Son honors dad's Nagasaki reporting

Anthony Weller of Gloucester has just published "First Into Nagasaki ," the long-lost dispatches of his father, legendary war correspondent George Weller, who went to Roxbury Latin School and Harvard. Working for the Chicago Daily News, George Weller sneaked into the atomic-bombed city in September 1945 and filed dozens of reports, totaling 25,000 words, on what he saw in and around Nagasaki , including hospitals and POW camps for American soldiers. But Army censors quashed the stories and destroyed the originals, and Weller thought his copies were lost. Anthony Weller found George Weller's long-misplaced carbons after his death in 2002 .

Q. How did you find these manuscripts?

A. After my father died, I started going through his house in Italy. There was a vast room full of papers and to enter, you had to part the seas like Moses. It must have been one of the largest archives of any war correspondent of the century, from the 1930s in the Balkan civil wars to the end of his career, investigating the UN food and agriculture program in the 1980s. At the bottom of a crate, I found these moldering, crumbling carbon copies of his original dispatches.

Q. Was it easy to put them in publishable form?

A. It was a nightmare. At the time, every foreign correspondent transmitted by cable. Since newspapers were cheap, they made writers imitate telegram language. At the receiving end, they would add the obvious missing words and the article would come to life. The carbons were all in this cable-ese, and the pages were not in order. I had to try to figure out which page went with which and reconstitute every sentence.

Q. How did it come to be published?

A. I had hoped some magazine would publish it, but got nowhere. A Japanese reporter was doing a story about the atomic bombings 60 years after, saw a 2004 Boston Globe story about me online, which mentioned the Nagasaki papers, and called me to do an interview for the Japanese newspaper Mainichi . She won the Japanese equivalent of the Pulitzer Prize for writing about it. Suddenly it was in 400 papers around the world. After that, it was not hard to talk a publisher into doing a book. Then Walter Cronkite stepped forward to do an introduction. He had known my father, who was 10 years older, as one of the older generation of reporters.

Q. The dispatches cover not only the visible devastation, but also the effects of radiation sickness, which no one knew about at the time. What were the most surprising or revealing things for you in the dispatches?

A. There is a first-hand sense of how things looked at that moment. He had told me this or that, but I had no idea of the richness of it. Historians knew that the dispatches had existed, but had assumed that he had only been there a couple of days and written a couple of stories. They did not realize what George Weller on a three-week tear, staying up all night, could accomplish.

Q. He also wrote about prisoner-of-war camps and prison ships , which he was the first American to reach after the surrender.

A. The most poignant thing for me was finding some of the men, in their late 80s, who were in the camps my father liberated. He was posing as an American colonel, and he literally went in there and told the commandant to release the men. They remembered him very well. They said, ' 'Your dad walked in and told us the war was over."

Q. How would your father feel about these dispatches being published after 62 years?

A. Like the other better war correspondents, he was aware that he was writing history. He worked so hard, and when he left Japan, he expected congratulatory cables to reach him in Guam. But there was nothing. It's sad to me that he died believing it was lost to history. It would have meant so much to him to know that it has finally appeared.