Posted on 07/29/2014 3:47:56 PM PDT by iowamark
Hiroshima is flat so there was a high correspondence between survivorship and distance from ground-zero.
Nagasaki was a back-up target and unlike HIroshima it’s very hilly —you could have someone just on the other side of the hill from epicenter who survived, while someone considerably further away died.
Kokura was supposed 2b destroyed but was simply cloudy that day.
RIP, sir, in the Arms of the Lord.
If you are referring to Col. Tibbets, he was the 509th Composite Group’s Commanding Officer. He had been involved in the development of the B-29. The 509th was designed specifically for delivery of the atomic bomb.
The Doolittle raiders outlived them, but not by much.
RIP, Sir. You did good.
May he rest in peace.
We damn sure couldn't with the Rules of Engagement we're forced to operate under today. Not to mention a limp-wristed President and a Congress of eunuchs.
Col Tibbets son died in the past year or so in Butler Co. Alabama. I saw the obit in the paper and called the paper a day or so later. they had no idear of his Dad. Latest bunch of news paper people have no knowledge of history.
When you only have two bombs that cost billions to make, the crew better be the best.
And don’t forget that the quick end to war also saved the lives of many hundreds of thousands of people living and working in Japanese slave labor camps or living under Japanese occupation. I understand several studies suggest that deaths of people in the camps or under occupation was somewhere between 10,000-20,000 per month.
Thank you for my freedom Captain Van Kirk, may God bless you and your loved ones.
Sad to see the WWII generation go. RIP to Mr. Van Kirk, he did his job well. BTW, a couple of years ago, he passed on as well, but I knew a WWII vet who was on Tinian. He watched them load “Little Boy” on the Enola Gay although at the time he did not know what was going on. After the Enola Gay came back from bombing Hiroshima, he served Colonial Tibbits and the crew in the officer’s club and he remembers Tibbits saying over and over, “what have we done?” He also remembered “Bock’s Car” too. He also told the story where he fought two Japanese army men on the island where he shot one and bayonetted the other in the stomach.
RIP.
I think the estimate for Allied deaths in a full-scale invasion of Japan would’ve been at minimum a million or more.
Yeah, I forgot to carry a zero, it was 1.5 million.
Thankfully a horrific spectacle never to be. I don’t think either side would’ve ever fully recovered from that.
Some historians believe that by 1945, we would have started to run out of men who would make good soldiers, maybe we were close to being bled dry. The UK was much worse. If that was the case, we had to bring the atomic bomb into play.
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