On August 6 1945, a man called Denis Bruce Soul was enduring his fourth year as a prisoner of the Empire of Japan.
In the squalor of Sime Road camp in Singapore, he existed on a few handfuls of rice a day: contemporary photographs show gaunt, emaciated, semi-clad captives. He was, slowly, being starved to death.
There was no reason for him to hope that his ordeal would soon end. The Allies had triumphed in distant Europe but they were still a long way from Singapore and mainland Japan. Months or years of captivity – and steadily more debilitating hunger – loomed ahead.
Yet on that morning, 80 years ago today, an American B-29 bomber was flying towards Hiroshima. At 8.15am local time, the atomic bomb eviscerated the city, killing at least 70,000 Japanese people instantly and tens of thousands more later.
The prisoners of Sime Road could not know it, but this act of supreme horror 3,000 miles over the horizon meant they were only weeks away from liberation.
I write this because Denis Bruce Soul was my grandfather and the accident of history that made him a prisoner in Singapore on the day the bomb fell places me, along with many other people, in a strange category of humanity.
There is no delicate way of putting this: I owe my existence to the atom bomb.
Had Robert Oppenheimer failed in his task or President Truman decided against using the new weapon, there is no telling what my grandfather’s fate would have been.
Had the war been prolonged, with the Americans invading Japan’s main islands and fighting their way street by street across a desolated landscape, it is just possible that my grandfather would have survived to be liberated in 1946 or 1947. But the odds would have been against him. He certainly would not have had a daughter (my mother) in December 1946 – and therefore I would not be here.
Instead, Japan surrendered on August 15 1945 and my grandfather was home before Christmas, arriving at Liverpool after a three-week voyage and then taking the train to Paddington.
He was reunited with my grandmother, Dorothea, and my uncle, Brendan, then aged six, having last seen them in 1942 when he placed them on board one of the final ships to leave Singapore before the Japanese captured the city. That desperate evacuation really was governed by the rule: women and children only.
On August 6 1945, a man called Denis Bruce Soul was enduring his fourth year as a prisoner of the Empire of Japan.
In the squalor of Sime Road camp in Singapore, he existed on a few handfuls of rice a day: contemporary photographs show gaunt, emaciated, semi-clad captives. He was, slowly, being starved to death.
There was no reason for him to hope that his ordeal would soon end. The Allies had triumphed in distant Europe but they were still a long way from Singapore and mainland Japan. Months or years of captivity – and steadily more debilitating hunger – loomed ahead.
Yet on that morning, 80 years ago today, an American B-29 bomber was flying towards Hiroshima. At 8.15am local time, the atomic bomb eviscerated the city, killing at least 70,000 Japanese people instantly and tens of thousands more later.
The prisoners of Sime Road could not know it, but this act of supreme horror 3,000 miles over the horizon meant they were only weeks away from liberation.
I write this because Denis Bruce Soul was my grandfather and the accident of history that made him a prisoner in Singapore on the day the bomb fell places me, along with many other people, in a strange category of humanity.
There is no delicate way of putting this: I owe my existence to the atom bomb.
Had Robert Oppenheimer failed in his task or President Truman decided against using the new weapon, there is no telling what my grandfather’s fate would have been.
Had the war been prolonged, with the Americans invading Japan’s main islands and fighting their way street by street across a desolated landscape, it is just possible that my grandfather would have survived to be liberated in 1946 or 1947. But the odds would have been against him. He certainly would not have had a daughter (my mother) in December 1946 – and therefore I would not be here.
Instead, Japan surrendered on August 15 1945 and my grandfather was home before Christmas, arriving at Liverpool after a three-week voyage and then taking the train to Paddington.
He was reunited with my grandmother, Dorothea, and my uncle, Brendan, then aged six, having last seen them in 1942 when he placed them on board one of the final ships to leave Singapore before the Japanese captured the city. That desperate evacuation really was governed by the rule: women and children only.