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Chargement... First Into Nagasaki: The Censored Eyewitness Dispatches on Post-Atomic Japan and Its Prisoners of War (2006)par George WELLER
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Inscrivez-vous à LibraryThing pour découvrir si vous aimerez ce livre Actuellement, il n'y a pas de discussions au sujet de ce livre. Uneven but interesting account of the days following the Nagasaki nuclear attack. The part about the American prisoners in the Philippines is actually better. ( ) This is a book about military censorship. MacArthur and the US government did not want any reportage of any lingering or long-term radiation affects of the bomb. That is why Weller's dispatches were suppressed. Interestingly, Hiroshima was much more destructive because its topography was flat, whereas Nagasaki's was much more hilly. But Nagasaki reportage was just 20% or so of the book. Most of the book was about his reports of the Japanese POW camps, and the atrocities done there. I was most impressed by the quality of his dispatches: the facts and just the facts. There is relative little spin. Very, very different from the reporting done by "embedded" reporters during the Iraq War. Here is an example of "objective" reporting, that I miss from any journalist in any media today. Raw history. Recommended. Excellent addition to anyone reading about WWII, Japan, atomic bombs, Gen MacArthur, prisoners of war. There will never be a definitive answer to the question of should we have dropped the bombs, but this adds info about the question of the character of the Japanese at war. They would never have stopped fighting until the Emperor told them to. Their treatment of prisoners reveals what they would have been like as conquerors and masters. Have they ever accepted responsibility for their part in starting the war? The hell they put the pows through... no words are good enough to describe it. Talks about the propaganda presented after the war by both sides. Does not attempt to give a final answer, but does present more information that should be considered... This book is mistitled. Very little of it is about Nagasaki. Almost all of it is about the POWs in Japan and on the way to Japan in aptly described “death ships.” It has so little about Nagasaki, it is almost false advertising. The death ship narrative is a feat of exceptional journalism and told with gruesome, but respectful detail. A strong book, but the misleading title is an annoyance.
The importance of the dispatches, however, extends far beyond the value of the information from Nagasaki. George Weller is a voice from a past generation, and the publication of his censored dispatches raises a series of deeply important issues and, in the process, reveals an immense cultural divide between his world and ours today.
Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter Weller covered World War II across Europe, Africa, and Asia. At war's end, correspondents were forbidden to enter Nagasaki and Hiroshima, but Weller, presenting himself as a U.S. colonel, set out to explore the devastation. As Nagasaki's first outside observer, he witnessed the bomb's effects. He interviewed doctors trying to cure those dying mysteriously from "Disease X." He sent his forbidden dispatches back to MacArthur's censors, assuming their importance would make them unstoppable. He was wrong: the U.S. government censored every word, and the dispatches vanished from history. Weller also became the first to enter nearby POW camps. He gathered accounts from hundreds of Allied prisoners--but those too were silenced. Weller died in 2002, believing it all lost forever. Months later, his son found a fragile copy in a crate of moldy papers. This historic body of work has never been published.--From publisher description. Aucune description trouvée dans une bibliothèque |
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Google Books — Chargement... GenresClassification décimale de Melvil (CDD)940.54252244History and Geography Europe Europe 1918- Military History Of World War II Campaigns and battles by theatreClassification de la Bibliothèque du CongrèsÉvaluationMoyenne:
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