BG Paul W Tibbets, USAF, Ret: "That's their tough luck for being there."

Today is Hiroshima Day, the anniversary of the first use of a bomb so powerful that it would come to threaten the existence of the human race. Only two such devices have ever been used, but now, a decade after the end of the cold war, the world faces new dangers of nuclear attack - from India, Pakistan, Iraq, al-Qaida, and even the US. Launching a special investigation into nuclear weapons, Paul Tibbets, the man who piloted the Enola Gay on its mission to Japan, tells Studs Terkel why he has no regrets - and why he wouldn't hesitate to use it again

Studs Terkel: We're seated here, two old gaffers. Me and Paul Tibbets, 89 years old, brigadier-general retired, in his home town of Columbus, Ohio, where has lived for many years.

ST: I know. See, I'm 90. So I got you beat by three years. Now we've had a nice lunch, you and I and your companion. I noticed as we sat in that restaurant, people passed by. They didn't know who you were. But once upon a time, you flew a plane called the Enola Gay over the city of Hiroshima, in Japan, on a Sunday morning - August 6 1945 - and a bomb fell. It was the atomic bomb, the first ever. And that particular moment changed the whole world around. You were the pilot of that plane.

PT: My mother. She was Enola Gay Haggard before she married my dad, and my dad never supported me with the flying - he hated airplanes and motorcycles. When I told them I was going to leave college and go fly planes in the army air corps, my dad said, "Well, I've sent you through school, bought you automobiles, given you money to run around with the girls, but from here on, you're on your own. If you want to go kill yourself, go ahead, I don't give a damn." Then Mom just quietly said, "Paul, if you want to go fly airplanes, you're going to be all right." And that was that.

PT: Well, that was Miami, Florida. My dad had been in the real estate business down there for years, and at that time he was retired. And I was going to school at Gaysville, Florida, but I had to leave after two years and go to Cincinnati because Florida had no medical school.

PT: I didn't think that, my father thought it. He said, "You're going to be a doctor," and I just nodded my head and that was it. And I started out that way; but about a year before, I was able to get into an airplane, fly it - I soloed - and I knew then that I had to go fly airplanes.

ST: Now by 1944 you were a pilot - a test pilot on the programme to develop the B-29 bomber. When did you get word that you had a special assignment?

PT: One day [in September 1944] I'm running a test on a B-29, I land, a man meets me. He says he just got a call from General Uzal Ent [commander of the second air force] at Colorado Springs, he wants me in his office the next morning at nine o'clock. He said, "Bring your clothing - your B4 bag - because you're not coming back." Well, I didn't know what it was and didn't pay any attention to it - it was just another assignment.

I got to Colorado Springs the next morning perfectly on time. A man named Lansdale met me, walked me to General Ent's office and closed the door behind me. With him was a man wearing a blue suit, a US Navy captain - that was William Parsons, who flew with me to Hiroshima - and Dr Norman Ramsey, Columbia University professor in nuclear physics. And Norman said: "OK, we've got what we call the Manhattan Project. What we're doing is trying to develop an atomic bomb. We've gotten to the point now where we can't go much further till we have airplanes to work with."

He gave me an explanation which probably lasted 45, 50 minutes, and they left. General Ent looked at me and said, "The other day, General Arnold [commander general of the army air corps] offered me three names." Both of the others were full colonels; I was lieutenant-colonel. He said that when General Arnold asked which of them could do this atomic weapons deal, he replied without hesitation, "Paul Tibbets is the man to do it." I said, "Well, thank you, sir." Then he laid out what was going on and it was up to me now to put together an organisation and train them to drop atomic weapons on both Europe and the Pacific - Tokyo.

ST: Interesting that they would have dropped it on Europe as well. We didn't know that.

PT: My edict was as clear as could be. Drop simultaneously in Europe and the Pacific because of the secrecy problem - you couldn't drop it in one part of the world without dropping it in the other. And so he said, "I don't know what to tell you, but I know you happen to have B-29s to start with. I've got a squadron in training in Nebraska - they have the best record so far of anybody we've got. I want you to go visit them, look at them, talk to them, do whatever you want. If they don't suit you, we'll get you some more." He said: "There's nobody could tell you what you have to do because nobody knows. If we can do anything to help you, ask me." I said thank you very much. He said, "Paul, be careful how you treat this responsibility, because if you're successful you'll probably be called a hero. And if you're unsuccessful, you might wind up in prison."

