U.S. Reporter Gets A-Bomb Scoop -- 60 Years Late

SAN FELICE CIRCEO, Italy, Aug. 7, 2005 — -- Sixty years ago, war correspondent George Weller had the scoop of a lifetime.

The dateline was Nagasaki, Japan, just after the atomic bomb fell there on Aug. 9, 1945. But it was a story Weller never got to report in his lifetime.

"Nothing was ever published," said his son, Anthony Weller, who must have heard the story from his father a thousand times, and has finally made it public.

The year was 1945, Japan had just surrendered on the USS Missouri, and George Weller was there. But Gen. Douglas MacArthur had some disappointing news. He told the reporters that Hiroshima and Nagasaki, targets of two atomic bombs dropped by the United States at the end of the war, were off limits.

"MacArthur's logic," Anthony Weller said, "was that, 'Oh, it's not safe for anybody to see southern Japan.' And my father was absolutely furious at this."

So Weller signed up for a trip organized by the military to an abandoned kamikaze base, one of the few places MacArthur would allow reporters to go. Weller knew Nagasaki was just a few miles away, so he snuck off.

When he got there, Nagasaki was a city in ruins. Weller immediately took off the insignia that identified him as a war correspondent.

"He presented himself to the Japanese general, and said that he was Col. Weller, and he'd been ordered to come here and collect all the information possible about the results of the atom bomb," Anthony Weller said. "At that moment, the general thought for a second and then bowed to him."

George Weller was in. But his dispatches, written as telegrams, never made it past MacArthur's censors.

Anthony Weller read from one of the telegrams: "Chicago News, New York, from Weller, Nagasaki, publish any time, new cases atomic bomb poisoning, with approximate 50 percent death rate."