Anthony Weller talked about the book he edited, First into Nagasaki: The Censored Eyewitness Dispatches on Post-Atomic Japan and Its Prisoners of War, published by Crown. Mr. Weller also wrote an essay included in this collection of his father’s censored dispatches. George Weller, a Pulitzer Prize-winning war correspondent for the Chicago Daily News, entered Nagasaki on September 6, 1945, four weeks after the atomic blast leveled the city. The first Westerner to tour the city’s ruins, he talked with doctors at the makeshift hospitals and scoured the countryside in search of the prisoner-of-war camps scattered across southern Japan. His reports from Japan were censored and never published. In 2003, a year after George Weller’s death, his son Anthony found the carbon copies of the dispatches that had been missing since the war and assembled them into the book. 

Guest interviewer Norman Hatch, a World War II Marine Corps photographic officer, arrived in Nagasaki at the time George Weller was leaving. Major Hatch was a combat cinematographer and photographer for the 2nd and 4th Marines. He also coordinated the photographic coverage of the battle for Iwo Jimo.