6 days ago
The bombing of Hiroshima saved my grandfather – and tens of thousands more
The chances that my grandfather would have survived much longer as a prisoner might be judged by the fact that he weighed 6st 7lb (41kg) on his release.
Once home at the age of 38, he recovered quickly and resumed his career at the Hong Kong and Shanghai Bank, now HSBC, serving variously in India, China and West Germany, before retiring to Bognor Regis and living until his 91st year. After the war, he had two daughters (my mother is a twin) and seven grandchildren, of whom I am the second oldest.
All because he was freed in 1945. All because the atom bomb fell when it did.
How many others were prisoners of Japan on this day 80 years ago? Throughout the war, Japan captured about 270,000 Allied soldiers and civilian internees, with my grandfather in the latter category. In the occupied countries of Asia, many thousands more people will have been held in countless jails.
How many were still alive to be liberated in 1945 is uncertain. We know that 37,500 British and Commonwealth military prisoners came home from the Pacific theatre, together with 12,000 Americans.
What is certain is that all endured abominable treatment at the hands of an empire that scorned the Geneva Conventions and despised anyone who submitted to captivity.
And whatever the total number who were liberated, today I must be one of millions of their descendants across the world.
But you did not have to be incarcerated in Sime Road or Changi or any other jail to be a prisoner of the Japanese. On this day 80 years ago, entire nations were being tormented and enslaved.
Lee Kuan Yew, the first prime minister of independent Singapore, describes in his memoirs how Japan began its occupation by executing thousands of young Chinese males, chosen at random, to spread terror and demonstrate the price of resistance.
The young Lee, then 19, avoided murder by pure chance simply because a Japanese soldier inexplicably allowed him through a checkpoint. 'I will never understand,' he wrote, 'how decisions affecting life and death could be taken so capriciously and casually'.
Once the mass graves of Singapore were exhumed after the war, Lee concluded that the number massacred was 'between 50,000 and 100,000'.
Elsewhere, if it can be believed, Japanese imperial rulers treated their unwilling subjects yet more brutally. In his history of Japan's war against China, which began in 1937, Rana Mitter of Oxford University writes that 14 million Chinese people were killed and another 80 million driven from their homes. 'The narrative of the war,' he writes, 'is the story of a people in torment'.
So as the B-29 approached Hiroshima, millions across Asia, within and without Emperor Hirohito's prisons, were being starved, brutalised, enslaved. What would have become of them if Japan had not been forced to surrender when it did?
On the question of the morality of the atom bomb, I am perhaps not the best person to ask. I can never be truly objective.
And I have to confess that when I read Albert Einstein's letter to Franklin Roosevelt from 1939, telling the president that a 'new type' of bomb may be possible and that America should get on with its 'experimental work', I find myself hoping that the scientist will be heeded. I know that six years later, Denis Bruce Soul will be freed because Einstein did not write in vain.
On this anniversary, there must be millions of people who can trace their own existence back to a similar story.
