George Weller - Legacy

Legacy

The Notes to Last Train from Hiroshima state: "As it was, Weller's notes were confiscated and classified. Later, his carbon copies were stored and replicated (in edited form) as internal military and Atomic Energy Commission documents—and in time, they became more or less gospel."

The Atomic Energy Commission's successor agency the Department of Energy was asked for all records by or about George Weller from September 1945 and after. Assigned to the Executive Secretariat a search was conducted of documents in the Record Storage maintained by the History Division: nothing was found.

Weller stated in his article published in the Chicago Daily News Saturday August 14, 1965: "The original notes and the original stories are buried in a family attic in New England."

In the foreword to his Weller's final book, First Into Nagasaki: The Censored Eyewitness Dispatches on Post-Atomic Japan and Its Prisoners of War, Walter Cronkite wrote:

"This is an important book—important and gripping. For the first time in print we can read the details of the nuclear bombardment of Nagasaki, Japan, as written by the first American reporter on the terrible scene ... reports, so long delayed but now salvaged by his son, at last have saved our history from the military censorship that would have preferred to have time to sanitize the ghastly details ... Also delayed by MacArthur's censorship were Weller's dispatches from his visits to American prison camps here he uncovered the Japanese military's savage treatment of their American prisoners ... There is so much in this volume that we never knew or have long forgotten. This volume of the last generation's history is an important reminder, a warning to inspire civilian vigilance."