If I were to make a film about Australians at the end of World War II it would be set in the Japanese coastal town of Ohama. In the Ohama coal mine, which  stretched out beneath the sea, Australian prisoners of war worked side by side with Japanese civilians. Everyone knew the war was entering the final phase of its drama but no one knew exactly what that final phase would be.
Food was getting short for the Japanese generally; the ones getting the least were the prisoners. They knew the Americans were getting close. but they feared the Americans would bomb the mine and hit the pumps. The mine leaked and, without the pumps, they'd drown. There was also a fear that the Japanese would slaughter all their prisoners once the Allied forces landed on Japanese territory, to prevent them escaping and joining up with the invasion force. When one of the Australians at Ohama, Doug Craig, spilt a can of hot ash, he was made to kneel in the snow outside the guard house for a whole night. In the morning, his mates, in the words of one of them, tried to "thaw" him but he was dead. 
Ohama lies only 65 kilometres south of Hiroshima and 100km east of Nagasaki. All his life, Tom Uren remembered seeing the orange glow over Hiroshima after the dropping of the atomic bomb. A member of the Whitlam and Hawke Labor governments, Uren would take his political philosophy of what he called collectivism from his experience as a POW  under Weary Dunlop's command on the Burma Railway. He would also come to the view that the dropping of the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki was a crime against humanity.
Tom Uren was like my godfather so his opinion is of consequence to me. Nonetheless, the evidence is pretty clear that if it were not for the dropping of the two atomic bombs, I would never have existed. My father was a prisoner in the Ohama camp.
My father said the news the war had ended met with "neither cheers nor tears" among the people he was with. They were - to use his word - spent. They'd been prisoners of the Japanese for three-and-a-half years. They'd worked on the Burma Railway, where 2700 Australians died in the way that slave labourers have always died - of illness, exhaustion, beatings and malnutrition. They'd survived being transported to Japan in a rusty hulk that narrowly avoided being torpedoed by the Americans and was all but tipped over in a typhoon. And now that the war was finally over, they found themselves between the two incinerated cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, 200,000 civilians dead, and a fearful new weapon having been unleashed on the world.
Meanwhile, in Europe, the victorious Allied armies were discovering another horrifying global first - the camps where the Nazi regime had practiced murder on an industrial scale.
The world was grieving and exhausted - 60 million people had died, 30,000 of them Australian, women as well as men. In Europe, millions of people were on the move in the biggest refugee crisis seen on the continent up until that time.
My father enlisted to fight during World War II for the same reason certain educated northerners enlisted to fight for the Union during the American Civil War. He believed the war was about the defence of civilised values. The morality of war is complex and murky, but my impression is that most people, then and now, believe World War II was a war that had to be fought. The Imperial Japanese Army had committed mass atrocities in China, a memory that is burningly alive in China to this day and a good reason for Australia not to step lightly into the escalating tensions between China and Japan in the South China Sea.
In World War II, unlike World War I, Australia was threatened with invasion. Northern Australia was bombed. Six months ago I went into a Melbourne school and asked a group of year 11 and 12 students how many knew where Darwin is. About a quarter put up their hands. I then asked how many knew about Pearl Harbour. More than half the hands went up. A girl cried out, "It was bombed." I said, "Well, Darwin had more bombs dropped on it in World War II than Pearl Harbour did." The Japanese launched 63 raids on Darwin. Australian children today should know that Australia was attacked during World War II. They should also know that World War I and World War II were fundamentally different conflicts and we do no one, least of all our children, any favours by blurring that difference.
At Gallipoli we invaded a country with whom we had no difference beyond those created by the bonds of empire.
In 1939, when World War II broke out, Australia's population was 7 million; 1 million of those were involved with the armed services. Some of them, no doubt, would have been young men who were, more or less, on for anything - the mere idea of war didn't scare them off. And there were probably men who could find no other occupation. But, in making any judgment of those who fought, I can only be guided by the World War II veterans I have encountered along the way. The five Burma Railway men I got to know well had seen a lot, had suffered a lot and were people of compassion. They were like my elders.
And then there were the women, heroes like Vivian Bullwinkel, sole survivor of the Banka  Island massacre, when 22 Australian nurses were told to walk into the sea by their Japanese captors, then machinegunned from behind. I feel it necessary to add at this point, having just mentioned another atrocity committed by the Imperial Japanese Army during World War II, that last month I attended an Australia-Japan reconciliation conference in Sydney. My father believed, in his words, that no nation of people has moral superiority over another; he said it was a matter of how people were led, of good and bad governments.
Then there were the women back here in Australia. Football legend Ron Barassi's first memory is of seeing his mother weeping and being held by his uncle. She'd just learnt that his father had died at Tobruk. Australians would fight and die in north Africa, they would lead the charge at the battle of El Alamein. They would fight in the Mediterranean and Europe - on land, in the air, on sea. I grew up listening to World War II songs. The line, "Keep smiling through/ just like you/ always do" seemed to sum up the best of this generation. They were courageous and stoic. When 9/11 happened and there was that atmosphere of panic, the two calmest people I knew were my parents, then in their 80s. They'd seen it before, they'd seen worse.
