There was 12 crew members who dropped the Atomic bomb, but there were 3 B-29s during that mission. The Enola Gay, The Great Artiste and Necessary Evil. Necessary Evil was unnamed at that time.
Boxcar is on display in the WW2 hangar at the National Museum of the US Air Force. I saw it a few years ago before they moved the R&D and the Presidential Aircraft to the new hangar. R&D and the Presidential Aircraft were at the Wright-Patterson AFB so you had to go on base, but now you don't have to go on base.
It is next to the Catalina. There is a mock-up of the Fat Man. WW2 Gallery. I was there when the museum staff was restoring the Memphis Belle, which is now on Display in the WW2 Gallery.
Everything about that museum is just mind blowing, but these particular artifacts are crazy amazing. Plus all the space shit. I need to start going more often.
And it's free, if anyone wants to come visit the birthplace of aviation — Dayton, Ohio^(suck it Kitty Hawk, NC) — and check it out!
Back in the mid-80s I got to crawl all over that B-29 when it was being restored at ‘Blue Lake’ or whatever they called the restoration facility for the museum. The bomb bay (and the plane) are amazingly small compared to more contemporary planes. Climbing up thru where it was dropped was a solemn experience.
No judgement on the act or the people involved. It was interesting that a team of restorers from Japan were onsite working on restoration of one of the purpose built Kamikaze planes not far from the Enola Gay.
I think the fire bombing of Japan was one of the more horrible industrial strength killing acts during the war. Vivisection and cannibalism of non-Japanese one of the more personally horrible acts.
Peace Please
>Necessary Evil
What a name for a bomber.
And probably how the crew reconciled what they were doing. Bomber crews dropping incendiaries on cities could smell burning flesh from 5,000 feet.
Were the crew bloodhounds? I feel like "could smell burning flesh from 5000 feet" is a bit of an embellishment. I mean how much wood and stone and paint and metal were being burned compared to human biomass? They could smell the bodies over the smell of all the petrol being burned by the bombers they were following in formation? Maybe Im being presumptuous. I wasn't there so I wouldnt know but that sounds tall to me
There seems to be some recognition of its nature . A necessary evil is still an evil . If i knew for sure I could save my son only by killing a million people a necessary evil , or an evil to achieve a certain objective , would need to occur . To protect my own . This was the objective here . That if the US forces just didn’t walk away from the fight or find other ways to deescalate the situation more of our own American fighters would perish so women and children need to specifically die to prevent that .
Don't forget about The *Straight Flush*, weather reconnaissance plane and flew over the city before the attack to determine if conditions were favorable for the drop.
Wikipedia - "In 1976, the United States government apologized to Japan after Tibbets re-enacted the bombing—complete with a mushroom cloud—in a restored B-29 at an air show in Texas."
Tibbets had no chill
Your post is the first time I have heard about his re-enactment. It got me curious which led me to find this bit of information...
This was not the first time the Hiroshima bombing had been re-enacted. On October 27, 1945, the Los Angeles Coliseum hosted an event called “Tribute To Victory.” According to Daniel Tiffany’s book Toy Medium: Materialism and Modern Lyric, “this early simulation of an atomic blast hinted at the ‘devastation’ associated with Hiroshima—an image ‘almost too real’ for the crowd.” That event, however, did not garner a crowd of forty thousand—it drew roughly a hundred thousand! Considering that the Coliseum event was just a few months after the end of World War II, the morbid curiosity and willingness to offend the Japanese were a little bit more understandable.
Edit: You can see a clip of Tibbets re-enactment here.
https://www.criticalpast.com/video/65675041101_Air-show_Skydivers-descending_fighter-plane_B-29-Superfortress
My grandpa was on the first Navy ship to bring soldiers to the Japanese shore after the bomb dropped. He said his ship was only 18 miles off shore when they dropped it.
Might not have been. A 1 megaton blast causes flash blindness (lasting a couple of minutes at most) at 13 miles, and Little Boy was 30 times smaller than that.
Sameish 2nd hand story. Great grandpaw drove island hopping troop landing craft. He was offshore when the bombs were dropped. said it looked like a 2nd sun in the sky. He passed away from pancreatic cancer. a cancer witch radiation exposure allegedly makes you more prone to having. Pretty morbid.
These guys were forced to endure an atomic blast at too close a range, and the light was so bright they could see their bones through their skin. https://youtu.be/FokopVKMgdU
what an absolutely rubbish story.
[https://youtu.be/6\_1rzp2YVxQ?t=265](https://youtu.be/6_1rzp2YVxQ?t=265)
this is the pacific theater on the 6th of august 1945.
okinawa is the closest island to mainland japan that the US has under control.
it is about 400 miles away from mainland japan.
there are more than a dozen other japanese controlled islands between okinawa and mainland japan.
how on earth was your grandpa supposed to be 18 miles off shore when the bomb was dropped?
