George Weller, a U.S. journalist, snuck into Nagasaki in September 1945 and chronicled the destruction by the nuclear bomb dropped on the city on Aug. 9.

While he is considered to be the first foreign journalist to visit there, Weller's stories were never published. Military censors spiked them. Four of them have now been published.

The Mainichi Daily News has a special report about them.

An excerpt from the NYT story:

Mr. Weller sent his reports to Gen. Douglas A. MacArthur's censorship office in Tokyo, as he was required to do. Unknown to him for much of his stay in Nagasaki, the articles were never published.

Some of his observations appeared for the first time on Thursday in the Japanese daily Mainichi Shimbun and in English on the paper's Web site. His writing and photographs from Nagasaki were thought to have been lost for most of the last 60 years until his son, Anthony Weller, discovered them in his father's old apartment in Italy. Mr. Weller died in 2002.

The articles that appeared online were filed on Sept. 8 and 9, 1945, early in Mr. Weller's roughly three-week stay in Nagasaki. Written in the first person, they provide a raw account of the destruction and the sad confusion that survivors experienced as they watched their neighbors and members of their families die from radiation exposure. ...

Mr. Weller said his father was furious that the censors blocked his articles, which not only detailed Nagasaki's destruction but also included accounts from witnesses of the explosion - prisoners of war who had survived the explosion by burying themselves in trenches.

"All of this was kept from the American people who had a right to know," Anthony Weller said.

Greg Mitchell, the editor of Editor & Publisher, which first reported the publication of the articles, and an author with Robert Jay Lifton of "Hiroshima in America," said Mr. Weller's articles were of great historical importance.

"To me, it's one of the great historical spines of our times," Mr. Mitchell said. "For decades, the full picture of what the bomb did was kept from the people."