Van Kirk is back row, second from left, next to Tibbets.
Posted on 05/25/2010 3:52:48 PM PDT by Repeal The 17th
Theodore Van Kirk is sitting at his desk in a detached bungalow in the gated community outside Atlanta, Georgia, where he lives. The room is cluttered with boxes, trinkets, shelves full of books on wartime history and photographs of planes on the walls...
(Excerpt) Read more at express.co.uk ...
God bless those men, and many thanks for their service.
yeah....so would zer0bambam....on Israel, South Korea...and quite possibly the state house of Arizona.
The problem we have is that we HAVEN’T used the bomb
again. Had we used it in Korea our resolve would not
be in question.
I had a fascinating chat last week with an old sailor. He entered the Navy in ‘43 and served abord a landing ship that participated in the last of the Pacific island-hopping.
When they dropped the bomb, he was engaged in training exercises for the invasion of Japan.
The crew of the Enola Gay very well might have saved his life — and countless hundreds of thousands, maybe millions, of other lives — Japanese as well as Americans.
God bless Mr. Van Kirk. And thanks for the post.
Van Kirk is back row, second from left, next to Tibbets.
IMHO we should have used them on the Soviets at the end of WW2.
Hindsight is a bitch.
Great article, thanks for posting it.
BTW, I find myself wondering how many of the crew that flew Bockscar (i.e. the plane that carried out the Nagasaki bomb mission) are still with us?
Brave men, all.
You are spot on, the Bockscar’s crew got less attention than Enola Gay’s.
Yep. After Normandy, my dad and his boat were on the way to the Pacific to prepare for the invasion of Japan, when the war ended.
Even looking back at the casualties, dropping ‘the bomb’ was a no brainer. Us dropping those bombs SAVED LIVES. It probably saved more Japanese lives than American.
We were preparing to invade main land Japan with a force numbering in the millions, and there would have been hundreds of thousands, if not millions of dead on both sides.
Those nuclear bombs brought a swift end to the war. Not to mention how they were truly remarkable feats of technology for the time. It’s still scary to imagine what would have happened had Germany or the Japanese would have gotten the bomb before us. The Germans were still working on it as we defeated them. Luckily, many of their best scientists were Jewish, and fled to America to escape the Nazis. I believe Japan much less so.
I am often puzzled why newspapers in the U.K run more interesting stories about things going on in the U.S.
than our own newspapers do.
How ya’ doin’?
Doing good. Glad to see your project turned out ok.
“Pacific island-hopping.”
My Uncle was there, and feels the same way.
What a great story!
Van Kirk had it exactly right when he said: “I’ve never found a way to fight a war without killing people. If you ever find that out let me know.”
He’s right. In Afghanistan right now our strategy is based on the opposite, implausible premise: Fight and WIN a war without killing people. That’s not possible. Civilians will die.
Van Kirk’s story makes me wish I could have been around people like General Curtis LeMay. Instead of LeMay we get Stanley McChrystal and Obama, who are more concerned with protecting Afghans than with winning the war.
theconservativebeacon.net
The bombs possibly saved all the POWs in the Far East. It is said that Japan knew that it was losing the war and that they planned to make their last stand in Japan. They were willing to pull their troops back from the countries they occupied, but before doing so they were planning to execute all their POWs first.
About the time of Watergate it seems the journalism schools in the US filled up with kids who wanted to change the world (which of course means nailing Republicans and doing Democrat propaganda). They are poorly educated, incurious people who in many cases never learned their craft. Most don't know how to tell a story so as to hold the reader's attention. Sometimes I read a story and actually can't figure out what happened, as if the writer never learned the five "W's."
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