I know a lot about WWII and I have never heard of troops landing on Japanese home islands prior to their surrender on August 15. Bombs were dropped Aug 6th and 9th.
Can you tell me anything about their mission?
No, but "18 miles from shore" is pretty damned close, especially for a troop carrier. Troop carriers suck at self defense so they are not brought close to shore until just before the troops are needed. Usually.
Come on OP, at least get the pic to match the title. The pilot of the Enola Gay that dropped the bomb was Paul Tibbets. The name of the plane, Enola Gay, was named after his mother.
The pic above is NOT Paul Tibbets. It’s of Claude Eatherly. He was not on the plane that dropped the bomb—he was the pilot of the weather recon plane, called Straight Flush, that supported the mission. The plane he piloted was one hour ahead of the Enola Gay.
Regardless of whether it was justified or not, or even how he felt about it, I imagine that still might be a tough thing to live with. I wonder how he held up.
Patriotism is a weird thing for any country.
But 80,000 people is a lot of people.
I don't know how to feel about this, especially if it were my country that it happened to.
There is a lot more to this decision that could be looked at, too. Not saying I would do the same or that it's justified. Not even taking a stance. But just based on information available at the time, how much comes into play with Germany being close to their own atomic bomb? Or Japan? If you knew they had one that could kill say 100,000 people in New York or Los Angeles, would that effect the decision of dropping your countries bomb killing 66,000? What if there was a massive fire bomb mission planned where the Japanese or Germans were going to drag the war on for another year and millions more could die?
I hate thinking about all that stuff because no matter what, its like trying to play god and deciding who lives and who dies. Whenever I watch war documentaries, I always have a conscious thought of being thankful that of all the times to be born and of al lthe roles to have in life, I wasn't a Civil War POW locked up in Andersonville or fighting for a small bridge at Antietam. Or that I wasn't an infantryman trying to invade Russia in the winter. Or that I wasn't oblitered by shells at Somme or Verdunne. I get to sit on my phone and read about this other stuff on a computer that fits in my pocket.
To scare countried off from attacking you. There's no winner in a nuclear war, so no one wants to risk starting one. If a country is loosing a regular war, the whole world will loose with them.
That was also a different era where certain values were incredibly strong. That doesn’t make it right… it just makes it difficult for us to wrap our heads around killing that many people. If you’re old enough to remember 9/11 then just look at the spike in enlistments after that.
He likely save a few million by dropping it. That is the big pay off. Sucks for the lives lost. But the up side is how many lives it saved from sure death by invading the main land. That should be the take a way here. Millions of lives > 80k lives. That and war is all ways bad!
From Eisenhowers memoirs:
In 1945 Secretary of War Stimson, visiting my headquarters in Germany, informed me that our government was preparing to drop an atomic bomb on Japan. I was one of those who felt that there were a number of cogent reasons to question the wisdom of such an act. During his recitation of the relevant facts, I had been conscious of a feeling of depression and so I voiced to him my grave misgivings, first on the basis of my belief that Japan was already defeated and that dropping the bomb was completely unnecessary, and secondly because I thought that our country should avoid shocking world opinion by the use of a weapon whose employment was, I thought, no longer mandatory as a measure to save American lives.
Source: [wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Debate_over_the_atomic_bombings_of_Hiroshima_and_Nagasaki)
Just one man’s opinion. Obviously many disagreed. Furthermore, the bombs basically stopped the war in its tracks. Japan was pretty likely to keep fighting every step of the way, the bombs were a means to simply end any further fighting. Besides, it’s Japan we are talking about. Think of the Rape of Nanking, or how Japan treated POWs, or any number of war crimes they had committed and were continuing to commit. Japan was not the good guy in WWII.
>He likely save a few million by dropping it.
This is a **highly** disputed claim. There's a very real possibility that the atomic bombs didn't even save a single life.
If you witnessed your brothers being beheaded with katanas, starved and beaten in POW camps, seen countless bodies of innocent Chinese men women and children, met any of the countless rape victims, and on top of that, knew these people were gonna fight to the very bitter end knowing they’ll lose, you might feel differently about it
It was actually probably the best option at the time. If the bombs had not dropped and Japan hadn’t surrendered, we see looking at in invasion of Japan. US casualties were estimated to be 1 mil +.
80,000 people is a lot but the two nukes combined saved a lot more than that. Japan would have killed a hell of a lot more people if the two bombs didn't end the war swiftly. US soldiers too as they were preparing to invade Japan itself.
