When the smoke cleared he saw destruction, fires, and death everywhere. Knocked unconscious, he awoke to a world of complete black. His camp was less than two kilometres from the atomic bomb hypocentre on August 9. He was taken to Nagasaki's Fukuoka POW Camp 14 and put to work at a Mitsubishi steel foundry. Chick survived with a few others and was picked up by a Japanese fishing boat off the Kyushu coast. He was eventually put on a ship bound for Japan, but a US submarine attacked this ship, sinking it along with hundreds of POWs. More than 74,000 people died out of a population of 263,000, but some miraculously survived.Ĭhick and his battalion had been captured by the Japanese in Timor. Everyone within range of the bomb became a victim. But on that day when an American bomber dropped the last atomic bomb in the first nuclear war, it didn't matter if you were Japanese or Australian, if you were a child, a Japanese general, or an Allied POW. Private Alan Chick, of St Helens, Tasmania, was one of them. Twenty-four Australian prisoners of war survived the atomic bombing of Nagasaki on August 9, 1945.
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