Wednesday, January 6, 2010

A very, very bad week

Tsutomu Yamaguchi
On August 6, 1945, Yamaguchi was a 29-year-old engineer, preparing to leave Hiroshima, Japan, where he had been on a business trip. That morning, the crew of an American B-29 bomber, the Enola Gay, dropped an atomic bomb on the city, killing some 140,000 people.
Yamaguchi suffered burns but survived, and made his way back home to Nagasaki -- just one day before another B-29 crew dropped another atomic bomb on that city on August 9, resulting in another 70,000 deaths.
The New York Times reports that Yamaguchi, recognized as the only official survivor of both bombings, died on Monday in Nagasaki of stomach cancer at the age of 93.