I corresponded with a man, Captain Murphy, who was a POW held by Germans and then transferred to the Japanese where he was a slave laborer in Burma working on the Burma-Thailand railway. As in my mother's family, his family had news of his capture through one of the shortwave radio listeners who monitored Radio Tokyo for news of captured Americans.
He was US Merchant Marine on a ship sunk by a German Q-boat and transferred to a submarine that took him to the Japanese. One of the other prisoners from his sunken ship was separated from him when he was taken to Japan. Years later while vacationing with his wife in England at the height of anti-war, anti-nuke demonstrations in the UK, he watched an interview on TV of the man with whom he was captured. The man said his body was covered with tumors. He had been near ground zero at Nagasaki when the bomb exploded. Despite being riddled with cancerous tumors as a result of the bomb, he was glad the bomb was dropped as at least he was still alive, unlike many of the other slave workers he knew that were killed by the Japanese. Captain Murphy met with the man for drinks during his stay in the U.K. Interestingly, Gen. Curtis "Bombs Away" LeMay opined that had the U.S. lost the war, he undoubtedly would have been tried as a war criminal. Gil
