BY GEORGE WELLER
NOVELS
Not to Eat, Not for Love
Clutch and Differential
The Crack in the Column
HISTORY
Singapore Is Silent
Bases Overseas
First into Nagasaki
Weller's War
FOR YOUNGER READERS
The Story of the Paratroops
The Story of Submarines
TRANSLATION
(AS MICHAEL WHARF)
Fontamara, by Ignazio Silone
BY ANTHONY WELLER
NOVELS
The Garden of the Peacocks
The Polish Lover
The Siege of Salt Cove
TRAVEL
Days and Nights on the Grand Trunk Road:
Calcutta to Khyber
HISTORY (EDITOR)
First into Nagasaki
Weller's War
for
Gladys Lasky Weller
(1922-1988)
in loving memory
It is no one's fault. … Everybody struggles
as hard as he can to make war like war.
—ANTOINE DE SAINT-EXUPÉRY,
Flight to Arras
Contents
Foreword
I Early European Dispatches
II The Fall of Greece
III Canopies over Crete
IV The de Gaulle Debacle in Brazzaville
V The Belgian Campaign in Ethiopia
VI “In Darkest Africa”
VII With Haile Selassie in Addis Ababa
VIII Singapore Is Silent
IX The Collapse of Java
X “Luck to the Fighters!”
XI The Defense of Australia
XII Somewhere in New Guinea
XIII The Struggle for the Islands
XIV Bases Overseas
XV The Home Front
XVI Flak over Italy
XVII The Liberation of Greece
XVIII Across the Middle East
XIX From Burma to China
XX Japan Defeated
Acknowledgments
Foreword
Warfare profoundly changes not just its combatants but also its eyewitnesses. A war correspondent—the professional eyewitness whose task is to get as close as possible and report as much as possible while surviving as long as possible—is in a peculiar position. Neither victim nor killer, he still risks injury and death. Meanwhile, he must stand aside as portions of the truth he attempts to convey to a readership back home are siphoned off by censorship. It is, ultimately, a frustrating profession that one way or another can destroy many of its bravest and most honest practitioners.
George Anthony Weller (1907-2002) was among the eminent American correspondents of his era, recipient of a 1943 Pulitzer Prize and a 1954 George Polk Award, both for foreign reporting. He first made his name as a courageous reporter during World War II, one of the few to cover every principal theater of war on all the continents. To revisit his diverse work now, sixty-five years later, is to be reminded of how very much the foreign correspondent—a vanishing profession—can and should provide, and how much has been lost along with the reading public: not just the skill, in wartime, to evoke unforgettably a battle large or small, but also the rigorous ability to analyze the politics that lies behind it, and give voice to the rich personal stories and complex levels within any human struggle.
One self-flattering aspect of a purely contemporary viewpoint is to imagine that correspondents today are more daring or endangered than in the past. This detailed look at a single reporter's World War II odyssey should put such notions to rest. It is also a chance to follow the effect of five years of continuous war on an exceptional man. Here he is in 1943, after seven months of steadily worsening malaria in the jungles of Papua New Guinea, writing to his editor from a portable hospital near the front about when he might be coming home for a much-needed break: “You may wonder why it takes me any time at all to cut loose from this war, when others are able to flit from one theater to another like swallows. It is because I have been deep in it. It takes time to free oneself and get ready to come back.”
When George Weller left New York by ship in December 1940 to report from Europe for the Chicago Daily News, he was professionally successful and well prepared for the task at hand. At thirty-three, he had managed to survive the Depression as a writer. He was a mature, highly praised novelist and sometime translator, fluent (albeit with a Boston accent) in German, French, modern Greek, and Italian, conversant in Spanish and Portuguese. He had placed more than a hundred articles and short stories in the leading magazines, including a dozen pieces for the New Yorker. He had spent much of his twenties in Europe, writing two novels and working as a Balkans stringer (1932-1936, a dollar per day) for the New York Times.
