Cork native digging own grave in prisoner of war camp as Nagasaki atomic bomb detonated: Witness to rain of ruin
Nagasaki
was incinerated in a millisecond, as
Hiroshima
had been three days previously.
Aidan MacCarthy, a doctor from Cork, who had been a prisoner of the Japanese since the fall of Singapore in 1942, anticipated that day would be his last.
He was based in a prison camp near the Mitsubishi factory in Nagasaki, digging his own grave, when the second bomb was dropped.
Ironically, it may have saved his life. Just days beforehand, the Japanese had made the prisoners of war (POWs) dig their graves.
READ MORE
'We dug on incredulously, our feelings numbed. To dig one's own grave is an extraordinary sensation. A sense of deja vu seems almost to overtake one,' he wrote. 'I had a fantasy glimpse of my own shot-up corpse lying in the watery mud.'
When the bomb detonated, he escaped the camp and later helped those affected by it.
A mushroom cloud forms over Nagasaki after the United States Air Force dropped the atomic bomb on August 9th, 1945. Photograph: Reuters
One of 10 children of a merchant family from Berehaven, Co Cork, he went to Clongowes Wood and graduated as a doctor from University College Cork in 1938.
With few opportunities at home, MacCarthy joined the Royal Air Force. He had a remarkable war: was at Dunkirk and the fall of Singapore. His prison ship was torpedoed by the Americans and the Japanese captured him.
[
Frank McNally on the Irish wife of man who dropped US atomic bomb on Nagasaki
Opens in new window
]
MacCarthy survived the war and spent the rest of his life in London. He died in 1995. His autobiography A Doctor's War was published in 1979. He was the subject of a documentary entitled A Doctor's Sword, which was released in 2015.
Incredibly, he wasn't the only Irish eyewitness to the Nagasaki devastation.
There were at least three Irish Presbyterian missionaries there on that day.
Thomas McCurdy Barker was a Presbyterian minister and Professor of New Testament Greek in the Chinese province of Manchuria when it was overrun by the Japanese in 1937.
[
Nagasaki mayor warns of nuclear war as city marks 80 years since atomic bombing
Opens in new window
]
They had been in Manchuria when he was taken prisoner along with his wife, Ann Barker, a medical doctor, and Lilian McCombe, a schoolteacher and missionary.
Barker was incarcerated with a community of Catholic nuns in Nagasaki to whom, in the absence of a priest of their church, he ministered daily. That ministry was later recognised with gratitude by Pope Pius XII when he learned of it after the war.
There was also an Irish eyewitness to the Hiroshima bomb. Sr Julie Canny's convent was just 2km away from the epicentre of the blast. The nun, from Clonbur in Co Galway, was in the convent garden saying her morning prayers when the bomb detonated. She died aged 93 in Tokyo in 1987.
Hiroshima aftermath, Sr Julie Canny (inset). Photograph: Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum
Extract from A Doctor's War by Aidan MacCarthy:
On August 9th, the day started bright and clear with only occasional clouds to the north. During a 10-minute break in our clearing work, round about 10.45am, some of our men had gone back to the camp, which was close by, to get a drink of water or a cigarette.
High above us, we saw eight vapour trails showing two separate four-engine bombers, heading south. These were B-29 bombers, or B-NEE-JU-KU's as the Japanese called them. They had been seen going north earlier that morning. Then they suddenly altered course and came back over Nagasaki.
[
Atomic bombings anniversary: Japanese politicians consider a once-unthinkable question
Opens in new window
]
This manoeuvre was enough to send us wildly dashing for the air-raid shelters. To dig our own graves with a view to being shot by the Japanese was one thing, but to be killed by our own allies was far too galling.
In the shelters, we prayed that there would not be a direct hit. A couple of POWs did not bother to go into the shelters, staying on the surface and crouching on the ground in the shadow of the barrack huts.
They were gazing at the sky, watching the approaching vapour trails. One of them shouted to us that three small parachutes had dropped.
There then followed a blue flash, accompanied by a very bright magnesium-type flare which blinded them. Then came a frighteningly loud but rather flat explosion, which was followed by a blast of hot air.
[
The Irish man who filmed Hiroshima and Nagasaki
Opens in new window
]
Some of this could be felt even by us as it came through the shelter openings, which were very rarely closed owing to the poor ventilation. The explosions we heard seemed to be two in number, and this puzzled experts when later we were being debriefed.
