Nuclear bomb survivor signs out
By SARAH SCOPELIANOS, The Standard - UK
ONE of Australia's last living links to the end of World War Two, Murray Jobling, a former Grassmere soldier settler, has died.
The boy who had enlisted in the army just shy of his 22nd birthday in 1940 was aged 27 and in a Japanese prisoner of war camp in Nagasaki when the bomb hit.
He had trained as an army gunner with the 2/40 Battalion, and alongside 23 other Australians he survived the bomb blast at ground zero.
The Australians believed their captors had penciled in their executions and were saved by America's ``The Fat Man'' atomic bomb.
Mr Jobling told The Bulletin last year the dropping of the second atomic bomb was necessary.
``Of course it was. It saved our bloody lives. That's a stupid question,'' he said at the time.
His eldest child, Diane Wickson, said her father, who died in a Geelong nursing home two months short of his 88th birthday last Friday, was believed to have been one of two of Australia's last ground zero survivors.Ê
She said few people believed his tale of working at Mitsubishi's war plane factory in Nagasaki.
The bomb detonated above Nagasaki on August 9, 1945 at 11.02am, killing an estimated 35,000 people and injured another 25,000 people.
At the time Mr Jobling was having a smoke in the prisoners' camp and the blast picked him up but he landed on his feet. The person he was smoking with was buried unconscious under the rubble and the barracks were flattened.
``He was Dad. He went through quite a lot and was a quiet man. Like most people who go through a lot of trauma he never talked about it. When he did it was usually in brief terms,'' Mrs Wickson said yesterday.
``Over the years there were various comments about the neighbours who didn't believe him, that sort of thing, but I had no real idea because he didn't talk about it very much.''
It wasn't until 1974 when Japan opened its war records that evidence of the Australians' survival become a matter of public record.
During the years, Mr Jobling lived in Coburg, later in Appin South near Kerang where he married his wife, Evelyn, before moving to a soldier settlement block at Grassmere with his family.
Mrs Wickson said that in Kerang her father measured farmers' water allocations and wanted to settle in a place free of irrigation.
Mr Jobling resigned from the Koroit RSL in the 1960s in protest about the league's support for the Vietnam War and never re-joined.
``He believed it was just a civil conflict and had nothing to do with us and at the particular time it was very unfashionable.
``He didn't say a lot, but when he did he meant it. His family was his priority.'' He returned in 1965.
Mr Jobling is survived by five children, 10 grandchildren and seven great-grandchildren.
© 2006 Warrnambool StandardÊ