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 ...
This is an interesting point.
To a B29 pilot who was a member of a group that had been superheating Japanese cities for months with incendiaries, dropping an atomic bomb may have been the next logical step. (The destruction was comparable but the fuel bill for the mission was drastically reduced.)
Tibbets would probably be shocked if he had known that there would be any controversy about the topic.
Operation Starvation, ongoing since March ‘45, was just hitting stride. By this time there probably would have been no American invasion, bomb or not. Operation Starvation was moving on from from fire bombing burned out cities to total destruction of the Japanese interior transportation system. Food distribution was the main target now. It’s generally accepted that 20-30 million Japanese would have starved by year end ‘46. Yes, the Russians were working on the Japanese forces on Sakhalin Island to secure their assault base for the invasion and occupation of Hokkaido.
The earlier B-29 firebombings of Tokyo killed more than either of the A bombs.
“but it doesn’t have two major rivers..”
Huh? Detroit?
If you refer to Detroit, you need to look at a map.
Two rivers don’t come together in Detroit.
The Detroit River runs from Lake St Clair to Lake Erie.
Between Canada and Detroit.
People forget or don’t know that even after Nagasaki hardliners in the Japanese military attempted a coup. They planned to kidnap the Emperor in order to prevent him from cooperating in the surrender. It very nearly succeeded.
That would have likely meant more atomic bombings. (We could roughly produce 3 a month.) Probably invasion of the home islands and tactical atomic bombings to support the invasion. That would have even been dangerous to our ground troops.
The original plan was to nuke Germany and Japan on the same day.
Nobody who saw the burned out husks of every major city in Germany could doubt for one second that if we had had the bomb when the war was still going on with Germany, we would have used it.
BTW, the first people we unleashed the horrendous new weapon dow chemical came up with - napalm? The Germans. We used it in Operation Cobra and devastated the crack Panzer Lehr division and several others in our decisive breakout from Normandy.
You know what’s really strange? My birthday is Aug. 6 and my brother after me is Dec. 7.
I might write about it one day and present it to VFWs. It’s just very hard to process now. Maybe one day. And another ironic fact, two of my uncles were Zero pilots.
I would have adopted that outlook as well. Something like that has the potential to drive one crazy. Some people have told me it did drive him crazy, but who knows.
I don’t know. It was certainly a highlight for me. It still brings tears to my eyes. It’s like being a bridge with a difficult crossing.
200,000 German citizens were killed in the bombing of Dresden:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bombing_of_Dresden_in_World_War_II
Both atomic bombs killed 64,000:
https://www.atomicarchive.com/resources/documents/med/med_chp10.html
Obama wanted to apologize for Hiroshima but Japanese officials told him not to do so.
MSM still gave stories like this at the time:
https://www.yahoo.com/news/hiroshima-atomic-bomb-victims-want-apology-obama-115648493.html
Not to mention the fact that is was the kraut scientists that helped developed the A Bomb and were still under suspicion as to their loyalties.
Maybe they slowed down so that the war in europe was over before the bombs were ready.
Remember, we had no back up for them, if the japs hadn't called it a day, oh boy.
Great story.
Thank you. It helps me to talk about it, it’s difficult. Although trauma is devastating for war survivors, the effects continue through generations. Thankfully our Lord sees all and will carry us through if we ask Him.
A negotiated peace would have left the old Japanese political and social structure in place that could possibly start another war later. The bomb was meant to win the peace as well as the war. I hate to think what the Russians would have done if they took over Japan, which might have happened while we were trying to negotiate this peace. Dropping the bomb was the right thing to do. It saved a lot of American and Japanese lives. The left needs to stop whining about it.
Could be what looks like two rivers is Belle Isle.
One of my German friend’s mother survived Dresden. She and I both had mothers who lived through catastrophic bombings. That is our connection.
The Russians would have kept the bulk of the rabid militarist army and navy principals intact under their control.
By the time the bomb was ready, Germany had already surrender.
There was a real possibility that the soldiers who fought in Europe might have mutinied if they were shipped to the Pacific.
My uncle fought on Okinawa. He and many others cried when they heard the japs surrendered. They knew they wouldn’t have survived an invasion of the mainland.
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