PT: No, I didn't know anything at that time. But I knew how to put an organisation together. He said, "Go take a look at the bases, and call me back and tell me which one you want." I wanted to get back to Grand Island Nebraska, that's where my wife and two kids were, where my laundry was done and all that stuff. But I thought, "Well, I'll go to Wendover [army airfield, in Utah] first and see what they've got." As I came in over the hills I saw it was a beautiful spot. It had been a final staging place for units that were going through combat crew training, and the guys ahead of me were the last P-47 fighter outfit. This lieutenant-colonel in charge said, "We've just been advised to stop here and I don't know what you want to do... but if it has anything to do with this base it's the most perfect base I've ever been on. You've got full machine shops, everybody's qualified, they know what they want to do. It's a good place."

PT: Well, I had mentally done it before that. I knew right away I was going to get Tom Ferebee [the Enola Gay's bombardier] and Theodore "Dutch" van Kirk [navigator] and Wyatt Duzenbury [flight engineer].

ST: And now you're training. And you're also talking to physicists like Robert Oppenheimer [senior scientist on the Manhattan project].

PT: I think I went to Los Alamos [the Manhattan project HQ] three times, and each time I got to see Dr Oppenheimer working in his own environment. Later, thinking about it, here's a young man, a brilliant person. And he's a chain smoker and he drinks cocktails. And he hates fat men. And General Leslie Groves [the general in charge of the Manhattan project], he's a fat man, and he hates people who smoke and drink. The two of them are the first, original odd couple.

PT: Yeah, but neither one of them showed it. Each one of them had a job to do.

PT: From Dr Ramsey. He said the only thing we can tell you about it is, it's going to explode with the force of 20,000 tons of TNT. I'd never seen 1lb of TNT blow up. I'd never heard of anybody who'd seen 100lbs of TNT blow up. All I felt was that this was gonna be one hell of a big bang.

ST: Twenty thousand tons - that's equivalent to how many planes full of bombs?

PT: Well, I think the two bombs that we used [at Hiroshima and Nagasaki] had more power than all the bombs the air force had used during the war on Europe.

PT: Even though it was still theory, whatever those guys told me, that's what happened. So I was ready to say I wanted to go to war, but I wanted to ask Oppenheimer how to get away from the bomb after we dropped it. I told him that when we had dropped bombs in Europe and North Africa, we'd flown straight ahead after dropping them - which is also the trajectory of the bomb. But what should we do this time? He said, "You can't fly straight ahead because you'd be right over the top when it blows up and nobody would ever know you were there." He said I had to turn tangent to the expanding shockwave. I said, "Well, I've had some trigonometry, some physics. What is tangency in this case?" He said it was 159 degrees in either direction. "Turn 159 degrees as fast as you can and you'll be able to put yourself the greatest distance from where the bomb exploded."

PT: I had dropped enough practice bombs to realise that the charges would blow around 1,500ft in the air, so I would have 40 to 42 seconds to turn 159 degrees. I went back to Wendover as quick as I could and took the airplane up. I got myself to 25,000ft, and I practised turning, steeper, steeper, steeper and I got it where I could pull it round in 40 seconds. The tail was shaking dramatically and I was afraid of it breaking off, but I didn't quit. That was my goal. And I practised and practised until, without even thinking about it, I could do it in between 40 and 42, all the time. So, when that day came...

PT: Yeah. We were in Tinian [the US island base in the Pacific] at the time we got the OK. They had sent this Norwegian to the weather station out on Guam [the US's westernmost territory] and I had a copy of his report. We said that, based on his forecast, the sixth day of August would be the best day that we could get over Honshu [the island on which Hiroshima stands]. So we did everything that had to be done to get the crews ready to go: airplane loaded, crews briefed, all of the things checked that you have to check before you can fly over enemy territory.

General Groves had a brigadier-general who was connected back to Washington DC by a special teletype machine. He stayed close to that thing all the time, notifying people back there, all by code, that we were preparing these airplanes to go any time after midnight on the sixth. And that's the way it worked out. We were ready to go at about four o'clock in the afternoon on the fifth and we got word from the president that we were free to go: "Use 'em as you wish." They give you a time you're supposed to drop your bomb on target and that was 9.15 in the morning , but that was Tinian time, one hour later than Japanese time. I told Dutch, "You figure it out what time we have to start after midnight to be over the target at 9am."

