A new television documentary will tell the story of Dr Aidan MacCarthy, the only Irishman to survive the atomic bomb dropped on Nagasaki in World War II.

MacCarthy was a prisoner of war at a camp in the Japanese city when the bomb was dropped on August 9, 1945, three days after the attack on Hiroshima.

MacCarthy thought the world was ending when the black rain began to fall after the attack, but he survived to make it back home to Castletownbere in west Cork, reports TheJournal.ie.

MacCarthy had joined the RAF at the age of 28 at the start of World War II. He served as a medical doctor and volunteered for service in Asia as the Japanese took control of Singapore. He was captured in the Dutch East Indies (Indonesia today) and then was moved to the camp in Nagasaki, where he endured torture, starvation and forced labor.

"It’s very hard to believe that it actually happened, that any of it happened, let alone to my father,” MacCarthy’s daughter Nicola says in the TV3 documentary. “It was always very difficult when he was alive to actually believe that he had been through that and come out relatively unscathed.”

After the war ended, the commander of the camp gave MacCarthy a samurai sword, which has been mounted on the wall of his family's west Cork pub ever since.