Tsutomu Yamaguchi must be one of the happiest residents on earth. He was only twenty when he arrived in Hiroshima on the morning of August 6, 1945. At 08:15 local time, an American B-29 bomber dropped the first atomic bomb on the city, called "Baby". Later it became known that 74,000 people died that day, and 160,000 felt the consequences of the explosion. Among them was a young engineer who came to town on business matters, representing Mitsubishi. Despite being 3 kilometers away from the zone of total destruction at the time of the explosion, Tsutomu suffered burns on the left side of his body and was also temporarily blind. Rushing the next morning to the train that would allow him to leave this nightmare home, Tsutomu passed only two kilometers from the epicenter of the explosion and was exposed to residual radiation.
Yamaguchi's house was in... Nagasaki. It was there, two days later, that the Americans dropped the second atomic bomb - "Fat Man". The victims of the atomic bombing were 74 thousand people. In a bitter twist of fate, Tsutomu once again found himself 3 kilometers from the epicenter of the explosion. He was in the office explaining to his boss how he managed to survive two days earlier, when suddenly the whole room was filled with white light. “I thought a mushroom cloud was following me from Hiroshima,” Yamaguchi later recalled.
This one of the most dramatic stories of human survival has become widely known relatively recently. On January 19, 2009, at the age of 93, Tsutomu Yamaguchi, who was dying of cancer, probably caused by the atomic bombings, was awarded a certificate by the Nagasaki prefectural authorities. The document confirmed that Yamaguchi was the only person on earth who survived a nuclear explosion twice. According to the Japanese himself, the certificate he received will serve as a reminder to future generations of the horrors of the atomic bombings, which claimed the lives of a total of about 210 thousand people.
Living out his days in the rebuilt Nagasaki with his daughter Toshiko, Tsutomu is happy that his life story has gained worldwide fame. "After I die, I want the next generation and their children to know what we had to go through," Yamaguchi said in a telephone interview with The Independent.
Like many of the 260,000 survivors of the bombings, Yamaguchi experienced pain and anguish for much of his life. “Before I was 12, my father was covered in bandages and completely bald,” says Toshiko, now 60. “My mother was also exposed to radioactive rain and was infected. I think she passed on some of the radiation to us.”
The Yamaguchi children have serious problems with health. His son, Katsutoshi, died of cancer in 2005 at the age of 59. His daughter Naoko has been in poor health since birth. His wife died last year at the age of 88 from liver and kidney cancer. “I also suffer from low white blood cell count,” says Toshiko.
After the bombings, Yamaguchi tried to live as an ordinary person as possible in his case. After he recovered from his burns and recovered from radiation sickness, he continued to work as a ship's engineer at the local port, and rarely discussed what happened to him. “After all, he looked great – it was hard to imagine that his father had survived two bombings,” says Toshika. He raised his family and refused to participate in various actions in support of the victims, "because he was so healthy that, in his opinion, it would not be fair to those who are really sick."
When Yamaguchi was in his eighties, he wrote a book about his experiences and took part in documentary"Nijuuhibaku" (Twice Bombed, Twice Survivor). In the film, he cries, remembering how the bloated corpses of people collided in city rivers ...
Best of the day
Three years ago, the film was shown in New York, where Yamaguchi, already using a wheelchair, pleaded with the audience to fight for the abolition of nuclear weapons. "I have experienced twice nuclear strikes and I very much hope that there will never be a third,” he said.
Today, Yamaguchi believes that it was God who "tread the path" for him. "It's my destiny to tell everyone how it was," he says. Towards the very end of his life, and much to his surprise, Tsutomu Yamaguchi becomes a small part of history. Becomes known to the whole world. Some call him the luckiest man on earth, but his daughter says he doesn't care about those things. "He laughs when people ask him why he's so happy," Toshiko says. "He just doesn't know why."
On August 9, 1945, a B-29 bomber cut the sky over the city of Nagasaki and dropped a 22-kiloton plutonium bomb, known as "Fat Man", on it. The blinding white light that followed was already familiar to Tsutomu Yamaguchi, an engineer who had been seriously injured three days earlier in the Hiroshima atomic attack. Seventy years later, you can learn the story of a man who survived two nuclear explosions and lived to tell about it.
Preparing for departure
Tsutomu Yamaguchi was preparing to leave Hiroshima when the atomic bomb fell. The 29-year-old naval engineer was on a long three-month business trip from his employer, the Mitsubishi concern. And the day of August 6, 1945 was to be his last working day in the city. He and his colleagues spent all their time working on the design of the new oil tanker, and he was looking forward to returning home to his wife, Hisako, and infant son Katsutoshi.
