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 Children of HIGH MODERNITY" (1870 -1970)

     The generation of The Children of  High Modernity was born after 1870 and before the death of Queen Victoria in 1901.
     'Their War' was the Great War, WWI.
   They had children, usually when they were between 20 and 40.
    For their kids, 'their war' was WWII and they were flattered by being called "The Greatest Generation" by younger authors who wanted to sell lots of books to them.
    Their grandchildren were usually born between 1940 and 1960, the (Atomic) Boom Generation : 'their war' was Vietnam.
    For example, my grandfathers were born in the 1890s and served in WWI. Their kids were born in the 1920s and served in WWII.
     I, like virtually all their grandkids was born in the 1950s.
    While, as a Canadian, I wasn't expected to serve in Vietnam, some kids at my two high schools did volunteer to go do so.

     The possibility that a right wing government might send Canadian kids off, as right wing governments did in Australia and New Zealand ,was always on the minds of kids like me who were of prime draft age at the height of the Vietnam war.
   By the late 1960s, as one generation largely defended the Vietnam war and another one largely opposed it, The Children of High Modernity faded from the public discourse - through death or ill health.
   I wonder if they died angry, as they saw all that their High Modernity generation had done for (and to) the world, was beginning to come under sustained attack from their own grandchildren.....