Madam, - It's always enjoyable to read people playing the game of hindsight. The latest version comes from Mark O'Leary (August 23rd) regarding the atomic bomb drops on Japan.
We are all entitled to express our views about whether the dropping of the atomic bombs was right or wrong. Ironically, we can do this precisely because two atomic bombs were dropped and therefore the Allies won the war and because of that we enjoy freedom of speech.
Unless we resurrect those involved from both sides, who made the decision to bomb or to surrender, we will never know the real motives of President Truman, nor will we ever know how far the Japanese High Command needed to be pushed before it would unconditionally surrender.
The hard fact is that dropping those bombs ended the war. Mr O'Leary, in his letter, states that there would have been many more months before a land invasion of Japan. How many prisoners of war would have made it those extra few months, how many Japanese civilians would have starved by then, how many more civilians in the countries it occupied would have been murdered?
The casualties are a matter of semantics. Dropping two bombs might kill up to half a million, but if nothing is done until a land invasion is attempted, that might result in the deaths of half a million - same difference.
Having watched the VJ veterans last weekend, I am humbled by and grateful to them. Because of their generation, who made the hard decisions which we now have the luxury to analyse in a way they never did, I and I suspect Mr O'Leary, not to mention all the other armchair generals, are part of the generation who have never had to go to war and make hard decisions. - Yours, etc,
DESMOND FITZGERALD, Canary Wharf, London.