Tibbets Did Duty in Dropping Bomb, But Then Reveled in It
How convenient, this forgetting — this respected ignorance — that the only nation to have ever used the deadliest of all weapons of mass destruction, the only nation to have terrorized a country by means of those weapons, the only nation to have nuked civilians, twice, with questionable necessity, obliterating 340,000 lives (by the time all the deaths related to the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings were tallied five years out), is us, the United States.
How convenient the distance — geographic, historical, but mostly willed — from the horror those bombings inflicted, the “pity and terror,” as Richard Rhodes described it in “The Making of the Atomic Bomb,” the men of the Manhattan Project could foresee even as they built the bomb and saw its first test in the New Mexico desert that July dawn in 1945. “Now we are all sons of bitches,” Kenneth Bainbridge, director of the Trinity test, told Robert Oppenheimer, the Manhattan Project director, within moments of the blast. “We waited until the blast had passed,” Oppenheimer would later recall, “walked out of the shelter and then it was extremely solemn. We knew the world would not be the same. A few people laughed, a few people cried.” And Oppenheimer remembered a line from Hindu scripture, the Bhagavad-Gita: “Now I am become death, the destroyer of worlds.”
No amount of metaphysical anguish or contrition could approximate the suffering the bomb would unleash 21 days later, not on desert sands but on Hiroshima’s human beings, where the world ended 43 seconds after the Enola Gay, the B-29 carrying the four-ton “Little Boy,” dropped it over the courtyard of Shima Hospital. “It was all impersonal,” is how Enola Gay commander Paul Tibbets described it.
To him, maybe. Not to those below, where birds ignited in midair and human beings left their silhouetted outlines on the side of buildings. In the words of a fifth-grade boy who survived: “I had the feeling that all the human beings on the face of the Earth had been killed off.” A husband helping his wife: “While taking my severely-wounded wife out to the riverbank by the side of the hill of Nakahiro-machi, I was horrified, indeed, at the sight of a stark naked man standing in the rain with his eyeballs in his palm. He looked to be in great pain but there was nothing I could do for him.” A first-grade girl: “We were still in the river by evening and it got cold. No matter where you looked there was nothing but burned people all around.”
So tell me, now. Why is this Web site I’m looking at (enolagay.org) selling a “Little Boy Bomb Replica signed by Pilot and Navigator of the Enola Gay,” for $350 plus $15 for shipping and handling? There’s a picture of the blue bomb, “handcrafted solid mahogany replica,” 1/12 scale, “approx. 10 inches long.” Why is the Web site hawking print after print of the Enola Gay and Tibbets, of a “combo special” (autographed Tibbets book and print, “$95 + FREE SHIPPING!”)?
Because that’s what Tibbets did in his old age. He peddled WMD memorabilia, as repugnant a trade as the kind that specializes in the trinkets of Pol Pot’s harvests. People bought in. That’s what happens when atrocity is not only overlooked but transformed into something essential and heroic. Harry Truman did it politically when he declared the dropping of the bomb “the greatest thing in history.” Tibbets did it folklorically. And a war crime became a whoop.
There’s no begrudging Tibbets for fulfilling his mission Aug. 6, 1945. No one had the right to demand of him that he represent some kind of national atonement. But there’s a difference between a soldier honoring his service and a war lover celebrating it. Tibbets didn’t just defend his role in the bombing. He reveled in it, toured on it, profited from it, re-enacted it. He used his stature to slur history and the memory of the Hiroshima victims when he joined forces with veterans groups opposing a Smithsonian exhibit featuring the Enola Gay and the victims of the bombing. The exhibit went on, the historical context and Japanese perspective summarily censored.
Tibbets died at 92 last week. It may be crude to speak ill of the dead. But it was a Tibbets specialty. He told Studs Terkel in a 2002 interview, just months after the Sept. 11 attacks, that nuking Arab and Islamic capitals was the best response. “If,” he said, “the newspapers would just cut out the s— ‘You’ve killed so many civilians!’ That’s their tough luck for being there.” What a hero.
Tristam is a News-Journal editorial writer. Reach him at ptristam@att.net or through his personal Web site at www.pierretristam.com.
