An amazing book to read (or listen to - I would recommend listening). There are several books mixed into one here since the genesis is censored and then lost reports of George Weller from Japan after World War II. The immediacy of the war that comes from news reports is very different from even the best historical reports of the war. Emotions are raw and events just happened so there is no healing time or historical context. It was an important book for me to read since my only experience with the war for US soldiers is from afar; I have more contemporary accounts of the bomb from a Japanese point of view but none from the US soldier view.

Brilliant book! It is not so much the writing itself but the historic uniqueness of this little known saga of World War II. George Weller, a Pulitzer Prize winning reporter, was the first into Nagasaki after the atomic bomb was dropped weeks earlier. He had been forbidden to go but succeeded anyway and wrote dispatches about the aftermath of the blast: the city in ruins, seemingly healthy Japanese civilians dying weeks later, the myths behind atomic radiation effects, nearby prisoner of war camps with most having survived the bomb's ill effects, and the censorship that followed. General MacArthur was more concerned about PR than the truth and as a result, little of this information got out until decades later. In addition, there are dispatches from interviewing the prisoners of war and what they had suffered.

Weller's dispatches disappeared and his long lost carbon copies were found by his son, Anthony, who included them in this book. Also were other stories such as the horrendous journey on one of the prisoner hellships and a fabulous account of two contract civilians on Guam who survived being captured for months. If the reader gets bored with the sketchiness of the dispatches at the beginning of the book, skim them and go to Chapter V about the Two Robinson Crusoes. Also, the final chapter by Anthony Weller sums up the supreme significance of this material and discusses the censorship issues as well as the moral/immoral aspects of dropping the two atomc bombs.

This book was very interesting. It dealt with many aspects of WWII I was not very familiar with. The beginning relates the author's first-hand account of interviews with post-atomic Nagasaki residents and doctors. However, the majority of the book deals with first-hand accounts from soldiers encarcerated in Japanese POW camps. Those accounts; heart breaking, horrifying, and captivating; opened my eyes and caused me to appreciate the war in the Pacific more than I ever would have otherwise. The things those men went through are almost unbelievable, as was the huge effort to censor accounts about it from General MacArthur on down.

I have 2 grandfathers who served in WWII, both in the Pacific conflicts. Although neither of them ever had to endure the atrocities of a Japanese POW camp, I now appreciate how big a blessing that truly is. I would not have recognized that had I not read this book.

I would recommend this book to anyone who enjoys history or who wants to gain a greater appreciation for the immense and untold sacrifices of those who willingly and heroically gave their all to maintain the freedoms we continue to enjoy in this great country, the United States of America.

Contiene información poco conocida de la guerra con Japón: sus campos de prisioneros y el sadismo de los japoneses en esa etapa oscura de la humanidad.

Great book for anyone interested in WWII history or nuclear weapons. Particularly insightful about how horribly the Japanese treated their prisoners of war. With so much talk about Nazi atrocities, we forget how truly evil the Japanese officers could be. The sufferings endured by American prisoners were incredible---and while reading this account, you'll keep asking yourself why you have not heard more about that.

Weller, a noted war correspondent, did not see his dispatches from Nagasaki and surrounding POW camps published in his lifetime, but his son, having discovered carbon copies thought lost, has put the dispatches together, along with essays on his father's life and the dangers of censorship in a democracy. Like all POW and atomic pieces, this is a hard read, in a human sense, but invaluable for perspectives uncontaminated by hindsight.

The title sort of says it all. After reading this, one is left to wonder on the intentions of MacArthur in censoring all information out of Japan at the end of the war - regarding radiation sickness and the brutal POW camps; why there were no extensive war crimes trials in Japan; what would have been the result of not using the bombs in Japan (certainly all remaining POWs would have been worked or tortured to death). Quite an eye-opener, and I'm certainly grateful for the tenacity and perseverance of George Weller getting to Nagasaki and getting these stories, censored for nearly 75 years.

very educational and eye opening book

Libby audiobook

While the title implies it is about the atomic bombing of Nagasaki, and does contain much material about that and the immediate after effects, it is mostly a chronicle of the inhumane, sadistic, and barbaric treatment of POWs by the Japanese. This is described in horrid detail by personal narratives from prisoners he encountered along the way. Having read a lot about WWII, it is amazing to me that so little is known about this treatment by the Japanese, compared to Nazi POW camps. Almost never mentioned in history book, not dramatized on TV or in movies, I wonder why?

Statistically it was 7 times healthier to be in a Nazi POW camp than in a Japanese POW camp. By war's end 1 of 3 white prisoners dies, worked to death, starved to death, beaten to death. Dead from
diseases and injuries the Japanese refused to treat, withholding medicines supplied by the Red Cross. Another year of war, and there would be been no POWs left alive. Death rate under the Japanese 34% under the Nazis, 4%.

