Weapon of mass destruction ‘helped prevent countless deaths’
The terrible atomic bombs dropped on Japan really saved millions of lives, writes Christopher Booker.
I’VE lately had cause to reflect on what for me and countless others was one of the most unforgettable moments of our lives: on August 6, 1945, when we heard the unbelievable news that a city in faraway Japan had been destroyed in a flash, by a single, mysterious new kind of bomb, infinitely more powerful than any before.
Three days later came news of a second of these ‘‘atomic’’ bombs, dropped 70 years ago, soon leading to the announcement that the war everyone had expected to last for months more was suddenly, miraculously over.
In the following months we began to learn more about the unimaginable horror visited on the people of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
And in recent days we have rightly been reminded of what it was like to live through those terrible events which changed the world forever.
In 1945, however, we also soon heard much of the other side of the story, and how that same appalling tragedy might have saved the lives of up to a million or more American and British servicemen who could well have died in the invasion of Japan which would otherwise have been necessary to end the war.
Only more slowly did it come to light how the atom bombs had also saved the lives of up to a million prisoners in camps across southeast Asia, whom the fanatical Japanese commander, Marshal Terauchi, intended to massacre if the allies landed on the Japanese mainland.
There has been no more eloquent and gripping account of this than The Night of the New Moon, published in 1970 by my late friend Laurens van der Post, who had spent three years in those brutal camps on Java.
That summer he and fellow senior officers learnt of Terauchi’s murderous plans from an informant outside the camp.
So they could scarcely believe it when, on the night of August 6, their secret camp radio picked up from the ether the incredible news of that first bomb on Hiroshima.
Through the days that followed they were more than ever convinced that they might all be slaughtered at any moment – until van der Post, as a Japanese speaker, was inexplicably summoned to the palatial headquarters of the island’s Japanese high command. Still fearing the worst, he was astounded to be confronted with a roomful of senior officers who, as he entered, solemnly bowed to him.
They informed this emaciated, bedraggled British colonel that they wished him to take the surrender of all the Japanese forces in Java.
Van der Post was only prompted to tell this extraordinary story 25 years later, when, in a New York television studio, he found himself trying to explain to an elderly survivor of Hiroshima how it was because of all the horrors the man had witnessed in 1945 that the lives of millions of others, including Van der Post’s own, had been saved.