Friday Travels To 1945...!

Seems like lately I have been posting some very dark subject matter. It's time for a happier story.

We are going back to the year 1945 and the dropping of the very first atomic bomb on a city. The destruction and devastation was beyond believe! However, this is a story of one man that survived!

Double Nuked

Tsutomu Yamaguchi was the only officially recognized survivor of both the Hiroshima and Nagasaki atomic bomb blasts at the end WW2.

On 6 August 1945, Yamaguchi, a young engineer, was visiting Hiroshima. Seconds after getting off a tram at 8.15am he saw a massive flash of light and was knocked to the ground by the force of the bomb, and passed out as it detonated 600m above the city.

Around 140,000 of Hiroshima’s 350,000 people perished instantly. Though less than two miles from Ground Zero, Yamaguchi suffered only serious burns to his upper body and a perforated eardrum. He spent the night in an air-raid shelter, with people dying and screaming in pain all around him. The following day, Yamaguchi navigated through the piles of burnt and dying bodies to catch a train 180 miles back home to Nagasaki – which, like Hiroshima, was an important industrial and military base.

At 11.02am, and once again less than two miles from the centre, Yamaguchi saw a familiar flash of light. This time a 25-kiloton plutonium bomb exploded above Nagasaki, throwing Yamaguchi to the ground.

As well as almost total deafness in one ear, his skin wounds were bandaged for 12 years, and his wife was poisoned from the radioactive fall-out. She died in 2008, aged 88, of kidney and liver cancer. Their son, exposed to the Nagasaki radiation at six months old, died in 2005 – aged 59.

Before his death of stomach cancer, Yamaguchi became a passionate anti-nuclear weapons campaigner – but he never expressed any anti-Americanism.

I would say that this gentleman was watched over by an angel, without a doubt! One of the most amazing things about this guy, is that he never voiced anti-American feelings! That, my friends, is a miracle in itself!

Coffee on the patio this morning. There are some fresh oranges on the table we can share!