‘There then followed a blue flash accompanied by a very bright magnesium-type flare ... Then came a frighteningly loud but rather flat explosion which was followed by a blast of hot air ... All this was followed by eerie silence.’

Dr Aidan MacCarthy, from west Cork, was less than a mile from the epicentre of the atomic bomb when it destroyed the city of Nagasaki in August 1945. The epic journey through the Second World War which brought him to that fateful city is one of the most incredible true stories ever told. In 1940, he had been evacuated from Dunkirk, he then escaped burning planes, sinking ships and jungle warfare before being captured in Java by the Japanese. He endured almost four years of starvation, disease, slave labour and beatings at the hands of an enemy that had no regard for prisoners, and still managed to
survive.

When Japan surrendered on 15 August 1945, the Japanese POW camp commandant did something unheard of – he gifted his ancestral sword to MacCarthy. ‘A Doctor’s Sword’ tells the incredible life story of Dr Aidan MacCarthy and documents the MacCarthy family’s search to uncover the origin of the sword.