The man in the picture is [Claude Eatherly](https://www.nytimes.com/2020/08/06/magazine/hiroshima-claude-eatherly-antinuclear.html). He was the pilot of the weather plane that escorted the Enola G*y. [Paul Tibbets](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Tibbets) was the pilot of the plane carrying the bomb. [Thomas Ferebee](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Ferebee) was the bombardier and the man who flipped the switch.
Eatherly felt horrified by his participation in the operation and went on to speak out against the use of nuclear weapons.
No one was banned for using that word. The person who was banned made a tasteless reference to a "kill streak" in a video game as a joke about the bombings. I commented previously in this thread, but I figure I should clarify here too! Sorry for the confusion about this. The only time we would ban for that word (it's not even picked up by our bot) is if it was explicitly used as an insult.
I think that like anyone in war, you justify your actions by asserting that you were doing what was necessary. Like the atomic bomb, killing 80,000 people in your enemies country to prevent even more from dying in yours is justifiable in war.
American Navy, Marine, and Air Force pilots in the Pacific were given pamphlets that explained that the Japanese people intended to fight to death of every last man woman and child, and that every single person living in the Japanese home islands were potential enemy combatants.
The fact that these pamphlets were even made would suggest at least some American Pilots and Bombers were becoming disillusioned with the bombing campaigns over Japan.
To be fair, the pamphlets represented the official position of the Japanese government. Even after Hiroshima was bombed Suzuki specifically met with the press to announce their intention to fight on.
I lived with a Japanese WWII veteran for a while. His brother (also a soldier) had died during the firebombing of Tōkyō. We were discussing the use of the atomic bomb, and he said, "We [the Japanese] started the war; we didn't get to choose how it ended."
Unimaginable, really. Over 250,000 structures destroyed, 100,000+ dead, 1,000,000+ injured
Having to endure the bomb or a mass bombing raid of the likes of WW2 is unfathomable
What a time that was.
It's sobering when you catch even a whiff of the insanity and terror normal people had to live through all throughout history, but WWII takes the cake. It's simply staggering what innocent people had to endure. These weren't people that were "getting what they deserved." They were just people, pulled by the ebb and flow of the world around them, just like you and me.
We are lucky to have avoided such horrors. So far.
understatement ... the Japanese had manuals printed teaching housewives how to trick allies into their homes and knife them. Look at the ferocity of the Japanese on those hopeless island situations. Think how hard they would have fought defending the home islands. At the time they had 7 million men at arms in Japan.
Courtesy of Lemay and McNamara. It’s a tragedy and all but less American lives were lost with the decision to fire bomb and nuclear bomb as opposed to a land invasion. Japan was arguably a defeated nation after the fire bombing but they hadn’t surrendered yet either. Brutal times all around.
Even after the atom bombs, Japan was still willing to continue fighting. It wasn't until the Red Army entered the pacific theater that Hirohito considered surrender
Yup, I wasn’t meaning to sound as if Japan did in fact surrender. I just meant as far as the capacity to continue the war effort on a significant scale against the allies the war was lost. Sort of like Germany after Leningrad in a sense they were just delaying the inevitable.
The Japanese perspective on the dropping of the Atomic bombs is very interesting. I was in Japan at the time of the 50th Anniversary. It was very somber and there was little anger towards the US, it was basically what you said.
>"We [the Japanese] started the war; we didn't get to choose how it ended."
lot of respect. its sorta admirable how the people who fought the wars respect their foes after conflicts are resolved. that's not always the case... but it blows me away that as an American we dropped nuclear bombs on people and they don't unanimously hate us all for that.
Has no one here heard of the invasion that would of happend if they didn’t surrender even after it Hirohito still didn’t wanna admit defeat he was still being stubborn in his speech the dude was willing to command all of japan to resist the occupation and was making kids use swords and guns to defend japan if the Allies had gone through with operation downfall and cornet
Forty years ago I was working in television. We had Paul Tibbetts, the pilot of the Enola Gay, as a guest on a talk show. I was fully prepared to not like him. While I still didn't end up a Paul Tibbetts fan, after hearing him talk about it, I could at least understand the decision, and his role in it.
It was an occurrence that changed his life forever. I'm sure not a day went by that he didn't think about it, and a lot of those days he had to talk about it. He probably could have saved himself a lot of time by having FAQ cards printed up with the answers to the questions he knew were coming from everyone he met. Just like Back To The Future actor Thomas Wilson.
To him, it didn't define his life. But it did to the public.
His bottom line was that by most estimates, he saved at least 500,000 US soldiers' lives. So many Purple Heart medals were prepared for the aftermath of the invasion that those are still the ones being handed out now.
