Interview: Douglas Wellman Co-Author of SURVIVING HIROSHIMA #Interview

Douglas Wellman was a television producer-director for 35 years, as well as dean of the film school at the University of Southern California. He currently lives in Southern Utah with his wife, Deborah, where he works as a chaplain at a local hospital when he isn’t busy writing books.
For more information on Doug and the books he has written, visit his website at http://www.douglaswellmanauthor.com.

At 09 15:15am Tinian time - 08 15:15am Hiroshima time - the bomb drop sequence counts down to zero and Little Boy falls free from the bomb bay. Major Ferebee announces, “Bomb away,” but the everyone already knows that. Suddenly no longer struggling with its nearly 10,000 pound load, the Enola Gay has leaped upward, jolting the crew. Tibbetts immediately pulls the aircraft into a 155 degree right turn to put as much distance as possible between them and the blast site. They will have some time to make their escape. It will take Little Boy 44 seconds to fall to its designated detonation altitude of just under 2,000 feet.

--From Surviving Hiroshima

 

Welcome to The Writer's Life!  Now that your book has been published, we’d love to find out more about the process.  Can we begin by having you take us at the beginning?  When did you come up with the idea to write your book?

As with my previous books, Boxes, The Secret Life of Howard Hughes and Five Minutes, Mr. Byner! the story came to me, rather than being created by me. What has become Surviving Hiroshima, a Young Woman’s Story, is the true story of Kaleria Palchikoff and her family who survived the atomic bombing of Hiroshima. Her son, Anthony Drago, wanted to tell her story for thirty years, but didn’t know how to do it. He finally sent a proposal to my publisher, Terri Leidich, at Writelife Publishing, and she immediately recognized the historical significance of the work. Knowing the amount of research I’ve done on World War II, she knew that this story was for me. Ten minutes after she received the pitch, she had me on the phone. Ten minutes after that I had Anthony on the phone. This is turned out to be a wonderful experience for all involved.

Who is your publisher and how did you find them or did you self-publish?

I wrote my first book, Boxes, the Secret Life of Howard Hughes, from information provided by Major General Mark Musick, now retired. Writelife Publishing was interested in the story, so they published it. By the time we got around to writing the second edition of Boxes, Writelife was under new ownership. I have a wonderful working relationship with Terri and the editorial staff at Writelife. I’m very comfortable there and I have no desire to go elsewhere.

Is there anything that surprised you about getting your first book published?

The most surprising thing about getting my first book published was getting my first book published. I expected that I would have to shop it around to several publishers, so I was surprised when we were approached by Writelife. The other surprising thing was the amount of editorial work that went into creating the final product. From my previous career as a television producer-director, I knew that it is possible to get so close to the work that you stop being objective. In the case of my first book, a few things that were perfectly clear to me seemed to mystify my editor. That was a great learning experience.

Do you believe a book cover plays an important role in the selling process?

When I was producing comedy television shows years ago, I always wanted to start the show with something particularly engaging. With a book, I believe that’s the cover. The cover of my first book was brown, which worked creatively with the design, but I thought the color was a bit dull. When asked about the cover of my second book I suggested we have any color but brown. It came back brown. Again, it worked overall in the artistic vision of the cover designer, but it wasn’t very dynamic. For Surviving Hiroshima, a Young Woman’s Story, Anthony wanted a picture of his mother as a child on the cover. I wanted a picture of the atomic bomb blast as described by Bob Caron, the tail gunner on the Enola Gay. We combined the two images, with a young Kaleria in Japanese attire seated in a formal Japanese pose, placed against the atomic fireball. It’s pretty hard to miss the point.

How hard was it to write a book like this and do you have any tips that you could pass on which would make the journey easier for other writers?

When writing historical works, it’s very important to make certain you get the facts and details correctly. In the case of Surviving Hiroshima, damage and casualty reports are significantly different depending on what entity was providing them. That was frustrating. I had to examine a great deal of research material and look for consistencies. Another thing that caused me grief was occasionally neglecting to note a citation from a research work. Months after writing something I would want to add an end note and then discover that I had absolutely no idea where the material came from. It’s very time-consuming to have to go through a stack of material trying to find a source. It’s much, much easier to note your sources the first time around.

What other books are you working on and when will they be published?

I am currently writing a book on a woman Christian missionary in Burma. Several people told me it was a worthy story, and after meeting the woman I agreed. I’m at least a year away from publication on that one, probably a year and a half. Recently, I was offered a great deal of personal material and transcripts of interviews with a Polish Jewish woman who survived four concentration camps in World War II. I want to write that book, but there will be a significant amount of research involved in addition to the provided materials, so I don’t have an anticipated publication date on that.

What’s one fact about your book that would surprise people?

There is absolutely no question that the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were horrible, but there is an erroneous belief that they were the deadliest bombings of the war. The Hiroshima bomb killed about 70,000 people, which is awful, but a raid on Tokyo in March 1945 killed 100,000 people and left one million homeless. Bombing raids in Europe also had high casualty numbers. The most significant things about the atomic bombs were the fact that the devastation came from only one bomb per city, and that bomb was atomic

Finally, what message are you trying to get across with your book?

Surviving Hiroshima, a Young Woman’s Story is an example of a family who conquered a level of adversity never before seen. It’s a testament to the human will to survive, and a warning to never let such a thing happen again.

  

About the Book

From Russian nobility, the Palchikoffs barely escaped death at the hands of Bolshevik revolutionaries until Kaleria’s father, a White Russian officer, hijacked a ship to take them to safety in Hiroshima. Safety was short lived. Her father, a talented musician, established a new life for the family, but the outbreak of World War II created a cloud of suspicion that led to his imprisonment and years of deprivation for his family.

Then, on August 6, 1945, 22-year-old Kaleria was doing pre-breakfast chores when a blinding flash lit the sky over Hiroshima, Japan. A moment later, everything went black as the house collapsed on her and her family. Their world, and everyone else’s changed as the first atomic bomb was detonated over a city.

After the bombing, trapped in the center of previously unimagined devastation, Kaleria summoned her strength to come to the aid of bomb victims, treating the never-before seen effects of radiation. Fluent in English, Kaleria was soon recruited to work with General Douglas MacArthur’s occupation forces.

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