ABG             The two atom bombs that saved my life   tweaked on 22/09/2008

I recalled earlier that I have been blessed with a lot of luck during my life. And part of that that luck took place while I was in the services. I was called up into the army despite having been in the Air Training Corps. The RAF at the end of 1944 were over-subscribed, and although the European war was almost over, the Far East war still raging. I did three months primary training at York where I learned to crawl through the mud, to salute anyone who had a pip or a crown on his shoulder, fire a Bren gun and throw a grenade. I passed a trade test and went into the Royal Signals where they taught me to operate several types of radio sets and telephone machines. One of these telephones was a Fullerphone that was used in WW1. It was a clever device that suppressed radiated interference from a telephone line that might allow an enemy to intercept a line signal at a distance . My ATC Morse code training stood me in good stead.

I sailed from Liverpool for India on the SS Samaria two days after VE Day. As the European war was hardly over, we sailed under full wartime conditions as it was reasoned that some German submarines might not know (or care) that peace had broken out. We stopped at several places en route including Malta, Port Said, Port Tewfik, and Mits’iwa in East Africa. At this last port we disembarked a group of squaddies in full army serge uniform. The Red Sea in the middle of May is stifling, even in khaki drill shorts and a shirt. On deck in the breeze caused by the forward motion of the ship, it was still most unpleasant. Serge battledress must have been dreadful. These lads were going directly to a hill station inland, and there would be no opportunity en route for them to change out of tropical dress back into serge for the cooler clime of the hill station.

The rest of us went onward to disembark at Bombay (I still call it by it’s old name). To a very green rookie who had never even been as far as France, India was an eye-opener. I was rather alarmed to see so many buildings adorned with a swastika, but I later learned that it was a religious symbol that had been borrowed from the east by the Nazi party. I believe the Finnish air force also used the swastika as a symbol, but on the wings of their aircraft as distinct from the tailplane of the German planes And to the Indians, depending on which way round the swastika was drawn, depended its meaning. After going through various transit camps and having the usual set of jabs, I ended up at a Royal Artillery regiment 50 miles south of Poonah at a place called Kedgown. You’ve heard of Poonah is; it’s that place not too far from Bombay where pukka sahibs used to quaff chota pegs before the war. (I’ll leave the reader to use a good dictionary to translate the Roman Urdu into English.)

This artillery regiment had recently returned from Burma where they had been exchanging fire with the Japanese. They were real soldiers, not like us ‘charpoy chindits’ (again look in the dictionary). When I arrived, the regiment were waterproofing their lorries (we used the Hindi word ‘ghari’) in readiness for a beach landing somewhere on the coast of Japan. And I imagine I would have gone with them. Beach landings were bloody affairs, particularly against the Japanese. The Americans demonstrated this with the few Japanese islands that they took. Now, because casualties would be high, anyone who could drive a truck, or be taught how to, was wanted. I was taught to drive a Bedford 15cwt vehicle. So as to give my mission a bit of legitimacy, I was given a driving-test.

The Poonah/Bangalore Road was never busy, one bus an hour with the odd bullock cart in between, was the standard. The side-road where I took my test was even less busy. I saw nothing that moved on the road during the whole of my test. Half a mile of changing up and changing down through the crash-gearbox. Turn round and do the same in the opposite direction. I passed my test and duly got a piece of paper to say so. Not so very long after the driving test the CO had us all on parade and said how sorry he was that "our little escapade had been called off" The booing wasn’t loud, but it was audible. I learned later that the two atom bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki were the cause of the Japanese surrender I said that fate had smiled on me, when I was de-mobbed later, I managed to translate the army licence into a civvy one.

Trying to be objective, I sincerely believe that those two bombs were the most humane thing that could have happened at that time. Had the war continued in a conventional sense, the Japs would have fought to the last man, and the Japanese mainland would have been made into a desert by American bombing. The number of troops and civilians killed on both sides would have been enormous. Remember, the Japanese then were as fanatical as the Muslim suicide bombers are today. And they really believed that the Americans were evil. One bit of internal Japanese propaganda stated that an American Marine had to shoot his grandmother before he was accepted as a full-blown soldier. Also, the two atom bombs allowed the Japanese High Command to surrender without losing face. The weapons were of such ‘shock and awe’ that only a fool would continue to fight. I believe that the Manhattan Project team were the saviours of an enormous number of souls. (Just imagine, the Nazis were close to developing the bomb too. It was probably allied bombing of places like Peenamund that made them lose the race in the development of the bomb.) They had the rocket engineers too, who later were taken on by the Americans. Remember the name "Von Braun". Besides ending the war, the bombs have showed humanity just how dreadful they are. Had they not been dropped on Japan, I am convinced that one or more would have been used since, when the bombs would have been a great deal worse. To quote a Muslim proverb, "all things are for the best". A "What if" BBC radio programme proposed that if history had been a little different, the first atom bomb would have been on Berlin instead of on Hiroshima.  We all live a very uncertain world !