© 2007 News-Journal Corporation
“While taking my severely-wounded wife out to the riverbank by the side of the hill of Nakahiro-machi, I was horrified, indeed, at the sight of a stark naked man standing in the rain with his eyeballs in his palm. He looked to be in great pain but there was nothing I could do for him.”
While they’re at it, why don’t they have a statue of the “stark naked man standing in the rain with his eyeballs in his palm” for sale? That would be a great tribute to Tibbets and the other people capitalizing on that horror. Another example of sick and shameless “disaster capitalism”.
But without him, how would Hitler have condemned them at Dachau?
Without him Caesar would have stood alone.
He’s the one who gives his body as a weapon to a war,
And without him all this killing can’t go on.
He’s the universal soldier, and he really is to blame.
His orders come from far away no more.
They come from him, and you, and me–
And brothers, can’t you see?
This is not the way we put an end to war.
– Buffy Ste. Marie, “Universal Soldier”
This is a great example of what Noam Chomsky calls:
“American Exceptionalism.”
There were the Nuremburg Trials after WWII where Nazi leaders were tried and “just following orders” was not accepted as a defense.
Truman and Tibbets should have been tried and imprisoned for crimes against humanity…but the USA were the “victors” weren’t we? We “won” a war, but began to lose our souls and any moral high ground that we could ever claim.
Then Truman (who should never been in the position to have any “buck” stop on his desk), led our nation into the cluster f**k of Korea—where we can still view that legacy clearly; Vietnam; Balkans; Panama; Nicaragua—on and on to BushCo and the Iraq/Afganistan cluster f**k.
Peace makers are vilified while war criminals are lionized—war is peace—oppression is freedom—up is down and wrong is right.
This article will be staying with me all day.
Love
Cindy
Not only are we “Good Germans”, we are also great Capitalists. But it’s not surprising as people have been making a bundle off the Holocaust for decades. What a country.
Hoa binh
Cindy is so right: peacemakers are vilified. Look at Dennis Kucinich.
Look also at the students at Morton West High School near Chicago: http://antiauthoritarian.net/NLN/?p=361. Several are threatened with expulsion and even criminal charges for organizing a peace rally.
the us military has always been humble in thier use of WMDs - here’s a photo where we are showing our humility: http://us.history.wisc.edu/hist102/pdocs/boyer/10.htm
And her hat matches the cake in the photo! How cute. And maybe there is a sideboard of mushrooms as well. Great photo lucky. It should be titled “Psychopaths Cut Deep (Into Cake!)”
I see Tibbets’ role in implementing a Final Solution (of the Big Bang variety), his revelling in the post-mission glory, and his seemingly untroubled conscience, in terms of Robert M. Pirsig’s concept of Quality (see “Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance”).
A pilot is a technician, with a mind-set that values technical Quality above all. And certainly the Enola Gay’s mission was a triumph of technology and logistical planning– the culmination of thousands of hours of grueling creative work to develop and build the bomb, and probably as many hours fitting the aircraft and planning the details of the mission to the Enemy Homeland.
One aspect of a mind steeped in Technical Quality is that it more readily compartmentalizes reality. A thoughtful, comprehensive understanding of the wider implications of using nuclear weapons was expressed after the successful Trinity test by Robert Oppenheimer, who was reminded of a line from the Bhagavad Gita: I have become Death, the destroyer of worlds. But Oppenheimer, part of the scientific elite, was an exception. Tibbets’ mind-set began and ended with the event as a vital, successful, righteous Mission in which he had been tried, and come forth as gold.
In fairness to Tibbets, he was not alone in believing that he had done a virtuous, heroic deed. The Amerikan military had simply struck a necessary mortal blow to the dastardly enemy. Thus, fellow unreflective Amerikans wouldn’t see his endorsement of WMD kitsch as comparable to elderly German camp administrators selling autographed photos of the crematoria they dutifully, conscientiously, and even proudly operated for so many months.
Anyway, I see Tibbets as another example of a technician so caught up in the Technical Quality– the sheer technical excellence (ecstasy?) of a project– that he is indifferent, or blind to, the heinous anti-Quality of death, destruction, and human suffering that was the payoff to his success. All of that is truly “beside the point” to the rigidly compartmentalized technical mind-set, and clearly Tibbets’ experience did not cause him to evolve beyond that narrow template.
