ROBERT Readman rightly draws attention to the barbarism and brutality of the Japanese imperial army in World War II.

And he is right the Japanese government in all the decades has pointedly refused to face up to any recognition of the horrors they inflicted on so many Asian countries.

And it’s important to keep in mind the beginning of WW2 was in 1937 when the Japanese invaded Manchuria and then China.

The Japanese imperial army every bit on par with the worst of Nazi Facism with the Rape Of Naking, the then capital of China. Hundreds of thousands of civilians – men, women and children – brutally murdered in their own homes.

But no Mr Readman, we cannot say “ The 300,000 who died at Hiroshima pale into insignificance”.

Never does it pale into significance. That act, by the US Truman government, every bit as savage, merciless, and brutal – devoid of humanity – as the worst of the Japanese imperial army and Nazi mass murder.

Hundreds of thousand of Japanese men, women, and infants in schools, incinerated because they had the bad luck to live in a civilian city picked out by US bomber command.

Incinerated in a Nazi gas oven, incinerated by a US nuclear bomb, all screams to the heavens of man’s inhumanity on man.

The Japanese by August 1945 were defeated all but for a final surrender. The reason the US dropped “the bomb” is made all to clear by modern history. It was to scare the life out of the Russians – see what the US can do. Not to finish off the Japanese war.

And what do we say now to warmongering US backed by warmongering UK, and other Western nations, sending in battle fleets and stealth bombers into the South China Sea? The way we are going we could end with nuclear war exploding on the planet which will then dwarf WW2 millions of times over.

JEFF WILLIAMS

Jubilee Road, Parkstone