On the 65th anniversary of the dropping of the first atomic bomb, writer William Coles, right, asks if someone who survived both is the luckiest or unluckiest man alive. He tells Steve Pratt why he wanted to write about Mr Two Bomb.

THE question that troubles him more than anything is this one: is he the luckiest man alive or the unluckiest man alive? The fact that he’s alive at all is a miracle.

This is a man who survived the atomic bomb dropped on the Japanese city of Hiroshima on August 6, 1945, which killed 80,000 people instantly and 60,000 in the following months.

Surrounded by death and devastation, he decided to return home. To Nagasaki. He arrived 90 minutes before the second atomic bomb was dropped on August 9. Again he survived, but did that make him lucky or unlucky?

Author and journalist William Coles calls him Mr Two Bomb, the title of his latest book, which follows the fake memoirs of David Cameron and Lord Lucan.

He invented the central character, but everything that happens to Mr Two Bomb is based in fact, gleaned from researching 12 people who survived both bombs dropped 65th years ago this month.

He came across the story of double survivors while working in New York 13 years ago as a national newspaper correspondent.

He says: “The beauty of being out there is there were a lot of other foreign correspondents in the same bureau. One was an American guy who had worked in Tokyo and talked about these amazing interviews with guys who had survived both bombs.

“I thought it was a great story and spent some time researching it. A lot of books have been written about the 12, but the problem was that, although their stories were interesting and had parts that worked, there wasn’t one that worked as a whole.”

“So, for ten years I sat on it, aware there was a great story there.”

In the meantime, he wrote his first books – “sort of making up memoirs of Lord Lucan and David Cameron” – while deciding out how Mr Two Bomb might work as a book.

He says: “I immersed myself in all these books about the bombs. I must have read at least 70 and I planned to cherrypick the best bits and put them all on to one guy.

“I needed something to make the story work, a dynamo. The problem was you were not going to be rooting for him. Initially, I thought it was going to be a love story with him going back to his lover.

But one of my favourite books is A Christmas Carol, which is a story of redemption, and I realised that would make a much more viable story. So you start off with this guy who’s awful and the bombs turned out to be his ghosts. He could be looking back at what happened, thinking the bombs killed most of my friends and family, but for me they were life-changing.

“There was the question of whether he was the luckiest or unluckiest man alive, and how that would change if he thought the bombs provided his redemption. Books about the bombs tend to be rather gloomy – it’s difficult to be otherwise – but mine does have an uplifting ending.”

THROUGH Mr Two Bomb, the reader gets a chillingly accurate picture of events during the bombings and the awful aftermath, with a love story at the heart.

Coles was also struck by the role of fate in events. “In our lives, it does not make any difference whether you go for lunch at 12.30 or 12.45, or in the canteen or in the coffee shop over the road. In Hiroshima, everything depended on where you were at 8.15 in the morning.

If you were outside, you were dead; inside you stood a better chance. I liked the arbitrariness of it,” he says.

His book tells how the US selected Hiroshima as the target, leaving the city untouched by other bombers beforehand so the true effect of the atomic bomb could be gauged.

Nagaski became the target of the second bomb because cloud prevented it being dropped on the original target. “So that town was saved by a cloudy day, whereas with Nagaski a tiny gap in the cloud was enough for them to drop the bomb,” says Coles.

He was able to draw on interviews with the survivors, whose accounts had been documented in the past 65 years.

There is no doubt that his graphic depiction of the aftermath – two cities turned to wasteland with thousands killed instantly or suffering horrific injuries – brings home the reality of a situation the extent of which most find difficult to comprehend.

“British people don’t know much about the war in the Pacific. For us, the war really ends with the Nazis. We’re much more interested in our experiences with the Nazis. So it rarely occurs to people there might have been a few guys who survived both bombs,” he says.

Some elements of the story seems unbelievable; like the Japanese making kites as part of the war effort. They planned to pack them with explosives and detonate them above enemy ships off the coast.

Coles says: “It struck me as surreal that while US was working on the biggest single project that mankind has ever done, costing billions of dollars, the Japanese were beavering away making kites.”

He knows that some have found his descriptions of the effects of the bombing “near the knuckle”, but he tried not to be too graphic. “I did find it slightly shocking initially but, rather like the guy in the book, you become inured to it,” says Coles.

“The first book I read was the definitive one about Hiroshima. After a bit, you think ‘I’ve seen that and seen that’, and then you come across a new and different way someone has died. There was a picture of a bus that had been completely destroyed with all the bodies of the passengers still hanging to the strap handles but completely turned to charcoal.”

He’s now contemplating his next book and might have found a subject during our chat. He recalls the story about Japanese soldiers found in the jungle still fighting the war 20 years after it ended – and wonders aloud if that would provide the basis for a book.

“What I’m interested in is big events. Not necessarily disasters, although disasters usually turn out to be big events more than oneperson things. I’m primarily interested in events that are good stories in themselves,” he says ■ Mr Two Bomb is published by Legend Press, priced £5.49.