Yesterday was 9th March - Its significance may not be immediately apparent, and the date might have passed without any special note except for a couple of events in recent history.
1. It marks the fact that we have now been in Toowoomba for 4 years exactly - the best move we have made, but where has the time gone?
2. It also marks the day of the heaviest bombing raid of World War II. On that day 70 years ago, the US launched 860 B29-Superfortresses on Tokyo and they delivered more than 6000 tonnes of incendiaries and explosives over the city, causing unimaginable damage to the city.
I am currently reading "Unbroken" by Laura Hillenbrand, which gives an excellent graphical account of one American serviceman who endured the dreadful conditions of a POW in Japan for 2 and a half years. It is a coincident that yesterday I just happened to be reading the section which described this massive bomb attack on Tokyo. It should have signalled the immediate surrender of Japan because their air force had been substantially decimated, ships sunk, and most of their outlying islands had been captured as the allies advanced on the mainland. Yet the Japanese continued to pursue their insane policy of "fighting to the last man", and they endured another 5 months of intense destruction until the atomic bombs hit Hiroshima and Nagasaki, when they finally surrendered.
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