Sixty Year Old Photographs

Christmastime 1941 my dad was pulled out of his sleepy suburban DC high school by my grandfather and sent to Georgia Military Academy near Atlanta. He graduated in June 1945 and on his 18th birthday, second of July, he marked the day by joining the Marines.

The battle of Okinawa started first of April and finished July second, his birthday. I'm not going to write a report on that battle as there are stunning articles on the web already. You can read here for details of the horrific casualty figures and implications for the assault on the much bigger island of Japan.

Sixty years ago today President Truman dropped the first of the two atomic bombs he had in his arsenal on the headquarters of the supremely efficient Japanese 2nd Army in Hiroshima. Despite outrageous civilian fatalities the Japanese generals did not consider the possibility of unconditional surrender. This isn't really surprising. They hadn't considered surrendering after the Tokyo fire raid in March which killed almost double the number of civilians as the bomb on Hiroshima. It took the second bomb on Nagasaki and their medieval worship of their emperor who urged capitulation to secure a cease fire and ultimately the end of their aggressive war.

PJ O'Rourke wrote in "Peace Kills":

"After Iwo Jima a few more big World War II battles took place, notably in Berlin and on Okinawa. But it wasn't long before sensitive, intelligent nations evolved beyond such things - even if Hiroshima, one of those cataclysmic events common to evolutionary history, was required to spark the progress."

My dad never talked about his military service. I remember only one conversation with him on the subject:

Me: Do you ever regret that you didn't see any action, any fighting on a battlefield in the second world war?

Poppa: (dropping his jaw and looking at me in amazement, then, after a pause) No! Truman saved my life.

He had a dusty photograph album hidden away in his office at home. After he died we all looked through it and I saved a few photos. He also had an enormous Marine corps ring in a box with some tie pins and baby teeth. I have no idea what those meant to him but I know what he meant to me.