George Weller

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This article is about the writer. For the motorist in a fatal car accident, see George Russell Weller.

George Anthony Weller (1907–19 December 2002) was an American novelist, playwright, and Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist for the New York Times and Chicago Daily News, and former editorial chair of The Harvard Crimson. He was the first foreign correspondent to reach Nagasaki, Japan, following the U.S. atomic bombing of the city on August 9, 1945.

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[edit] Life & career

Weller was born in Boston on July 13, 1907, and graduated from Harvard University in 1929. He studied acting in Vienna, Austria as the only American member of Max Reinhardt's theater company. Weller was named to the Balkan reporting team of The New York Times, and during the 1930s also published two novels, numerous short stories, and freelance journalism from around Europe. He married Katherine Deupree and they had a daughter, Ann, in 1932. In December, 1940, soon after the beginning of World War II, he began working for the Chicago Daily News Foreign Service and covered the war in Europe, Africa, Asia, and the Pacific as one of the war's great correspondents, winning a 1943 Pulitzer Prize. Having divorced in 1944, he met reporter Charlotte Ebener in 1946, when the two were among a group of correspondents held for three weeks in Manchuria by the advancing communist Chinese army. They married two years later. For many years Weller covered the Balkans, Mideast and Africa from Rome, where he headed the Daily News bureau until retiring from the newspaper in 1975. Charlotte died in 1990. In 1957 Weller had a second child, Anthony, by the British ballet teacher and scholar Gladys Lasky Weller (1922-1988), with whom he maintained a relationship for over thirty years. Weller died at his home in San Felice Circeo, Italy, on December 19, 2002.

[edit] Awards & inspiration

Weller won a 1943 Pulitzer Prize for foreign reporting, for a story on an emergency appendectomy performed on a submarine in enemy waters, in which the crew had to use a tea strainer and spoons. Weller was also awarded the 1954 George Polk Memorial Award, and a Nieman Fellowship at Harvard in 1949. Late in life he received Italy's Premio Internazionale di Giornalismo. He also provided the inspiration for longtime friend Sean O'Faolain's 1974 short story "Something, Everything, Anything, Nothing".

[edit] Nagasaki Report Suppressed by U.S. Censors

On September 6, 1945, Weller was the first outside observer to reach Nagasaki, Japan exactly four weeks following the U.S. atomic bombing of the city. U.S. occupiers declared Nagasaki off-limits to reporters after the U.S. released the atomic bomb called Fat Man over the city. Weller managed to reach the blasted city by train after evading U.S. military authorities in southern Kyushu. To gain the cooperation of the Japanese authorities he posed as a U.S. Army colonel. (No American military nor medical personnel had yet arrived.) He spent a total of three weeks in Nagasaki and in the nearby Allied P.O.W. camps -- some of which he "opened". The U.S. military in Tokyo censored approximately 55,000 words of his dispatches, along with more than 100 photographs. For sixty years Weller's own carbon of these dispatches was presumed lost by him, until the copy was discovered by Weller's son, Anthony, at the family villa six months after George Weller's death, south of Rome.

The official United States narrative of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki downplayed civilian casualties and dismissed reports of the deadly lingering effects of radiation. Reporters whose dispatches conflicted with the official version of events sanctioned by the U.S. were silenced. [1] George Weller, then of the Chicago Daily News, slipped into Nagasaki and wrote a series of stories on the nightmare he found there.

On September 8, 1945, Weller wrote, "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." [2]

Later that same day when he visited Nagasaki hospitals, and saw civilians, including women and children, lying on the floor, with their hair falling out and covered in red blotches, one month after the nuclear bombing, he grasped that the people were in terrible shape and called what they were experiencing "Disease X." In 1945, most people outside the nuclear industry did not understand the enduring effects of radiation disease. Greg Mitchell, the editor of Editor and Publisher, trade magazine of the newspaper industry, said in a radio interview that Weller's later accounts varied greatly from the first sentence of his first story about the atomic bombing. But all of his stories on the effects of the atomic bombing of Nagasaki were suppressed and did not turn up for 60 years, when they were found after his death by his son in an Italian villa where the family had lived. [3]

The long-suppressed stories are scheduled to appear in book form in 2006.

[edit] Publications

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  • First Into Nagasaki: The Censored Eyewitness Dispatches on Post-Atomic Japan and Its Prisoners of War. by George Weller and Anthony Weller. (Crown: 2006) ISBN 0-307-34201-8
  • Not to Eat, Not for Love. 1933. New York: Smith & Haas. A novel of undergraduate life at Harvard.
  • Clutch and Differential. 1936. New York: Random House. A novel of linked short stories of the American panorama.
  • The Belgian Campaign in Ethiopia: a trek of 2,500 miles through jungle swamps and desert wastes. 1941. New York: Issued by the Belgian information center. War reporting.
  • Singapore is Silent. 1943. New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company. Eyewitness account of the fall of Singapore.
  • Bases Overseas: an American trusteeship in power. 1944. New York: Harcourt, Brace. Political history.
  • The Crack in the Column. 1949. New York: Random House. A novel of wartime Greece.
  • The Story of the Paratroops. 1958. Illustrated by W. T. Mars. Eau Claire, Wisconsin: E. M. Hale and Company. For young readers.
  • The Story of Submarines. 1962. New York: Random House. for young readers.
  • Typewriter Battalion: Dramatic front-line dispatches from World War II. 1995. New York: W. Morrow. An anthology containing Weller's Flight from Java, a 1942 dispatch concerning his escape.

[edit] External links

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