Bears repeating. Either of the two likely alternatives -- firebombing them into submission, or an invasion of Japan -- would have cost millions of Japanese lives, not to mention widespread destruction of their homeland.
The Battle of Okinawa, where 60,000 to 70,000 Japanese military and 150,000 Japanese civilians lost their lives was a hint of what horrors might have been -- multiplied by ten to fifty the number of casualties -- if not for the capitulation of Japan following the A-Bomb attacks.
Mr. Tibbets probably did sleep well at night, and why not. We WERE at war.
I pray he's resting in the arms of Jesus now.
All you need to know is that on March 8-9, 1945, 334 B-29s killed over 100,000 Japanese, mostly civilians, in the first firebomb raid on Tokyo. Sixteen square miles of the city was leveled, and a million people were made homeless. And that was just the first of dozens of low-altitude firebomb raids that Curtis Lemay’s Twentieth Air Force did over the next five months. Hiroshima and Nagasaki were among a very few major cities that hadn’t already been partially or totally leveled by the B-29s dropping M69 napalm bombs.
The only difference between Tokyo in March and Hiroshima in August is that Tokyo took 334 planes, and Hiroshima took three. That’s about it.
}:-)4