Posted on 07/26/2004 4:46:36 AM PDT by Clive
Given the odd modern notion that there's something immoral about nuclear weapons, I suppose they've gone and changed it by now.
When I visited the U.S. Air Force Museum in Dayton, Ohio, I walked up to a B-29 Superfortress called Bockscar. It was the aircraft that carried the second atomic bomb over Japan in 1945 and ended the Second World War. There was also a replica of the bomb, called Fat Man, and on it was chalked: Made in the U.S.A. Tested in Japan.
In my defence, I'm not the only one who laughed. And, curiously enough, there was a long line of smiling Japanese tourists waiting to have their photographs taken next to it.
The guy who flew that aircraft just died.
His name was Charles Sweeney.
It's important to mark the passing of heroes, particularly when those heroes have been consigned to the trash heap of history by the forces of political correctness.
Sweeney was 84. He was a member of what news anchor Tom Brokaw called "the greatest generation."
On Aug. 9, 1945, then-Maj. Charles W. Sweeney, U.S. Army Air Corps, piloted a B-29 Superfortress over the home islands of the Empire of Japan and dropped a bomb.
Just one.
The city over which he flew was called Nagasaki.
It was the last time a nuclear weapon was detonated in war-time.
After he was done, tens of thousands of people, mostly civilians, had died.
It was a monstrous thing to have to do.
It is fashionable to judge the actions of the past through the lens of the present. It's also a stupid thing to do. But the decision to drop the atomic bomb is currently regarded as something resembling a war crime.
It's important to realize a few things. The first is that this bomb was dropped on a rogue nation whose behaviour makes al-Qaida look like a gathering of Sunday school teachers. The Japanese military raped and murdered its way across China, attacked the U.S. at Pearl Harbor without warning, took the Philippines, Malaya, Singapore and Hong Kong, and wound up poised to take Australia. They slaughtered captured prisoners and used civilians and PoWs as guinea pigs for biological warfare experiments.
And as the tide of war in the Pacific turned against them, the American and Commonwealth troops who fought against them made a chilling discovery.
Japanese soldiers didn't surrender. They fought until they died. Or they fell on their swords, shot themselves or held a hand grenade next to their heads when defeat in battle was inevitable.
When Americans invaded an island home to a substantial Japanese civilian population, the civilians killed themselves, including young women, who ran off the edges of cliffs with their babies in their arms.
That degree of fanaticism is why the U.S. military budgeted close to half a million Allied casualties for their proposed invasion of the Japanese home islands. But there was another way, a better way and it was carried out by men like Sweeney.
The first A-bomb dropped on Hiroshima on Aug. 6, 1945. The Japanese did not surrender. Three days later, Sweeney took to the air. And the war was over.
The last time he was in public view was when the Smithsonian Institution, where the plane that carried the first A-bomb, the Enola Gay is housed, proposed text for the exhibition that portrayed the Japanese as innocent victims and the Americans as somehow evil.
Sweeney testified before a U.S. Senate committee that he hated nuclear weapons, that he felt no pride in their use. "President Truman was obliged to use all the weapons at his disposal to end the war. I agreed with Harry Truman then, and I still do today."
Heroes are the ones who do the hard things and save the rest of us. Charles Sweeney was a hero.
Clear and true!
At the time my father was on Okinawa as a member of a USN occupation team and saw "Bock's Car" land at the main USAAF base there He said the B-29 landed, rolled to the end of the runway, turned on to the taxiway and all 4 engines died- out of gas It was that close
A canook who gets it - go figure!
If the goal in warfare is to inflict as much damage on your enemy while taking as little as possible yourself, the drops of the nuclear bombs on Japan were probably the greatest moments of warfare in all of human history.
Fallujah should have been #3.
Won't work on a decentralized force.
Good point, BUT Hiroshima and Nagasaki did not kill all the Japanese enemy either.
No but they had a centralized government. I think we need to start beheading terrorists after pouring pig blood on them on video. FEAR is all this sub human swine know.
From what I have read, this wartime estimate would have been too low. The Japanese had materiel stashed in hardened shelters, with plans to attack after the troops came ashore. In addition, civilians were being pressed into service, but were not provided with uniforms. Under the rules of war, non-uniformed combatants could be, and usually were, executed. With no way of distinguishing foe from civilian, U.S. soldiers would have slaughtered many millions of Japanese civilians during an invasion.
I was not yet a gleam in his eye.
I've often wondered why we don't play a bit of their own game back on them, so to speak.
In my world?
A B-2 launches with decidedly non-lethal cargo. The next day, visitors at Mecca discover thousands of weighted flyers lying around their big black rock.
The message is simple. The next attack on American (or Allied) forces or interests, and the cargo will be nuclear. You can't see us, you can't track us, you can't stop us.
Every attack on us, an islamic shrine dies. And the bombs will be dirty, too. No pilgramages for oh, at least 50 years.
Play nice or die.
Of course, there are numerous reasons why this would probably be a bad idea. But hey, I can dream.
We are allowed to dream. I have had many as you describe.
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