The last portion of the book discusses the role and misuse of censorship. Censored news is propaganda. Today's policy of 'embedding' correspondents fills me with dread.

I thoroughly enjoyed this book, and would recommend it to anyone who is interested in World War II/Pacific Theatre. Even as a World War II major in college, the focus was mainly directed toward a few key Pacific Battles and the rest was European Theatre based. I do not recall learning anything about the dropping of the bombs, beyond that they were dropped and other such basic facts. I saw a documentary on Netflix about survivors from the bombings, and was extremely interested in finding other materials about this subject. This book gave a detailed insight into what it was like in Nagasaki and Hiroshima in the aftermath. I learned a lot from it, and I consider this book to be one of the most valuable ones I have in my Pacific Theatre collection of World War II books.

George Weller was the first Western journalist to go to Nagasaki, only a month after the atomic bomb was dropped and the war in the Pacific ended. This book is a collection of pieces he did based on that visit, and his time spent with American and British soldiers previously held in Japanese prison camps. Weller was a correspondent for an American paper, but though the war was over, news articles from Japan were still censored; none of Weller's copy, sent faithfully back to Tokyo, was ever released in to the press.

My mental rating of this book went up and down while I was reading it, and as I went on, I had to attribute that to both my current place in history, and the structure of the book, rather than the contents.

This book is divided into four sections: Weller's observations of Nagasaki after the bomb, his conversations with POWs held in the Nagasaki area, the transcript of a diary kept by one of two American soldiers who hid on Wake Island in the first days of WWII and evaded Japanese capture for a time, and his piece on the Death Cruise, one of the last and worst transports of POWs transferred into Japan for captivity.

The first section of the book is Weller's description of post-bomb Nagasaki, and of the Disease X which killed people a week or a month after the bomb itself. At the time, this was a shocking story, and the primary source of the censorship of Weller - the US military was denying that there was any 'atomic' effect of the bomb, and the description of Disease X flew in the face of those assertions. For me, this was the section of the book which suffered both from my knowledge, and my ignorance. We now know the dangers of radiation sickness, and the impact of the bombing that Weller could not have seen at the time - he of course underplays it - and the fact that this information is scandalous for the time, seems naive now. On the other hand, Weller's discounting of the significance of the bomb, placing it in the context of the firebombing of Tokyo and other Japanese cities, which produced incredible death and devastation, makes him sound like an apologist. It wasn't that bad, not many people died - this tone was jarring to me because I did not really know the context, and it's difficult to read it without our 60 years of hindsight - however, it's firsthand testimony which is both well written, and of historical value.

The fourth section is the Death Cruise, and this is where the book hits its stride. The incredible brutality that the Japanese showed to their prisoners has largely been overshadowed in the West by the Nazi deathcamps, and unlike in Germany, where self-acknowledgement of the Nazi crimes has been enmeshed in the culture, Japan has only reluctantly and recently admitted responsibility for the atrocities committed by them during WWII. The Death Cruise was one of many 'hellship' transports, where soldiers captured in the early days of the war were brought from across the Pacific, back to Japan for internment. One thousand, six hundred men got on the transport ship; seven weeks later, three hundred survived to be imprisoned. Weller interviewed many of the survivors, and patched their stories together into a terrifying narrative of brutality, starvation, and deprivation. Among them are bright sparks - soldiers who worked to keep other calm, to keep up morale, to collect scraps and water for the weakest. However, most of this story is dark, and Weller doesn't shy from details. Men going mad in crammed ship holds; friends taking clothes from the dying; finally, the complete and utter lack of compassion shown by the survivors to the suffering. And through it all, beatings, torture, and humiliation from the Japanese captors, who seemed to see the weakness of their charges as the moral justification for treating them as things without worth. Weller captures this aspect of the War in the Pacific without flinching, and it's a revelation for the reader unfamiliar with this portion of history.

The middle two sections of the book consist of snippets of POW observations of the Nagasaki bombing, the brutal treatment by the Japanese of the POW workers in the mines of Nagasaki, and the Wake Island survivors. In part, Weller covers this as a reporter wanting to send bulk material home which can be parted out and reprinted in papers around the country - snippets from a 'local boy' for regional use. As such they are often repetitive stories of Japanese abuse - interesting, but not really meant to be read as a piece. The Wake Island section is interesting historically, but mainly for the increasing desperation of these two, hiding from the Japanese in the first few weeks of the war, as they wait for Uncle Sam to come rescue them. Not knowing of the crushing attack on the Pacific Fleet at Pearl Harbor, these two waited in vain for a rescue which did not come.

Overall, this book is a fascinating picture of the American experience on the Pacific. It's less about Nagasaki, than how the Americans and Japanese viewed, treated and justified that treatment of each other, both in the opening days of the war, and the closing.