Widely published yet still barely solvent, once he left America behind for good and became a full-fledged foreign correspondent, he was immersed in nonstop war. In the opening year alone he endured at close hand a series of upheavals as the Axis took over the world. From Portugal and Spain he moved to more-familiar terrain and watched the Nazis seize Rumania, Bulgaria, Yugoslavia. His baptism of fire came as his beloved Greece fell to German assault. As the last reporter out of a burning Salonika (by fishing boat), he was “quarantined” by the Nazis in Athens and taken to Berlin. Freed after nine weeks, he headed south. He tramped to the heart of Central Africa to find tribesmen who had fought the explorer Stanley in the prior century. In Brazzaville he managed a controversial interview with General de Gaulle, head of Free France, who soon tried to deny the overtures he had just made behind Churchill's back.
From there Weller followed Belgium's Congolese army on an obscure campaign against the Italians in the highlands of western Ethiopia. He met Haile Selassie on his recovered throne and, after the attack on Pearl Harbor, was sent east by his editor to Singapore. For six weeks he covered the doomed British colony, strategic key to Asia's sea lanes, as the Malay Peninsula fell to the Japanese. He got away on one of the final ships through Bomb Alley and spent the next month covering the collapse of Java, fleeing under heavy strafing and shelling on the last boat to escape. (Time magazine called him the “much machine-gunned George Weller”) Reaching Australia, he sent out the first account of the epic Battle of the Java Sea, an Allied disaster. All these classic stories are in this book, seen through his skeptical, sympathetic, and fiercely intelligent words.
That was his opening fifteen months; the rest of his war was equally eventful. Amid bouts of malaria he covered the struggle for the Pacific, principally from New Guinea, the Solomons, and Australia. He trained as a paratrooper, the first reporter to do so, and received his Pulitzer for the account of an appendectomy performed by a pharmacist's mate aboard a submarine in enemy waters. After home leave he returned to the Pacific via Italy; a violated Greece in the early throes of civil war; across the Middle East through Palestine, Iran, Iraq; a spell with guerrillas behind enemy lines in Burma; by tumultuous road to China, thence the Philippines, finally Japan. The relentless struggle pared and galvanized his writing, and shaped his vision of the world. In sending back not only the guts of war but the thinking behind it, too, the dispatches transformed him irrevocably.
A gusty man with extraordinarily alive blue eyes and a head suggesting steel-reinforced bone structure, Weller always seemed larger than a mere six feet. As someone who felt at home everywhere and went deep into what he called the secret history of each place, his reportorial gift was a mask of complete innocence that was misleading and often trapped his subjects in unwitting revelations.
Having begun as a novelist, he had more literary style than most reporters. (“You could hear the bomb singing as it came down, singing like a bomb that loved its wo
rk.”) He joined the Chicago Daily News in late 1940. All but forgotten now, this afternoon newspaper's foreign staff was syndicated in over eighty papers—far more than even that of the New York Times. Thus Weller's coverage, with a readership of ten million, appeared regularly in the Boston Globe, the San Francisco Chronicle, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, and the New York Post. Besides him, the CDN could boast such correspondents as Leland Stowe, Paul Ghali, Robert J. Casey, Richard Mowrer, Edgar Ansel Mowrer, Webb Miller, Helen Kirkpatrick, John B. Terry (killed in the war), William H. Stoneman (wounded), Archibald Steele, John Whitaker, Walter Robb, David M. Nichol, Allen Haden, Hal O'Flaherty, and William McGaffin—four Pulitzers, one Medal of Freedom, and one French Legion of Honor among them. Time called their reporting of World War II “the best in the U.S.” They were under the direction of foreign editor Carroll Binder, whom Weller compared to a manager on a baseball team. “As events come to bat, he moves about his infield and outfield.” That might mean, for Weller, being shifted as rapidly as possible from an old war in Africa to a new in Asia: “When one war ends, another is quick to begin.”
