Hi everyone. I'm John Haggardorne. And welcome to Found in the Footnotes.

Amazing history in 5 to 10 minute sound bites. Now ready to be discovered every Wednesday at 4 p.m. Easter time, right here at 1001 Heroes.

Another gem rises to the surface, and our story begins.

On the morning of August 6, 1945, Sotomayu was running late.

He was a 29-year-old engineer from Nagasaki, in Hiroshima on a short

business trip for Mitsubishi heavy industries. The war was dragging on. Cities were being

fire-bombed nightly. This was not unusual. What was unusual was the sky. It was clear, too clear.

At 8.15 a.m., Yamaguchi looked up, and the world ended.

A flash, not an explosion, a light, brighter than the sun,

whiter than anything he had ever seen.

Yamaguchi was thrown into the air. His clothes were ripped from his body.

The heat burned the left side of his face and arms instantly.

His eardrums ruptured. He would later say it felt as if the sky itself had collapsed.

Hiroshima had just been hit by the first atomic bomb ever used in war.

We'll return to our story right after these sponsor messages.

And now, back to the man who survived two atomic bombs.

Yamaguchi didn't know what an atomic bomb was. No one did.

He woke up in darkness, surrounded by fire.

Buildings were gone, flattened into a smoking wasteland.

People wandered like ghosts, their skin burned,

their clothes hanging in tatters. Some didn't speak. Some couldn't. He stumbled toward a bomb shelter where doctors worked without supplies, without electricity, without answers. That night, Hiroshima burned, and somehow, somehow, Zomo Yamaguchi survived.

Two days later, injured, bandaged, half blind, he boarded a train. The rail line still worked. The

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