PT: Well, we got going down the runway at right about 2.15am and we took off, we met our rendezvous guys, we made our flight up to what we call the initial point, that would be a geographic position that you could not mistake. Well, of course we had the best one in the world with the rivers and bridges and that big shrine. There was no mistaking what it was.

PT: The airplane has a bomb sight connected to the autopilot and the bombardier puts figures in there for where he wants to be when he drops the weapon, and that's transmitted to the airplane. We always took into account what would happen if we had a failure and the bomb bay doors didn't open: we had a manual release put in each airplane so it was right down by the bombardier and he could pull on that. And the guys in the airplanes that followed us to drop the instruments needed to know when it was going to go. We were told not to use the radio, but, hell, I had to. I told them I would say, "One minute out," "Thirty seconds out," "Twenty seconds" and "Ten" and then I'd count, "Nine, eight, seven, six, five, four seconds", which would give them a time to drop their cargo. They knew what was going on because they knew where we were. And that's exactly the way it worked, it was absolutely perfect.

After we got the airplanes in formation I crawled into the tunnel and went back to tell the men, I said, "You know what we're doing today?" They said, "Well, yeah, we're going on a bombing mission." I said, "Yeah, we're going on a bombing mission, but it's a little bit special." My tailgunner, Bob Caron, was pretty alert. He said, "Colonel, we wouldn't be playing with atoms today, would we?" I said, "Bob, you've got it just exactly right." So I went back up in the front end and I told the navigator, bombardier, flight engineer, in turn. I said, "OK, this is an atom bomb we're dropping." They listened intently but I didn't see any change in their faces or anything else. Those guys were no idiots. We'd been fiddling round with the most peculiar-shaped things we'd ever seen.

So we're coming down. We get to that point where I say "one second" and by the time I'd got that second out of my mouth the airplane had lurched, because 10,000lbs had come out of the front. I'm in this turn now, tight as I can get it, that helps me hold my altitude and helps me hold my airspeed and everything else all the way round. When I level out, the nose is a little bit high and as I look up there the whole sky is lit up in the prettiest blues and pinks I've ever seen in my life. It was just great.

I tell people I tasted it. "Well," they say, "what do you mean?" When I was a child, if you had a cavity in your tooth the dentist put some mixture of some cotton or whatever it was and lead into your teeth and pounded them in with a hammer. I learned that if I had a spoon of ice-cream and touched one of those teeth I got this electrolysis and I got the taste of lead out of it. And I knew right away what it was.

OK, we're all going. We had been briefed to stay off the radios: "Don't say a damn word, what we do is we make this turn, we're going to get out of here as fast as we can." I want to get out over the sea of Japan because I know they can't find me over there. With that done we're home free. Then Tom Ferebee has to fill out his bombardier's report and Dutch, the navigator, has to fill out a log. Tom is working on his log and says, "Dutch, what time were we over the target?" And Dutch says, "Nine-fifteen plus 15 seconds." Ferebee says: "What lousy navigating. Fifteen seconds off!"

PT: Oh yeah. The shockwave was coming up at us after we turned. And the tailgunner said, "Here it comes." About the time he said that, we got this kick in the ass. I had accelerometers installed in all airplanes to record the magnitude of the bomb. It hit us with two and a half G. Next day, when we got figures from the scientists on what they had learned from all the things, they said, "When that bomb exploded, your airplane was 10 and half miles away from it."

PT: You see all kinds of mushroom clouds, but they were made with different types of bombs. The Hiroshima bomb did not make a mushroom. It was what I call a stringer. It just came up. It was black as hell, and it had light and colours and white in it and grey colour in it and the top was like a folded-up Christmas tree.

PT: Pandemonium! I think it's best stated by one of the historians, who said: "In one micro-second, the city of Hiroshima didn't exist."

PT: We're talking 1948 now. I'm back in the Pentagon and I get notice from the chief of staff, Carl Spaatz, the first chief of staff of the air force. When we got to General Spaatz's office, General Doolittle was there, and a colonel named Dave Shillen. Spaatz said, "Gentlemen, I just got word from the president he wants us to go over to his office immediately." On the way over, Doolittle and Spaatz were doing some talking; I wasn't saying very much. When we got out of the car we were escorted right quick to the Oval Office. There was a black man there who always took care of Truman's needs and he said, "General Spaatz, will you please be facing the desk?" And now, facing the desk, Spaatz is on the right, Doolittle and Shillen. Of course, militarily speaking, that's the correct order: because Spaatz is senior, Doolittle has to sit to his left.