IMO, this is also the conflict that generated the controversies about displaying the “Enola Gay” as a museum exhibit. The military/technical community resented the hell out of attempts to insist on displaying the historical artifact to the context in which it was used. The idea of displaying some Japanese schoolgirl’s melted lunch box along with the sleek silver Death Star was perceived as an inappropriate distraction which undermined and darkened the splendor of technological triumph embodied in the noble aircraft. Let us now praise Technical Quality, they seemed to say, without dragging in a lot of sloppy, unseemly, sinister, problematic negativism that only detracts from the presentation. That stuff can go in some other museum, where they’re not committed to accentuating the positive to inspire patriotic pride and awe.
It’s said that at the Trinity test referenced above, after Oppenheimer said, “It works!”, test director Kenneth Bainbridge replied, “Now we are all sons of bitches.” I don’t think Tibbets would particularly disagree, or be offended by the label. I think he would cheerfully amend the epithet by saying, “Yes, but we’re victorious sons of bitches!” Case closed.
I very rarely disagree with a topic on this site, but as a student of military history I must in this case. The carpet bombing of Japanese cities was killing about 50 to 100 thousand at a time. The japanese still would not surrender. The atom bombs were so dramatic they allowed the emperor to overrule his military and ask for peace. Even then the military attempted a coup. If the US invaded Japan the casualties could have been half a million on both sides. If Truman had allowed so many Americans to die and it was found out later he had a great weapon to stop the war and didn’t use it there would have been outrage. It is very easy to apply todays morality but the japanese with their Bushido code were a ruthless and impossible people to negotiate with.
Koalaburger is right, of course. More people died the night the US Air Force firebombed Tokyo than died in the atomic attacks. Dresden was a similarly “conventional” attack. There is nothing morally different about a fission or fusion bomb than incendiaries or high explosives if they land on your head. Tibbets killed a lot of people that day (and had a lot of help), but I’m willing to bet there isn’t a single USAF from WWII who doesn’t have blood on his hands.
However, I have a problem with the ensuing commercial venture of Tibbets — vulgar is one word for it.
Wanna hear a True, Modern Nuke Story? One that almost started World War III two months ago? Some friends and I checked through the current events and found it. Now we’re wondering why no one else saw it. Read it and weep…
The “Bin Laden Option” and the Missing Minot Nuke
Martha Rose Crow and SOTT Editors
http://www.sott.net
Monday, 05 Nov 2007
Right before September 11, 2001, the alarm bells were ringing across trading floors about some unusual trading in the US stock options market. An extraordinary number of trades were bet that American Airlines stock prices would fall….
As much as Tibbets is worthy of contempt–the real devils are the scientists who made the bomb.
The Buffy St Marie song could easily be reworked to refer to scientists.
If they say: hey! we had to make it because the Nazis were going to make one.
But who was going to make one on the Nazi side, janitors?
And the fact that they took bets on whether the atmosphere would ignite…absolutely disgusting. Childish irresponsibility.
And I dont give Oppenheimer a pass for realizing he was wrong AFTER the fact. What a fool he was. You are building a weapon you idiot. It is supposed to kill people.
This is why scientists are intellectually inferior to artists. They lack ethical processing due to their narrow minded thinking.
Jonathan Swift didnt have electricity but he predicted the lunacy of atomic bombs in Gulliver’s Travels. Mary Shelley and HG Wells predicted the moral corruption of vivisection a long time ago.
The religious philosophy of mysticism was dreamt up thousands of years before Werner Heisenberg got clued in to it in his Uncertainty Principle of the 1930s.
I would just laugh off these scientists as children but they play with very dangerous things. Genetic engineering etc.
Medieval witches were burned at the stake for things that today’s scientists do in a 9-5 job.
Oh wait–its “progress,” the disciples of the religion Science might say.
Yes, finding new more efficient ways to kill and trying to cure diseases and death by causing disease and death–yep, really intelligent thinking there.
Cindy Sheehan writes:
‘ This is a great example of what Noam Chomsky calls:
“American Exceptionalism.”
