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For those in Nagasaki who heard it, the deep rumble of the approaching B-29s that pierced the cloud-filled skies on August 9, 1945, must have caused a moment of pause. An all-clear had already sounded after an early morning bombing raid, and the city of 200,000 had begun to return to normal. Schoolchildren filtered back to class, unaware that one of those planes carried a doomsday weapon in its bowels.

British prisoner of war Geoff Stott heard no such warning. But the sound he was about to hear would change his life forever. Emaciated after three years as a Japanese captive - including time on the Burma-Thailand "death railway" - the 21-year-old was working inside the Kawanami shipyard on Koyagi Shima island in Nagasaki Bay. The vast complex employed 60,000 workers and was vital to Japan's war effort. Among them were 1,500 Allied POWs who toiled within its thick, blast-proof walls. Geoff had joined the Royal Navy in 1939 at just 15 and had already seen action aboard HMS Exeter.

The cruiser was key in crippling the German battleship Graf Spee in the war's first naval engagement. By the end of the Battle of the River Plate, only one main gun was working and, with 63 crew dead, she limped to the Falklands for repairs.

In 1942, Exeter was sent to the Far East as part of a fleet tasked with stopping Japan from invading Java - then part of the Dutch East Indies.

Her next engagement - the Battle of the Java Sea - was a disaster. Most Allied ships were lost, and over 2,300 sailors were killed. Exeter was finally sunk on March 1 while fleeing Japanese pursuers.

Geoff was taken prisoner and moved through squalid camps before being forced to work on the Burma-Thailand Railway, where thousands died of disease, beatings and starvation.

By 1945, he had been working at the Kawanami shipyard for over a year. The tasks were hard and dangerous - caulking, riveting, welding, gas cutting. Training was minimal and accidents common. At 11.02 am on August 9, Geoff left his post to investigate a massive explosion that had shaken the shipyard to its core.

Before him, the sky was on fire.

A great column of boiling smoke rose across the bay - black at the base, orange-red at the core, like a furnace erupting from the earth. It twisted upward in an angry spiral, dwarfing the mountains behind. The top billowed into a vast mushroom-shaped crown, tinged with yellows and purples that made no sense.

Even from three miles across the harbour, the scale was monstrous.

Fires had already broken out across the city. Geoff saw rooftops collapse in waves, and a thick haze sweeping towards the gathered PoWs.

After the roar came a dreadful quiet, and then the wind - hot, gritty and full of ash and charred wreckage.

"We were not quite sure what we were witnessing," he told historian Gary Bridson-Daley. "No one had ever seen anything like it before."

With news blocked, the PoWs had no idea about the atomic bomb that had destroyed Hiroshima three days earlier.

Nor could they have known the bomb above them - "Fat Man" - had a 21-kiloton yield, 40% more powerful than Hiroshima's "Little Boy."

Detonated at 1,650 feet, it affected 43 square miles.

Within half a mile of ground zero, around 40,000 people died instantly. Homes within a mile and a half were obliterated.

Ground temperatures reached 4,000C, igniting paper two miles away. Of Nagasaki's 52,000 homes, 14,000 were destroyed and 5,400 badly damaged. Only 12% escaped unscathed.

Days later, the guards vanished. American planes dropped food and medicine. Hospital ships docked.

The war was over.

"We didn't know how close they were to defeat," Geoff said.

After two months' leave, Geoff returned to naval service for another eight years.

Asked about his remarkable survival, Geoff said: "Perhaps it's because I was on an island three-and-a-half miles away, and the prevailing winds swept the radioactivity away.

"Things happen and things don't happen. And there are things you come through that you just can't understand. But here you are. And, as I say to people - you just keep going. You read it in the paper and think, 'Blimey. I was there'."

He rarely spoke about the bomb or the years that led to it.

It wasn't until the 1980s that his daughter, Angela, discovered what her father had endured.

Browsing a library book about the war in the Far East, she saw a photo of a gaunt man in tattered shorts - skeletal, barely alive.

It was Geoff.

"He had the most haunted expression on his face," she recalled. "He was never one for talking about himself. But what happened to him did affect him. I think that's why he never really spoke about it."

Geoff's story, and that of many other veterans, is included in Gary Bridson-Daley's book Poetry and Portraits.