IT’S 68 years ago this week since US atomic bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki to bring Japan to its knees after a long, brutal war.
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But Koroit’s Grant Warnock can still remember the scenes as if it was yesterday.
“It’s vivid in my mind, especially when they start talking about bombs nowadays,” he told The Standard.
“There was terrible devastation — bent and twisted steel frames everywhere.”
Mr Warnock, now 87, was with the British Command occupation forces for two years at a base in the port city of Kure, where former warships were cut, dismantled and the steel recycled for peacetime use.
“There was an acetylene smell in the air all the time,” he said.
“I had the cushy job of running a canteen selling cigarettes and other extras including chocolates, tinned food and beer rations.
“We started in a shed which had been bombed and I slept at the back.
“Eventually we got it reroofed and turned it into a club for night entertainment.”
In their spare time they travelled to other parts of Japan. “We quite often went by jeep to Hiroshima and gazed at the mess.
“It was deserted, but wasn’t closed off and I took photographs.”
He said the Japanese were quiet and orderly, but many were starving.
“I remember hearing noises at night near where we slept and decided to investigate.
“What I saw was a Japanese man bending over a 44-gallon drum we used for food scraps.
“He was scraping the bottom to get the food out.
“We would see people eating their lunch of cold rice and a bit of green on top which had to keep them till the next meal.”
He has never returned to Japan.
“If everybody was shown the Hiroshima damage you’d have second thoughts about atomic warfare,” Mr Warnock said. He volunteered for service in 1945 after a short working career as a wool classer based at Newmarket in Melbourne.
The war ended the day he finished training in tank attack. He was assigned to peacetime desk duties in Australia. “But we worked it so we went to Japan.”
“I came home from Japan on my 21st birthday.
“Later I married a dairy farmer’s daughter (Beryl Anderson) and moved to the Koroit district in 1951 and ran a farm at Southern Cross.”
The United States dropped its nuclear weapons on Hiroshima on August 6, 1945, and three days later on Nagasaki.
Before the bombing, Hiroshima’s population has been estimated at 350,000. About 70,000 died immediately from the explosion and another 70,000 died from radiation within five years.
An estimated 40,000 people were killed outright by the bombing at Nagasaki and 25,000 injured. Thousands more died later from related injuries and illnesses.