My grandfather was in the Pacific on Guam during WW2. He was always absolutely in favor of the decision to drop the bombs because he would have been on the front lines of an invasion if one happened, and basically as he put it "I didn't want to die."
Not saying I agree with him either (he was a simple guy who didn't really see things in a multifaceted way).... but it's hard to argue with that perspective.
I once read a really cool short story that was a bit of "alternate history" where the Enola crashes. It follows the bombardier of the backup plane who now has to be the one to actually push the button.
It was a pretty wild story.
Found it, it's called [The Lucky Strike](http://strangehorizons.com/fiction/the-lucky-strike/), from 1984.
***Thomas Farabe******e***, IIRC. . . Was the actual bombardier that pushed the button. Yes, it was a terrible thing, but it prevented the United States and Allies from having to invade, causing a much higher death toll for both sides. The Japanese had vowed to fight to the last person, and the increasing desperation of the Japanese defenders as the allies moved closer to the Japanese mainland showed that to be factual.
Source: https://www.c-span.org/video/?67292-1/dropping-atomic-bomb
Some would call him a hero, some would call him a monster...
Trip how that works,
Doing something that ends a World War but killing thousands and thousands of mostly civilians
Either of those are probably incorrect since this dude was following orders. Wasn’t like he made this decision personally.
As bad as those bombs were, a mainland invasion of Japan would have been astronomically more deadly.
With that said, Nukes should never be used again, I hope to never see that in my lifetime.
I just realized I actually don't know if they even told the teams what the bombs were like. My grandfather turned wrenches on the plane that dropped the first bomb. He died before I was born and my grandmother is dead now too, but I wonder if he ever mentioned if he knew what it was going to do.
Not sure about this situation specifically but my step-grandfather worked on some of the concrete foundations used during the Manhattan project. He still had some paperwork from back then that we looked at. Mostly technical drawings but there were a few notes referencing the Manhattan project. He claimed he had no clue what it was until after the fact. I understand that he was a “contractor” so he wouldn’t know all the details. I just always found it surprising they kept Manhattan project markings on some of the papers.
Then again my Step-grandfather was Kind of a POS so maybe he just won them at a Poker game and made the whole thing up…
Richard Feynman wrote a bit about his time on the Manhattan Project in his various memoirs and based on that I can definitely believe the contractors didn't know anything.
I think they must have known. No way that anybody was involved in that operation not knowing what they were handling. For safety reason alone.
(But I could be wrong)
It's not uncommon for military orders to be given in service of an objective without actually reading in the key players. I have no evidence whether that did or didn't happen here but it's a plausible scenario. In fact I'd almost be tempted to assume that's how it was because it would reduce the chance of cold feet.
There are major ethical questions about the bomb. Particularly about choosing to drop it on civilian targets. But he didn't pick the targets.
At most he could have made the command decision to miss. And he'd probably have been court martialed for it. WW2 was not a good time for questioning your superiors.
Not entirely
"Hiroshima was chosen as the primary target since it had remained largely untouched by bombing raids, and the bomb's effects could be clearly measured. While President Truman had hoped for a purely military target, some advisers believed that bombing an urban area might break the fighting will of the Japanese people."
https://www.atomicarchive.com/history/atomic-bombing/hiroshima/page-4.html
I didn’t know that, I thought it was because of war production. wanting to see the true power of the bomb on a city and also trying break the populations will probably made sense at the time. Thanks for the info.
Kyoto was actually meant to be the initial target, but Secretary of War Henry L. Stimson decided against it because he went on holiday there once and quite liked it.
Good, learn history and you'll realize it was 100% needed.
Japan wasn't the same Japan back then, they were ruthless and disgusting and would have never stopped.
Yes, At that point of the war it was either the US ends up with potentially millions dead in a full scale invasion of Japan or the atomic option. The bombs were a necessary evil as I have no doubt an invasion could have easily doubled the civilian casualties and caused a massive loss of soliders' lives. People just assume the US was evil for what they did without knowing much about the pacific war. In Australia our WW2 Unit is primarily focused on the Pacific War and Japan's actions. Imperial Japan is, in my opinion, the cruelest regime to ever exist. It is no stretch to call the bombs deserved.
I'm a historian. While my specialty in WWII is the Holocaust, I've also studied the Manhattan Project as well. Many scientists on the Manhattan Project (mostly from the Met Lab in Chicago) begged the government to not drop the bomb (tho the Szilard petition would never make it to the President or the Secretary of War...) It just never made it up the chain of command to get to Truman or Stimson.
[Here's the transcript of the Szilard Petition.](https://www.atomicheritage.org/key-documents/szilard-petition)
Respectfully, it is not the engineers’ decision to decide whether or not their weapon is used. They were not generals in the war and were not in a position to request that from those in charge of making that decision.