Then I was taken by this man and put in the chair that was right beside the president's desk, beside his left hand. Anyway, we got a cup of coffee and we got most of it consumed when Truman walked in and everybody stood on their feet. He said, "Sit down, please," and he had a big smile on his face and he said, "General Spaatz, I want to congratulate you on being first chief of the air force," because it was no longer the air corps. Spaatz said, "Thank you, sir, it's a great honour and I appreciate it." And he said to Doolittle: "That was a magnificent thing you pulled flying off of that carrier," and Doolittle said, "All in a day's work, Mr President." And he looked at Dave Shillen and said, "Colonel Shillen, I want to congratulate you on having the foresight to recognise the potential in aerial refuelling. We're gonna need it bad some day." And he said thank you very much.

Then he looked at me for 10 seconds and he didn't say anything. And when he finally did, he said, "What do you think?" I said, "Mr President, I think I did what I was told." He slapped his hand on the table and said: "You're damn right you did, and I'm the guy who sent you. If anybody gives you a hard time about it, refer them to me."

PT: Second thoughts? No. Studs, look. Number one, I got into the air corps to defend the United States to the best of my ability. That's what I believe in and that's what I work for. Number two, I'd had so much experience with airplanes... I'd had jobs where there was no particular direction about how you do it and then of course I put this thing together with my own thoughts on how it should be because when I got the directive I was to be self-supporting at all times.

On the way to the target I was thinking: I can't think of any mistakes I've made. Maybe I did make a mistake: maybe I was too damned assured. At 29 years of age I was so shot in the ass with confidence I didn't think there was anything I couldn't do. Of course, that applied to airplanes and people. So, no, I had no problem with it. I knew we did the right thing because when I knew we'd be doing that I thought, yes, we're going to kill a lot of people, but by God we're going to save a lot of lives. We won't have to invade [Japan].

PT: Unknown to anybody else - I knew it, but nobody else knew - there was a third one. See, the first bomb went off and they didn't hear anything out of the Japanese for two or three days. The second bomb was dropped and again they were silent for another couple of days. Then I got a phone call from General Curtis LeMay [chief of staff of the strategic air forces in the Pacific]. He said, "You got another one of those damn things?" I said, "Yessir." He said, "Where is it?" I said, "Over in Utah." He said, "Get it out here. You and your crew are going to fly it." I said, "Yessir." I sent word back and the crew loaded it on an airplane and we headed back to bring it right on out to Trinian and when they got it to California debarkation point, the war was over.

ST: One big question. Since September 11, what are your thoughts? People talk about nukes, the hydrogen bomb.

PT: Let's put it this way. I don't know any more about these terrorists than you do, I know nothing. When they bombed the Trade Centre I couldn't believe what was going on. We've fought many enemies at different times. But we knew who they were and where they were. These people, we don't know who they are or where they are. That's the point that bothers me. Because they're gonna strike again, I'll put money on it. And it's going to be damned dramatic. But they're gonna do it in their own sweet time. We've got to get into a position where we can kill the bastards. None of this business of taking them to court, the hell with that. I wouldn't waste five seconds on them.

ST: What about the bomb? Einstein said the world has changed since the atom was split.

PT: Oppenheimer is dead. He did something for the world and people don't understand. And it is a free world.

ST: One last thing, when you hear people say, "Let's nuke 'em," "Let's nuke these people," what do you think?

PT: Oh, I wouldn't hesitate if I had the choice. I'd wipe 'em out. You're gonna kill innocent people at the same time, but we've never fought a damn war anywhere in the world where they didn't kill innocent people. If the newspapers would just cut out the shit: "You've killed so many civilians." That's their tough luck for being there.

ST: By the way, I forgot to say Enola Gay was originally called number 82. How did your mother feel about having her name on it?

PT: Well, I can only tell you what my dad said. My mother never changed her expression very much about anything, whether it was serious or light, but when she'd get tickled, her stomach would jiggle. My dad said to me that when the telephone in Miami rang, my mother was quiet first. Then, when it was announced on the radio, he said: "You should have seen the old gal's belly jiggle on that one."

He is talking about civilians, not the "recent spate of news stories concerning possible civilian deaths in Afghanistan," as you put it. He is dismissing civilian deaths as too bad, so sad, as "tough luck."

