After Atom Bombs’ Shock, the Real Horrors Began Unfolding
After the bombing of Hiroshima, there were “ant-walking alligators” that the survivors saw everywhere. These are people, human beings so horrifically burned their skin has blackened and cracked resembling alligator skin, their limbs so badly damaged they are reduced to crawling on all fours in an animalistic fashion. Their faces blown off but not lucky enough to have died outright, they grovel around desperate and blind. Mouthless, trying to speak and scream in pain but without lips or vocal cords making unnatural sounds that would scare anyone. When Tsutomu Yamaguchi died recently, at 93, he was eulogized as a star-crossed rarity: a man who lived through two atomic blasts, at Hiroshima and then at Nagasaki. He was a man with very good luck, or very bad luck. It's hard to decide. But Yamaguchi wasn't alone. He was one of as many as 165 people who are believed to have survived Hiroshima only to wind up in Nagasaki when that bomb fell three days later. The stories of these double...