BTW, I'm not sure in the post 1 pic that it's really Detroit, I can't see in Detroit where 2 rivers come together, and all those bridges. The pic here has Tiger Stadium so it looks right.
Posted on 08/07/2022 6:13:37 AM PDT by 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.
(Excerpt) Read more at msn.com ...
That story should be written up and published - very impactful.
If it had even one more top secret in it the plane could not have taken off < /s>. Did the editor not notice the worx "pounds" was missing?
If the atomic bomb had not worked, Col. Tibbets would probably been a small part of thousand plane air raids firebombing cities like Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Although the ability to use one bomb to destroy a city had profound geopolitical effects, it mattered very little to the residents whether they were killed by a burst of radiation and an overpressure wave or being doused in napalm and being burned alive or suffocating from lack of oxygen as your city burned around you.
Had the bomb not been used (in fact, it took TWO to convince them to give up), the warmongering Japanese military would have forced every man, woman and child to the homeland invasion front to die en masse needlessly.
Wow
That is shamefully stunning.
Great perspective
Exactly. They were doomed regardless
P4L
Interesting fact for all scared of radiation.
From official French Gov. web site:
The excess mortality from cancers is obtained by comparing survivors from Hiroshima and Nagasaki with a control population. There is a significant excess at all ages, on average 5%: 7578 cancer deaths compared to 7244 for the control population, i.e. an excess of 334. The observation period is from 1950 to 1986.
What it means, that practically all dead from atomic bombs died from the explosion and heat generated by the bombs.
Only about 334 (statistically) survivors died later on from radiation exposure!
The Trinity Test was on 5:29 a.m. on July 16, 1945. VE Day was May 8th, 1945. Dropping it on Germany would not only have been a war crime, but also resulted in a number of friendly casualties, since any German city of any size was already occupied by the Allies.
During the Battle of the Bulge, an anxious FDR asked the Army if they could speed up the delivery of the A-Bomb, just in case the German offensive was successful. If the Allies had had the A-Bomb in June 1944, Berlin, and Germans in general, today would be even more sanctimonious and insufferable than they already are.
The U.S. in August 1945, had plans to drop one A-Bomb every 10 days on Japan, a schedule they had every intention of sticking to. Had Unternehmung Wacht am Rhein been more successful, today German might only be spoken in Hell.
My father was in the Philippines preparing for the invasion of Japan when the bombs were dropped. They probably saved his life and the lives of countless others.
It’s a powerful meme but, for the record, the US city pictured in 1945 is probably Pittsburgh. Detroit was similarly prosperous, but it doesn’t have two major rivers....
why would he feel bad?
would it have been somehow more humane to have dropped 1,000’s of fire bombs?
The war against Germany was essentially over by late April 1945.
The first atomic bomb was not even tested until 16 July 1945 - ten weeks later.
“I like that the church is still standing. Amazing”
Maybe not, if I remember correctly most Japanese structures at the time were wood. So the wood was smashed but most of the stone endured.
Tibbit’s nephew was a patient in our coumadin clinic. I asked him about his uncle. He said, “he did not lose a minute of sleep over the bombing.”
More radiation covered Japan from the Red Chinese and Russian nuclear experimental testing than from the bombs from Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Before the release of reconnaissance data from the USAF testing the clouds the Japanese in the early 1990’s were clamoring for restitution for the cancer that was affecting the citizens. Since I wasn’t sworn to secrecy and I was at Yokota AFB with my Father as a child, I remembered the squadrons and the results of the RB-57 overflights into the radiation clouds. I called the Commander of the American Legion and gave him the information and with that he was able to shut up the State Department from bending to the Japanese demands. In 2001 the data and overflights into the PRC and Soviet Union were declassified and the information is readily available. In the late 1950’s and early 1960’s radiation from these tests was so high we were not allowed to go outside for weeks.
That's true, but the overall priority of the war was "Germany first". If the bombs had been ready in time, I don't think there's any question that Roosevelt would have used them against Germany.
It is certainly a widespread belief, then and now. There have always been those who disagreed, including Ike, George Marshall, Wm. Leahy, Curtis LeMay and IIRC Nimitz and MacArthur.
Go up and talk to the folks around St George Utah, AZ Strip, and the Indian reservations. At St George, they used to hang radiation detectors on the high school kids, and others, and come back to collect them. The exposure was extremely high. It reflected in the cancer rates over the years after.
And funny thing Jeep..they managed to exclude all of Clark Co NV and Mohave CO from the downwind scandal.
They used to let school out to watch the mushroom clouds around Kingman AZ.
The US government purposely killed thousands and thousands of citizens with its ignorance.
Another great prime example is the Castle Bravo test that got way out of hand.
Germany was also clearly at the end of its rope. There was no tactical or strategic need to use the weapon on a nearly depleted enemy.
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