One possible explanation is that the second sound was a giant echo from the surrounding hills. All this was followed by eerie silence. Then an Australian POW stuck his head out of the shelter opening, looked around and ducked back in, his face expressing incredulity. This brought the rest of us scrambling to our feet and a panic rush to the exits. The sight that greeted us halted us in our tracks.
As we slowly surveyed the scene around us, we became aware that the camp had to all intents and purposes disappeared. Mostly of wooden construction, the wood had carbonized and turned to ashes.
Bodies lay everywhere, some horribly mutilated by falling walls, girders and flying glass. There were outbreaks of fire in all directions, with loud explosions recurring as the flapping, live electric cables fused and flared.
The gas mains had also exploded, and those people still on their feet ran round in circles, hands pressed to their blinded eyes or holding the flesh that hung in tatters from their faces or arms.
The brick-built guardroom had collapsed, and the dead guards lay almost naked. We could suddenly see right up the length of the valley, where previously the factories and buildings had formed a screen. Left behind was a crazy forest of discoloured corrugated sheets clinging to twisted girders.
Burst water pipes shot fountains of water high in the air. The steel girders stood like stark sentinels, leaning over a series of concrete 'tennis courts' that had once been the floors of factories.
[
'Such a cruel sight': A visit to Hiroshima lives long in the memory
Opens in new window
]
But most frightening of all was the lack of sunlight in contrast to the bright August sunshine that we had left a few minutes earlier; there was now a kind of twilight. We all genuinely thought, for some time, that this was the end of the world.
As I dashed through the shelter opening and scrambled on to the surface, my predominant thought was to get away as far and as fast as possible. I turned and ran. Others followed. The sea seemed to offer the most immediate prospect of safety, but as we ran towards it, we encountered another mob running towards us.
Everyone seemed to be looking for an intact bridge across the Urakami river. We were on the south side and to make our way to the sea and hills we needed to cross to the north bank. Unfortunately, no bridge seemed to be available so I jumped into the cloudy waters and swam. Unwillingly, the rest of the group joined me in the water.
On the opposite bank, we stuck in the black glue-like mud and discovered that struggling only made matters worse. Eventually, muddy, smelly and exhausted, we got clear of the river and headed for the foothills to the north of the valley.
En route, we were physically sickened by an endless stream of burnt, bleeding, flesh-torn, stumbling people, many unable to rise from where they had fallen. Others were still trapped under fallen debris. Occasionally, someone had gone berserk.
The whole atmosphere was permeated with blind terror, and the macabre twilight was illuminated by numerous fires, the crackle of which mixed with the screams of the dying and injured. These sounded even more horrific because of the eerie overall silence.
Thousands of people scrambled, pushed, shoved and crawled across the shattered landscape in a crazed attempt to seek safety. At last, we reached the foothills and the locals seemed quite pleased to see us, particularly when they discovered I was a doctor.
Immediately I set to work. Burns were the main problem and these were of two types – fire burns and flash burns. The locals used some native fern-like leaves to ease the pain-and this seemed to work. I was able to help by splinting and tying up broken bones.
Later that day the authorities began to set up first aid posts in caves which had been dug in the hillsides as air-raid shelters. Word soon spread amongst the wounded and injured and many were carried off on makeshift stretchers to these 'hospital' caves. Meanwhile, it began to rain. This helped to quell some of the fires.
The rain was black – which frightened everybody, including the Japanese. Not knowing until later anything at all about the effects of an atomic explosion, I seriously wondered whether we had finally arrived at Judgement Day.
An angry God was devastating the Japanese for their sins – and mistakenly including us in the holocaust.
