Front & Center with John Callaway: Anthony Weller

John Callaway sat down with Anthony Weller, author and son of respected reporter George Weller, to discuss his father's career as a reporter and combat correspondent, and how his unique experiences and reports from post-war Japan were censored by military authorities.

George Weller, a Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter, covered almost every major operation of War II in Africa and Europe and was one of the first correspondents on the ground in Japan in September 1945. While constrained by restrictive media rules from General MacArthur's headquarters, Weller found his way to be the first correspondent known to have entered Nagasaki—without an escort officer. In the critical weeks following the use of the second atomic bomb against the Japanese city of Nagasaki, and the unconditional surrender of the Japanese, Weller boldly bluffed his way into the greatest unreported story of the war, and possibly his career.

In Nagasaki, Weller reported on what he saw and experienced and about the horrific effects of the atomic bomb on Nagasaki. Weller was also able to visit nearby Japanese POW camps, reporting with stark clarity about the brutal conditions and treatment afforded to American and Allied prisoners under the control of the Japanese.

His reports and dispatches were sent back to MacArthur's censors, with the hope that their importance would make them unstoppable. Weller was proven wrong. Military censors withheld the dispatches and his first-hand accounts and reporting never ran in the mainstream media of the time.

George Weller died in 2002, his story and experiences, while recorded, remained untold and unknown. Months later, his son Anthony found a fragile copy in a crate of moldy papers and realized the importance of this unpublished the body of work—laying the foundation for First into Nagasaki.

George Weller was born in Boston and graduated from Harvard in 1929. As an admired but penniless young novelist, he began reporting on Greece and the Balkans for the New York Times in the 1930s, then made his name covering the war for the Chicago Daily News. He won a 1943 Pulitzer Prize for his story of an emergency appendectomy on a submarine in enemy waters. Throughout a long career Weller reported from five continents; he was a Nieman Fellow in 1947 and also won a 1954 George Polk Award. His work includes two highly praised WWII books, Singapore Is Silent and Bases Overseas. He died at his home in Italy, aged 95.

Anthony Weller, George Weller's son, is the author of three novels—The Garden of the Peacocks, The Polish Lover, and The Siege of Salt Cove —and a memoir of India and Pakistan called Days and Nights on the Grand Trunk Road. He has traveled widely for numerous magazines and is also a much-recorded jazz and classical guitarist.