There were the Nuremburg Trials after WWII where Nazi leaders were tried and “just following orders” was not accepted as a defense. ‘
This applies to every soldier in Iraq. Of all ranks. Ignorance has never been a defence for a crime. Again, under Nuremberg, the attack on Iraq was ‘ the supreme international crime’. Nuremberg’s definition would likely find all who have been or are there, war criminals.
Best, j.
koalaburger writes:
> “The carpet bombing of Japanese cities was killing about 50 to 100 thousand at a time. The japanese still would not surrender. The atom bombs were so dramatic they allowed the emperor to overrule his military and ask for peace. Even then the military attempted a coup. If the US invaded Japan the casualties could have been half a million on both sides.”
Contemporary scholarship has established a strong case that Japan would have surrendered short of an invasion, particularly after the Soviets declared war on Japan, and particularly if the Allies had explicitly offered the eventual terms of surrender- allowing Hirohito to remain as nominal head of state.
However, it is fair to say that Truman and his top advisors did not know this at the time, and could not have known it for certain. I don’t think they spent much time considering whether or not to go ahead and use the bombs. That was the program.
The military coup that you speak of was actually an abortive junior-level plot with little support. However, it does show that there were fanatical elements opposed to any surrender, even in defiance of the emperor.
The bombing of Japanese cities was certainly as horrible as you say, but Hiroshima was ultimately the most lethal bombing of the war. The cumulative number of deaths attributed to the Hiroshima and Nagasaki nuclear attacks to date exceeds half a million, so even assuming that an invasion might have been fought out, the claim that the bombings saved lives on balance is dubious.
The US elite should have let the Soviet Army invade Japan; in turn, the US could’ve both supplied the Red Army and feinted with diversionary invasions.
The average German soldier (be he young or old)was also fanatical. And A-bombs were not used.
Remember, in the European theatre, the Soviets took the brunt of German (and their allies) forces while the Western allies slowly worked their way through Italian boot.
Even when the Western allies attacked during D-Day, they took horrible losses. They could only make a beach head, consolidate and move forward because most German troops were trapped at the Eastern Front.
Anyway, if Americans really want to feel what the longterm effects of the US’s urban terror bombing of Japan, view the DVD, “Funeral of the Fireflies”. (Get the subtitled version.)
Most Americans don’t know what it FEELS like on any form of personal level. Thus, when I have shown this film or lent it to others, most Americans have to rebel against the emotional honesty of the film.
They don’t want to understand the human consequences of their nation’s history of massive urban terror bombings.
In fact, our rulers didn’t let the general US public to see actual photos of either A-bombed cities until the 1970s.
Remember, we made sure the German civilians living near the Gestapo run death camps had to view what they didn’t want to feel or understand.
Being a victor means one doesn’t have to do the same.
Just because we are against the nukes that were dropped on hiroshima and nagasaki does not make us for firebombing civilians in tokyo…
or napalming vietnamese citizens…or using cluster bombs and white phosphorous in iraq…on and on…not to mention the nuclear war we are waging in the middle east right now in the form of depleted uranium.
it is all monstrous.
I think my Republican daughter and son-in-law would shrug their shoulders and say “hey, it was a war they started, shit happens” . Of course the need to drop this bomb is evaluated historically only by the victors as they want the world to understand the dropping of two atom bombs on areas heavily populated with civilians.
What Tibbets and his comrades and the command structure behind did was an atrocity. A moral outrage of staggering proportions. But just as sickening to me are the reasoners who find excuses for what he did, and the warmongers who state it doesn’t need excusing but was right and proper. They’re just as guilty and they aren’t old - they’re deciding policy and setting up the conditions for yet more atrocities now.
Paul Tibbetts should go down in history along with Himmler, Mengele, Goering, Phil Sheridan, and the rest.
Monstrous indeed.
I don’t mean to be a Cindy dittohead, and I’m not under some delusion that I’m her lost twin brother, Windy– but when you’re right, you’re right.
But speaking of delusion, IMO warmongery compels the warrior to regard war as a force or method that remains under the control of the party which wages it. The actual violence, combat, and destruction in “the fog of war” is incontrovertibly irrational and violently chaotic beyond measure– as General Sherman succinctly observed, “War is Hell”.
Perhaps it would be more accurate to say that “control” is the legendary gold at the end of the incarnadined rainbow; war is in and of itself a struggle for control– first over battlefields, then over the occupied territory. “Victory” is about who emerges as the Decider and who emerges as a broken Decidee.
