I say we tell them to "lighten up!"
My wife, being Japanese, reminds me whenever this anniversary comes up. Despite the seriousness of such a thing, it’s more like a running joke between us. Especially with me being former military. Tonight, I asked her: So, if Japan had the same bomb back then, do you think they would’ve dropped it on LA or San Francisco? She said, oh yeah. No doubt. I said, well there you have it.
Not only did the atomic bombs end the war in the Pacific, but it has kept the major powers at peace for more than 70’years.
Of course there have been proxy war since 1945, but nothing on the scale of the Second World War.
So much has changed since then.
Back then, our leaders and the media were solidly and unabashedly on our side against the Axis powers. Now, it seems like they are all siding with the enemy.
Considering that Truman didn’t even know about the Bomb when he took office, he certainly made the right choice to go ahead, as any sane person would have, any person who was sick of the war and the carnage, and wanted it to be over.
Listen to or read any contemporary news reporting of the war-it’s almost shocking to hear pro-American bias from the news media!
The one thing that surprises me is that the LGBTQ Nazis haven’t demanded that the word “Gay” be stricken from the nose of that aircraft, and from the historical record of the event.
This is a short video of an excellent documentary I saw about the lead up to the dropping, the dropping, and the aftermath:
Hiroshima: Dropping the Bomb
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NF4LQaWJRDg
When I first watched the full documentary on Net Flix, I felt the enormity of the event when it was dropped...as much as I could watching it on TV. I can’t even imagine the adrenaline and anxiety of the actual mission.
I have a good related story for this:
My grandfather was an engineer and a welder during WWII. He first worked at the Bremerton shipyards near Seattle. He was offered a job to work at the Hanford Site in eastern Washington.
His job there? His group welded together the outer shell/casing of the Fat Man bombs. The designs and plans and original ideas came from Los Alamos, but the actual steel shell of the things were built in Hanford.
Another snippet from the same documentary:
US troops preparing to drop the atomic bomb on Hiroshima - BBC
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A0eHCytkcHg
I would not be here today were it not for Little Boy and Fat Man. My father was on the Philippine island of Mindanao, helping to keep the Nips bottled up in the interior and preparing for the invasion of Japan, when the atomic bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The quick end to WWII allowed him to return home in December 1945, marry my mother in January 1946, and father four children, all raised to honorable adulthood. Never any question Truman made the right call for America, our Allies, and our enemies. It saved millions of lives on all sides that otherwise would have been lost having to take the Land of the Rising Sun by force from fanatical Japs.
Yes, I used Nips and Japs...deal with it. Read “The Rape of Nanking” and “Prisoners of the Japanese.”
Enola Gay was compley restored and is on display at the Smithsonian. She looks ready to go.
It was clearly the right thing to do, but our xxxxxx President has apologized for it.
http://www.legacy.com/ns/paul-tibbets-obituary/97120088
Buried in the expanded obit you find the below comment. Kind of the measure of Paul Tibbets.
Tibbets had requested no funeral and no headstone, fearing it would provide his detractors with a place to protest, Newhouse said.
He wasn’t a General at the time of the mission, was he? What WAS his rank? Captain, maybe?
It was either drop the Bomb or prepare for an actual invasion of Japan that could have cost over one million American lives and at least ten times that among the Japanese. And that invasion would have resulted in the Japanese forever resenting us.
June 6, 1944 - D-Day.
August 6, 1945 - Bomb Day - Hiroshima.
If it’s August, it must be time to whip this dead horse again.
Time for the Liberals to come out of the woodwork, weep, wail, get glassy eyed, foam at the mouth and fall down and get skinned up because we used TWO BOMBS to do what two hundred planes loaded with 20,000lb of high explosives or incendiary bombs could have done without ending the war.
Wonder how many of these jerks would have volunteered to be in the first wave of landing craft going into a still at war Japan.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Alberta
Project Albert was a fast moving, complicated project. Lots of interesting information here.
3 “bomb assembly kits” were shipped to Tinian per the above source. Another source indicated the 3rd unit was held in reserve in CA and/or test assembled in CA. These (kits) were complete independent bases, buildings for administration, assembly and operations, all the equipment, scientific gear, etc EVERYTHING.
Two were assembled. On sept 7 disassembly began and they were dropped in the ocean for security reasons.
