← Back to the front page

A Downed Pilot Who Ran Away in a Stolen Enemy Plane and Other Historic Escapes

Khalid Elhassan September 13, 2020 28 min

A P=51 making a low level pass on a German airplane. Art Station

8. The Japanese Man Who Managed to Escape the Frying Pan by Heading Into the Fire

The mushroom clouds over Hiroshima and Nagasaki. History Daily

On the morning of August 6^th, 1945, Mitsubishi Heavy Industries employee Tsutomu Yamaguchi was going about his work while on an out-of-town business trip. Unfortunately, that trip had taken him to Hiroshima, so he was there when an American B-29 dropped the world’s first atomic bomb on that city.

The blast blinded him temporarily, ruptured his eardrums, and inflicted serious burns on his upper body. Nonetheless, although he had suffered some burns, Yamaguchi managed to escape with his life and survived. After spending the night in an air-raid shelter, he left the devastated Hiroshima the following day and returned home. Unfortunately, home for Tsutomu Yamaguchi happened to be Nagasaki.

Written by

Khalid Elhassan

A lifelong history buff, I developed a particular passion for WW2 history as a child, when I spent hours listening to my grandfather, enraptured, as he recounted his wartime experiences in the British East African Campaign and with the British 8th Army in North Africa.

I graduated with a history BA from George Mason University, then went on to get a JD from the University of Virginia School of Law. After lawyering for a decade, I moved to sunny Rio de Janeiro and a less demanding career, opening a tourism agency in Copacabana.

A big chunk of my free time is spent blogging (you can follow me on Quora https://www.quora.com/profile/Khalid-Elhassan ) or freelance writing, mostly about my favorite subject, history.