Up to 12 Irish may have witnessed attack on Nagasaki

There may have been up to a dozen Irish eyewitnesses to the dropping of the atomic bomb at Nagasaki other than Dr Aidan MacCarthy, it has been claimed.

Dr MacCarthy, a native of west Cork, witnessed the atomic bomb when he was a Japanese prisoner-of-war in Nagasaki.

In his autobiography A Doctor's War, he was says that he was unaware of the nature of an atomic bomb. He wrote: "I seriously wondered whether we had finally arrived at Judgement Day."

His story has been made into a documentary A Doctor's Sword, which is now on general release.

According to Salters Stirling, the former academic secretary at Trinity College Dublin (TCD), there were at least another three and up to a dozen Irish witnesses of the same bomb.

In a letter to The Irish Times Mr Stirling said Presbyterian minister Dr Thomas McCurdy Barker, his wife Dr Ann Barker and Lilian McCombe, a Presbyterian school teacher, were all there when the bomb was dropped on Nagasaki.

They had been working in Japanese-held Manchuria and were incarcerated by the Japanese when the war broke out.

Mr Sterling made reference to a letter Ms McCombe wrote in which she stated that "some 12 friends" from the Irish Presbyterian mission in Moukden were incarcerated too in Nagasaki at the time.

The 70th anniversary of Victory in Japan (VJ) Day was marked in Belfast at the weekend with a wreath-laying ceremony at the Northern Ireland war memorial and two minutes of silence.

There were no official events in the south but some veterans and the children of veterans met at The Club in Dalkey on Saturday.

Veronica Heywood, who was there, said her father Graham Heywood’s journal of his time in a POW Camp will be published next year.

A civilian, he was one of the first to be captured by the advancing Japanese army when they invaded Hong Kong in December 1941.

His daughter has been living in Ireland since 1968. “One forgets it is my father. His account is gripping,” she said. “The worse part of it was starvation and being badly fed. The Hong Kong Chinese were incredibly brave in passing things through the fences.”

Another who marked VJ Day in Ireland was Francis Bailey. He joined the Royal Engineers in England after the Luftwaffe bombed him and his family out of their home in Birmingham.

Born in October 1923, he spent his 21st birthday in the jungles of Burma. While constructing a base hospital in Rangoon, he came down with a tropical disease and was invalided to modern-day Bangladesh.

Mr Bailey (93) stresses that he was just an “ordinary soldier”, but the war “was not a piece of history for me. It directly affected my life”.

When the bombs were dropped in Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945, he argued with his comrades in arms that it was wrong. It is a view he holds to this day, articulating it again in a letter to The Irish Times last week.

“I’m not a pacifist. We have to defend what is worth defending, but there are limits to which one should go,” he explained.

“I can’t understand why the Americans could not have dropped the bomb on a desert island as a demonstration instead of killing hundreds of thousands of people.”