'First Into Nagasaki' unearths once-censored eyewitness accounts

One 38-year-old American war correspondent, Pulitzer Prize winner George Weller, violated the blackout, becoming the first Western reporter to witness the devastation on the ground . Weller, impersonating a colonel, sneaked into Nagasaki and brazenly demanded the help of Japanese military authorities in writing a report about the bombing. "Colonel" Weller interviewed eyewitnesses, survivors, doctors, and imprisoned Allied POWs and wrote a brilliant series of reports about the decimated city. Alas, when he sought to get these dispatches printed in American newspapers, including his own Chicago Daily News, American military censors stepped in and had them all suppressed.

Weller's Nagasaki dispatches wouldn't be discovered until after his death, in 2002 , and they are reproduced here, as edited by his son Anthony, for the first time. These exceptionally important eyewitness accounts, collected and organized by a tireless war reporter dedicated to making the horrible truth known to the American public, describe the fateful moment of atomic impact. An American POW imprisoned near Nagasaki, Captain John Farley of New Mexico, told Weller, "I saw a terrific flash. It was white and glaring. . . . Light was projected upward as well as downward, something like the aurora borealis." Farley then described the mushroom cloud, the intense heat, and the resulting destruction. A British POW who also witnessed the bomb dropping described "a ball of fire giving off white smoke in the sky, and suddenly bursting out in all directions."

Weller visited Nagasaki's overcrowded hospitals, brimming with scenes of death and suffering worthy of the nightmarish imagination of Hieronymus Bosch . Weller describes one hospitalized Nagasaki woman who "lies moaning, with a blackish mouth stiff as though with lockjaw, and unable to utter clear words. Her exposed arms and legs are speckled with tiny red spots in patches." Weller notes that 70 percent of the deaths were from burns, but many other victims suffered from something Japanese doctors dubbed "Disease X," later known as radiation poisoning.