We actually finished on schedule! We watched the footage from The Last Days of World War II, specifically, the last week leading up to VJ Day... Very thought provoking, especially as it was juxtaposed, in my mind, with the commemoration of 9/11.What surprised me most was that, initially, the Japanese army felt that the atomic bombs were not substantially more damaging than the firebombings of other cities. One expert said that if he gave us a pile of pictures from Hiroshima, Nagasaki, and several other fire bombed cities, we would likely not be able to tell which was which, the damage and injuries were so similar. The big difference being the number of bombs. And the radiation, of course, but they didn't know that yet.
It was the emperor who grasped the problem and insisted they surrender before more harm was done.
As a child, I believed that a nuclear war between the US and USSR was nearly inevitable, and the meaning of that was very clear to me. Do you remember The Day After? My family had a specific plan in the event of a nuclear attack, and we prayed the Rosary for peace every night at 7:00.
More than that, I remember the fall of the Berlin Wall, and what that meant to me, a mere 20 years after my birth in Western Germany. It meant that my own children would grow up out of the terrible shadow of the mushroom cloud.
Back to the end of WWII, the most amazing thing to me was the phenomenon of people who survived both blasts. One man was on a business trip in Hiroshima, and then returned to his home in Nagasaki... Talk about unlucky... Or, maybe, talk about lucky - he lived into his mid nineties!
Next up, the post war world, the Cold War, the Space Race, the Baby Boom, Rockin' Robin and the Lone Ranger. Yes! We are headed into the fabulous 50s!
Also, I don't know why Blogger does this sometimes (cuts off all older posts on the page), but there is another new post published today, but you'll have to click "older posts" to get it.
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