I concur with you on the "moral approach" to this issue. We should not be surprised when old birds of prey come home to roost.

One of the reasons we had to cut short the first gulf war was the saturation television coverage of the civilians who died in the bunker buster blast. Well, THEY DIED BECAUSE SADDAM HUSSEIN PUT THEM IN A MILITARY INSTALLATION!!!

In the case of the "Afghan Wedding Party" hoax, a group of Afghan people, which may or may not have included a bride, a groom, and a bridal party, chose, of its own free will, to encamp in a military installation that was targeting USAF fighter planes with anti-aircraft fire. TOUGH LUCK!!!

As far as the rules of war, the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, while a little cowardly, was a perfectly legitimate military act. For that matter, so was Al Qaeda's attack on the Pentagon. What was illegitimate was slashing the throats of civilian airline stewardesses, and murdering the entire civilian contingent on the airliner.

When our forefathers declared independence from England, they fought and died, as men, on the field of battle. John Wilkes Booth notwithstanding, hundreds of thousands of American warriors were slaughtered in an unsuccessful attempt to defend the federal constitution against Abraham Lincoln. When Hitler invaded Poland, the Poles faced the Panzers with horse-mounted cavalry, and mule-drawn artillery, and fought and died with as much courage, and as much valiantry, as any men in the annals of warfare.

Islam is more than welcome to wage war on the post-Christian West, but if, as the cowards they are, the men of Islam run and hide behind the skirts of women and children, well, that's their tough luck for being there.

The slop that the Japanese were ready to surrender is a pile of steaming Bravo Sierra.

So, I guess Eisenhower is full of BS, and knew nothing about the war?

You say I must know nothing about the Japanese people. Odd, that. My mother was one of those allegedly "being organised into cadres which were to be armned (sic) with bamboo spears." She was 18 when the war ended. Like all of her peers, she was mightily sick of war, and not inclined to sharpen any bamboo.

As for your "dogs" comment, I believe you can read, and I believe the rules of posting insist you not engage in personal attacks. Calling someone an "ignorant, ungrateful dog" proves true one of the golden rules of debate: When you're losing points, resort to name-calling. I'm sorry you chose to go down that pitiful path.

Do you also comdemn the bombing of Japenese and German cities with conventional bombs?

Absolutely, the firebombing of German and Japanese cities by the Brits and the US respectively were equally immoral.

Should we have foresworn any military action which might have endangered civilians?

No, but we should take reasonable precautions to ensure that civilian lives are not lost.

But the questions raised are as current as today's news headlines. Should the Israelis restrain themselves from bombing the terrorist masterminds in such a way that innocent civilians can't possibly be killed? Wouldn't such a policy simply give an insurmountable edge to the Islamo-fascists?

It is one thing when a nation launches a strike against a military target and civilians die by mistake and wholly unintentionally. It is wholly another for a country to purposely have as the objective of his attack the mass obliteration of innocent civilians or in this case of entire cities. That is always immoral as a matter of course whatever the justification or pretext. The ability to discern the difference is what discerns enlightened and civilized Christian man from the barbarians of the Dark Ages.

Smart bombs are good...I think America should always work to minimize civilian casualties whenever and wherever possible...but to restrain ourselves from going after our mortal enemies because the cowards hide themselves amongst the innocent would assure our defeat.

You and Sean Hannity get this one wrong. If a terrorist hides in an apartment building of 200 plus innocent people and the only way you have a 50% chance or better to kill him in the building is to kill everyone else in the building, do you kill 200 innocents just to kill one guilty. Sean Hannity says kill the innocent women and children to get to the terrorist, which is by definition committing a terrorist act or fighting terrorism with terrorism. So would Hitler, Stalin, Mao or Timothy McVeigh. What say you?

Maybe your mother-in-law was out sick that day, or was someplace where they weren't doing that, but it was being done. And she would have been doing it whether or not she was "so inclined."

Loss of lives in a military operation are acceptable under certain circumstances and completely in line with Just War theory.

If you seriously believe that, then you obviously know nothing about Just War Theory and are merely attempting to twist it to justify past atrocities committed by another former Democrap President (Truman). I don't think it is a coincidence that a liberal Democrap President committed the war crime of Hiroshima just as it was no coincidence that another liberal Democrap President sent our finest young men to die in Vietnam. I seriously doubt that a God fearing Republican President would not have employed the atomic bombs against innocent civilians--men, women and babes.

