First Into Nagasaki (21 page)

Still inseparable, Scotty and Fred were taken in September 1942 to Sasebo camp, where 53 Americans out of 265 from Wake died in eighteen months of hard labor and starvation, with many cases of pneumonia and beating. They survived, and were found in Camp #23 in central Kyushu by this
Chicago Daily News
correspondent accompanying prisoner recovery teams.

VI

The Death Cruise: Seven Weeks in Hell

(September–October 1945)

Immobilized, having abandoned Nagasaki, still under the control of MacArthur’s censors, Weller left by Navy ship for Okinawa, Saipan, and Guam, which he reached around Octo ber 20. En route he seems to have devoted most of his time to drawing up an eyewitness narrative of the 1944–1945 Death Cruise—one of the last and very worst of the two-hundred-plus Japanese “hellship” voyages—that bore some of the U.S. prisoners he had just interviewed to POW camps on Kyushu. This unique historical account was sent to the
Chicago Daily News
from Guam, where Weller was now accredited to Admiral Nimitz, and soon appeared in the newspaper, heavily sanitized, and in San Francisco, St. Louis, and else where. It has never appeared complete until now.

Railroad tracks at the city’s heart (p. 30). In the distance (
center
) is the Medical Institute Hospital, 700 meters south of where the bomb exploded. Nagasaki, September 7, 1945.

One of two
torii
(gates) still standing after their shrine was destroyed, 700 meters south of the atomic blast. The Medical Institute Hospital is in the backgound. Nagasaki, September 7, 1945.

The exact “hypocenter” beneath where the bomb burst; the district is Matsuyama-cho. The Catholic cathedral is in the background (p. 37). Nagasaki, September 7, 1945.

The Medical Institute Hospital, (p. 31), 700 meters south of the bomb hypocenter. In the distance (
center
) is a prison; on the hill (
right
) a medical school. Nagasaki, September 7, 1945.

Passersby covering their noses from the lingering stench of the dead near the demolished Nagasaki Steel Company, approximately 700 meters from the blast. Nagasaki, September 7, 1945.

Presumably a Mitsubishi factory. Nagasaki, September 7, 1945.

A Mitsubishi weapons complex about 500 meters from the blast, destroyed except for two concrete walls. In the background is a middle school. This man may be Weller’s interpreter. Nagasaki, September 7, 1945.

In the concrete Mitsubishi headquarters, surviving employees set up an altar of little boxes containing the ashes of unknown colleagues. (p. 280) Nagasaki, September 7, 1945.

Just-liberated Allied prisoners, probably U.S. servicemen. Camp #17, Omuta, September 11 or 12, 1945.

POW Sgt. Wallace Timmons of Chicago, presumably nicknamed “Tim” (see p. 50). Camp #17, September 11 or 12, 1945.

Sleeping just-liberated prisoners. Camp #17, September 11 or 12,1945.