First into Nagasaki

On September 6, 1945, less than a month after the atomic bomb was dropped on Nagasaki, George Weller, a Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter, became the first free Westerner to enter the devastated city. Going into the hospitals and consulting the doctors of the bomb's victims, Weller was the first to document its unprecedented long-range medical effects. He also became the first to enter the nearby Allied POW camps, which rivaled those of the Nazis for cruelty and bested them for death count. Among these prisoners' untold stories was that of their voyage to imprisonment in Japan on "hellships" that transported them so inhumanely that one third died in transit. Heavily censored by General MacArthur, most of these dispatches were never published and believed lost - until now. This historic body of work is a stirring reminder of the courage of rogue reporting that ferrets out the truth.