The US military seized a lot of the Unit 731 information, data, notes, diagrams, photos and such, and also decided to go easy on the Japanese War Criminals in order to pick their brains to develop our own weapons of mass destruction program. It is kind of sick, us using experimentation notes for our own program, gained at the cost of live Chinese being vivisectioned. Oh yes, it is a historic fact we covered up for a lot of these guys who otherwise should have been sent to the gallows.

SCAP and GHQ even helped reinstitute some of the criminals to positions of power. Shunichi Suzuki, of Unit 731, even went on to leadership in the Liberal Democratic Party and on to several terms as the Governor of TOKYO! (I never would have believed these things, or would have thought of them as 'communist propaganda', had I not directly researched them in Japan in the Japanese language and changed my mind).

I've seen interviews with a Japanese survivor of Hiroshima, who was *ahem* getting free medical services in this country. She quite frankly admitted that as a school girl at the time, she was being trained to use sticks to attack American soldiers. Maybe your mother-in-law was out sick that day, or was someplace where they weren't doing that, but it was being done. And she would have been doing it whether or not she was "so inclined."

Gumlegs: Oh, no doubt that the Japanese government wanted to make children attack American troops. My mother (not an in-law) and her peers decided, after years of listening to government lies about Japan "winning the war," that they would not participate in such wrongdoing. I didn't say it didn't happen; I simply said there were Japanese citizens who vehemently opposed the notion.

Would they have been arrested, detained, perhaps even killed by their government? Most certainly. Did they choose to make a principled stand against a policy they thought was wrong? Most certainly.

Actually, General Tibbets shows considerable humanitarianism.

His efforts forced the Japanese to surrender, something that they weren't capable of doing on their own.

That surrender ended our bombing attacks and brought relief supplies to their starving, diseased population.

It was the Japanese warlords who refused to surrender because they weren't getting "acceptable terms" of surrender who prolonged the agony and caused the deaths of so many of their own people.

They should have raised the white flag and stopped all attacks on all Americans.

They didn't. At least, they didn't until we made them stop.

In the mean time, their people suffered no matter what apologists like yourself try to make people believe.

That's their tough luck for being there.

Oh, I get it. Civilians at Hiroshima are to blame because they were dumb enough to live there. Too bad, so sad. People consider this acceptable?

I concur with rond. General Tibbits' statements that its "their tough luck for being there" is truly callous and barbaric. It is and something that Hitler might have said about the Jews living in Europe or Timothy McVeigh might have said about the little babies playing in the day care at the Oklahoma City federal building at the time of the bombing. It is typical of the mentality of the mind of a terrorist/mass murderer to say that. With all due respect to General Tibbits, I can honestly say that he is a disgrace to the proud uniform of the United States Army.

I wonder how Gen. Tibbet has had to deal with 100,000 deaths, including several children (you probably meant thousands of children as there were), and probably some American POWs.

This, in itself, is a fascinating topic. One human being, unless they were totally devoid of a moral framework and no guilt trait, would have to rationalize it somehow otherwise they would go absolutely nuts and probably commit suicide or become alcoholic (as some crew members did in fact do).

I have seen interview after interview of Tibbits. He is a crusty old man now, certainly courageous, and did his duty. You can also read his words very closely and see that he has fully compartmentalized it and rationalized it. For the sake of his own sanity. Some part of my tells me, though, that deep down old Paul knows the horrendous dimension, the human dimension, the civilian dimension, the moral dimension of what went on down there at 8:15 a.m. on August 6, 1945.

As I said, he is a man of courage. He would prove his courage to me even more so if he were to take one last trip to Japan (I suspect he has never been back) to go through the massive and rather detailed Hiroshima Museum at ground zero that I have had the chance to see. I think he would not be able to compose himself after walking through; or if he could, he has nerves of more steel and human capabilities to rationalize far beyond what I would imagine any man to have.

This, above, does not negate the historical fact of the War end being hastened by the bombings. It is just some musings about a man who would normally have a lot on his soul for the rest of his life.

At any rate, when we all cross over to the 'other side', and face our judgement for our various acts since our age of reasoning, it will be very interesting to see the Good Lord's take on all of this. If, Jesus would agree with some Freepers that more 'japs' should have been incinerated, or that two a- bombs were not enough, such as I have heard expressed here before.....

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