Weller's War

Starred review from February 23, 2009
Reporting on WWII for the Chicago Daily News
from 1941 to 1945, George Weller (1907–2002) filed stories from every theater. He won a Pulitzer Prize in 1943 for a story on an emergency appendectomy performed with kitchen utensils on a submarine in Japanese waters. He was strafed and shelled, contracted recurrent malaria, trained as a paratrooper, flew a mission over Italy on a B-17 with two engines down. He was the first outside observer at nuclear-devastated Nagasaki. He reported it all in an urbane, understated style that never palls. Weller had no sense of himself as a Great Journalist—which perhaps is why he was one. Weller's 1944 presentation of “the worldwide American” stands out as a model of brevity and insight: “His foreign policy represents an attempt to become popular by being benevolent, rather than to be respected by being reasonable.” Weller has been obscured by better known personalities like Ernie Pyle. This anthology, edited by his son, should give him the recognition his work merits. 16 pages of b&w photos.

Starred review from March 15, 2009
An adventurous correspondent's World War II dispatches reanimate the great cataclysm of the 20th century.

Journalist/novelist Anthony Weller discovered a cache of his father George's dispatches, which had been presumed lost, following the latter's death in 2002. First Into Nagasaki (2006) collected George's revealing stories from defeated Japan, censored by order of General MacArthur. Here, Anthony has compiled and edited a much larger selection consisting primarily of pieces written for the Chicago Daily News, supplemented by a half-dozen longer magazine articles and abridged versions of his father's three wartime books: Singapore Is Silent,"Luck to the Fighters" and Bases Overseas. The material details events beginning in 1940 and ranging from Greece and the Balkans to Africa, the Middle East, Southeast Asia and the Pacific Islands. In all those locales, the reporter often struggled to get his dispatches through not only enemy lines but also"friendly" censors. Readers will be immediately struck by the profound difference between Weller's coverage of armed conflict and the sort typically seen on television today. The cultured, cosmopolitan, multilingual journalist strove to present not just the images and events of a world war but the political machinations behind its gruesome twists and turns. He reveled in the irony, for example, of entire Nazi battalions on their way to invade Greece strolling through Bulgaria, whose government was supposedly neutral, as"tourists" in civilian attire. In Africa, he sensed the heroic significance of Belgian officers marching their Congolese troops 2,500 miles across jungle and desert to participate in the eventual defeat of the Italians in Ethiopia, the first retaliatory blow of a victim nation against the Axis powers. Also included here is the famous story gleaned from a U.S. submarine crew of an emergency appendectomy performed by a pharmacists' mate while submerged in enemy waters. It earned Weller a 1943 Pulitzer, and was cribbed twice without credit by Hollywood.

Adds scope, analysis and emotional immediacy to a critical body of history.

(COPYRIGHT (2009) KIRKUS REVIEWS/NIELSEN BUSINESS MEDIA, INC. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.)

March 15, 2009
George Weller wrote for the "Chicago Daily News" for 35 years, achieving fame for his widely ranging dispatches from the many fronts of World War II. He was captured by the Gestapo in Greece, escaped from Java on a boat strafed by Japanese fighters, marched with Belgian colonial troops fighting Italian colonial troops in Ethiopia, and slogged through swamps with Americans and Australians locked in grim struggles in New Guinea. Weller's war reporting won him the Pulitzer Prize in 1943. Here, his son assembles many of his dispatches, which add tremendously to our understanding of the war at ground level, the people's war. His aim was to tell the people back home what their heroes were doing. Anthony Weller previously edited "First into Nagasaki: The Censored Eyewitness Dispatches on Post-Atomic Japan and Its Prisoners of War", a book of his father's unpublished dispatches from post-surrender Japan. Anyone interested in World War II will want to read both volumes.Edwin B. Burgess, U.S. Army Combined Arms Research Lib., Fort Leavenworth, KA

Copyright 2009 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

April 1, 2009
Of American World War II correspondents, George Weller isnt as well remembered as Ernie Pyle or Edward R. Morrowan amnesia his son aims to remedy with this collection of his dispatches. A novelist before and after the war, Weller carried into his Chicago Daily News reportage a literary sensibility adjusted to the incident at hand, whether a battle, an interview with de Gaulle, or an Axis atrocity. As the editor notes and this works contents bear out, he regarded his roles as those of witness, interpreter, and predictor of history; hence, he shaped his prodigious output of articles (this volume contains but 10 percent) into books that looked backward at the course (Singapore Is Silent, 1943) and forward to the outcomes (Bases Overseas, 1944) of the conflict. Shrewd and verbally pictorial, Wellers wartime articles constitute a rewarding reminder of his prominencehe received a Pulitzer Prize in 1943and of the intrepidness, not to mention mobility (the datelines range from Greece to Ethiopia to New Guinea), associated with the title war correspondent.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2009, American Library Association.)