Attack
At 8:15 am, Yamaguchi was walking to the local Mitsubishi plant for the last time when he heard the drone of an airplane overhead. Looking up into the sky, he saw a B-29 bomber hovering over the city, and he also noticed a small object slowly parachuting down. Suddenly, the sky flared up with a bright light, which Yamaguchi later described as "the lightning flash of a magnesium torch". He had just enough time to jump into the ditch before there was a deafening explosion. The shock wave tore Yamaguchi out of his hiding place and hurled him further - he was less than two miles from the epicenter.
Effect
"I didn't understand what had happened," Yamaguchi later told the British newspaper The Times. “I think I passed out for a while. When I opened my eyes, it was dark all around, I couldn't see anything. It was like in a movie, when the movie hadn't started yet, but the screen changed to black frames without a single sound. Nuclear explosion kicked up so much dust and debris into the air that it was enough to completely outshine the sun. Yamaguchi was surrounded by falling ash, but he could see the fire mushroom in the sky over Hiroshima. His face and hands received severe burns, and his eardrums burst.
Return to Nagasaki
Yamaguchi walked, as if in a fog, to what was left of the Mitsubishi factory. There, they discovered his colleagues Akira Iwanaga and Kuniyoshi Sato, both of whom survived the explosion. After a restless night in a bomb shelter, they awoke on the morning of August 7 and headed for the railway station, which was somehow still functioning. The road offered nightmarish vistas of still-flickering lights, ruined buildings, and charred corpses. All city bridges were destroyed, so Yamaguchi had to swim among the many corpses. When he got to the station, he boarded a train full of burnt and going crazy passengers and settled in for the long trip to native city Nagasaki.
Truman's speech
By the time Yamaguchi got to his wife and child, the whole world had turned their attention to Hiroshima. Sixteen hours after the explosion, President Harry Truman gave a speech that shed light on what atomic bombs were for the first time. "It's a taming of the basic forces of the universe," he said. "The power from which the Sun draws its strength was directed against those who brought war to the Middle East." A B-29 bomber that took off from the Pacific island of Tinian flew about 1,500 miles before dropping the bomb, known as "The Kid". The explosion instantly killed 80,000 people and tens of thousands more died later. Truman warned that if Japan refused to surrender, it could expect devastating rain from the skies like no one on Earth had seen before.
State of Yamaguchi
Yamaguchi arrived in Nagasaki on the morning of August 8 and immediately went to the hospital. The doctor who saw Yamaguchi turned out to be his former classmate, but the burns on the man's hands and face were so severe that he didn't recognize him at first. As did his family. When Yamaguchi returned home covered in bandages, his mother mistook him for a ghost.
Second attack
Despite the fact that he was on the verge of losing consciousness, Yamaguchi got out of bed on the morning of August 9 and reported on the work done at the Mitsubishi office. At about 11 am, he found himself in a meeting with the director of the company, who demanded a full account of what happened in Hiroshima. The engineer recounted what happened on August 6 - a blinding light, a deafening explosion, but his boss told him he was crazy. How can one bomb destroy an entire city? Yamaguchi was trying to explain when the same bright flash happened outside the window again. Yamaguchi fell to the floor in just a second of how shock wave smashed all the windows in the office building and sent them all over the place along with other debris. "I thought the mushroom from the explosion was following me away from Hiroshima," Yamaguchi later admitted.
bomb power
The atomic bomb that hit Nagasaki was even more powerful than the one that was dropped on Hiroshima. But, as Yamaguchi later learned, the hilly landscape of the city and the fortified walls of the office building drowned out the explosion inside. However, Yamaguchi's bandages were blown off anyway, and he also received another incredibly high dose of cancer-causing radiation, but he remained relatively unharmed. For the second time in three days, he was “lucky” to be about two miles from the epicenter nuclear explosion. Once again, he was lucky enough to survive.
Yamaguchi family
After Yamaguchi was able to get out of what was left of the Mitsubishi office building, he rushed through bomb-ravaged Nagasaki to check on what had happened to his wife and son. He feared the worst when he saw that part of his house had been reduced to dust, but soon discovered that both his wife and son suffered only minor damage. His wife and son went looking for Yamaguchi's burn ointment, so they were able to hide from the explosion in the tunnel. It turned out to be a strangely happy twist of fate - if Yamaguchi had not been in Hiroshima, his family and he would have quite possibly been killed in Nagasaki.
Exposure to radiation
In the following days, the double dose of radiation Yamaguchi received began to take its toll. His hair fell out, the wounds on his arms were covered with gangrene, and he also vomited non-stop. He was still hiding with his family in a bomb shelter when Emperor Hirohito of Japan announced the country's surrender over the radio. "I didn't feel anything about it," Yamaguchi later said. “I was neither upset nor happy. I was seriously ill, I had a fever, I ate almost nothing and did not even drink. I already began to think that I was going to go to the next world.
