[Rhodes22-list] History - Another Great One Gone West

[john Belanger]

i seem to recall the reasoning was that having seen a willingness to commit forces to suicidal missions and refusals to surrender to american troops on guadalcanal, truman did not want any more unnecessary casualties. but i also heard that hiroshima and nagasaki were not bombed at all prior to the a-bomb so that the effects could be judged accurately. tibbets is well known, but who commanded the nagasaki bomber?

Brad Haslett <flybrad at gmail.com> wrote:  No doubt, everyone read the news this week that Paul Tibbets died. I have
an acquaintance from Illinois, recently retired as an engineer from
Caterpillar, who lost siblings in Hiroshima. Not directly from the bomb but
from the mudslides as a result of the hillsides being denuded and the
subsequent rains from the condensation nuclei. Ike was against it but he
wasn't asked. I don't second guess Harry on the decision. MacArthur wanted
to use them against China but was overruled. I am convinced that any leader
who refuses to acknowledge the Holocaust doesn't need possession of one.
Anyway, here's the view from Mr. Tibbets.

Brad

----------------------------

chicagotribune.com Editorial Paul Tibbets and the bomb

November 4, 2007
* * 


For many Americans, J. Robert Oppenheimer was the genius who created the
atomic bomb and later agonized about it. By contrast, Lt. Col. Paul Tibbets
Jr. was the pilot who dropped the bomb and famously said he never lost a
night's sleep over it.

Tibbets, who died Thursday at his home in Columbus, Ohio, was no gunslinger.
He was a plain-spoken Midwesterner who, before launching the most
cataclysmic military attack in human history, named his B-29 bomber after
his mom.

Tibbets had no clear idea of what to expect as he flew over Hiroshima on
August 6, 1945. He said of the blast that killed tens of thousands
instantly: "If Dante had been with us on the plane, he would have been
terrified. The city we had seen so clearly in the sunlight a few minutes
before was now an ugly smudge. It had completely disappeared under this
awful blanket of smoke and fire."

Those are not the words of a man who relished destruction. They are the
words of a man who did his duty.

Over the years, a few critics have questioned the decision to bomb Japan,
speculating about whether Japan would have surrendered without suffering
such a horrendous attack. There were critics even in 1945. After the
mission, Tibbets and other senior officers met with President Harry Truman,
who pounded his fist on the desk, and said "If anyone gives you a hard time
about that decision, you refer them to me. Because I'm the one who sent
you.'"

But Tibbets wouldn't pass the buck. He never apologized for that mission and
never had reason to. To him, and millions of Americans, the world's first
nuclear attack cut short World War II. Countless Americans didn't die in an
invasion of Japan because of that decision.

"Just hang a sign on the nose of the plane," Tibbets said in 2001. "Have the
sign say: `We did what we were supposed to do.'"

In that sense, Tibbets did much more than drop the first atomic bomb. He
came to personify America's postwar struggle -- and, ultimately, reluctant
comfort -- with the decision to obliterate much of Hiroshima.

That bombing and the subsequent attack on Nagasaki exposed the horrors of
nuclear war. America and its allies have spent decades trying to slow the
spread of nuclear weapons and ensure that they will never be used again.

What those bombings didn't produce, partly because of a tough, resolute
pilot from Columbus, were decades of second-guessing and guilt for most
Americans.

Tibbets helped end a brutal war. He moved on, and so did they.

Copyright (c) 2007, Chicago Tribune 
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