BOOMERS : too young to have had nightmares about daddy, brother, uncle, grampa dying in the invasion of Japan

The postwar's first (transitional) generation of very young children, all grown up now, may feel an intellectual ambivalence about whether to decision to drop the A-Bomb on Hiroshima was indeed the only way to save lives by ending the war.

But they don't feel the searing emotional ambivalence that their older siblings, parents and grandparents had to feel, all their lives, about that same decision.

We never had to reconcile the joy in knowing that a close relative didn't have to die in the invasion of main islands Japan with the thoughts of all those Japanese grandparents and grandchildren fried and boiled alive at Nagasaki and Hiroshima.

My own father might would have been on a Canadian warship off Japan if Operation Olympic had happened, as planned, in October 1945 - been there almost for sure, if Operation Coronet had gone ahead in March-April 1946.

I know this, know the extreme risk for small (all Canadian warships were small) vessels under a Japanese Kamikaze attack - but I don't feel it in my gut - I don't recollect any searing childhood fear - because I wasn't even born until six years after the war's end.

I am in fact in a similar situation about the Korean War - my father re-joined up to serve in Korea but was never assigned there - I do not recall the Korean War at all, let alone as the source of the possible death of a parent.

So, although as a Canadian I always knew my father, uncle or I would never have to fight there, Vietnam ended up becoming my first real war...

The Chosin Few vs American Sniper

Hollywood is so fixated on superheroes and victories that it ignores the most highly dramatic war stories - even if they happen to be true.

If Hollywood - leftish or rightish minded, it matters not - ever made a well done film about the key battle of the Korean War - Winter 1950's Battle for Chosin Reservoir - I'd see it in a Wilshire Blvd minute. And I hate to watch war movies usually.

Partly my interest is personal --- the bad news from Choisin was so depressing to my parents that they went home and defiantly made me.

It was a sort of demographical nose-thumbing against the incoming Chinese Communist forces currently overwhelming the UN forces high in the mountains amid bitter cold and wind.

My father had just given up his career in the university tenure track to volunteer once again with the overseas Canadian Armed Forces.

But Chosin deserves to be much better known  to all of us.

Partly for the sheer drama of very large forces on both sides fighting full out for a brutal 17 days straight - and fighting as much against Siberian cold and starvation as against each other.

Chosin marks the only time the West ever invaded a communist country and the first and only full war clash between China and America.

But mostly it should be remembered because there is a direct line between the Allied retreat at Chosin and the long term massive buildup of cold war nuclear weapons, first among the west and then matched in the east.

If the world had ended in one big bang in 1962, Chosin could take a bow.

(President Truman in fact first publicly warned the world he might use the A-bomb, on the very day the Chinese unexpectedly surrounded the American (and a few British) Marines at Chosin.)

Chosin still looks far too grim for Hollywood - too much like WWII's Eastern Front in the winter to suit So Cal's sunny mood.

No flashy superheroes here - just Willy and Joe winning by merely surviving, hanging in there, enduring .....

My very first PUBLIC memory : Little Rock 1957

Why I think toddlers watching TV news is actually good for them 

In September 1957, I had just turned six, my family had just arrived in Victoria BC and my dad was away on a Canadian Navy ship.

Mom had the radio on as always (I think we got TV for the first time, a few months later) but up till then, radio has made absolutely no (none , zippo) impression on me in my early memories.

(My only previous radio memory was about 2 years earlier, when the Halifax CBC radio station had played Guy Mitchell's version of "Singing the Blues" and my dad joined in.

But it was the unusual fact of my dad singing, and singing what my parents usually casually dismissed as 'jazz' , that struck me as so unusual that my 4 year old mind remembered it at all.)

 Mom suddenly - very serious - told me to listen carefully to the onging radio news story about two little boys my age who had switched a rail yard switch and derailed a big train.

Struck by her seriousness, I listened intently, all the while thinking this was not something I'd ever think of doing in a million years, being in fact a very responsible child.

The next news item said something about President Eisenhower, Little Rock and sending in troops and then my memory fades out.

(Now I said I just said that I remembered this news - not that I understood it at all).

Little kids can't read, and then can't read very well : we don't even 'listen and understand' radio very well.

But we understand visual images, mixed with audio and parental explanations, very well indeed - and from an extremely early age.

When my family got TV - albeit a shadowy greyish black and white blobby image much of the time in bad weather, I got an insight to worlds far beyond my home and neighbourhood and beyond my own era.

The local TV stations, in a big area for military personnel , always found that endless WWII movies - English as well as American went down well.

My parents unexpectedly encouraged little old 6 and 7 year old me to stay up late to watch these adult oriented war dramas and willingly discussed the events with me.

I don't remember ever watching the local TV news until more than two years later but me constantly asking or receiving explanations about incidents on screen in these adult movie (and TV docu-dramas) sure made me grew up fast intellectually.

In 2016 election year, its worth remembering that no one left in the workforce will personally remember the Korea War at all, left alone WWII

All this is to suggest that just how much small kids from the WWII years actually personally remember anything about it is very much dependent on these sort of incidents such I have recalled about me and Little Rock.

Most of the British Invasion rockers were tiny kids during WWII and their only war memories, as recounted in many interviews, seems to consist of the one time  a street near by got hit by bombs sometime very late in the war.

I have sure all kids born before 1935 are fully part of The Greatest Generation Ever and personally feel part-ownership of the WWII memories and myths.

But the kids born between 1935 and 1941 - I am less sure - it depends on chance vivid incidents forming secure memories.

And those born after 1941 - they're effectively one of us, the post WWII generations ...