http://www.thenation.com/blog/162596-hidden-history-american-pows-were-killed-hiroshima
http://m.thenation.com/blog/162596-hidden-history-american-pows-were-killed-hiroshima
Hidden History: American POWS Were Killed in Hiroshima
Greg Mitchell on August 5, 2011 - 2:14PM ET
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At least twenty-three US servicemen were in Hiroshima when the bomb fell. They were prisoners of war, former aviators, held at several locations in downtown Hiroshima. It's likely we would have never learned of this if a B-29 had not ditched off Japan two days after the Hiroshima attack, on August 8, 1945. Picked up by a fishing boat, the crew ended up on a drill field in devastated Hiroshima, bound by rope and blindfolded.
A Japanese police captain saved them from a mob by taking them to the suburb of Ujina. En route he stopped at the Hiroshima train station, removed their blindfolds, and according to Matin Zapf, one of the Americans who would survive), shouted, "Look what you have done! One bomb!"
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Along the way they came across two more American prisoners: a navy aviator and an Air Force sergeant. They were suffering from nausea, with green liquid dripping from their mouths and ears. Held in Hiroshima when the bomb hit, they had survived by jumping into a cesspool. Clearly, they were suffering from radiation disease, but no one at the time knew anything about it.
That night, as the pair screamed in pain in their cells—asking to be put out of their misery—the other Americans asked the Japanese doctors to do something. "Do something?" one of the doctors replied. "You tell me what to do. You caused this." The two men died later that night.
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Three days after the Hiroshima blast, perhaps as many as a dozen Dutch POWs were killed in the bombing of Nagasaki. One American soldier there, a Navajo from New Mexico, survived in his cell.
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