Weller was a man of the world, in an old-fashioned definition: an American type who existed midcentury, charming, stubbornly confident, at ease in any situation. At the same time, he never forgot growing up poor—his Harvard tuition was generously paid by a man he caddied for as a teenager—and he remained frugal all his life. A career under fire or stuck in different places stopped him from worrying about eating well or dressing stylishly.
His second job after college, during a year of study at the University of Vienna, was as an actor with Max Reinhardt's theater company, partnering the young Hedy Lamarr. Freelancing from Vienna, Capri, and Athens, through the 1930s he managed to publish reportage and fiction regularly in Story, the Nation, Esquire, Collier's, Harper's, Vanity Fair, the New Republic, the Atlantic, and the New Yorker while getting a political education for the New York Times.
He also published two novels that secured his early reputation but made him little money. Not to Eat, Not for Love (1933) was a modernist work about Harvard whose diverse language held tinges of Joyce's influence and whose technique owed much to Dos Passos. Praised by luminaries such as Conrad Aiken, it went through five printings and is still remembered. Clutch and Differential (1936) fared differently. A panoramic attempt to portray American life through linked stories—connected by interludes using the automobile as allegory—the book received strong, if puzzled, reviews and sold fewer than three hundred copies “in the heart of the Depression,” as Weller put it, “when people on bread lines couldn't wait to read an experimental novel.”
His last novel, The Crack in the Column (1949), set in Greece during the Nazi occupation and subsequent civil war, was written during his stint as a Nieman Fellow. It was dedicated to George Polk, the CBS newsman whom Weller had met as a naval officer in the Solomon Islands and whose murdered body was found in Salonika Bay in May 1948. (Seven months earlier, in Greece, Weller had been Polk's best man and loaned him his wedding suit.) The dedication does not explain any of this, but reads simply: TO GEORGE POLK / WHO KNEW THE GREEKS / AND DID NOT FEAR THEIR GIFT.
From the 1950s, Weller covered principally the Mediterranean and the Middle East, but also the Soviet Union, Eastern Europe, South America, Africa, and the Pacific. He added to his résumé by being a prisoner of the Communist Chinese in Manchuria and the Germans in East Berlin. Once he traveled for a year and a half with never more than a week in one place, and often only a night or two; he roamed so constantly that one editor, looking over his expense sheets with dismay, said: “You can always count on Weller—he proceeds from A to B by way of Z.” He also wrote several plays that enjoyed the distinction of actually being produced. In 1972, six years before the CDN's untimely demise, he “retired” but continued to write and was awarded Italy's Premio Internazionale di Giornalismo. Most of his life was spent overseas—he died at ninety-five in his seaside villa, south of Rome—and across seven decades he reported from nearly every country.
Weller's War can be read not only for his accounts of dramatic events but, beneath this, as a wartime journey of the soul. It appears at a moment when World War II is about to leave the domain of the recent past, recalled in detail by some of our elders as an individual conflict in which they participated, and become a mythology.
“I should have felt remiss in the correspondent's duty toward history if I failed to record this before liberation had sicklied over the sharp memories,” he wrote in a letter to his editor near the end of the war, and often in these pages you can sense, behind his toil, a determination that what he has seen not be forgotten.
The toll on Weller's colleagues quickly becomes evident. Many reporters wound up dead. At the same time, the more outlandish episodes were typical; people feared lost in one country turn up alive, years later, on the other side of the world. The scale may seem immeasurably vast, but these dispatches show that it was a personal war, with its coincidental meetings, its quick friendships, its quirks of fate.