But War is a Monster greater than the sum of the warring parties. The Monster is always seeking to be set free, and is happy to let its liberators believe that they are its master. But the raging beast of warmongery invariably drags the warmongers ever-onward into self-perpetuating rationales for expanding, and infuses them with its ruthless, subhuman soullessness. The anasthetic lexicon of military strategy, with its metrics organizing mass slaughter of innocents and its view of death and destruction as a matter of statistics and cost-benefit analysis, is not a product of the human heart.
The detached, arid, businesslike reduction of the reality of war into “objective” data sets is simply a rhetorical trick to convince the credulous and unwary that the military authorites are getting the job done according to plan(s) instead of flailing in the wake of the Monster it revived.
That might be why the US prefers such lean, athletic high-ranking generals– they run so briskly behind the Dog of War as if they’re controlling the leash, instead of being pulled along by it.
Don’t get me started. [Oh– Go Cindy! ♥]
unfortunately you can go to any VFW club, have a beer & meet Tibbetts’ soul mates on any weekend.
To have acknowledged the monstrosity of what he did would have meant he would have had to reevaluate his whole life, his one
moment of fame & glory has been historically judged to be a crime w/o equal in our “civilized” world.
His pride & joy (wasn’t Enola his mama’s name?) and even his livlihood were eventually condemned by the entire planet, of course he couldn’t see it.
Sorry everyone.
Ebert considers the Japanese anime,”Grave of the Fireflies,” the greatest war movie ever made.
It graphically presents the firebombing of Kobi in 1945. It is very interesting that an anime has the power to punch through the emotional defenses of, rationalizations, and denials many US citizens seem to need.
If you find “Grave of the Fireflies,” make sure you get the subtitled -not dubbed- version.
I have shared this anime in my classes and with others. It usually provokes a strong reaction. In fact, I shared it with an older, intelligent and educated colleque and she couldn’t watch it.
Why? It wasn’t the firebombing; it was the slow, deadening and dehumanizing aftermath. And “we” were reponsible.
Of course, specially timed incindery bombs were used on Kobe. This had screeching whistles attached to terrorize the civilians.
They usually panicked and left their traditionally built Japanese houses. However, the bombs were timed to allow a few minutes for the population to go back home. Immediately fterwords, they were incinerated.
Previously, ealier firebombs were dropped in order to start raging, oxygen-sucking fires. As a result, those civilians hiding in bombshelters or subway tunnels would be suffocated.
So, as the A-bomb finally became viable, it was a no-brainer for “our” mass-murderers to go the extra mile.
At least they didn’t incinerate Kyoto…though it was on the origial list of A-bomb targets.
American hero’s, men [now women] who kill others. oops, excepton; abortionist!
LITTLE BROTHER: Or you could just cut to the chase and say he’s an amoral sub-human without the slightest capacity for empathy, a/k/a a sociopath disguised as a “war hero.”
Remember, the US administration is doing the same to the people of the Middle East through DU and threatening use of nuclear bombing of Iran. Tibbets is only one of a long line of war criminals. The US is exceptional for sure, exceptionally murderous.
The greatest terrorist state in the world at present.
True enough, Siouxrose– although, verbose as I am, for me this is “cutting to the chase”!
Kolaburger and millions of Americans still think the nuking of Japan was necessary but experts AT THE TIME decided that the nukes were NOT necessary. The ‘United States Strategic Bombing Survey’ which was ordered by Truman released their study in July 1946. They said, “Based on a detailed investigation of all the facts and supported by the testimony of the surviving Japanese leaders involved, it is the surveys opinion that certainly prior to 31 Dec. 1945 and in all probability prior to 1 Nov. 1945, Japan would have surrendered even if the atomic bombs had not been dropped, even if Russia had not entered the war, and even if no invasion had been planned or contemplated.” For more details download, for free, the ‘Bombing Civilians’ chapter www.amoralamerica.info
I find these discussions terribly misguided; Tibbets was singled out because he dropped one really big bomb that killed many in one single blast. Yet I don’t read similar articles about any of the pilots that set fire to Dresden, Germany over the course of dozens of missions using incendiary phosphorus bombs, or those who dropped the napalm on Viet Nam. Do any of you know the names of those pilots? Why not?
