Documentary filmmaker and published historian Craig Collie set about reconstructing precisely what happened on those few days in August 1945 which brought World War Two to an end. He interviewed elderly survivors of the Nagasaki blast, and descendants of victims, and has stitched together those interviews with eyewitness testimony, diaries and journals, and official documents -- Japanese, American and Australian. He grippingly recounts the decision-making, the confusion, the politicking, the denials, and, above all, the devastation and disorientation. Within a few days of the blast, 80,000 Nagasaki residents were dead, half of them instantly the moment the bomb struck. Their loss and their pain, and that of those who survived, are honoured at last in this unprecedented book.