Hiroshima and Nagasaki - Information on the WWII (2) atomic bombings

Introduction
Wilfred Burchett - Hiroshima.
George Weller - Nagasaki, Part One.
George Weller - Nagasaki, Part Two.

INTRODUCTION

On August 6th 1945 at about 8am the Japanese city of Hiroshima had been given the 'all clear' signal after an air raid warning. Fifteen minutes later a lone United States bomber flew over the city and dropped a single bomb which:

-Flattened 18 square kilometres of the city
-Killed up to 200,000 people and injured thousands more.
-Created a fire-storm and winds of up to 55 kilometres per hour.

This was an atomic bomb, the first nuclear bomb ever to be used.

Three days later, on the 9th of August, 1945, a second nuclear bomb was dropped on the city of Nagasaki, it produced similar results. Smoke and flame could be seen over 400 km away. Two different kinds of bomb were used, one plutonium and the other uranium 235. Nothing was known about the 'special qualities' of these bombs and more fear and alarm started to spread through the survivors when thousands of people who has escaped the devastation began to die. This mysterious sickness was radiation and it is still claiming victims as the curse is passed from generation to generation.

There were other bombing raids in the Second World War that wiped out entire citires - but hundreds of planes were involved and thousands of conventional bombs. In all the allied raids on Germany in WWII about 600,000 people were killed. The two small atom bombs dropped in Japan in August 1945 killed at least 300,000.
Back to Top

WILFRED BURCHETT

Australia's Wilfred Burchett was the first journalist to go to Hiroshima after the A-bomb and he filed the world's first report in September 1945. He had reported on many of the theatres of war during World War 2 and was determined to report on Hiroshima, but his visit to that bombed city was complicated and shrouded in secrecy.

Wilfred Burchett was among the 600 reporters from all over the world that had gathered in Tokyo to cover the Japanese surrender ceremony to be held on the US warship Missouri. While he was there he went to the Japanese Press Organisation in Tokyo and told them he wanted to go to Hiroshima. They were astonished and told him that nobody went there as everybody was dying, but he insisted and they gave him a letter of introduction to their Japanese reporter in that city, and also buy him a return ticket to Hiroshima.

After making these arrangements he rejoined the press corps waiting to be taken to the Missouri. When the US officials came to escort them to the warship they found that Wilfred Burchett had been struck down with a severe attack of diarrhoea and had to be left behind! After they had left, Burchett got up, changed his clothes and packed his camera and typewriter and went to catch the train to Hiroshima. The 20-hour train journey had its own dangers, but eventually he arrived at his destination late at night. He got off the train and was immediately arrested and taken to the temporary lock-up. The following morning he produced the letter from the Tokyo Press Bureau and was released. He met the Japanese reporter and together they covered the makeshift hospitals and surveyed the ruined city taking notes and many photographs. Wilfred Burchett wrote his dispatch and sent it to the Tokyo press office that in turn sent it to London.

When Wilfred Burchett arrived back in Tokyo his dispatch to The Daily Express had been sent all over the world and the US authorities were furiously denying that there were any after effects of the bomb, and put Hiroshima out of bounds for other journalists. Burchett was taken to a US Army hospital for a check-up. While there his camera, films and notes were confiscated and destroyed, his press accreditation was withdrawn and he was expelled from Japan.

NAGASAKI

United States journalist George Weller was the first Western reporter to reach Nagasaki after the atomic bomb of August 9th 1945.

U.S General Douglas MacArthur had put a news cordon around both the atomic bombed cities and much of Southern Japan had been placed 'off limits'. George Weller was a member of an officially controlled tour of a Japanese kamikaze base on the island of Kyushu. While on Kyushu he noticed that the town on the mainland, just a few hundred metres from the island, was connected to Nagasaki by rail. He slipped away from the official tour and took a boat to the mainland.

By impersonating a senior US officer and commandeering military vehicles, Weller was able to reach Nagasaki by train on September 6th. He began to file his reports from Nagasaki to his paper, The Chicago Daily News on September 8th 1945. He sent his reports back to Tokyo by hand to be approved by the military, but they were censored and destroyed by orders of General MacArthur.

George Weller died in 2002 believing that all of his reports from Nagasaki had been lost. Three days after his death, George Weller's son was going through old papers and he discovered boxes and crates of faded papers from the Pacific war. Among them was the old mildewed carbon copies of the dispatches that had been sent from Nagasaki by his father, 60 years ago. These dispatches have now been published in a Japanese newspaper.

WASTELAND OF WAR

The description of the scenes that confronted George Weller fill his dispatches with horror that stayed with him for life. In his first report filed from Nagasaki on 8th of September 1945 he wrote:

'In swaybacked or flattened skeletons of the Mitsubishi arms plants is revealed what the atomic bomb can do to steel and stone, but what the riven atom can do against human flesh and bone lies hidden in two hospitals of downtown Nagasaki. Look at the pushed-in façade of the American consulate, three miles from the blast's centre, or the face of the catholic cathedral, one mile in the other direction, torn down like gingerbread, and you can tell that the liberated atom spares nothing in the way.'

George Weller's initial reports from Nagasaki suggested he was not against the atomic bomb. One early dispatch said: 'The atomic bomb may be classified as a weapon capable of being used indiscriminately, but its use in Nagasaki was selective and proper and as merciful as such a gigantic force could be expected to be.'

He suggested that the death toll stood at no more than 24,000 (the actual figure was more than 75,000, with another 75,000 injured and countless more left to die later from the radiation sickness). Later he added:

'Nobody here in Nagasaki has yet been able to show that the bomb is different than any other, except in a broader extent flash and a more powerful knock-out.'

As Weller travelled around the city, visiting hospitals filled with sick and dying people and talking to the Japanese doctors that were unable to help so many of the sick, he became aware that something was terribly wrong. Doctors at one hospital told him that a month after the explosion, people were dying at the rate of 10 a day. He wrote in another dispatch:

'The atomic bomb's peculiar disease, uncured because it is untreated and untreated because it is not diagnosed, is still snatching away lives here. Men, women and children with no outward marks of injury are dying daily in hospitals, some after having walked around for three or four weeks thinking they have escaped. The doctors here have every modern medicament, but candidly confessed in talking to the writer - the first allied observer to Nagasaki since surrender - that the answer to the malady is beyond them. Their patients, though their skin is whole, are all passing away under their eyes'. Twenty-five Americans are due to arrive September 11th to study the Nagasaki bombsite. Japanese hope they will bring a solution for Disease X.'