Here's why the pilot of Enola Gay had no regrets about dropping the first atom bomb

Task & Purpose ^ | Aug 6, 2022 | Tom Porter

[where's_the_Outrage?]

Early in the morning of August 6, 1945, a U.S. Air Force B29 bomber, the Enola Gay, took off from the its base in Tinian, near Guam, and headed for the city of Hiroshima in southern Japan.

It was carrying a 9,700 top-secret bomb named Little Boy. Its pilot was Col. Paul W. Tibbets Jr., who led a crew of 12 men on a mission that would change the history of the world.......

Pilot Tibbetts Jr and other crew members believed to the end of their lives that the bomb was necessary — and they say that it ultimately saved lives.

In a 2002 interview, Tibbetts told writer Studs Terkel: "I knew we did the right thing because when I knew we'd be doing that I thought, yes, we're going to kill a lot of people, but by God we're going to save a lot of lives. We won't have to invade [Japan]."......

He said: "You're gonna kill innocent people at the same time, but we've never fought a damn war anywhere in the world where they didn't kill innocent people.

"If the newspapers would just cut out the s--t: 'You've killed so many civilians.' That's their tough luck for being there," he said.

[Salvavida]

Biblical theology is consistent that national sin falls on everyone’s head. And there are much worse ways to go than incineration.

We deserve the absolute worse.

[rxh4n1]

2403 military and 68 civilians were killed in the unprovoked cowardly sneak attack on Pearl Harbor.

They sowed the wind.

Right. Sick of the whining about how mean we were to the poor, innocent Japanese. My dad was in the Battle of Manila. He saw what they did. The Japs (yes those were Japs) got pissed cause they were losing and massacred 100,000 or more Filipinos.

[Texas Fossil]

“and they say that it ultimately saved lives”

My father was in Germany and had just gone through training preparing them to be assigned to the invasion force to invade Japan.

He knew what he was facing. And to invade a people in their own nation is sobering.

For the rest of his life he thanked God for delivering him from that invasion. He died in March 2021, in his own home in his own bed. Fitting end for one of those WWII soldiers.

[schurmann]

“...There have always been those who disagreed, including Ike, George Marshall, Wm. Leahy, Curtis LeMay and IIRC Nimitz and MacArthur. [Stingray51, post 37]

Bunches of senior officers voiced no opposition at the time, to employment of atomic bombs in action.

Cutesily, they only began voicing “moral” concerns after the war, when it became evident that the nation’s self-appointed moral arbiters and other members of the chattering class were making headway in their efforts to shift public opinion against the military establishment and nuclear weapons (today, they’ve pretty much succeeded). Every man on your list was politically sensitive to the whims of the public - they could never have risen so high had they lacked savvy.

There has also been the longstanding problem of interservice rivalry.

US Army and US Navy and their apologists/advocates have been competing since before the Constitution was ratified. Squabbles altered and intensified after 1926, when the Army Air Corps was created - hostility refocused on air power, which had already become more than mere potential during the First World War, and which was foreseen as soon to be decisive.

World War Two proved the predictions of air power advocates. Interservice squabbles did not let up during American participation and indeed reached new levels of hostility.

It came to a head after air attacks on Japan’s Home Islands induced the Imperial Japanese to capitulate without suffering invasion; in effect, proponents of the Army and the Navy could never forgive the Army Air Forces (by 1945 a separate armed service in all but name) for winning the war before they had a chance to win yet-greater glory.

Anyone inclined to doubt these conclusions ought to study up on disputes occurring after the Marianas were retaken in 1944. Tawdry, petty, and borderline violent.

Further insults to the preconceptions of traditionalists happened soon after 1945, when USAF became a separate service and a unified Department of Defense was established. USN resisted in a prolonged and vigorous fashion, refusing to concede the obvious as late as the 1960s, sometimes in obscure and arcane ways.

The elder branches clung tightly to their self-righteous backward-looking worldviews, insisting that their domination of two-dimensional environments was superior to domination of the only environment containing three dimensions. USAF had become the first line of national security and an indispensable arm of support for everything the senior services were doing, or hoped to do.

In reality, no single armed service can succeed without the others. Joint and Combined operations are the only way to proceed; that was officially conceded in 1947, but apologists for “pure” operations within their own pet areas of expertise & control still refuse to accept it.

[Captain Walker]

Biblical theology is consistent that national sin falls on everyone’s head.

We're still bound by the laws of just warfare. (The men who flew the planes into the towers on 9/11 could have said the same thing: "You deserve this; it's biblical.")

[1Old Pro]

2403 military and 68 civilians were killed in the unprovoked cowardly sneak attack on Pearl Harbor. They sowed the wind.

Of course. Thankfully the pilots realized that what they did was necessary in war.

