La Costa Glen Carlsbad Resident to Appear in PBS Film "The Bomb"

Lester Tenney, a World War II prisoner of war and resident of La Costa Glen retirement community in Carlsbad, Calif., will be featured in a new PBS documentary airing nationwide on Tuesday, July 28. “The Bomb,” produced by Lone Wolf Media of Portland, Maine, will air locally on KPBS San Diego at 8 p.m.

“The Bomb” tells the story of the most destructive invention in human history. The film will be aired between the 70th anniversaries of the Trinity Test – the first explosion of an atomic bomb at Los Alamos Laboratory in New Mexico – and the bombing of Hiroshima in 1945. State-of-the-art transfer techniques were used by the filmmakers to turn recently declassified images into vivid footage.

The documentary outlines how America developed the weapon, how it changed the world and how it continues to impact international relations even today. The documentary was written and directed by Rushmore DeNooyer, who visited La Costa Glen with his crew last summer to interview Tenney.

Now 95, Tenney is a survivor of the Bataan Death March in the Philippines and was a Japanese prisoner of war in a Philippines camp for six months. Tenney was then transferred from the Philippines to a camp near Nagasaki, Japan, where he witnessed the atomic bombing of that city. One of the few people still living who saw the bombing first-hand, Tenney talks about the brutality of the Death March, the bombing of Nagasaki and how he learned the war was over in the movie.

Through restored footage, the film also provides background and insights from Richard Rhodes, Martin Sherwin and other noted historians, scientists, Sergei Khrushchev, son of former Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev, and former Secretaries of State George Shultz and Secretary of Defense William Perry, who wrestled with the bomb’s impact on international diplomacy. Also interviewed were men and women who built the weapon piece by piece as well as others who were there when the atomic age began.

A longtime resident of La Costa Glen, Tenney has been an outspoken advocate for POWs from World War II and other wars for decades. He documented his experience as a POW in his memoir, My Hitch in Hell, and is a frequent speaker on the subject of POWs and Japanese acknowledgement and restitution for war crimes.

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