Recovery
However, unlike many victims of radiation exposure, Yamaguchi slowly recovered and continued to live a relatively normal life. He worked as an interpreter for the US military during the Occupation of Japan and later taught school before resuming his engineering career at Mitsubishi. He and his wife had two more children, both girls. Yamaguchi wrote poetry to cope with the horrific memories of what happened in the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, but he avoided public discussion of his impressions until the 2000s, when he published his memoirs and joined the movement against atomic weapons. Later, in 2006, he traveled to New York where he gave a report on nuclear disarmament to the United Nations. "I've been through two atomic bombings and survived, my destiny is to tell about it,” he said in his speech.
If there were top 10 luckiest people on the planet on the Internet, then for sure, Tsutomu Yamaguchi would take first place in the top, as this Japanese was able to survive in a situation where it was impossible.
Tsutomu Yamaguchi was born on March 16, 1916 in the city of Nagasaki (Japan) in a family of ordinary Japanese workers.
Tsutomu Yamaguchi was a simple engineer who, in May 1945, went on a business trip to the city of Hiroshima, where he began working at a shipbuilding and automobile factory.
On August 6, 1945, the engineer was supposed to leave for Nagasaki and, before reaching the station, was blinded by a bright flash.
When the Japanese found himself and came to his senses, he felt severe pain in his chest and bloody burns on his body.
Everything around was destroyed and destroyed, all the buildings were almost completely in ruins, all around lay the gray bodies of the dead inhabitants and not a single living soul.
The half-dead engineer, with great and persistent work, was able to find the surviving residents and, together with them, find a way to leave the city.
The victims had to wait one long night, after which, thanks to the train, they managed to get to Nagasaki.
In Nagasaki, doctors gave Yamaguchi first aid, which helped him regain his energy and go back to work.
On August 9, Tsutomu Yamaguchi, during a conversation with colleagues at the plant, the Japanese again noticed the brightest flash in the sky, and this time the engineer quickly realized and fell to the floor near the iron barrier that protected him.
This time, the young engineer has already suffered much less, but, anyway, he received severe burns and radiation contamination.
There were very few chances to survive, but fate smiled on the lucky Japanese.
Tsutomu eventually managed to live a happy and long life filled with pleasant emotions.
After a full recovery, the Japanese continued to work as an engineer at a shipyard and tried very rarely to discuss his bitter past with someone.
Later, Yamoguchi got married, and his wife was able to give birth to two healthy children for him, who became the new meaning of life for the lucky one.
In 2009, the Japanese authorities officially recognized Tsutomu Yamoguchi the only person in a world that managed to survive two atomic bombings.
By his old age, the happy Japanese began to travel around the world very actively and tell his life story to all interested listeners.
Their only enemy in World War II was Japan, which also had to surrender soon. It was at this point that the United States decided to show its military power. On August 6 and 9, they dropped atomic bombs on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, after which Japan finally capitulated. AiF.ru recalls the stories of people who managed to survive this nightmare.
On the morning of August 6, 1945, an American B-29 "Enola Gay" bomber dropped the "Kid" atomic bomb on the Japanese city of Hiroshima. Three days later, on August 9, a mushroom cloud rose over the city of Nagasaki after a B-29 Bockscar bomber dropped a Fat Man bomb.
After the bombing, these cities turned into ruins, there was no stone left of them, the local civilians were burned alive.
According to various sources, from the explosion itself and in the first weeks after it, from 90 to 166 thousand people died in Hiroshima, and from 60 to 80 thousand in Nagasaki. However, there were those who managed to stay alive.
In Japan, such people are called hibakusha or hibakusha. This category includes not only the survivors themselves, but also the second generation - children born to women who suffered from the explosions.
In March 2012, there were 210 thousand people officially recognized by the government as hibakusha, and more than 400 thousand did not live to this moment.
Most of the remaining hibakusha live in Japan. They receive a certain state support, however, in Japanese society there is a prejudiced attitude towards them, bordering on discrimination. For example, they and their children may not be hired, so sometimes they deliberately hide their status.
miraculous rescue
An extraordinary story happened to the Japanese Tsutomu Yamaguchi, who survived both bombings. Summer 1945 young engineer Tsutomu Yamaguchi, who worked for Mitsubishi, went on a business trip to Hiroshima. When the Americans dropped an atomic bomb on the city, it was only 3 kilometers from the epicenter of the explosion.
Frame youtube.com/ Helio YoshidaTsutomu Yamaguchi's eardrums were blown out by the blast, and an incredibly bright white light blinded him for a while. He received severe burns, but still survived. Yamaguchi reached the station, found his wounded colleagues, and with them went home to Nagasaki, where he became the victim of a second bombardment.
