(Pictured left to right) Ron Drez, George Weller, Cleveland Harrison, and Host Gene Edwards

“December 7th pushed it over the edge,” declares author/historian Ron Drez of the forces propelling the United Stated into World War II. Drez, an associate of the late Stephen Ambrose, Vietnam veteran and author of several books, is one of the guests at the roundtable in Writers: World War II.

 

Cleveland Harrison provides another perspective. A reluctant 18-year-old draftee in early 1943, he remembers that he had “just assumed it would end before I was called.” Harrison trained as an Army engineer at Ole Miss before he was transferred to the 94th Infantry in preparation for the Invasion of Europe. Severely injured in the fighting in Germany, his memoir Unsung Valor chronicles his service as an ordinary soldier.

 

Anthony Weller’s father was the Pulitzer Prize winning war correspondent George Weller, the first westerner into Nagasaki after the bomb. According to the younger Weller, he was astonished that MacArthur was sequestering reporters in Yokahama and not allowing anyone into southern Japan. “He felt that since the Japanese were no longer our enemy he had a right to go wherever he wanted.” So this journalist bucked orders, posed as an American colonel, and marched into the bombed city.

 

In spite of filing over 50,000 words in three weeks, Weller never saw his dispatches published. All were censored by MacArthur, an act which was “the largest frustration in his 60-year career.” Nonetheless, Weller captured the post-war climate in incredible detail. “This was his profession,” Anthony Weller explains, “to try to make a far-off and complex situation vivid and dynamic and apparently complete for the readership back home.”

 

Weller kept carbons of his dispatches but unfortunately lost them after the war. After his death in 2002, his son found them and published everything in a book which sheds new light upon Japanese wartime activities—First Into Nagasaki.

 

Host Gene Edwards marvels at the long memories. According to Anthony Weller, his father never stopped talking about his experiences in post-war Japan. Cleveland Harrison adds that veterans remember combat in particular because they were young and their lives were on the line. Ron Drez collected interviews in a 15 year oral history.