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Irish Times
09-08-2025
- Irish Times
Cork native digging own grave in prisoner of war camp as Nagasaki atomic bomb detonated: Witness to rain of ruin
Eighty years ago today, the second – and hopefully last – atomic bomb used in warfare was dropped. The city of Nagasaki was incinerated in a millisecond, as Hiroshima had been three days previously. Aidan MacCarthy, a doctor from Cork, who had been a prisoner of the Japanese since the fall of Singapore in 1942, anticipated that day would be his last. He was based in a prison camp near the Mitsubishi factory in Nagasaki, digging his own grave, when the second bomb was dropped. Ironically, it may have saved his life. Just days beforehand, the Japanese had made the prisoners of war (POWs) dig their graves. READ MORE 'We dug on incredulously, our feelings numbed. To dig one's own grave is an extraordinary sensation. A sense of deja vu seems almost to overtake one,' he wrote. 'I had a fantasy glimpse of my own shot-up corpse lying in the watery mud.' When the bomb detonated, he escaped the camp and later helped those affected by it. A mushroom cloud forms over Nagasaki after the United States Air Force dropped the atomic bomb on August 9th, 1945. Photograph: Reuters One of 10 children of a merchant family from Berehaven, Co Cork, he went to Clongowes Wood and graduated as a doctor from University College Cork in 1938. With few opportunities at home, MacCarthy joined the Royal Air Force. He had a remarkable war: was at Dunkirk and the fall of Singapore. His prison ship was torpedoed by the Americans and the Japanese captured him. [ Frank McNally on the Irish wife of man who dropped US atomic bomb on Nagasaki Opens in new window ] MacCarthy survived the war and spent the rest of his life in London. He died in 1995. His autobiography A Doctor's War was published in 1979. He was the subject of a documentary entitled A Doctor's Sword, which was released in 2015. Incredibly, he wasn't the only Irish eyewitness to the Nagasaki devastation. There were at least three Irish Presbyterian missionaries there on that day. Thomas McCurdy Barker was a Presbyterian minister and Professor of New Testament Greek in the Chinese province of Manchuria when it was overrun by the Japanese in 1937. [ Nagasaki mayor warns of nuclear war as city marks 80 years since atomic bombing Opens in new window ] They had been in Manchuria when he was taken prisoner along with his wife, Ann Barker, a medical doctor, and Lilian McCombe, a schoolteacher and missionary. Barker was incarcerated with a community of Catholic nuns in Nagasaki to whom, in the absence of a priest of their church, he ministered daily. That ministry was later recognised with gratitude by Pope Pius XII when he learned of it after the war. There was also an Irish eyewitness to the Hiroshima bomb. Sr Julie Canny's convent was just 2km away from the epicentre of the blast. The nun, from Clonbur in Co Galway, was in the convent garden saying her morning prayers when the bomb detonated. She died aged 93 in Tokyo in 1987. Hiroshima aftermath, Sr Julie Canny (inset). Photograph: Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum Extract from A Doctor's War by Aidan MacCarthy: On August 9th, the day started bright and clear with only occasional clouds to the north. During a 10-minute break in our clearing work, round about 10.45am, some of our men had gone back to the camp, which was close by, to get a drink of water or a cigarette. High above us, we saw eight vapour trails showing two separate four-engine bombers, heading south. These were B-29 bombers, or B-NEE-JU-KU's as the Japanese called them. They had been seen going north earlier that morning. Then they suddenly altered course and came back over Nagasaki. [ Atomic bombings anniversary: Japanese politicians consider a once-unthinkable question Opens in new window ] This manoeuvre was enough to send us wildly dashing for the air-raid shelters. To dig our own graves with a view to being shot by the Japanese was one thing, but to be killed by our own allies was far too galling. In the shelters, we prayed that there would not be a direct hit. A couple of POWs did not bother to go into the shelters, staying on the surface and crouching on the ground in the shadow of the barrack huts. They were gazing at the sky, watching the approaching vapour trails. One of them shouted to us that three small parachutes had dropped. There then followed a blue flash, accompanied by a very bright magnesium-type flare which blinded them. Then came a frighteningly loud but rather flat explosion, which was followed by a blast of hot air. [ The Irish man who filmed Hiroshima and Nagasaki Opens in new window ] Some of this could be felt even by us as it came through the shelter openings, which were very rarely closed owing to the poor ventilation. The explosions we heard seemed to be two in number, and this puzzled experts when later we were being debriefed. One possible explanation is that the second sound was a giant echo from the surrounding hills. All this was followed by eerie silence. Then an Australian POW stuck his head out of the shelter opening, looked around and ducked back in, his face expressing incredulity. This brought the rest of us scrambling to our feet and a panic rush to the exits. The sight that greeted us halted us in our tracks. As we slowly surveyed the scene around us, we became aware that the camp had to all intents and purposes disappeared. Mostly of wooden construction, the wood had carbonized and turned to ashes. Bodies lay everywhere, some horribly mutilated by falling walls, girders and flying glass. There were outbreaks of fire in all directions, with loud explosions recurring as the flapping, live electric cables fused and flared. The gas