Hiroshima: 75 Years Later Sun. 8/02/20 8pm on History Channel

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Hiroshima: 75 Years Later is a landmark 2-hour documentary to mark the anniversary of the first explosion of a nuclear weapon in wartime. Using never-before-seen archival footage, long-suppressed color film from the immediate aftermath of the bomb, and overlooked audio testimony from core protagonists and victims, the film provides a unique and highly personal understanding of the most devastating experiment in human history. Told entirely from the first-person perspective of leaders, physicists, soldiers, and survivors, Hiroshima: 75 Years Later presents the moral, scientific and military conundrums of the atomic bomb, as felt by those closest to it.

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Some 260,000 people survived the atomic bomb attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki during World War II, but Japanese engineer Tsutomu Yamaguchi was one of the very few who endured the horror of both blasts and lived to the tell the tale.

Evan Andrews

Tsutomu Yamaguchi was preparing to leave Hiroshima when the atomic bomb fell. The 29-year-old naval engineer was on a three-month-long business trip for his employer, Mitsubishi Heavy Industries, and August 6, 1945, was supposed to be his last day in the city. He and his colleagues had spent the summer working long hours on the design for a new oil tanker, and he was looking forward to finally returning home to his wife, Hisako, and their infant son, Katsutoshi.


Around 8:15 that morning, Yamaguchi was walking to Mitsubishi’s shipyard a final time when he heard the drone of an aircraft overhead. Looking skyward, he saw an American B-29 bomber soar over the city and drop a small object connected to a parachute. Suddenly, the sky erupted in a blaze of light, which Yamaguchi later described as resembling the “the lightning of a huge magnesium flare.” He had just enough time to dive into a ditch before an ear-splitting boom rang out. The shock wave that accompanied it sucked Yamaguchi from the ground, spun him in the air like a tornado and sent him hurtling into a nearby potato patch. He’d been less than two miles from ground zero. ...

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