Nagasaki
The Last Witnesses
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- $18.99
Publisher Description
The second volume in a prize-worthy two-book series based on years of irreplicable personal interviews with survivors about each of the atomic bomb drops, first in Hiroshima and then Nagasaki, that hastened the end of the Pacific War.
On August 6, 1945, the United States unleashed a weapon unlike anything the world had ever seen. Then, just three days later, when Japan showed no sign of surrender, the United States took aim at Nagasaki.
Rendered in harrowing detail, this historical narrative is the second and final volume in M. G. Sheftall’s series Embers. Sheftall has spent years personally interviewing hibakusha—the Japanese word for atomic bomb survivors. These last living witnesses are a vanishing memory resource, the only people who can still provide us with reliable and detailed testimony about life in their cities before the use of nuclear weaponry.
The result is an intimate, firsthand account of life in Nagasaki, and the story of incomprehensible devastation and resilience in the aftermath of the second atomic bomb drop. This blow-by-blow account takes us from the city streets, as word of the attack on Hiroshima reaches civilians, to the cockpit of Bockscar, when Charles Sweeney dropped “Fat Man," to the interminable six days while the world waited to see if Japan would surrender to the Allies--or if more bombs would fall.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Japanese studies scholar Sheftall turns to the bombing of Nagasaki in this harrowing follow-up to Hiroshima. In his opening passages, Sheftall briefly surveys Nagasaki's history, particularly the Mitsubishi Corporation's 1920s transformation of the city into an industrial center, and its unique landscape—the city occupied two valleys amidst three mountain peaks—all of which contributed to the day's fateful events. After several last-minute reroutes due to poor visibility, the bomb was dropped over the less populated of the city's valleys, which contained two Mitsubishi plants, inadvertently allowing a mountain to shield many downtown residents from the blast. The bulk of the text presents the recollections of five now-elderly survivors; four were teenagers at the time, but all had been put to work for the war effort. One 16-year-old, home after working an overnight factory shift, stood by his window shirtless to cool off; he recalls feeling "like someone had just pressed a laundry steam iron onto his bare back" before "a tremendous gust" sent him "tumbling through the air." A 13-year-old employed digging an air raid shelter recalls that "a blast of hot wind hit her like a giant slap... flinging her into the far wall of the ditch." The horrors were compounded in the aftermath as residents feared further attacks and inadvertently exposed themselves to radiation. Sheftall's meticulous, novelistic recreations are deeply immersive. It's an invaluable contribution to 20th-century history.