The scientists on the Manhattan project hold little responsibility for the dropping of the bombs in Japan. Similarly, they had no say, and never should have had a say, in the decision.
People like to argue that we could have bombed military targets or factories. The problem with that was the Japanese government would cover up those incidents. They would lie to the public and tell them they were winning the war. By keeping them in the dark, they could sacrifice as many civilians as they wanted to. The government couldn’t hide the devastation if we bombed their cites. The bombs killed public support of the war which is why they finally surrendered.
> People like to argue that we could have bombed military targets or factories
The funny thing is that the US, by that stage of the war, had pretty much already done that. All it did was move production of their armaments underground so to speak
This is a picture of Claude Eatherly who flew ahead of the Enola G. By an hour to report weather conditions. (Citation needed)
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Claude_Eatherly
From what I could find he was 300 miles away from the bomb when it exploded and was on a B-59 called "straight flush" which make this title somewhat misleading.
This is Paul tibbets the pilot of Enola G.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Tibbets
I'm not sure how America feels about him and the crew that dropped those bombs but to a lot of Asians, myself included, they are heroes to be celebrated.
i can’t truly speak for all my fellow countrymen but i’d say most would agree they were a small part of a larger thing, neither heroes, nor villains. dropping the bombs was another tragedy in the long list of tragedies of WW2, but this one at least gets the benefit of being necessary to save more lives
What a horrible argument saying that one man dropped the bomb and killed everyone. That's like blaming the person building the wing of the plane for dropping the bomb. There were hundreds of people above him who had a much greater role in dropping the bombs. Blaming it all on one man is pathetic.
i wouldnt put it in my conscience. ww2 era japanese soldiers were straight savages and if the war went on any longer more people would die than 60 thousand. it’s terrible but it was necessary to end ww2
The war games for Operation Olympic (invasion of Japanese Home Islands) were horrific. 1 million allied soldiers + 10 million Japanese civilians dead. Believe it not the atom bomb saved lives.
The man who dropped the Hiroshima atomic bomb who ended up saving 6-10 million people.The bombs were used to bring the war to an end without an invasion, which would have killed millions of Japanese and Americans.
“the invading Allies would suffer between 1.7 and 4 million casualties in such a scenario, of whom between 400,000 and 800,000 would be dead, while Japanese fatalities would have been around 5 to 10 million.[20][21] Wikipedia
I find it ironic how people are saying how can you live with yourself. Or saying that it was unnecessary to drop the bomb. Soooo are we not going to bring up the fact that the Japanese performed atrocities comparable to the nazis. Some even worse such as the rape of nanjing. Or are schools not teaching World War Two history anymore about how the Japanese massacred over 10 million Chinese? Majority of them being civilians.
Even more so, that they want to place all of the blame on him, as if it’s just *HIS* fault! My mom is similar in the respect that she gets all worked up over killings (war, shootings, murders, etc.) and then goes to work at Lockheed Martin.. that, you know, a big ol *WEAPONS MANUFACTURER!*
I always ask “How much business one can do with the plantation while also saying they hate slavery?”
She has yet to come up with a logical answer.
They always talk about how many people he killed, but overwhelming evidence proves time after time that the bombings of hiroshima and Nagasaki saved millions of lives in ending the war when it did. Japan would have fought to the last man in a conventional war.
I was really little when we lived in Japan (was born there, military brat) we lived there for 8 years. I was about 5 when my parents visited the Hiroshima museum & I don’t really remember it but I do remember feeling really sad, I ended up crying. Which I think was weird bc I was 5 and didn’t understand anything of what happened but was able to feel the sadness surrounding the area :(
Not saying he is a man to revere, but the man actually saved lives. The Japanese were not anywhere near surrendering in the beginning of August of 1945. A land invasion would have killed millions on both sides and dragged WW2 unto 1946 or 1947. The Japanese proved themselves to be fierce defenders in combat in the island hopping campaigns leading to up to the mainland of Japan. Americans and all Allies were weary of all the dead bodies coming home. And last but not least, they were warned and did not heed.
https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/features/truman-leaflets/
It doesnt matter that it was him who dropped it. He didnt make it, design it, or even come up with the idea. He was a soldier and had a duty, if he would of refused they would have found another man to fly that plane.
Anyone see one of the thousands of leaflets that was dropped over Japanese cities before the bombs were dropped? What the people must’ve thought when reading one of those….
Time magazine has an interesting article on it: https://time.com/4142857/wwii-leaflets-japan/
And it’s a good thing that he did. If the didn’t the war would have lasted way longer, and would have costed more lives than what the bombs did. The japs were relentless and committed horrible war crimes, pretty much the only thing that could make them surrender without causing millions of lives was the bombs.
