First Into Nagasaki (35 page)

     This curious situation of the vanquished announcing the details of a coming surrender which the victor grimly refuses either to confirm or to deny can be considered typical of the Pacific situation today. Whereas in Germany, British, American and Russian armies did their occupying first and their talking afterward, Japan seems to be—at least in the eye of MacArthur’s headquarters—just as much a problem in logistics and military secrecy after the “unconditional” surrender as before.

     In some senses, this attitude of supersecrecy is undoubtedly justified. Never conquered before in her history, Japan is still a land of the unpredictable. But the paradox has arisen that while MacArthur’s planners have been forced to put most details of the forthcoming occupation in Japanese hands in order to insure their success, they cannot—for reasons which may well be good and sufficient—reveal them publicly.

     Meantime, without hindrance or even rebuke, Japanese Radio continues broadcasting to the world that the first American party will land by plane at Atsuki Airdrome on the west side of Yokohama next Sunday, and that the main naval landing will occur on Tuesday at Yokosuka. Because—by reason of many imponderables—responsibility for security has shifted to the Japanese, the initiative for announcements is also theirs, causing some observers here to inquire: “Say, who’s surrendering here, anyway?”

[
The rest of the dispatch is missing.
]

Defying a censorship, even through timing, could damage a reporter. In the 1966 memoir “First into Nagasaki,” which opens this book, Weller writes: “At least I was not busted by my organization for bucking the system, like dour, funny Ed Kennedy, who was too early for Eisenhower with the signing of the armistice. Ed, who had covered the fall of Greece with me, had set up communications that were too good.”

Kennedy, the Associated Press bureau chief in Paris, had—along with all the other reporters present at Germany’s surrender to the United States on May 7—promised Eisenhower he would wait until the Germans also surrendered to the Russians before he broke the news. Once the peace was broadcast to the German people at large, however, Kennedy figured any agreements were off, and he went ahead and broke the story to America via the AP. Kennedy stirred up the ire of his colleagues, lost his credentials, was sent home in professional disgrace, and wasn’t reaccredited by Eisenhower until 1947.

This wasn’t Kennedy’s first scrap; Weller had met up with him in 1941 in Egypt, “his Buster Keaton visage . . . concealing an expert newspaperman . . . Once, a year earlier, he had dressed himself up as an Arab and picketed a leading Cairo hotel, telling all questioners with sad nobility: ‘I am picketing this hotel in protest against the British censorship.’”

Part of Weller’s higher education had come in 1942 at Singapore, as one of the final correspondents to escape the island colony, which was being futilely portrayed by British information officers as impregnable long after Japanese characters were writ large, in blood, on the bomb-shattered walls. In
Singapore Is Silent
(1943) Weller devotes an entire chapter to censorship:

Nearly every ship that left southward was bombed. The air was completely in Japanese hands. Yet the censors still blue-pencilled “siege.” . . . After the causeway was blown, the troops having retreated across it, there was a conference in the pressroom at the Cathay [an office building] which would have made Noah Webster smile. “Can we refer now to the ‘siege of Singapore’ as having begun?” the correspondents wanted to know. The army’s strategist-lexicographer hesitated . . . it was a matter of hours, perhaps of minutes, before the very room in which the correspondents were sitting . . . would be under Japanese shellfire. But had Singapore’s siege begun? The military censor did not like to think so.

“I still don’t like that word,” he said. “I still don’t think it’s justified.”

There was a burst of expostulation.

“But surely you can’t deny that we are besieged,” said someone.

“Besieged, yes,” said the military censor, “but I object to the noun ‘siege.’”

“We cannot say that ‘the siege of Singapore has begun.’ Can we say that ‘Singapore is now besieged’?”

The censor nodded. “Yes, I will pass ‘besieged.’
But I still don’t like the word ‘siege.’
”

At least one newspaperman who missed the conference and still could not seem to get the hang of this rule even after his colleagues patiently explained it to him, led his dispatch off with “The siege of Singapore has begun.” The next morning when the shells were dropping on the island, he received his censored carbon back, and it read “The besiegement of Singapore has begun.” Naturally “besiegement” was changed in London and New York back to “siege,” the cable editors reasonably considering that this was a time for plain language.

