Agreed. Thoroughly bad taste. I’m sure the Japanese were a hated enemy, and I’m glad the war was ended quickly with a fraction of the lives lost than had we invaded...but, to celebrate joyfully at the incineration of tens of thousands of non-combatants is pretty disgusting. As much as I hate the hajis, even I wouldn’t go dancing a jig if Baghdad got nuked. People need to have a little more respect.
He could get eyewitness accounts of the cruelty of Japanese military towards Allied POWs near Nagasaki that were liberated, the guy also could document the immense CIVILIAN tragedy (casulties and radiation disease) that were the aftermath of the Naga bomb as well. Ending the war is worth celebration; gloating over massive civilian deaths in the process, however, is barbaric and is not American.
Chicago Daily News reporter George Weller broke all the rules when he went into Nagasaki about four weeks after it had been blasted by the second atomic bomb dropped on Japan. He escaped his military escort, rode a still-running Japanese train, and pretended to be an American army officer. The ruse worked to the point that he obtained official Japanese cooperation, but his on-the spot reports were snagged by General MacArthur's censors and destroyed. The carbons from his typewriter were found in 2003. First into Nagasaki is the first publication of most of the stories from his months in and around Japan in the fall of 1945. Why were Weller's reports suppressed? His accounts were not sensational. In fact, the military accounts of destruction and loss of life were higher, and most of his pieces dealt with soldiers and civilians who had been Japanese prisoners of war. In a memoir that he wrote later (also in this book), he surmised that MacArthur and his staff wanted full control of the story, which the reporter threatened. The prisoner of war stories are more interesting than the Nagasaki story, which is as much about Weller's adventure as about the military event. The reporter spoke with hundreds of service men who had spent years in brutally hard work camps, often recording their own words. First Into Nagasaki should have an index so the descendants of these men could more easily find their stories.