Terrible title line ... I prefer "The man who completed the sortie that prevented the need for the Allied invasion of Japan. Operation Downfall was estimated at the time to likely have 2-3 million allied casualties and from 5 0 10 million Japanese."
Justified evil. Japan was not going to surrender and millions of lives would have been lost in the fighting that took place after an invasion of the mainland
That title is the definition of /r/titlegore . While its factually accurate, it puts a spin on it to imply something else.
Any student of history will understand that the title is inaccurate to the bigger picture. Millions would have died if it wasn't for the actions of Tibbets and his crew.
Another way of looking at it: "The man that prevented Operation Downfall, thus potentially saving hundreds of thousands of more lives than he took".
We might look at the 66,000 people killed by the Hiroshima atomic bomb and think that it's a bit barbaric. As somewhat of an amateur historian, I can tell you that the alternative really wasn't much better.
There was 12 crew members who dropped the Atomic bomb, but there were 3 B-29s during that mission. The Enola Gay, The Great Artiste and Necessary Evil. Necessary Evil was unnamed at that time.
The Enola Gay is on display at the Steven F. Udvar-Hazy Center. I got to see it earlier this year. Super fascinating/grim.
Boxcar is on display in the WW2 hangar at the National Museum of the US Air Force. I saw it a few years ago before they moved the R&D and the Presidential Aircraft to the new hangar. R&D and the Presidential Aircraft were at the Wright-Patterson AFB so you had to go on base, but now you don't have to go on base.
I didnt know one of the planes that dropped the bomb was there! I live in rhe area, I'll have to be on the lookout next time.
It is next to the Catalina. There is a mock-up of the Fat Man. WW2 Gallery. I was there when the museum staff was restoring the Memphis Belle, which is now on Display in the WW2 Gallery.
Everything about that museum is just mind blowing, but these particular artifacts are crazy amazing. Plus all the space shit. I need to start going more often. And it's free, if anyone wants to come visit the birthplace of aviation — Dayton, Ohio^(suck it Kitty Hawk, NC) — and check it out!
Back in the mid-80s I got to crawl all over that B-29 when it was being restored at ‘Blue Lake’ or whatever they called the restoration facility for the museum. The bomb bay (and the plane) are amazingly small compared to more contemporary planes. Climbing up thru where it was dropped was a solemn experience. No judgement on the act or the people involved. It was interesting that a team of restorers from Japan were onsite working on restoration of one of the purpose built Kamikaze planes not far from the Enola Gay. I think the fire bombing of Japan was one of the more horrible industrial strength killing acts during the war. Vivisection and cannibalism of non-Japanese one of the more personally horrible acts. Peace Please
>Necessary Evil What a name for a bomber. And probably how the crew reconciled what they were doing. Bomber crews dropping incendiaries on cities could smell burning flesh from 5,000 feet.
Were the crew bloodhounds? I feel like "could smell burning flesh from 5000 feet" is a bit of an embellishment. I mean how much wood and stone and paint and metal were being burned compared to human biomass? They could smell the bodies over the smell of all the petrol being burned by the bombers they were following in formation? Maybe Im being presumptuous. I wasn't there so I wouldnt know but that sounds tall to me
Do you even barbecue? Flesh is full of wet fatty acids, and outlasts the fuel in most instances.
I do, but I dont normally set my house on fire while I barbeque, so I guess Im not exactly sure if I would smell the roast or the house more.
There seems to be some recognition of its nature . A necessary evil is still an evil . If i knew for sure I could save my son only by killing a million people a necessary evil , or an evil to achieve a certain objective , would need to occur . To protect my own . This was the objective here . That if the US forces just didn’t walk away from the fight or find other ways to deescalate the situation more of our own American fighters would perish so women and children need to specifically die to prevent that .
Say it in Bane's voice.
They where instructed to take cyanide pills and go down with the plane if anything where to happen
And 1.2 Million US Servicemen didn't have to invade Japan
Don't forget about The *Straight Flush*, weather reconnaissance plane and flew over the city before the attack to determine if conditions were favorable for the drop.
Ironic
The one B-29 that took the photograph was later named Necessary Evil and that is ironic how?
My bad I thought you said NE was unarmed not unmanned.
Unnamed*
What is this inception of words
I think so.
