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Title details for First into Nagasaki by George Weller - Available

First into Nagasaki

The Censored Eyewitness Dispatches on Post-Atomic Japan and Its Prisoners of War

by George Weller
Anthony Weller
Audiobook
1 of 3 copies available
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1 of 3 copies available

On September 6, 1945, less than a month after the atomic bomb was dropped on Nagasaki, George Weller, a Pulitzer Prize–winning reporter, became the first free Westerner to enter the devastated city. Going into hospitals and consulting doctors of the bomb's victims, he was the first to document its unprecedented medical effects. He also became the first to enter the Allied POW camps, which rivaled Nazi camps for cruelty and bested them for death count. Among the prisoners' untold stories was of their voyage to imprisonment in Japan on "hellships" that transported them so inhumanely that one third of them died in transit.

Heavily censored by General MacArthur, most of these dispatches were never published and believed lost—until now. This historic body of work is a stirring reminder of the courage of rogue reporting that ferrets out the truth.

  • Creators

  • Publisher

  • Release date

    January 1, 2006

  • Formats

    • OverDrive Listen audiobook

      • ISBN: 9781483050560
      • File size: 335843 KB
      • Duration: 11:39:40

  • Languages

    • English

  • Reviews

    • AudioFile Magazine
      The suffering and death of American prisoners held by the Japanese during WWII fill what may be the most depressing audiobook yet published. George Weller, the first American reporter to enter Nagasaki after the atomic bomb exploded there, wrote reports of the terrible aftermath, including personal histories of captive American servicemen. Stefan Rudniki's deep, resonant voice aptly imitates the British accents and the accented English spoken by the Japanese. He sets apart the words of many soldiers expressed in brief paragraphs by making the narration sound more stilted than his own. Multiple narrators, however, would have better differentiated among the author's words, GIs' memories, the forward by Walter Cronkite, and long additions by the editor--the author's son. J.A.H. (c) AudioFile 2007, Portland, Maine
    • Publisher's Weekly

      October 9, 2006
      George Weller, a Pulitzer Prize– winning war correspondent for the Chicago Daily News
      , entered Nagasaki on September 6, 1945, four weeks after the atomic blast leveled the city. The first Westerner to tour the city's ruins, he talked with doctors at the makeshift hospitals and scoured the countryside in search of the POW camps scattered across southern Japan over several weeks. His eyewitness dispatches were intercepted and buried, however, by Gen. Douglas MacArthur's censors. Weller saved his carbons, but they disappeared in the hectic months after the war and remained lost for 60 years, until rediscovered after his death by his son Anthony, himself a journalist and a novelist (The Garden of the Peacocks
      ). Weller's dispatches from Nagasaki are riveting even at this late date, though they are only a small part of the book. His extensive interviews with POWs mostly reinforce what we already know about their brutal treatment. The book also offers an account of one of the so-called "death ships" that carried POWs from the Philippines to Japan, and a 1966 essay on Weller's experiences in Nagasaki. On balance, Weller's dispatches are a welcome addition to the historical record.

    • Publisher's Weekly

      Starred review from February 26, 2007
      Rudnicki reads Weller's reports of life in the ravaged city of Nagasaki in the final moments of World War II with a quiet authority—one perfectly suitable for the veteran journalist's forceful, never-before-published testimony of the atomic bomb and its terrible destruction. Traveling through a defeated, battered Japan, Weller's dispatches—originally censored by Gen. Douglas MacArthur—reveal the results of a war of ceaseless brutality and its seemingly inevitable atomic finale. Weller meets ordinary Japanese brutalized by the war and explores a country only just emerging from its worst moments. Rudnicki carefully assesses each of Weller's words (collected by his son), preserving their gravity and their well-measured, colorful authority. His reading gives a punch and immediacy to Weller's solidly constructed first-person reports on the horrors of war. The result forcefully documents a superb war correspondent's eyewitness testimony. Simultaneous release with the Crown hardcover (Reviews, Oct. 9).

Formats

  • OverDrive Listen audiobook

subjects

Languages

  • English

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