Read First Into Nagasaki for Free Online

to a vast American readership via syndication. These dispatches have remained unpublished for sixty years; it appears that the U.S. government destroyed the originals. Weller’s own carbon copies were found in 2003.
             
    nagasaki 62300 herewith follows first known eyewitness account results atomic bomb dropped nagasaki by american ground observer chicagonewses george weller who reached crippled city three days after first american troops landed southern kyushu
             
    Nagasaki, Japan—Thursday, September 6, 1945 2300 hours
    Walk in Nagasaki’s streets and you walk in ruins.
    It is thirty-three days * since two American planes appeared in a clear midday sky and let fall the blow which clinched Japan’s defeat and decided her surrender. The mystery of the atomic bomb is still sealed. But the ruins are here in testimony that not only Nagasaki but the world was shaken.
    The last two or three of what were scores of fires are burning amid Nagasaki’s ruins tonight. They are burning the last human bodies on improvised ghats of rubbish. Flames flicker across flattened blocks from which planks, lathes and timbers have been removed as a fire menace, and only shapeless piles of plaster remain.
    Yet the atmosphere is not precisely dolorous. Nagasaki cannot be described as a city of the dead. The unquenchable Japanese will to live has asserted itself. Though the smashed streets are as barren of production or commerce as Pompeii’s, yet a living stream of humanity pours along them, looking with alert, shoe-button eyes for today’s main chance.
    After a 24-hour trip on what seemed like dozens of trains, the writer arrived here this afternoon as the first visitor from the outside Allied world. Trains coming from both Honshu and southern Kyushu were so jammed with returning human beings that the writer was able only to fight his way into the baggage cars. Some refugees rode the locomotives’ cowcatchers. Nagasaki has only about one hundred fifty of its normal three hundred thousand inhabitants, but they are coming back. By the hundreds they streamed along the concrete platforms which alone remain of Nagasaki’s station, their belongings tied in big silk scarves or shoulder rucksacks. Painstakingly these Nagasakians ignored the soot-stained American trudging beside them. Fear or merely resignation may have accounted for their indifference. What looked like disinterest amid Nagasaki’s peace-imploring debris was the suppression of personal feeling in obedience to the emperor’s order.
    The first thing you learn as you walk amid the flattened houses, and the cordwood that was once walls piled with Japanese neatness, is that the atomic bomb never really “hit” Japan. If the Japanese are right, the bomb exploded over Japanese soil. They can only tell what they saw and try to guess much of what really happened.
    At about 11:30 o’clock on the morning of August 9th, a lieutenant who is aide to Major General Tanikoetjie, commanding the district, was walking through the headquarters on the hill above Nagasaki’s long waterfront. The lieutenant heard a high faint moan of aircraft motors, found his fieldglasses, went to a porch and trained them to the sky. What he saw was two B-29s at about 22,000 feet, flying in echelon. No anti-aircraft fire was around them; they were too high for Nagasaki’s batteries.
    Suddenly there broke from the forward plane three parachutes. Their canopies unfolded and what they bore earthward seemed to be three oblong boxes. The boxes looked about thirty inches long by eight inches wide. Demurely as
The Mikado
’s three little maids from school, the canopies sailed downward. The lieutenant took them for some new form of pamphlet propaganda.
    The three parachutes had reached the point where the lieutenant could begin sending auto crews to confiscate their freight when something violent happened. With the parachutes at perhaps a five thousand feet level there suddenly occurred below