mains had also exploded, and those people still on their feet ran round in circles, hands pressed to their blinded eyes or holding the flesh that hung in tatters from their faces or arms. The brick-built guardroom had collapsed, and the dead guards lay almost naked. We could suddenly see right up the length of the valley, where previously the factories and buildings had formed a screen. Left behind was a crazy forest of discoloured corrugated sheets clinging to twisted girders. Burst water pipes shot fountains of water high in the air. The steel girders stood like stark sentinels, leaning over a series of concrete 'tennis courts' that had once been the floors of factories. [ 'Such a cruel sight': A visit to Hiroshima lives long in the memory Opens in new window ] But most frightening of all was the lack of sunlight in contrast to the bright August sunshine that we had left a few minutes earlier; there was now a kind of twilight. We all genuinely thought, for some time, that this was the end of the world. As I dashed through the shelter opening and scrambled on to the surface, my predominant thought was to get away as far and as fast as possible. I turned and ran. Others followed. The sea seemed to offer the most immediate prospect of safety, but as we ran towards it, we encountered another mob running towards us. Everyone seemed to be looking for an intact bridge across the Urakami river. We were on the south side and to make our way to the sea and hills we needed to cross to the north bank. Unfortunately, no bridge seemed to be available so I jumped into the cloudy waters and swam. Unwillingly, the rest of the group joined me in the water. On the opposite bank, we stuck in the black glue-like mud and discovered that struggling only made matters worse. Eventually, muddy, smelly and exhausted, we got clear of the river and headed for the foothills to the north of the valley. En route, we were physically sickened by an endless stream of burnt, bleeding, flesh-torn, stumbling people, many unable to rise from where they had fallen. Others were still trapped under fallen debris. Occasionally, someone had gone berserk. The whole atmosphere was permeated with blind terror, and the macabre twilight was illuminated by numerous fires, the crackle of which mixed with the screams of the dying and injured. These sounded even more horrific because of the eerie overall silence. Thousands of people scrambled, pushed, shoved and crawled across the shattered landscape in a crazed attempt to seek safety. At last, we reached the foothills and the locals seemed quite pleased to see us, particularly when they discovered I was a doctor. Immediately I set to work. Burns were the main problem and these were of two types – fire burns and flash burns. The locals used some native fern-like leaves to ease the pain-and this seemed to work. I was able to help by splinting and tying up broken bones. Later that day the authorities began to set up first aid posts in caves which had been dug in the hillsides as air-raid shelters. Word soon spread amongst the wounded and injured and many were carried off on makeshift stretchers to these 'hospital' caves. Meanwhile, it began to rain. This helped to quell some of the fires. The rain was black – which frightened everybody, including the Japanese. Not knowing until later anything at all about the effects of an atomic explosion, I seriously wondered whether we had finally arrived at Judgement Day. An angry God was devastating the Japanese for their sins – and mistakenly including us in the holocaust.
Irish Times
19-07-2025
- Irish Times
Sesame and miso baked salmon bowl with peanut and carrot coleslaw
Serves : 2 Course : Dinner Cooking Time : 15 mins Prep Time : 40 mins Ingredients 1tbs miso paste ½tbs sesame oil ½tbs soy sauce 1tsp brown sugar 1tsp rice wine vinegar 2 pieces of salmon, about 150g each, skin on For the slaw: 1 medium carrot ¼ white cabbage 1tbs peanut butter ½tbs Dijon mustard 1tbs white wine vinegar Olive oil Salt and pepper 1tbs vegetable oil 1tbs sesame seeds Handful picked coriander leaves Handful picked mint leaves 1 red chilli, thinly sliced 1tbs peanut rayu Steamed rice, to serve 1 lime, for wedges Place the miso paste, sesame oil, soy, brown sugar and rice wine vinegar in a small bowl and mix together. Place the salmon fillets on a small plate or dish and brush them with the miso mix to coat evenly, then place them in the fridge for 30 minutes to marinate. While the salmon is marinating, prepare the coleslaw. Peel the carrot, use a medium-sized cut on a box grater and grate into a mixing bowl. Then – carefully – thinly slice the white cabbage using a mandolin and add it to the carrot. Place the peanut butter, mustard, vinegar and a drizzle of olive oil in a small bowl and whisk together, then season with salt and pepper. This will be used to dress the coleslaw when the salmon is cooked. Back to the salmon. Preheat the oven to 180 degrees. Heat an oven-proof nonstick pan and add the oil. Place the salmon in the pan skin-side down, and cook for three minutes on a medium heat until the skin turns golden brown and begins to crisp. Keep a small bit of pressure on the salmon in the pan to prevent the skin from curling. Then transfer the pan to the oven to finish cooking for five minutes at 180 degrees. When the salmon goes into the oven, place the sesame seeds on a small tray and place them in the oven too to roast for five minutes until toasted. Remove the salmon from the oven and allow to rest for two minutes. Dress the coleslaw lightly in some of the peanut dressing and spoon into a serving dish. Add some steamed rice and a handful of the picked herbs. Place the salmon in the bowl and garnish with some sliced chilli, toasted sesame seeds and a drizzle of peanut rayu. Serve with a wedge of lime.
