Barack Obama will be the first sitting president to visit Hiroshima. (Reuters Photo)
A group representing American former prisoners of war under Japan says the White House has invited one of them to accompany President Barack Obama on his historic visit to Hiroshima this week.
Jan Thompson, head of the American Defenders of Bataan and Corregidor Memorial Society, said the group has chosen 94-year-old Daniel Crowley of Simsbury, Connecticut, and submitted his name to the White House.
Crowley was in the US Army Air Corps when his unit surrendered in the Philippines in 1942. He was shipped to Japan in 1944 and forced to work in a copper mine until the war's end.
Obama will be the first sitting president to visit Hiroshima, the city hit by the first of two atomic bombs the US dropped on Japan in World War II.