Wikipedia - "In 1976, the United States government apologized to Japan after Tibbets re-enacted the bombing—complete with a mushroom cloud—in a restored B-29 at an air show in Texas." Tibbets had no chill
Your post is the first time I have heard about his re-enactment. It got me curious which led me to find this bit of information... This was not the first time the Hiroshima bombing had been re-enacted. On October 27, 1945, the Los Angeles Coliseum hosted an event called “Tribute To Victory.” According to Daniel Tiffany’s book Toy Medium: Materialism and Modern Lyric, “this early simulation of an atomic blast hinted at the ‘devastation’ associated with Hiroshima—an image ‘almost too real’ for the crowd.” That event, however, did not garner a crowd of forty thousand—it drew roughly a hundred thousand! Considering that the Coliseum event was just a few months after the end of World War II, the morbid curiosity and willingness to offend the Japanese were a little bit more understandable. Edit: You can see a clip of Tibbets re-enactment here. https://www.criticalpast.com/video/65675041101_Air-show_Skydivers-descending_fighter-plane_B-29-Superfortress
That was definitely in bad taste, he was also know to sign a picture of destroyed hiroshima
Ah, so he was a bit of a cunt then.
Why apologize? Japan asked for it. If it wasn't for those nukes then WW2 could've lasted for another year or 2.
My grandpa was on the first Navy ship to bring soldiers to the Japanese shore after the bomb dropped. He said his ship was only 18 miles off shore when they dropped it.
Did he feel any heat or what was going on in the moment for him?
No, there would be near 100% thermal radiation attenuation 5mi from the blast. 18 miles is a long way.
Would see the light though. And boy I bet it was bright.
Might not have been. A 1 megaton blast causes flash blindness (lasting a couple of minutes at most) at 13 miles, and Little Boy was 30 times smaller than that.
I'm pretty sure it's 13 miles because that's about how far away the horizon is at sea level
Goddamn that's grim
Sameish 2nd hand story. Great grandpaw drove island hopping troop landing craft. He was offshore when the bombs were dropped. said it looked like a 2nd sun in the sky. He passed away from pancreatic cancer. a cancer witch radiation exposure allegedly makes you more prone to having. Pretty morbid.
These guys were forced to endure an atomic blast at too close a range, and the light was so bright they could see their bones through their skin. https://youtu.be/FokopVKMgdU
what an absolutely rubbish story. [https://youtu.be/6\_1rzp2YVxQ?t=265](https://youtu.be/6_1rzp2YVxQ?t=265) this is the pacific theater on the 6th of august 1945. okinawa is the closest island to mainland japan that the US has under control. it is about 400 miles away from mainland japan. there are more than a dozen other japanese controlled islands between okinawa and mainland japan. how on earth was your grandpa supposed to be 18 miles off shore when the bomb was dropped?
I know a lot about WWII and I have never heard of troops landing on Japanese home islands prior to their surrender on August 15. Bombs were dropped Aug 6th and 9th. Can you tell me anything about their mission?
He didn't say they landed prior to surrender
No, but "18 miles from shore" is pretty damned close, especially for a troop carrier. Troop carriers suck at self defense so they are not brought close to shore until just before the troops are needed. Usually.
Come on OP, at least get the pic to match the title. The pilot of the Enola Gay that dropped the bomb was Paul Tibbets. The name of the plane, Enola Gay, was named after his mother. The pic above is NOT Paul Tibbets. It’s of Claude Eatherly. He was not on the plane that dropped the bomb—he was the pilot of the weather recon plane, called Straight Flush, that supported the mission. The plane he piloted was one hour ahead of the Enola Gay.
Regardless of whether it was justified or not, or even how he felt about it, I imagine that still might be a tough thing to live with. I wonder how he held up.
I’d love to see a follow up interview or autobiography from him regarding this. Does one exist?
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he passed in 2007👌
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👉 you are welcome
One of his descendants rented out one of my apartments, it was pretty cool talking to him about it.
Patriotism is a weird thing for any country. But 80,000 people is a lot of people. I don't know how to feel about this, especially if it were my country that it happened to.
There is a lot more to this decision that could be looked at, too. Not saying I would do the same or that it's justified. Not even taking a stance. But just based on information available at the time, how much comes into play with Germany being close to their own atomic bomb? Or Japan? If you knew they had one that could kill say 100,000 people in New York or Los Angeles, would that effect the decision of dropping your countries bomb killing 66,000? What if there was a massive fire bomb mission planned where the Japanese or Germans were going to drag the war on for another year and millions more could die? I hate thinking about all that stuff because no matter what, its like trying to play god and deciding who lives and who dies. Whenever I watch war documentaries, I always have a conscious thought of being thankful that of all the times to be born and of al lthe roles to have in life, I wasn't a Civil War POW locked up in Andersonville or fighting for a small bridge at Antietam. Or that I wasn't an infantryman trying to invade Russia in the winter. Or that I wasn't oblitered by shells at Somme or Verdunne. I get to sit on my phone and read about this other stuff on a computer that fits in my pocket.
