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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

7. Super Unlucky, or Super Lucky?

Tsutomu Yamaguchi. All That Is Interesting

Tsutomu Yamaguchi made it back home to Nagasaki, and reported for work on the morning of August 9^th, still heavily bandaged. He was in the middle of describing the Hiroshima atomic blast to a supervisor, when a B-29 dropped an atomic bomb on Nagasaki. This time around, Yamaguchi was about two miles from ground zero, so he was not as badly hurt as he had been in Hiroshima. However, between the shock and possible radiation sickness, he ended up throwing up for a week while suffering a high fever.

Yamaguchi might have been one of history’s unluckiest individuals, considering that had an atomic bomb dropped on him – twice. He might also have been one of history’s luckiest individuals, seeing as how he survived having an atomic bomb dropped on him, and managed to escape death twice. Either way, Tsutomu Yamaguchi recovered fully and lived until 2010, when he died at the ripe old age of 93.

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.