the time - he of course underplays it - and the fact that this information is scandalous for the time, seems naive now. On the other hand, Weller's discounting of the significance of the bomb, placing it in the context of the firebombing of Tokyo and other Japanese cities, which produced incredible death and devastation, makes him sound like an apologist. It wasn't that bad, not many people died - this tone was jarring to me because I did not really know the context, and it's difficult to read it without our 60 years of hindsight - however, it's firsthand testimony which is both well written, and of historical value.The fourth section is the Death Cruise, and this is where the book hits its stride. The incredible brutality that the Japanese showed to their prisoners has largely been overshadowed in the West by the Nazi deathcamps, and unlike in Germany, where self-acknowledgement of the Nazi crimes has been enmeshed in the culture, Japan has only reluctantly and recently admitted responsibility for the atrocities committed by them during WWII. The Death Cruise was one of many 'hellship' transports, where soldiers captured in the early days of the war were brought from across the Pacific, back to Japan for internment. One thousand, six hundred men got on the transport ship; seven weeks later, three hundred survived to be imprisoned. Weller interviewed many of the survivors, and patched their stories together into a terrifying narrative of brutality, starvation, and deprivation. Among them are bright sparks - soldiers who worked to keep other calm, to keep up morale, to collect scraps and water for the weakest. However, most of this story is dark, and Weller doesn't shy from details. Men going mad in crammed ship holds; friends taking clothes from the dying; finally, the complete and utter lack of compassion shown by the survivors to the suffering. And through it all, beatings, torture, and humiliation from the Japanese captors, who seemed to see the weakness of their charges as the moral justification for treating them as things without worth. Weller captures this aspect of the War in the Pacific without flinching, and it's a revelation for the reader unfamiliar with this portion of history.The middle two sections of the book consist of snippets of POW observations of the Nagasaki bombing, the brutal treatment by the Japanese of the POW workers in the mines of Nagasaki, and the Wake Island survivors. In part, Weller covers this as a reporter wanting to send bulk material home which can be parted out and reprinted in papers around the country - snippets from a 'local boy' for regional use. As such they are often repetitive stories of Japanese abuse - interesting, but not really meant to be read as a piece. The Wake Island section is interesting historically, but mainly for the increasing desperation of these two, hiding from the Japanese in the first few weeks of the war, as they wait for Uncle Sam to come rescue them. Not knowing of the crushing attack on the Pacific Fleet at Pearl Harbor, these two waited in vain for a rescue which did not come.Overall, this book is a fascinating picture of the American experience on the Pacific. It's less about Nagasaki, than how the Americans and Japanese viewed, treated and justified that treatment of each other, both in the opening days of the war, and the closing.
—Laura Gurrin
