Firsthand Reports of the Nagasaki Aftermath

Via a heads up from Kevin Drum, the first Western reports out of Nagasaki after the city was hit by an atomic bomb, reports believed lost for almost sixty years, have been published today in the Japanese newspaper Mainichi Shimbun. George Weller, a reporter for the Chicago Daily News, snuck into the city while journalists were still officially barred nearly a month after the bomb had been dropped on August 9, 1945. He wrote extensively and sent his reports to General Douglas MacArthur's office in Tokyo to be censored before publication (a requirement of all journalism leaving Japan at the time). The reports were never released by the censorship office. Although he'd held on to his carbon copies (who here's old enough to remember those?), over the years the reporter lost track of them. After Weller died in 2002, his son went through his archives and found the missing carbons, the first of which became public today. Read the first of four reports, which also has links to the other three, as well as Mainichi Shinbun's backgrounder. Editor & Publisher has more from Weller's son.