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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

5. There Is Even a Japanese Term for “The Double Atomic Bombed“

Battered religious figures stand watch on a hill above a tattered valley in Nagasaki after the atomic bombing. Wikimedia

In 2006, a documentary called Twice Survived: The Doubly Atomic Bombed of Hiroshima and Nagasaki was produced, and screened at the United Nations. The documentary’s producers had tracked down 165 people who had been in Hiroshima on August 6^th, 1945, when that city was nuked, then ended up in Nagasaki when that city experienced a similar fate three days later on the 9^th.

Those who survived were able to testify for the rest of their lives about what it was like to escape not one, but two atomic blasts. The Japanese, who coined the term hibakusha (“atomic bombed”) to describe the survivors of the atomic bombings, refer to those double survivors as the nijyuu hibakusha (“double atomic bombed”).

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.