First into Nagasaki: The Censored Eyewitness Dispatches on Post-Atomic Japan and Its Prisoners of War provides an unparalleled look at the effects of the bomb that killed more than 70,000 people and led to the end of World War II.On September 6, 1945, less than a month after the atomic bomb was dropped on Nagasaki, Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter George Weller became the first free Westerner to enter the devastated city. Disguised as a U.S. colonel to escape General MacArthur’s censors, Weller set about driving around the ruined town to discover precisely what had happened.
At first, Weller’s dispatches were stoic, treating the A-bomb as just another weapon of the war, albeit one of the more destructive. However, Weller soon noticed the awful degradations the injured started to show from the effects of the bomb and a terrible and astonished realization came to Weller's dispatches, that this was not a usual bomb at all. The dispatches were heavily censored by MacArthur and never published. Weller died believing they were lost to history.
This is the first time Weller’s dispatches are being published in their entirety. After his death, his son Anthony found the legendary reports, mildewed and falling to pieces, while cleaning out his father’s study in an Italian villa.
In addition to the lost dispatches about the destruction, First into Nagasaki features two other significant pieces about the Nagasaki story: Weller’s accounts of the experiences of numerous Allied POWs who saw the bomb drop after years of torture in imprisonment and a reprinting of an astonishing and heartbreaking piece by Weller called The Death Cruise describing an appalling journey taken by sixteen-hundred POWs in a series of barges from Manila to Nagasaki.