🎧 Nagasaki: Friendly Fire
🎧 Warfare • 32m
Warning: The events recounted in this episode may be distressing to some listeners
At 11.02 am on August 9 1945, America dropped the world's most powerful atomic bomb on Nagasaki. The Japanese port city was flattened to the ground 'as if it had been swept aside by a broom', with over 70,000 people killed.
At that time, hundreds of Allied prisoners of war were working close to the bomb's detonation point, as forced labourers in the shipyards and foundries of Nagasaki. Having survived four years of malnutrition, disease, and brutality, they now faced the prospect of the US dropping its second atomic bomb on their prison home.
In this episode James is joined by John Willis, whose new book Nagasaki: The Forgotten Prisoners paint a vivid picture of defeat, endurance, and survival against astonishing odds.
Up Next in 🎧 Warfare
-
🎧 Hiroshima: A Survivor's Story
Warning: The events recounted in this episode may be distressing to some listeners
Keiko Ogura was just eight years old on August 6 1945 when her home city of Hiroshima was destroyed by the US in the first atomic bomb attack in history.
Almost 150,000 people lost their lives in that first bombi...
-
🎧 Taiwan: China's Ukraine?
Located just 100 miles off the coast of mainland China, the nation of Taiwan sits in the so-called 'first island chain' - a number of US-friendly territories deemed crucial to American foreign policy.
Yet China's president Xi Jinping maintains that Chinese reunification with Taiwan must be fulfi...
-
🎧 North Korea & the Kim Dynasty
With Kim Jong-un having issued a new threat of nuclear war just this week on the anniversary of the Korean War armistice in 1953, we take a look at the origins of the North Korean state and the Kim dynasty that has ruled it with an iron fist since that conflict.
From founder Kim Il-sung, to his ...