Posted on 08/06/2020 10:18:12 AM PDT by DFG
On August 6, 1945, 30-year-old U.S. Air Force pilot Col. Paul W. Tibbets Jr. took to the sky in the Enola Gay, his Boeing B-29 Superfortress heavy bomber. His destination, the Japanese city of Hiroshima, was not an especially notable target. His payload, however, a single bomb nicknamed “Little Boy,” would change the course of history.
True watershed moments in history are rare — the agricultural revolution is one such example, as was the Battle of Salamis, the advent of Jesus Christ, and the fall of Western Rome. Yet in the last 1,500 years, no two distinct epochs of time are as clear as the time before the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and all the time since.
(Excerpt) Read more at thefederalist.com ...
A lot of us baby boomers wouldn’t be here today if we had been forced to invade Japan. The nuke saved countless American and Japanese lives.
If he was wrong to do it (he wasn’t), how would we further punish ourselves as a society/nation? Is there a limit to white guilt? Maybe not.
Dropping the bombs was the right thing to do. It ended the war and saved millions of lives.
Bump
So when do the demands for ‘reparations’ begin?
Interesting visual.
I remember this from years ago...They calculated how many American lives would be lost in an invasion and made the right decision.
To give some perspective, the number killed by the Bomb was roughly 0.25% of the total number of lives lost due to World War II. And it ended that war.
There’s the fear & horror of atomic weapons as a psychic issue, but in terms of actual decimation of civilian populations, the blanket use of non-nuclear incendiary bombs, in Coventry, Dresden & Tokyo, was far more significant. To our perspective, Truman shouldn’t have used nuclear or atomic weapons, but then, with the extreme militarization of Japan, with every little school child and even babies in prams in effect in the military, it was a modern equivalent of the Spartan militarization of a society. If such a society fails in its primary endeavor, taking over a large part of the world by military action, it sentences itself to death—do or die, still in action as the Japanese people refuse to have children. It was only a technical limitation that the Japanese failed in their effort to bomb the West coast of the United States with bubonic plague bacteria in clay bombs, but one which the Chinese Communist Party and People’s Revolutionary Army learned all too well from Japanese Unit 731’s biological warfare.
It basically allowed us to avoid dividing Japan with the Soviets like it happened in Germany. Was very economical in Russian lives too.
This is not withstanding the dastardly unit731, which, had we known about it, would have given immediate attention to developing and using nukes on Japan.
Hiroshima was a significant military target, not something that was chosen by happenstance.
As noted in several other historical post and coments, the Jap war machine instilled a level of fear and fanaticism amongst the civilian population, who would have fought and died to preserve their emperor. Additionally, after the US planes were detected by the Jap radar, the planes were dismissed as a recon flight and not eorth wasting aircraft fuel over.
There’s a recent book which picks up the Japanese development of nuclear weapons, and there’s strong speculation that if they’d waited another six months...they would have had enough nuke material for a couple of weapons and drastically changed the war.
One aspect that the book pointed out....the Navy and the Army weren’t sharing technology, and both had their own developmental programs going on.
And Chinese and Russians too. We had to take the masculine role of the bad guy punisher.
McArthur was right too to threaten nuke on China over Korea. The North would not be in this mess today
Thank God for The Bomb!
Not mention is that post war information shows that the US Army underestimated the strength of the defenses on Kyushu. The landing there would have been a victory in the sense that the US could force itself ashore, but the cost would have been more horrific than estimated
This is only new, news, debatable or even interesting to anyone who is ignorant of it and that would be poorly educated children of today. Like Josh, the author.
My late Twin sister and I had our fifth Birthday when the bomb fell on Hiroshima.
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