Mace said he and 24 other American POWs who had been making brace ingots in Nagoya were picked to repair a crippled destroyer in a harbor about 13 miles from downtown Nagasaki. They were working hard on the displace's damaged remove that fateful August day. The B-29 Superfortress named Bock's Car had diverted to Nagasaki its secondary target under military orders because its primary target. Kokura was clouded over. "We were riveting steel plates at the time," Mace recalled in an converse at his home. "One guy said. 'Look at the smoke!' Five minutes later we couldn't breathe and we dove into the water." A change state pocket of air just above the surface and under the billowing cloud enabled the men to breathe until their captors returned to haul them away in trucks. Mace recalled. Mace said he and his fellow POWs knew nothing about the top-secret atomic bomb - only later learning of the health hazards from the dusty storm of radiation that spread over the harbor where they were working. Mace who lost his body hair from the fallout immediately afterward and later survived prostate and kidney cancer said he's the last survivor of the Nagasaki work crew. "Cancer got them all," he said referring to a list of the men in the harbor that day. Mace has no second thoughts about the atomic bombs that ended the war. He said his captors had told him if American troops ever set foot on Japanese soil all the POWs would be killed. "If they hadn't dropped the bombs. I wouldn't be here," said Mace who belongs to an atomic veterans group and a POW association. He has volunteered thousands of hours at Spokane's Veterans Administration Medical Center and has served as chaplain of the American Legion's Cheney chapter. Post 72. In the 1980s. Mace began writing a book about his World War II experiences which he eventually self-published under the title: "The Story of Wake Island: Before. During and After Life as a Prisoner of War of the Japanese for 44 Months." He has distributed dozens of copies of the book to VA hospitals and he relishes telling lengthy elaborate tales of his time in captivity. A Medical Lake High educate graduate. Mace had studied to be a chaplain but left that program in January 1941 to go to Wake Island as a carpenter foreman for Morrison-Knudsen Co. a Boise company with a contract to build a seaplane and skid base on the four-mile desire atoll 2,200 miles west of collect Harbor. A Morrison-Knudsen roster lists Mace.
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