He goes on to describe several partial censorships. One is how news gets delayed until the official version catches up to reporters. (“It is difficult to mention the military, naval, and RAF censors temperately. They held the correspondents’ noses fast to the grindstone of the communiqués, even when the communiqués were two to three days behind the facts.”) He also points out how a rigid system ordains what a correspondent turns out, knowing that certain ideas are forbidden. (“The newspaperman’s malady is to accept all the inhibitions of a bad censorship and to discourage himself by precensoring his own work.”) Another constant danger is “the staff of robot censors,” who can be ferocious, “cut an entire leading paragraph off a narrative and then send it 10,000 miles away to enter the newspaper office headless, its whole opening statement of topic, place, and circumstances amputated.”

Though it may be difficult, in our era of instantaneous electronic transmission, to conceive of any blockage interrupting the channel of news from reporter to editor—save by a more cunning censorship on the part of a government—it is illuminating to remind ourselves that the correspondents’ version of World War II was, in a sense, only what the censors failed to stop.

And there was always the threat of dire punishment: the withdrawal, in a war zone, of accreditation, without which a reporter could not function, leaving his news organization without a berth in an important dateline. Thus in Singapore, to control American press criticism, the British disaccredited E. R. Noderer of the
Chicago Tribune
and Cecil Brown of CBS,
Newsweek,
and
Life.
Both men were compelled to leave; it radically altered their careers. Regarding Brown, “a strong hint was dropped that he was being punished for matter which he submitted and which was censored, but whose very submission indicated that he was not disposed as he should have been.”

Weller concludes:

Military censorship always ends by being political . . . A censorship is supposed to keep political criticism under control. Is there any point at which a correspondent would be hauled before the authorities for being too optimistic . . . by filing a dispatch that outbuttered the most complacent greasers of public opinion[?] . . . Words, words, words. But these were words to remember. Those tiresome discussions in the Cathay involved the principles for which people were offering all they had, blood and sweat, tears and toil . . . In one way the American and British peoples were fighting to be informed. They did not want to be fooled. They wanted to hear the truth. They could take it.

It is through knowing the truth that the people discover their hidden will.

Throughout the war, then, there was another war going on, all along, and it did not end with any treaty of surrender.

So why were virtually all of Weller’s 1945 dispatches from Japan censored? Surely the prison camp stories would’ve played well back home, building the case against a brutal enemy—even if the Nagasaki reports each contained a dangerous radiation all their own, the unpredictable half-life of truth. Difficult as it may be to parse MacArthur’s motivations, it’s also hard to think of one good reason why the U.S. government might’ve wanted to encourage any correspondents outside their guidance to venture into the nuclear sites. After Burchett, Weller was unknowingly sending his dispatches into a hornets’ nest in Tokyo, where he hadn’t a prayer of success. And after Truman’s confidential memorandum, one week into Weller’s odyssey, anything that got through the censors would’ve still probably been silenced back home.

Weller always maintained that since MacArthur was determined to be known as the vanquisher of Japan (despite denials of presidential ambition), he did not want to promote the bombs’ success at the cost of his own, having already been upstaged by a troupe of scientists in New Mexico.

Likewise, a candid report on the radiation suffering in the Nagasaki hospitals, contradicting U.S. government assurances, could only embarrass MacArthur before the American people, since even a month after the bomb he had failed, as supreme commander, to provide medical assistance to the devastated scene. Nor would there be any such aid in Nagasaki until six weeks had passed; and it would come via the Navy, not thanks to MacArthur. That, for Weller, remained the great shame of the whole event, and the largest humiliation of all buried in the killed dispatches.

