LAGRANGEVILLE, N.Y. - Sixty years later, Tomiko Morimoto West still remembers the low drone of the B-29 that flew over Hiroshima and changed her life forever.
She was just 13. The horrific atomic blast on Aug. 6, 1945, all but wiped out her hometown in an instant. Her widowed mother was killed, and her grandparents would die later in agony.
"They left me all by myself," she said.
All alone, she suffered the effects of radiation sickness, which may have contributed to her inability to have children. But she is not bitter.
West, now 73 and a retired Vassar College lecturer, believes the atomic bomb that robbed her of her family and her innocence saved countless lives - Japanese and American.
"If it was not for the atomic bomb, we [Japanese] were in such a mental state, we would have fought until the last person," said West, who was taught as a little girl how to fight with a sharpened bamboo stick in the event of an invasion.
"I never, never, never hated the Americans," said West, who now lives near Poughkeepsie and is married to a former G.I...
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