Irish Times
14-07-2025
- Irish Times
There's a feminist argument against a writer spending time cooking and sewing, but it pleases me
I've had the sewing machine out for the first time in a while this week. For months I'd been hankering to make a dress, for no discernible reason. The pattern is in a Japanese book I've had for years without going further than thinking that one day I might like to make that, and there is no definition of 'need' that would include my possession of a new dress. Even so, one of my vague projects for this year – career break, turning 50 – is occasionally to do things because I feel like it. The career break is of course a rare luxury, but on whatever scale it's possible to follow the odd harmless whim, I recommend it. I learned to use a sewing machine as a child. My mother made most of our clothes, and passed on her skills. As a teenager, with the brazen confidence of someone who doesn't know what's supposed to be difficult, I embarked on whatever stood between me and the item of clothing I had in mind. I cut and sewed dresses on the bias, became confident with the strange geometry of the crotch seams of trousers and the counterintuitive curves of sleeve-heads. I added pockets and linings when I wanted them, learned the hard way which fabrics suited which designs. There is no need, now, for me to make my own clothes. For years it was a choice between buying poor quality and making good quality; we can all afford badly made fast fashion but I had learned to respect natural fibres and French double seams. These days I can buy durable, well-made clothes, but I still knit my own jumpers and apparently, this week, sew my own dresses. I know a couple of my friends think it's a waste of time, all this handicraft. There's an obvious feminist argument against a writer spending her time cooking and sewing. Still, it pleases me. READ MORE Making things yourself only sometimes, unpredictably, gives you better than you can buy. (Home-made pitta bread is revelatory. See also hummus, crackers and rice pudding.) But the professionals are often better at it, and it's certainly cheaper to buy even the poshest jam than devote an afternoon to fruit-picking and an evening, a lot of sugar and a lot of electricity to making your own, which may or may not turn out well. Price my time at minimum wage, add materials, and the dress-in-progress has already cost more than buying a ready-to-wear equivalent. You could plausibly argue that by doing these things myself, I'm depriving the sustainable small businesses from which I would otherwise buy. But that's not it. Making things isn't about penny-pinching. And I don't think cooking or sewing, or for the matter of that carpentry or wood-turning, are intrinsically moral acts. Maybe it's a declaration of independence, and certainly there's temptation to keep going down the production process; my mother now grows the plants to dye the yarn she spins to weave scarves and towels. I have a friend who progressed from making bread to feeding sourdough to grinding flour, and he daydreams of growing the grain. Some of my own cooking experiments have seemed absurd even to me; I'm sure efficiency comes with practice but the time it took me to make enough tortellini for a dinner party, including making the pasta dough and rolling it by hand, was wildly out of proportion to the time it took my friends to eat it. Never again. I feel similarly about sewing my own underwear and maybe knitting my own socks, though I know people who do both. [ Sarah Moss: 'I'm a classic first child. A driven overachiever. Slightly neurotic' Opens in new window ] If the pleasure of this kind of make-do-and-mend is not about saving money, the planet or achieving independence from consumerism, what is it? Something about knowing how things work, how the objects we handle and need and love are made; something about being able to make things well, or at least making them badly often enough to learn respect for good makers. There are places for machines, technology, software. I don't want to ride in an artisanal handmade helicopter and if I were to need a ventilator or pacemaker, I'd want the latest tech. Dishwashers, vacuum cleaners and washing machines are obvious godsends to those of us who have lived without them. But I have a deep sense that it's good to know with your hands and your body where things come from and how they are made.
