When Hitler Took Cocaine and Lenin Lost His Brain Read Online Free PDF Page B

to their hometown of Nagasaki, some 200 miles away.
    Yamaguchi was in a poor state and went to have his wounds bandaged as soon as he reached Nagasaki. But by 9 August, after just two days of convalescence, he felt well enough to struggle into work.
    His boss and his co-workers listened in horrified amazement as he described the unbelievable destruction that a single bomb had managed to cause. He told them how the explosion had melted metal and evaporated entire parts of the city. His boss, Sam, simply didn’t believe him.
    â€˜You’re an engineer,’ he barked. ‘Calculate it. How could one bomb destroy a whole city?’
    At the exact moment he said these words – 11.02 a.m. – there was a blinding white flash that penetrated to the heart of the room. Yamaguchi’s tender skin was once again pricked with heat and he crashed to the ground. ‘I thought that the mushroom cloud followed me from Hiroshima,’ he said later.
    The US Air Force had dropped their second nuclear warhead – Fat Man – named after Winston Churchill. It was much larger than the Hiroshima device, a twenty-five kiloton plutonium bomb that exploded in the bowl of the valley where Nagasaki is situated.
    The destruction was more confined but even more intense than at Hiroshima. Some 74,000 were killed and a similar number injured.
    Yamaguchi, his wife and his baby son miraculously survived and spent much of the following week in an air-raid shelter near what was left of their home. Five days later, they heard the news that Emperor Hirohito had announced Japan’s surrender.
    Yamaguchi’s survival of both nuclear explosions was little short of miraculous. Yet it was later discovered that he was one of 160 people known to have lived through both bombings.
    In 1957, he was recognized as a hibakusha or ‘explosion affected person’. But it was not until 2009 that he was officially allowed to describe himself as an eniijuu hibakusha or double bomb survivor.
    The effects of the double bombings left its scars, both mental and physical. Yamaguchi lost the hearing in his left ear as a result of the Hiroshima explosion. He also lost his hair temporarily. His daughter would later recall that he was swathed in bandages until she reached the age of twelve.
    Yamaguchi became an outspoken opponent of nuclear weapons until he was well advanced in years, at which point he began to suffer from the long-term effects of the exposure to radiation. His wife developed liver and kidney cancer in 2008 and died soon after. Yamaguchi himself developed acute leukaemia and died in 2010 at the age of ninety-three. His longevity was extraordinary, as he knew only too well. He viewed his long life as a ‘path planted by God’.
    â€˜It was my destiny that I experienced this twice and I am still alive to convey what happened,’ he said towards the end of his life.

 
    10
    Agatha Christie’s Greatest Mystery
    At shortly after 9.30 p.m. on Friday 3 December 1926, Agatha Christie got up from her armchair and climbed the stairs of her Berkshire home. She kissed her sleeping daughter, Rosalind, aged seven, goodnight and made her way back downstairs again. Then she climbed into her Morris Cowley and drove off into the night. She would not be seen again for eleven days.
    Her disappearance would spark one of the largest manhunts ever mounted. Agatha Christie was already a famous writer and more than one thousand policemen were assigned to the case, along with hundreds of civilians. For the first time, aeroplanes were also involved in the search.
    The Home Secretary, William Joynson-Hicks, urged the police to make faster progress in finding her. Two of Britain’s most famous crime writers, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, creator of Sherlock Holmes, and Dorothy L. Sayers, author of the Lord Peter Wimsey series, were drawn into the search. Their specialist knowledge, it was hoped, would help find the missing writer.
    It