It’s the war that is hell, and that blame lies with the one and only one at the top who says, “Let’s Roll”. Every single soldier serving beneath them who signs up to a chorus of “hero” when he pledges to defend his country, faces a lifetime in prison for saying “No” to an abhorrent mission handed down by his commanders that turns out to be too much ‘war’ for us to handle.
So I say to you if we dare to suggest our troops our heroes when the conduct a noble mission and saves lives, it’s disingenuous at best to condemn the ones who were chosen for some other mission with more nefarious ends; for the soldier had no choice which one he was given.
They don’t get to pick their mission, we should not be chosing who to salute or condemn when we personally never had to face the consequences were it our choice to follow orders or face a firing squad.
I save my wrath for Bush/Cheney/Rumsfield/Wolfowitz/Rice and whoever replaces them when their reputation becomes too much to stomach, for it was the ‘thinkers’ who subject their subordinates to all the heat for the decisions they say will either save us all or lose the country, for they can prove neither.
i can understand dropping the bomb and the circumstances around it but not the targets…why civilian cities? a naval base would have sufficed. for dropping it on a city, that makes it for me an enormous crime against humanity
its funny how humankind will spare no expense to develop weapons of destruction but when it comes to sharing and developing for people’s good there is a drag and a lot of selfishness. they couldn’t wait to rush the bomb into killing. Full speed ahead for destruction. At the stage of Hiroshima and Nagasaki I think Americans were war weary and didn’t care. If the bombs ended the war, that was great. The feeling was that “they” started this…we will end it in whatever way we can as soon as we can. How can we expect concern for Japanese citizens, when our own troops and citizens were exposed repeatedly to above ground atomic testing. When we can get people like Tibbets to become introspective then maybe we can change. The bombs were terrible events in a world of war.
There is a time lag in grasping the destructiveness of weapons. The vain little flag wavers of August 1914 thought that their proud young men were going off to fight a quick skirmish or two and things would be at an end. Only four brutal years of massive slaughter taught them the horrific reality of technological warfare; all the creeps who cluck their tongues over the politicos in the mid-to-late 1930s who were trying everything to avoid another war are every bit as dissociative ss Paul Tibbets was.
The Americans on the home front never dealt with the reality of WWII & they cheered the boys who came home; while Zinn, Mailer, Vonnegut, Fussell and others spent decades dealing with recognizing their own part in the insanity, most kept their memories to themselves or drowned them with cheers & adoration of family & community.
It took about sixteen years for a number of Americans to get past the idiot fantasy of duck-and-cover drills — to confront nuclear madness & to try to stop it. Just after the collapse of the USSR, we were told it HAD stopped; there were stories about the US destroying its stockpiles & its bombers & the USSR doing the same.
It was all another shit lie. The nuke factories kept happily turning out product, la la, and packaging new & even exciting ways to murder people.
What drove the citizenry into righteous frenzy in September 2001 is not the cruelty of the bombing attack, but that someone dared do it to us, when the natural order was us doing it to everyone else & patting ourselves on the back. For the first time, Americans got a taste of our own medicine — and rather than pull back & reflect on the disproportionality of our murdreousness — Madeleine Albright & Clinton by extension shrugged off the death of half a million Iraqi children by “sanctions” & after-effects of the war there — the vast majority signed on.
Maybe the survivors of the terrible civil war that is coming will look back & wonder what was wrong with their predecessors. If they aren’t reduced to pure barbarity in the rubble.
I was unaware until now that Paul Tibbets did the things after the war which are described in this article. If it is true, then Tibbetts was a very sick man. It is possible he was attempting to mentally cover guilt feelings by acting as if he didn’t care. Whatever his reasons, it is a sick mind to brag or feel good about killing another person in any manner, whether it was war or not.
May the rains of Karmic Justice descend upon their souls in a torrential downpour. And may we observers find some way to forgive.
I strongly agree with Pierre Tristam that no one should ever profit from crimes against humanity. But Paul Tibbet’s crimes were no worse than those of U.S. and U.K. aviators who killed and injured hundreds of thousands of civilians by fire bombing Japanese or German cities.
