Seeing a lot of tweets about the Hiroshima bombing 75th anniversary. Lot of Canadians of 2020 taking a pretty firm line against the bombings. Fair enough. Let me present an alternate view. Not mine. My grandfather's. He was fighting Japan with the RAF out of India in 1945. +

My grandfather had already served in Europe, with an RCAF unit. U-Boat patrols, I think (I'd have to go look at his flight logs again, I don't have them). Later in the war, he joined an RAF transport squadron in India, supplying allied units in Asia. +

He was the only survivor of his crew after his plane crashed in a jungle. He was lucky to be found by allied personnel. He knew what happened to POWs taken by Japan.

I don't have his journal and letters home with me, and it's been a few years, so I can't quote precisely. +

But he was still serving in August of 1945, when Japan was functionally defeated but refusing to surrender. The bombs changed that. Historians today debate whether the bombs were necessary. They pose hypotheticals about other things that could have been done. +

The choice to use the atomic bomb was by no means unanimous among President Truman's advisors. Even those agreeing it had to be used disagreed how how it should be used. But for reasons that have been pretty well explored by historians, Truman elected to proceed as he did. +

But for my grandfather and his fellow airmen, there wasn't a lot of debate. The bombs ended the war, suddenly and quickly. No invasion. No mopping-up actions against hold outs or Japanese units that didn't get the word. No more transport flights in worn-out planes over the Hump.+

The bombs meant they got to come home alive.

Something to consider alongside all the retrospectives of an event very few Canadians alive today can ever really understand, because they weren't the ones whose lives were in danger for every day the war dragged on.

-30-