"It was the atom bomb that saved my life"

Last month, on the anniversary of the bombing of Hiroshima, I wrote a column in The Guardian (which published letters in response here and here) recounting the conclusions of recent historical research:

The decision to drop the bomb was founded on the conviction that a blockade and invasion of Japan would cause massive casualties. Estimates derived from intelligence about Japan's military deployments projected hundreds of thousands of American casualties.

The Guardian has published today a remarkable testimony on an aspect of the Pacific War that I ought also to have referred to. The author is a gentleman called Charles Cleal. Now nearly 90, Mr Cleal is an RAF veteran who was held from 1942 to 1945 as a Japanese prisoner of war. I urge you to read his article. He is clearly a man of great personal resources and courage, whose life has been marked ever after by his wartime experiences. One passage bears on the conclusion of the Pacific War:

There was horrendous disease in the camp and vast, excruciating ulcers. Prisoners were given three floorboards' living space each - at one point I had a dead body on each side. I'd been talking to the chap next to me one night; when I woke up in the morning he was dead.

After three years as a prisoner, it was the atom bomb at Hiroshima that saved my life. The Japanese soldiers had been ordered to retreat into the mountains, killing all but a handful of their prisoners, but after Hiroshima the Japanese emperor sent out orders that they should surrender. Planes flying overhead dropped food parcels - and the news that our ordeal was over.

Mr Cleal is stating here not a subjective impression born of terrible circumstances, but a straightforward point of fact. Hundreds of thousands of Western prisoners were held under the responsibility of Field Marshal Terauchi Hisaichi. We know that Terauchi had given orders that all those prisoners be executed once the Allied attack on Southeast Asia began. That invasion was planned for 6 September 1945. It did not take place, because Japan surrendered after the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

This historical consideration does not resolve the ethical debates over use of the A-bomb. It ought in my view powerfully to inform those debates, however. So should the hundreds of thousands of deaths, from maltreatment and malnutrition, directly attributable to Japanese actions in the territories of the Japanese Empire every month that the war continued. The salience of those issues may be the reason that anti-Truman campaigners have for decades resorted to bogus history - claims that Japan was in any event on the point of surrender, or that America's principal motivation for using the A-bomb was to intimidate the Soviet Union - sooner than acknowledge the momentous implications of their position.