Hiroshima

[Chock]

It's difficult to put yourself in the shoes of people at the time, and that is what you have to do when thinking about how the two atomic bombs were used in WW2. Most of my relatives who served in the Pacific theatre (sadly all now deceased), wouldn't have p*ssed on a Japanese person if they were on fire as a result of what they saw and experienced when fighting the Japanese, particularly those who ended up as POWs, and while this may seem harsh to us, it is nevertheless true.

Having endured several years of war in which barely a family in the entire world hadn't experienced some tragedy or other, it's obvious that most people on the Allied side would have wholeheartedly approved of the attacks, although with the caveat that most people at the time would have had little understanding of the effects of radioactivity, or the tremendous damage from blast and fire.

It should be noted that several raids using conventional munitions exacted larger initial death tolls than the atomic attacks, including one on Dresden and one on Tokyo, both of which started firestorms.

Hard as it seems, some good has come out of the attacks, in that it has served to show people what a terrible thing a nuclear weapon is.

In the UK, Group Captain Leonard Cheshire, who was invited as an observer on one of the nuclear raids, said that it made him very anti-war, and in fact ended up driving him to pursue a very humanitarian life afterwards, culminating in his creation of the Leonard Cheshire Foundation, which provides charity sheltered housing for the infirm in the UK. An organisation from which many thousands of people have benefitted (and still do).

Chock