Keith Miller, later to win fame as a Test cricketer, flew Mosquito fighter-bombers over Europe in the last year of the war. When asked by a sportswriter to talk about pressure, Miller famously replied, "Pressure is having a Messerschmitt up your arse. Cricket is not."
They were a tough generation. The Bloodbath, the 1945 grand final between Carlton and South Melbourne, stands as the most violent grand final in the history of the game. I'd always assumed the players were young men home from the war letting out their demons. But when I investigated the matter I found that perhaps only three or four of the players in the game had seen action. But there were plenty of young men fresh home from the war in the crowd of 62,000. Princes Park - where the game was played - the MCG being an American military base - was supposed to hold fewer than than 30,000. So young men who hadn't been to war put on a display of their courage and fighting abilities for young men who had been to war.
A total of 10 players were charged including one, Carlton's Freddie Fitzgibbon, who was sitting in the crowd suspended and leapt the fence to join a melee. Ted Whitten, later dubbed Mr Football, was there as a 12-year-old boy - he said it was the best game he ever saw.
Researching the Bloodbath, I read a lot of newspapers for that period immediately after the war in Melbourne. One newspaper described the celebrations which followed the end of the war in the Pacific as "the storm which followed the storm". There was a lot of vandalism. In the newspapers there were already discussions about the atomic bomb and what might happen if it fell into the possession of an enemy power. Already, a man called Bob Santamaria was saying that enemy was the Soviet Union. World War II had scarcely ended and the next war, the Cold War, had begun.
About 10 years ago, with my father, I met an Australian who  had been a prisoner of the Germans. He'd been in a plane shot down over Germany. The plane was dropping through the sky in flames when he got out; not all his crew-mates did. I met him about  60 years after that terrifying event. I thought he was a lovely, giving man but I also saw that within him was a sort of blur, like some part of  his nervous system had been activated by trauma and couldn't be switched off. An Aboriginal man who fought with the Australian Army in Malaya once told me, "Everyone is wounded in war".
And then there are those who didn't come home. In 2001, when Dad and I wrote a book about the Burma Railway, Dad wrote the dedication: "Dedicated to those who never returned to lead the old life again, to love and be loved." On the following page was a quote I chose from the Australian poet John Shaw Neilsen about a returned soldier from World War I: "Simple, salt tears will redden his eyes; No one shall hear what he hears, or see what he sees."
I said at the start that if I was to make a film about Australians at the end of World War II it would be set in Ohama, Japan. Two years ago, my brother Tim, our family historian, tracked down an Ohama story from another man who was there when the war ended. From Scone in New South Wales, his name was Allan "Bridie" Brideoake. The story is contained in a book titled Closer Than Brothers, by his son Bruce, but I rang Bridie to hear it for myself. Even at 95, he was full of good cheer. He'd grown up in the bush, was good with horses, and liked having fun with his mates. In that spirit, he'd gone off to the war.
He was wounded and captured during the fall of Singapore. "Bridie" was sent to the Burma Railway but he counted  himself lucky - 12 of his mates were sent to Borneo and died on the Sandakan Death   March. Bridie copped his share of beltings from guards, suffered from beriberi and nicked what he could from slow-moving trains; the camp doctor was particularly pleased when he arrived back with a bottle of quinine. He made the sea journey to Japan in a rusty hulk and was sent to Ohama. And that's where he was when the war ended.
Bridie and a couple of his mates decided to take the initiative. They strode into the guards' hut. The guards didn't move as the Australians took their rifles. Then one of Bridie's mates, a feller called Bligh, known to his mates as The Governor, suggested they go for an outing. In a nearby town, they beheld a fire brigade station, went in and said they wanted a truck. The fire brigade thought they were the US army and gave them a very old truck that pre-dated pneumatic tyres. Off they bumped.
Some 10 or 20 miles later, they saw a brewery. Three of them went and requisitioned half a dozen cartons of beer. The brewery manager demanded a signed authorisation to present to the US army for payment. Governor Bligh signed the document "Governor Bligh". Two of his mates stepped forward and the document was counter-signed by "Ned Kelly" and "Bob Menzies".
In telling me this story all those years later, Bridie Brideoake said of Governor Bligh, "The old Governor could be a bit unpredictable." A further 20 minutes down the road, they saw a bank. Governor Bligh called a halt, declaring, "I've always wanted to rob a bank." Taking the rifle with him, the Governor entered the building. Then the others heard a loud bang as the Governor put a shot through the roof. A minute later, he emerged with an armful of money.
And if I were to make a film about Australians at the end of World War II, the concluding image would be what happened next: Governor Bligh walking down the street throwing notes this way and that, impoverished Japanese civilians coming out of the ruins to follow him, his mates in the fire truck with their Japanese beers standing and cheering him on.
Martin Flanagan is a senior writer at The Age.