This an edited transcript of an oral history interview of Wataru Namba conducted by Layne Karafantis. Wataru Namba was born in 1927 in Stockton, California. His father’s family was from Hiroshima, Japan, and came to California to work on fruit farms. When he was seven years old, the family returned to Hiroshima in 1934. After a few years, most of his family returned to Stockton, while he remained in Hiroshima with his brother, sister, and grandparents. He was in engineering school when the first atomic bomb detonated over Hiroshima on 6 August 1945, and he survived a case of radiation sickness. Within a few years, he decided to return to the United States, and he was quickly drafted into the US Army. He served his time in Japan, where he met his wife. Namba then returned to California to pursue graduate studies in engineering at UCLA. He then worked at Douglas designing missiles, and then at North American Aviation designing heat shields for the B-50 and later, for the Apollo capsules. [Object file name], Aerospace Oral History Project, The Huntington Library, San Marino, California.
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