[Salvavida]

As a graduate of the Navy’s Law of War course, that is false. There were four criterion the 9/11 attackers failed to meet a just standard of war.

Secondly, “bound” by International Law has grey areas. Chiefly, it is the victors who apply justice, as the institution of war is messy at best, and that is not even considering the sinfulness of man attempting to put guardrails on the conduct of war.

Third, the biblical view trumps whatever philosophy or devices adopted by man. The Japanese had every opportunity to conclude a peace, but their pride took them to mass destruction. As a heathen country, they earned their wages; “for the wages of sin is death.” Romans 6:23.

It matters what god a nation follows and exults.

[Captain Walker]

It matters what god a nation follows and exults.

No, what matters is being on the side of the victorious when the war crimes tribunals are held; because as we all know, there are no war criminals on the winning side.

Even Curtis LeMay stated as much after his air crews burned Tokyo to the ground.

[Salvavida]

So God has zero play in determining who the winner is? He is just casual observer? Or he doesn't exist at all leaving man up to his own devices?

"From one man he created all the nations throughout the whole earth. He decided beforehand when they should rise and fall, and he determined their boundaries."

Acts 17:26

[Captain Walker]

So God has zero play in determining who the winner is? He is just casual observer? Or he doesn't exist at all leaving man up to his own devices?

I have no doubt that He would intervene on a nation's behalf. I'm only stating that we're still subject to His law at all times. (It's not up to us to carry out the murder of innocents simply because we decide we're in the right.)

The Germans also believed that they had Divine Providence on their side; does a moral right or wrong come down to nothing more than simply being on the winning or losing side?

[Salvavida]

But it wasn’t murder. Therein lies the issue. Collateral damage on military targets is war, and that is always been the scope of war. Limiting death to military personnel has always been unavoidable. Don’t start a war if you have a distaste of harm coming to your citizens. War has never been clinical.

Any nation invoking Divine Providence had better align itself with the Divine, less they be rebuked. Both Germany and Japan were rebuked. If you dig into the Nazis you will discover its leaders were deep into the occult. Japan’s mistaken beliefs are manifest.

Which Law’s of God are you invoking? The Deca Law? God gave the sword to government for a reason: to punish the wicked. Both Germany and Japan were wicked. Rulers are not a terror for good, but for evil, and they carry a sword to carry out God’s wrath (Romans 13:3-4).

[Captain Walker]

But it wasn’t murder. Therein lies the issue. Collateral damage on military targets is war, and that is always been the scope of war.

If I launch a bomber raid on a munitions plant in an enemy country, the bombs that miss that munitions plant and kill innocents in the process are said to result in collateral damage. (This is the proper meaning of the word "collateral"; it is not intended.)

If I launch a bomber raid with the intent of simply destroying the city, then anyone and everyone in that city is an intended target; the deaths of the innocents are not collateral; the raid was designed to kill them.

(And it's not enough to say that just because we used sufficient firepower to kill the innocents, it doesn't mean that we actually wanted to kill them.)

Any nation invoking Divine Providence had better align itself with the Divine, less they be rebuked. Both Germany and Japan were rebuked. If you dig into the Nazis you will discover its leaders were deep into the occult. Japan’s mistaken beliefs are manifest.

And Communist Russia (who made both countries look like amateurs in their body counts)?

Your theology is terribly subjective, I'm afraid.

[Salvavida]

1. We dropped leaflets on both Hiroshima and Nagasaki well in advanced, notifying both cities would be destroyed. That isn’t murder.

2. Both Hiroshima and Nagasaki were significant military targets, both in terms of heavy industry and military assembly areas and headquarters.

It isn’t “my” theology. I don’t have a theology apart from the Bible. I didn’t make the rules.

[Captain Walker]

1. We dropped leaflets on both Hiroshima and Nagasaki well in advanced, notifying both cities would be destroyed. That isn’t murder.

You could tell yourself whatever you want; we would have executed any Japanese leader who had the bomb dropped on an American city, leaflets or not. Dropping leaflets in advance doesn't give anyone carte blanche to target a population center.

And these were just two cities; the campaign against cities up and down the Japanese islands took place over some six months' time. But everyone gets hung up on these two, because they think that these were somehow unique in that they were population centers being targeted for the first time. (They weren't.)

The plan from the beginning was always to get heavy bombers within reach of Japan and then let them go to town (without any concern about who might be killed); the annual August discussion about the Bomb is nothing more than a sideshow for those who don't know the background.

Do an internet search on the M69 incendiary bomb, and how it was chosen to be used as the primary weapon for the B29 raids; you'll learn about the Japanese and German village we built in Utah for the purpose of testing which was the best incendiary to use to burn a Japanese house down. (The M69 won the contest.)

The testing was done in 1942, some three years before Enola Gay took off that August morning.

(Once you know the background, you're not going to care a bit about any semantics about leaflets or casualty estimates; at the end of the day, the men giving the orders and the men in the planes really didn't give a schitt.)