By an evil twist of fate, Tsutomu Yamaguchi was again 3 kilometers from the epicenter. When he was telling his boss at the company office about what happened to him in Hiroshima, the same white light suddenly flooded the room. Tsutomu Yamaguchi survived this explosion as well.
Two days later, he received another large dose of radiation when he almost came close to the epicenter of the explosion, unaware of the danger.
Long years of rehabilitation, suffering and health problems followed. Tsutomu Yamaguchi's wife also suffered from the bombing - she fell under the black radioactive rain. Not escaped the consequences of radiation sickness and their children, some of them died of cancer. Despite all this, Tsutomu Yamaguchi after the war got a job again, lived like everyone else and supported his family. Until he was old, he tried not to attract much attention to himself.
In 2010, Tsutomu Yamaguchi passed away from cancer at the age of 93. He became the only person who was officially recognized by the Japanese government as a victim of the bombings in both Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
Life is like a struggle
When the bomb fell on Nagasaki, the 16-year-old Sumiteru Taniguchi delivering mail on a bike. In his own words, he saw what looked like a rainbow, then the blast wave threw him off his bike to the ground and destroyed nearby houses.
Photo: Hidankyo Shimbun
After the explosion, the teenager survived, but was seriously injured. The tattered skin hung in tatters from his arms, and there was none on his back at all. At the same time, according to Sumiteru Taniguchi, he did not feel pain, but his strength left him.
With difficulty, he found other victims, but most of them died the night after the explosion. Three days later, Sumiteru Taniguchi was rescued and sent to the hospital.
In 1946, an American photographer took the famous photograph of Sumiteru Taniguchi with horrific burns on his back. Body young man was mutilated for life
For several years after the war, Sumiteru Taniguchi could only lie on his stomach. He was released from the hospital in 1949, but his wounds were not properly treated until 1960. In total, Sumiteru Taniguchi underwent 10 operations.
Recovery was aggravated by the fact that then people first encountered radiation sickness and did not yet know how to treat it.
The tragedy experienced had a huge impact on Sumiteru Taniguchi. He devoted his whole life to the fight against the spread of nuclear weapons, became a well-known activist and chairman of the Council of victims during the nuclear bombing of Nagasaki.
Today, 84-year-old Sumiteru Taniguchi lectures around the world about the terrible consequences of the use of nuclear weapons and why they should be abandoned.
Round orphan
For 16 year old Mikoso Iwasa August 6 was a typical hot summer day. He was in the yard of his house when the neighboring children suddenly saw a plane in the sky. Then an explosion followed. Despite the fact that the teenager was less than one and a half kilometers from the epicenter, the wall of the house protected him from the heat and the blast wave.
However, Mikoso Iwasa's family was not so lucky. The boy's mother was at that time in the house, she was filled with rubble, and she could not get out. He lost his father before the explosion, and his sister was never found. So Mikoso Iwasa became an orphan.
And although Mikoso Iwasa miraculously escaped severe burns, he still received a huge dose of radiation. Due to radiation sickness, he lost his hair, his body became covered with a rash, his nose and gums began to bleed. He has been diagnosed with cancer three times.
His life, like the lives of many other hibakusha, turned into misery. He was forced to live with this pain, with this invisible disease for which there is no cure and which is slowly killing a person.
Among hibakusha, it is customary to remain silent about this, but Mikoso Iwasa did not remain silent. Instead, he became involved in the fight against the spread of nuclear weapons and helping other hibakusha.
To date, Mikiso Iwasa is one of the three chairmen of the Japan Confederation of Atomic and Hydrogen Bomb Victims Organizations.
Explosion atomic bomb Little Boy dropped on Hiroshima. Photo: commons.wikimedia.org
Was it necessary to bomb Japan at all?
Disputes about the advisability and ethical side of the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki have not subsided to this day.
Initially, the American authorities insisted that they were necessary to force Japan to capitulate as soon as possible and thereby prevent the losses among its own soldiers that would be possible in the event of a US invasion of the Japanese islands.
However, according to many historians, the surrender of Japan even before the bombing was a matter of course. It was only a matter of time.
The decision to drop bombs on Japanese cities turned out to be rather political - the United States wanted to scare the Japanese and demonstrate their military power to the whole world.
It is also important to mention that not all American officials and high-ranking military officials supported this decision. Among those who considered the bombings unnecessary was Army General Dwight Eisenhower who later became President of the United States.
Hibakusha's attitude towards explosions is unequivocal. They believe that the tragedy that they experienced should never be repeated in the history of mankind. And that is why some of them dedicated their lives to the fight for the non-proliferation of nuclear weapons.
