THE UNLUCKIEST MAN: BOMBED AT HIROSHIMA AND NAGASAKI

He was crossing Hiroshima on a public tram when he heard the droning sound of an aircraft engine in the skies above.

Twice bombed, twice survived

Tsutomu Yamaguchi thought nothing of it: after all, it was wartime and planes were forever passing over the city.

He was unaware that the engines belonged to the US bomber, Enola Gay, and that it was just seconds away from dropping a 13 kiloton uranium atomic bomb.

Yamaguchi was just stepping off the tram as the plane approached its target at 8.15am on 6 August, 1945. He glanced up at the sky and noticed it pass overheard. He also saw two small parachutes. And then, quite without warning, all hell broke loose.

‘[There was] a great flash in the sky and I was blown over.’

The massive nuclear warhead had exploded less than three kilometres from the spot where he was standing.

A blinding flash of light

The warhead was detonated at 600m: as Yamaguchi swung his gaze upwards he saw a vast mushroom-shaped pillar of fire rising high into the sky.

Seconds later, he passed out. The explosion ruptured his eardrums and the flash of light left him temporarily blinded.

The heat of the exploding warhead was such that it left him with serious burns over the left side of the top half of his body. When he eventually regained consciousness, he crawled to a shelter and tried to make sense of what happened. He was fortunate to stumble across his colleagues, who had also survived. All three of them were young engineers with the shipbuilder Mitsubishi Heavy Industries and been unlucky enough to be sent to Hiroshima at the very time of the bombing.

Hiroshima after the attack

They spent the night together in an air raid shelter, nursing their burns and wounds. Then, on the following day, they ventured out of their shelter and picked their way through the charred and molten ruins.

Enola Gay's return

They passed piles of burnt and dying bodies as they made their way to the nearest functioning station. They were desperate to catch a train back to their home town of Nagasaki, some 180 miles away.

Nagasaki after the attack

Yamaguchi was in a poor state and went to have his wounds bandaged as soon as he reached Nagasaki. But by 9 August, he felt well enough to struggle into work.

His boss and his co-workers listened with horrified amazement as he described the unbelievable destruction that a single warhead had managed to cause. He told them how the bomb had melted metal and evaporated entire parts of the city. His boss, Sam, simply didn’t believe him.

‘You're an engineer,’ he barked. ‘Calculate it. How could one bomb...destroy a whole city?’

At the exact moment when he said these words - 11.02am - there was a blinding white flash that penetrated to the heart of the room. Yamaguchi’s tender skin was once again pricked with heat and he crashed to the ground. ‘I thought that the mushroom cloud followed me from Hiroshima,’ he said later

The US Airforce had dropped their second nuclear warhead, ‘Fat Man’, named after Winston Churchill. It was much larger than the Hiroshima device - a 25-kiloton plutonium bomb that exploded in the bowl of the valley in which Nagasaki is situated.

A model of the Nagasaki bomb

The destruction was more confined but even more intense than at Hiroshima: some 74,000 were killed and a similar number injured.

Yamaguchi, his wife and his baby son survived and spent much of the following week in an air raid shelter near what was left of their home. Five days later, they heard the news that Emperor Hirohito had announced Japan's surrender.

Yamaguchi’s survival of both nuclear explosions was little short of miraculous. Yet it was later discovered that he was one of 160 people known to have lived through both bombings.

He survived both of these

In 1957, he was finally recognized as a hibakusha or ‘explosion affected person’. But it was not until 2009 that he was recognized as an eniijuu hibakusha or double bomb survivor, the only person in Japan to be officially recognized as such.

Fellow Nagasaki survivors

The effects of the double bombings left its scars, both mental and physical. Yamaguchi lost the hearing in his left ear as a result of the Hiroshima explosion. He also temporarily lost his hair and his daughter would later recall that he was swathed in bandages until she reached the age of 12.

Yamaguchi became an outspoken opponent of nuclear weapons until he was well advanced in years, at which point he began to suffer from the long-term effects of the exposure to radiation. His wife developed liver and kidney cancer in 2008 and died soon after. Yamaguchi himself contracted acute leukemia and finally died in 2010 at the age of 93.

His longevity was extraordinary, as he knew all too well. He viewed his long life as a ‘path planted by God’.

‘It was my destiny that I experienced this twice and I am still alive to convey what happened,’ he said towards the end of his life.

UK paperback

I am the author of seven works of narrative history including the best-selling Nathaniel's Nutmeg and, most recently, Wolfram: The Boy Who Went to War. If you'd like to buy my books, click here for UK readers and here for US readers. For more information about my books, visit www.gilesmilton.com