[sport]

I think Col. Tibbets said it best. “I saw the POWs”. Tell it to the Chinese that were used as bayonet practice by the Japs. Tell it to the people including American POWs that were in the Unit 731 camp. Tell it to the Aussie and American nurses who were slaughtered. Tell it to the men that were in the Bataan Death March. Tell it to the Philippine civilians and Soldiers that were slaughtered by the Japs. The Japanese got off easy. The Chinese, the Filipinos, the Aussie and American POWs not so much.

[Salvavida]

We didn’t target a population center. We targeted the military targets, giving advanced notice so that the Japanese people would leave. That is a FACT.

You hypothetical is irrelevant. You are arguing from a position that didn’t happen. The US showed an amazing amount of grace by not dropping one on Tokyo to take out then entire C2.

We are never going to see eye to eye on this.

[Captain Walker]

I’m just not sold on the argument that “they were barbaric so we had to burn them to death”.

[sport]

Perhaps you would have thought differently if you was wriggling on one of their bayonets like a worm on a fishhook. I read the book The Rape of Nanking and saw the pictures that were in it of the things they did to the Chinese.

[Captain Walker]

The US showed an amazing amount of grace by not dropping one on Tokyo to take out then entire C2.

As I said in a previous post, this is an annual discussion held by people who don't know the background of the bombings...

Look up "Operation Meetinghouse" to see what LeMay's pilots and aircrews had already done to Tokyo, and you'll understand why it couldn't have been a target for an atomic bomb.

Here's a hint...

We didn’t target a population center. We targeted the military targets, giving advanced notice so that the Japanese people would leave. That is a FACT.

This is a map of Tokyo that was used by the Army Air Force during WWII.

No, it's not marking military targets, which would be necessary for your argument to be correct. And no, it's not marking hospitals, which would be required if the intended raid was to be in line with the Geneva Convention. It's marking areas by their inflammability, which goes to my argument that the raids against Japan were designed to simply burn cities to the ground, and that the raids against Hiroshima and Nagasaki were simply the next logical step in such a campaign.

If military targets were really the intended aiming points, what could be the point of determining the best means of burning houses to the ground? (Why build a village to perfect a means of burning homes to the ground, if you didn't actually intend to burn homes to the ground?)

It was all part of the plan (and there's nothing "hypothetical" about it; the words of the men at the time give it away).

"A small number of long-range bombers carrying incendiary bombs could quickly reduce Japan's paper-and-matchwood cities to heaps of smoking ashes." (Claire Chennault)codoh.com

“If war with the Japanese does come, we’ll fight mercilessly,” General George C. Marshall told news reporters in an off-the-record briefing on November 15, 1941, three weeks before Pearl Harbor. “Flying Fortresses will be dispatched immediately to set the paper cities of Japan on fire. There won’t be any hesitation about bombing civilians—it will be all-out.” www.smithsonianmag.com

Japan's vulnerability with regard to its inflammable cities and the will of the Americans to use that vulnerability against the Japanese with little or no regard for innocent life was well-known, even to the Japanese.

"This is even in the event that war should break out and Tokyo should be in flames by the action of the United States Air Forces. If huge fires break out in Tokyo and Tokyo is completely destroyed by fire three or four times, and if I must witness it while waiting for a strategically opportune time, I cannot remain still." - Admiral Yamamoto, 11/12/1940. "At Dawn We Slept", Gordon Prange. catdir.loc.gov

(Not to worry. I have great confidence that after the last American serviceman who served in that war has gone to his grave, we'll be able to discuss the subject like adults.)

[schurmann]

“I’m just not sold on the argument that “they were barbaric so we had to burn them to death”.” [Captain Walker, post 157]

“...(Why build a village to perfect a means of burning homes to the ground, if you didn’t actually intend to burn homes to the ground?)...” [Captain Walker, post 159]

The Imperial Japanese attacked the Allies. They made themselves into an enemy. Compared to that, the particulars of their motivation for doing so do not matter. And the details of how & where are secondary - by a very long stretch.

It might seem to amateurs that the construction of Japanese and Germans structures on weapons test ranges was something profound and sinister, but the real answer is no more than a detail: the armed forces were required to determine effects of weapons before deploying them in action. It had to be done in compliance with public law back then, and it’s still a requirement. Building structures that resembled potential targets, then hitting them with various munitions and measuring the results, was one way to do that.

In a similar vein, the existence of plans to strike targets in the territory of a potential adversary riles folks who have minimal experience concerning the military establishment. It all might seem alarming, but in reality, pre-planning is essential if anything is to be accomplished, when sudden realignments occur. All major commands keep staffs on hand. They spend lots of time and effort planning for contingencies, likely and unlikely. Commanders would be unwise not to require it.