And after watching Ken Burns’ “The War” and the horrific military and civilian casualties that were suffered in the island-by-island, fleet-by-fleet battles to finally invade Japan, I can better understand why Truman used “the bomb” to avoid even worse casualties, and why war-traumatized Americans celebrated its use. For me the most horrific scene of “The War” was Japanese women, with children in their arms, jumping off cliffs to avoid being captured by American marines.
That’s why Burns refused to tout his 14-1/2 hour gut-wrenching production as “The
Good War.”
Furthermore, there are respected scholars who claim that Imperial Japan was on the verge of surrendering before “the bomb” destroyed Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and that it was ruthlessly used for geopolitical instead of casualty saving reasons. Whatever the truth may be, Paul Tibbets was only one of many allied civilians and combatants who committed, and in some cases shamelessly profited, from crimes against humanity.
RLD, USAF Strategic Air Command 1952-1956
Hind sight is 20/20. The truth is that there is no morality when it comes to war. A great war leaves a country with three armies: an army of cripples, an army of mourners, and an army of thieves.
There were many respected scholars who wrote books about the war and offered strong opinions about the use of the atomic bombs.
Any good writer, or a person with a vivid imagnation, can take the first and last chapters of a story or event, fill in the middle and make for good reading.
History is truth, which cannot be altered, except with error or deception.
Truman was aware that Germany had sent nuclear materials to Japan, when a German submarine surfaced and surrendered when Germany surrenderd. The sub was caarrying a cargo of nuclear material to Japan and it was not the first load. It was the last. Truman did not know how soon Japan may be to developing the atomic bomb at that time, or until after August 6th, 1945. He nor anyone else in the United States knew, all they knew was it was possible.
Truman also was aware, that the Japanese had managed to build the largest submanines ever constructed, which were aircraft carriers able to carry three large twin engined bombers. How many did they have available? Truman didn’t know. All of this was ultra secret information at that time and for many years after the war ended. The book writers were unaware of those critical things as was almost everyone.
Now, should Truman have made the decision to not use the atomic bombs, hoping Japan did not have them also, and surely if they did would use them on our invasion fleets, or even perhaps our cities. When Japan surrendered, one of those gigantic submarines was at sea, in route to bomb the Panama Canal. Japan did not have the atomic bomb and was not close to having any, but Truman had no way of knowing that in August of 1945.
Was Japan ready to surrender? Perhaps, but only on their terms. Their terms would have been unacceptable for the most liberal left winger in the United States at that time. Did Japan ask for a cease fire and truce to attempt to negoiate surrender terms? ___ No, they did not, but they did have that option. Had the Japanese, while lengthy talks took place, use that time to finish developing atomic bombs? Truman didn’t know, there was no way he could have known.
He made a tough decision based upon that and other intelligence and the firm belief it would end the war and prevent millions of deaths, both Japanese and our military. The first bomb was used and Japan still refused to surrender, the second was dropped and the war ended. The Emporer of Japan had had enough. Even then, at the final hour, some radical Japanese army officers attempted to stop their emporer from broadcasting the surrender over the airwaves.
Now, Tibbets was selected to command the special operations squadron based upon his past performance as a pilot and leader. I doubt that at that time in our history, if any American Army pilots would have refused to fly the Enola Gay and drop that first bomb.
For any to relish it and make money for it and glory in the result of the hoorror of the atomic bombs is not right. Only a sick minded person could do that. To kill another human or any animal, is not somethig to feel good about. ___ Sorry any hunters, that’s my humble opinion. I shot and killed one deer in my life and I never felt anything but sadness about it. I’ve shot at humans during a war and would not hesitate to kill another person durng a war or to save my own or some other innocent person’s ass in civilian life. I’d never fell good about it or brag about it. Never.
How sad that as human beings, we still need to debate whether or not warfare in any of its horrific manifestations can be explained, justified, found meaningful in any way.
What would be more uplifting to decide is how to move the mass consciousness beyond the very notion of aggression. How barbaric and primitive the species remains in spite of the aoens of evolution and the many interventions and visits from kinder, gentler, saner entities committed to our survival and that of our beloved Mother Earth. It’s a wonder any of this species has managed to survive. We use all the “advances” to create more effective means of extermination. Read The Chalice and the Blade and you might understand how the tyranny of yang energy, at the expense of its necessary and modifying yin. (think fire and water) has brought us to this place. Balance/harmony is what needs to be restored. But alas, they’ve driven the goddess underground, and in her absence commit matricide of their mother earth and their earthly mothers.
