The only man to survive both nuclear weapons succumbs to stomach cancer 64 years later at age 93.
Tsutomu Yamaguchi, Survivor of 2 Atomic Blasts, Dies at 93
By MARK McDONALD
The New York TimesTsutomu Yamaguchi, the only official survivor of both atomic blasts to hit Japan in World War II, died Monday in Nagasaki, Japan. He was 93.
The cause was stomach cancer, his family said.
Mr. Yamaguchi, as a 29-year-old engineer for Mitsubishi Heavy Industries, was in Hiroshima on a business trip when the United States dropped the first atomic bomb on the morning of Aug. 6, 1945. He was getting off a streetcar when the so-called Little Boy device detonated above the city.
Mr. Yamaguchi said he was less than two miles away from ground zero that day. His eardrums were ruptured, and his upper torso was burned by the blast, which destroyed most of the city’s buildings and killed 80,000 people.
Mr. Yamaguchi spent the night in a Hiroshima bomb shelter and returned to Nagasaki, his hometown, the following day, according to interviews he gave over the years. The second bomb, known as Fat Man, was dropped on Nagasaki on Aug. 9, killing 70,000 people.
Mr. Yamaguchi was in his Nagasaki office, telling his boss about the Hiroshima blast, when “suddenly the same white light filled the room,” he said in an interview last March with the British newspaper The Independent.
“I thought the mushroom cloud had followed me from Hiroshima,” he said.
Incredibly bad luck to be nuked not once, but twice. Incredibly good luck to have survived and lived to a ripe old age.
Hat Tip: Glenn “Instapundit” Reynolds