Chronologically, the five years contained in Weller's War lead up to the three weeks already covered in First into Nagasaki: The Censored Eyewitness Dispatches on Post-Atomic Japan and Its Prisoners of War (2006). As the first outside observer to reach Nagasaki (September 6, 1945), four weeks after the bomb, he defied MacArthur's blackout forbidding reporters from entering either nuclear site. After daring to make his way into the scorched city before any American soldiers or doctors, and brazenly telling the Japanese military he was not a newspaperman but a U.S. colonel, he wrote dispatch after dispatch of the greatest scoop of his career—indeed, one of the greatest of the century—only to see it all snuffed by MacArthur's censors. The stories were blocked from reaching his editors back at the Chicago Daily News.
After a week among the ruins and makeshift hospitals, speaking both with doomed Japanese and with their doctors cataloging the effects of radiation, Weller left Nagasaki to visit several nearby Allied POW camps—most of whose prisoners still didn't know the war was over. He took down each tortured man's saga of years at slave labor in treacherous coal mines. Those dispatches were suppressed, too.
As a result of the interviews, he wrote “The Death Cruise,” a long narrative about the worst Japanese hellship, whose cargo hold carried sixteen hundred prisoners from the Philippines to the prison camps. After seven weeks of dehydration, starvation, murder, bombing by our own planes, and even cannibalism, only three hundred survived.
Thwarted by the censors, Weller finally gave up on Nagasaki and moved on. His carbon copy of the dispatches soon went astray. It was one of the frustrations of his later years that these stories, among the most important of his career, were lost to posterity, erased by his own government. Six months after he died, amid the chaotic archive in his villa by the Mediterranean, I discovered the missing typescripts in a mildewed wooden crate—crumbling, moldy, still afire with all they had to say. They had been waiting, one room over from where he sat, ever-more faintly remembering; and my triumph was tempered by a sadness that he had died believing them vanished.
That book has made possible Weller's War. When I began assembling it, I was unaware of how very much my father had written during five years of war, or all he had survived to see the atomic conclusion. Because I grew up hearing story after story, I thought I had a notion of what his World War II had been like—the first war of his professional life. When I read all the dispatches, I realized I could not have been more wrong.
It was not just that in many parts of the world he reported from, the airplanes and trucks looked antiquated and rickety, or that what he called modern armaments seemed to belong to an age long before the atomic bomb. I'd imagined the war as a twentieth-century struggle, but so much of his experience—landscapes, empires, and people—instead seemed to leap fully grown from the nineteenth century. He had given me a sense of the heroism, the humor, and the bloodshed, but what he'd seen was more poignant, more funny, and far more horrible than what he lat
er recounted. Best of all, I could watch it happening right before his eyes, before all his senses.
Inevitably, the present book is as much about being a war correspondent as it is about what one man witnessed. The ease of modern communications can make us overlook the fact that, until recently, a reporter's challenge lay in surmounting the problems not only of “getting in,” but of swiftly being able to get a story out. During World War II there were no instantaneous satellite links, only cable offices within reach if one were lucky, where—along with normal, excruciating delays—the tendrils of political and military censorship could be too muscular to remove.
The articles in this book were sent back in four ways. After being censored locally, most early dispatches were relayed to Chicago by telephone or radio. Those Greek dispatches following Weller's release by the Nazis seem to have been mailed from neutral locations, probably Bern and Lisbon, before Weller left for Africa.
The bulk of the book's dispatches were cabled via New York to Chicago, where CDN stenographers expanded them from a ready-for-telegram language that foreign correspondents wrote in directly. Due to the cost of sending stories across the globe (often forty cents a word), this compressed “cablese” removed everything obvious. Numbers, acronyms, and punctuations were spelled out. Each text was dated with the day and hour when a reporter was typing, since a dispatch might sit in a telegraph office for many days awaiting transmission. In 1942, for example, the South Pacific had only two cable routes, and one was the slow way around Africa; a reporter covering the war on New Guinea while nominally based in Australia might queue up behind a logjam of four hundred coded government messages.
To illustrate cablese—this lost language in which most of Weller's articles were composed in the field—here is the beginning of a dispatch from Nagasaki, typed at 1 a.m. on the morning of September 9, 1945:
Weller's War Page 1