Yes, any good writer can take the first and last parts of a fact and fill in the middle with fantasy to make a good story. That’s why we have the History Channel. The blunt truth is that the Japanese government knew the war was lost from the summer of 1944. And the only condition they wanted (instead of “un-conditional surrender”) was the assurance that the Emperor would be safe. Which is what they got after two atomic bombs. And even more bluntly, their diplomatic code had been cracked and we knew they would surrender as soon as the Soviet Union declared war on them. And the Soviet Union had promised to declare war three months after the end of war in Europe. A promise they kept to the day.
There are government documents that are now being released that show a definite motive in wanting to end the war in the Pacific before the Soviet Union participated.
I won’t argue that point because it is so. Having the Soviet Union involved in the war with Japan would have been another political and geopolitical disaster as it was in Europe. We broke their diplomatic codes but the Japenese military wasn’t interested in what the diplomats were saying and would never have allowed their Emperor to surrender, especially if Russia had entered the conflict.
It was just a lucky break that their Emperor was able to broadcast the surrender when he did manage to do so. What you say about their terms is not so either. Also, do not forget what Truman did know at the time and what he didn’t and could not have known in regards to how far along Japan was to having the atomic bomb. It is history and the History channel does not always have it totally correct either. They also sometimes read what pundents have written on the subject and give diverse opinions to tell two or three sides to the story. It is at times, he said __ she said.
Sorry it took a while to get back to you.
What point is it that you’re not arguing because it is so?
I also don’t understand what you’re saying about the Soviet Union’s participation in the war in Europe. Are you saying that not having Russia fight the Germans would have been better for us? 88% of all German casualties in the war were inflicted by the Russians. Would you rather that our fathers and grandfathers would have had to fight those soldiers as well?
If the Japanese military would never have allowed the Emperor to surrender, (as proven by the docudrama on the History Channel about the clique of desk-jockey officers who almost stole the recording of the Emperor’s speech) why did they actually surrender when the Emperor told them to? Why didn’t they pull off a successful coup or at least keep fighting?
And yes, we don’t know if Truman knew how far the Japanese were in their developement of an atomic bomb. I’m sure there were physics majors in college who had been reading foreign tech journals for years and might have figured out that a bomb was feasible, but it takes a mighty good imagination to call that “…how far along Japan was to having the atomic bomb. “. Look at all the time and money and resources that went into our developement. Look at the devastion of their country prior to Germany’s surrender. The Japanese government knew that when American and English Naval and Air Forces leave Europe and go to the Pacific, it would get even worse. In the first 6 months of 1945, there electric grid was so badly damaged, they were shutting down aluminum production. Their naval and air forces were so destroyed they were telling their military in China not to expect any re-supply efforts. In the spring of 1945 they announced the forming of a government department for the production of wooden aircraft.
Of course, there is one thing we know Truman knew. Because it’s in his daily journal.
July 17,1945: Japs fini when the Russians enter the war.
History is not reading what pundits say and expecting issues to be resolved only as far as he said-she said. History is digging into solid evidence. Written documents and plain old common sense. for example: Countries that don’t have enough electricity to produce aluminum are not going to be able to develope and then produce atomic weapons.
While I might agree that selling nuclear-attack souvenirs is a bit tacky (okay, a lot tacky, although it’s a tough job ranking tacky stuff in our “civilization”), I cannot join the chorus condemning the atom bomb attacks on Japan as “war crimes.” With (mild) apologies for those who say two wrongs don’t make a right, the Japanese, as a nation, slaughtered millions for their own amusement and/or dreams of conquest. They continued to slaughter Americans long after the war was lost. I suspect that many, maybe most, Americans, as the long bloody war raged, would have voted to kill every human being in Japan than to have one more American lost. If there’s a lesson, maybe it is that starting a war is very dangerous, a lesson lost on pretty much every megalomaniac who seeks to lead a modern nation. Okay, okay, a lot of them anyway.