Besides the public relations headache that there had been American and Allied POWs directly beneath the Nagasaki bomb, the fact that most of them avoided atomic incineration simply by ducking into a shallow trench was not a military secret anyone wanted exposed. The bomb was an all-powerful, divine weapon; W. L. Laurence had said so.

There was yet another reason. Weller had been MacArthur’s nemesis ever since the correspondent escaped from Singapore and Java to Australia in early 1942, and came under the iron hand of censorship while reporting the struggle up the Pacific islands. The general would have taken Weller’s entry into Nagasaki as a personal affront as much as a defiance of his authority.

Already, a year earlier, in
Bases Overseas,
Weller had written: “Political censorship under MacArthur’s command was strict, the officially expressed view of his headquarters being that a war correspondent was not entitled to inform the American public of matters of controversial nature . . .”

He then quotes a letter received from one of MacArthur’s censors:

We believe that a correspondent has a certain duty towards the Commander of the Forces whom he represents, and it is the Commander-in-Chief’s desire that nothing of a political nature be released as coming from his staff of correspondents, and nothing that may be in any way criticizing the efforts of any Commander of any of the Allied nations.

“What the United States badly needs,” Weller concludes, “is a long cold bath of reality.”

Tantalizingly absent from the files is an exchange of cables which must have taken place between Weller and his
Chicago Daily News
editor over the strange silences between September 5—the date on his Kanoya dispatches—and when he reached Guam seven weeks later. Once he learned his worst fears had been realized, he would’ve had to describe the enormous scoops that got away, and explain the most damning censorship he had suffered in the entire war. It is not so surprising I found no trace of these cables, or the home-office replies, anywhere in the archive. They must have hurt deeply.

Just after MacArthur’s death, Weller summed him up as

deliberately remote, intimate only with his peers at the top. Rarely casual, dedicated, nearly humorless . . . [with] the unconscious assumption of effortless superiority that the British once bred into their elite. It drew to him very competent specialists, who asked only to be firmly directed, and sycophants, especially newsmen who gave up the fight against his censorship. Every general wants more of everything than he has, but the difference between MacArthur and others was that he would break windows to get it.

Twenty years later, in 1984, at age seventy-seven, Weller wrote:

As sure as Judgement Day, his wrath fell upon me. I had already tried to pass a dispatch saying that Yalta was an American disgrace, but this was worse . . . Jealous of the fact that “his war” of four years had been won by two bombs prepared without his knowledge and dropped without his command, MacArthur determined to do his best to erase from history—or at least blur as well as censorship could—the important human lessons of radiation’s effect on civil populations.

VII

Very little of this book has ever seen the light of day.

“First into Nagasaki” was written for and appeared, with significant editorial cutting, as “Back to Nagasaki” in a 1967 anthology of reporters’ memoirs entitled
How I Got That Story,
put together by the Overseas Press Club of New York. (I have restored all the deleted passages.) Weller had, in 1965, produced a short account for his paper, the
Chicago Daily News,
on the twentieth anniversary of the bomb. For the longer piece, written in Rome in July 1966, he benefited from far more space, a sense of authorial independence, and from Gilbert Harrison’s army report, written right after their shared journey and which Harrison—by then the editor of the
New Republic—
kindly forwarded to him in Italy. Harrison’s notes have clarified questions I had about Weller’s first few days in Nagasaki and also suggest there may yet be some dispatches missing.

Weller appears not to have realized then that Burchett had beat him to a nuclear site (his opening paragraph suggests as much), but in later years he always spoke admiringly of the achievement.

One inaccuracy in his recollections concerned how much work he produced in three weeks on Kyushu; over the years he called it anything from ten thousand to twenty-five thousand words. This probably comes from conflating the Nagasaki stories with the POW stories, but it is still way off the mark, since the true figure is nearly fifty-five thousand words. “The Death Cruise,” researched on Kyushu but largely written after he left Nagasaki by ship for Guam, runs at over twenty-five thousand words. Thus, apart from the 1966 memoir and my present essay, this entire book was written between September 6 and October 21, 1945, totaling about eighty thousand words of material in unedited form.