Hiroshima Day

Press, 12 August 1986, Page 20

Hiroshima Day

Sir, — Bill Filshie’s description of feeling personal terror and helplessness in a situation over which he had no control during war time (August 7) matches exactly my feelings as a youth of the nuclear age. The world’s leaders, who have lived most of their lives, cannot know what it means to have to come to terms with the almost certainty of being unable to live out any personal hopes and aspirations,

of being unable to bear children and watch them grow and, bn top of this, to have to accept that this is but of our control and in the hands of other men. What hope is there for my generation? — Yours, etc., E. H. MCNAUGHTON. August 7, 1986.

Sir,—lt is Hiroshima Day, and I give thanks for my freedom. I remember with gratitude those who lived and died for it on the Kokoda Trail and the Burma Railway. I recall the cemetery at Singapore, the camp at Changi, the Battle of the Coral Sea and Japanese submarines in Sydney Harbour, the Red Cross ship Centaur sunk off the Australian coast and civilian prisoners at Stanley Camp in Hong Kong. And I remember at very special prisoner — my father. And, to any American who may happen to read this, I say thank you. For your countrymen released my father to freedom after years of internment. As they entered the concentration camp your soldiers sang “Oh What a Beautiful Morning.” I write lest you should think, as the bonds of A.N.Z.U.S. are broken, that we have all forgotten.—Yours, etc.,

SUE HUNT. August 6, 1986.