REPATRIATION

Though I may surmise Merle you would have conducted yourself with restraint and dignity for what that monument signified, one could say it was a most horrid weapon to release on human beings it was suggested a naval blockade similar to what Germany faced in WWI may hold the key but that would be a protracted affair and most probably more inhuman that dropping that thing twice.
I know there are victims still dying from the affects of the radiation released on those occasions and looking back I think that Truman made the right choice as in the long run and the bigger picture it saved horrendous casualties from both sides one figure quoted in a doco I have recently watched about this affair of the bomb put US casualties at 2.5 million from attacking and fighting on mainland Japan.
In this doco it explains that Truman was informed discretely in a meeting he was in with Stalin about the project Trinity detonation the fact is Uncle Joe knew about it anyway so it really was not a secret the thing was the US did not have the capability to drop a 3rd one as they had no sufficient amount of U235 or Plutonium to manufacture another weapon for another 9 months.
Anyway a bit off track but for me personally any war grave site I visit mainly friends and not to many foes is shown respect as they were all soldiers once.........

My daughter and her husband taught English in Japan for 5 years at an American owned school and we travelled to see her on three occasions.

It is probably the strangest environment or country I have ever been too.
Very formal, highly efficient but totally unorthodox. Ruled by officialdom and everybody appears to tow the line, for their own reasons!!
However,
Whilst we were there a number of years ago, an English girl teaching English to a Millionaires son was murdered and found in a bath filled with sand on a balcony, another girl was murdered by another millionaire and found on a beach. She was a hostess, and a guy walked into a Police station and stabbed all the officers, so you have to balance what goes on and where!!!

It is such a strange country and one has to go there to experience the legacy. One has to think the A Bombs have made them totally subservient in many many ways, and scared to upset anybody, but these odd things then occur which you can't even start to explain.

I know you can't blame their fore fathers for everything, but I find the massacre of 200 bed ridden British soldiers and nurses and doctors in Alexandria Hospital in Singapore in 1941 totally unacceptable and a total flout of the Geneva Convention, and their bodies tipped into a mass grave still there today under the football pitch. That afterall was what they were good at, slaughter.
I have never knowingly bought anything Japanese and can fully understand those men that were in their camps feeling the same and very bitter even today, especially those that worked on the Burma Railroad!!

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Originally Posted by Gil Boyd

these odd things then occur which you can't even start to explain.

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Including the fist fights in their political forum...on TV...

..............ha ha yes and that very unusual for what appear a docile race nowadays

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Originally Posted by Merle

I was on the other side of that coin when I visited the atomic bomb museum in Nagasaki, japan.....

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I visited Hiroshima in the mid fifties, and surprisingly enough encountered no animosity at all, or at least none that I was aware of.
I think that the bad feelings that the world expresses about nuclear bombs today is a fairly recent development- at the time most people in Japan that I encountered seemed to feel that they were just another way to bomb them, especially when compared to the Tokyo fire bombings.

Sadly, it was the only way to stop such a powerful force from proceeding around the globe unchecked with support from Germany!
Did the President make the right decision.................I personally think he did. He had to be a bigger man, and what a burden to have on your shoulders for the rest of his life!!!

Bit like the father of the bomb Oppenheimer whom I think stated or said words to the effect after the Trinity detonation "I have become the destroyer of Worlds."

History is a remarkable thing...........just imagine for one minute either Germany or Japan having it first. Germany was very capable towards the latter days, and they were searchuing for a quick deadly solution as they realised their days were numbered.
Feel quite lucky in that respect!!

I had already made it known to my parents that I didn't want to be buried anywhere in the Far East but Australia would be acceptable. In Malaya/Singapore/Hong Kong we were buried there but SVn it was back to Oz but I was a pom, as were plenty of the others. The irony was that if your parents or NoK wanted you anywhere else than 'NATO standard' (or SEATO standard there!!), they had to pay. To be really honest, when you're just 20, it's not a thing that you actually worried about. What do the others say?

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Originally Posted by Peter Laidler

when you're just 20, it's not a thing that you actually worried about. What do the others say?

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No, didn't enter conversation. Don't know for sure but I think after Korea we repaitreated all. KIA in UN duty wouldn't likely see me buried up by the Grammar School in Nicosia...probably repat...

No, we didn't think about it.