Double A-Bomb victims, Tsutomu Yamaguchi, Akira Iwanaga and Kuniyoshi Sato

Below is an excerpt fro a TimesOnline blog article written by Richard Lloyd Perry: ( http://timesonline.typepad.com/times_tokyo_weblog/2009/03/the-luckiest-or.html )

"Tsutomu Yamaguchi, Akira Iwanaga and Kuniyoshi Sato are either the luckiest or the unluckiest men alive, and after three days in their company and long hours of conversation, I still had no idea which. It is sixty years since their monstrous ordeal and all three are well into their ninth decade. Mr Sato, who is 86, uses a wheelchair after injuring his back, and 89-year old Mr Yamaguchi is almost deaf in one ear. But all of them exude the dignified vigour of elderly Japanese, the world’s healthiest and longest living race. “I was a heavy smoker,” Mr Yamaguchi told me during our first meeting, “but I gave up smoking and drinking when I was 50. I didn’t expect to live to 80. And now I’m well over 80.” The miracle is not that he is alive now, but that he made it past the age of 29.
Mr Yamaguchi and his friends are freaks of history, victims of a fate so callous and improbable that it almost raises a smile. In 1945, they were working in Hiroshima where the world’s first atomic bomb exploded 60 years ago this morning, on 6 August 1945. 140,000 people died as a result of the explosion; by pure chance, Mr Yamaguchi, Mr Sato and Mr Iwanaga, were spared. Stunned and injured, reeling from the horrors around them, they left the city for the only place they could have gone – their home town, Nagasaki, 180 miles to the west. There, on 9th August, the second atomic bomb exploded over their heads."
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If you ever think you are having a bad week, stop and think about these three guys. Thanks to a bit of topographical good luck, these three men survive the Hiroshima blast only to find themselves in Nagasaki three days later. There is a passage in Perry's article that I actually found a bit humorous. Yamaguchi is back in Nagasaki reporting to the director that sent him to Hiroshima:
“Well, the director was angry. He reproached me for losing Sato. He said: ‘A single bomb can’t destroy a whole city! You’ve obviously been badly injured, and I think you’ve gone a little mad.’ At that moment, outside the window, I saw another flash and the whole office, everything in it, was blown over."

So, as soon as his boss says a single bomb can't destroy an entire city "Fat Man" blows up over their heads. Again, if you think you are having a bad day........

This certainly prompts a discussion about the morality of dropping atomic bombs on Japan. It's going to be a short discussion. It is always easy to be a Monday morning quarterback, but in the context of the time, Truman had no choice. I'm starting to see some revisionist history where things such as the Bataan Death March and the activities of Unit 731 are dropping from the history books. I remember about 8 or 9 years ago talking with a Marine Corps veteran of the Pacific who was in his eighties. He recounted an event where one of their men had become separated from their unit. When they found him several days later they discovered the Japanese had tortured him and cut around his anus and yanked his guts out. Estimated American casualties from an invasion of Japan were at least 250,000 and some estimates were over a million.

For those who think the war with Japan was already over, Japan still had over 2 million soldiers stationed on the main islands and almost 10,000 combat aircraft, most of which were being fitted for Kamikaze missions.

The second world war was a worldwide tragedy, but we had to do what we had to do.