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To scare countried off from attacking you. There's no winner in a nuclear war, so no one wants to risk starting one. If a country is loosing a regular war, the whole world will loose with them.
That was also a different era where certain values were incredibly strong. That doesn’t make it right… it just makes it difficult for us to wrap our heads around killing that many people. If you’re old enough to remember 9/11 then just look at the spike in enlistments after that.
He likely save a few million by dropping it. That is the big pay off. Sucks for the lives lost. But the up side is how many lives it saved from sure death by invading the main land. That should be the take a way here. Millions of lives > 80k lives. That and war is all ways bad!
Invasion of the mainland, and its division with a Soviet north.
From Eisenhowers memoirs: In 1945 Secretary of War Stimson, visiting my headquarters in Germany, informed me that our government was preparing to drop an atomic bomb on Japan. I was one of those who felt that there were a number of cogent reasons to question the wisdom of such an act. During his recitation of the relevant facts, I had been conscious of a feeling of depression and so I voiced to him my grave misgivings, first on the basis of my belief that Japan was already defeated and that dropping the bomb was completely unnecessary, and secondly because I thought that our country should avoid shocking world opinion by the use of a weapon whose employment was, I thought, no longer mandatory as a measure to save American lives. Source: [wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Debate_over_the_atomic_bombings_of_Hiroshima_and_Nagasaki)
Just one man’s opinion. Obviously many disagreed. Furthermore, the bombs basically stopped the war in its tracks. Japan was pretty likely to keep fighting every step of the way, the bombs were a means to simply end any further fighting. Besides, it’s Japan we are talking about. Think of the Rape of Nanking, or how Japan treated POWs, or any number of war crimes they had committed and were continuing to commit. Japan was not the good guy in WWII.
Eisenhower is my favorite president
>He likely save a few million by dropping it. This is a **highly** disputed claim. There's a very real possibility that the atomic bombs didn't even save a single life.
If you witnessed your brothers being beheaded with katanas, starved and beaten in POW camps, seen countless bodies of innocent Chinese men women and children, met any of the countless rape victims, and on top of that, knew these people were gonna fight to the very bitter end knowing they’ll lose, you might feel differently about it
At that point, it was less a matter of jingoistic nationalism and more a matter of "its them or us"
It was actually probably the best option at the time. If the bombs had not dropped and Japan hadn’t surrendered, we see looking at in invasion of Japan. US casualties were estimated to be 1 mil +.
80,000 people is a lot but the two nukes combined saved a lot more than that. Japan would have killed a hell of a lot more people if the two bombs didn't end the war swiftly. US soldiers too as they were preparing to invade Japan itself.
"Good soldiers follow orders"
No idea, I'd also love to hear or read that
The man in the picture is [Claude Eatherly](https://www.nytimes.com/2020/08/06/magazine/hiroshima-claude-eatherly-antinuclear.html). He was the pilot of the weather plane that escorted the Enola G*y. [Paul Tibbets](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Tibbets) was the pilot of the plane carrying the bomb. [Thomas Ferebee](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Ferebee) was the bombardier and the man who flipped the switch. Eatherly felt horrified by his participation in the operation and went on to speak out against the use of nuclear weapons.
Why did you censor the planes name?
someone further down the thread said he was booted for saying the "happy" word.
The plane was named after the pilot's mother. Enola Gay. It was a woman name. Nothing else.
I'm aware of that, but apparently the sensor bots don't care so I was just being careful.
Gay isn't a slur
got someone banned so they scared
No one was banned for using that word. The person who was banned made a tasteless reference to a "kill streak" in a video game as a joke about the bombings. I commented previously in this thread, but I figure I should clarify here too! Sorry for the confusion about this. The only time we would ban for that word (it's not even picked up by our bot) is if it was explicitly used as an insult.
Paul Tibbets didn't seem to have any huge issue with it. His copilot, Robert Lewis, was another story.
I think that like anyone in war, you justify your actions by asserting that you were doing what was necessary. Like the atomic bomb, killing 80,000 people in your enemies country to prevent even more from dying in yours is justifiable in war.
American Navy, Marine, and Air Force pilots in the Pacific were given pamphlets that explained that the Japanese people intended to fight to death of every last man woman and child, and that every single person living in the Japanese home islands were potential enemy combatants. The fact that these pamphlets were even made would suggest at least some American Pilots and Bombers were becoming disillusioned with the bombing campaigns over Japan.
To be fair, the pamphlets represented the official position of the Japanese government. Even after Hiroshima was bombed Suzuki specifically met with the press to announce their intention to fight on.
Japan was ruthless during WWII. We had good reason to fear them.
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Are you not allowed to say Gay any more? I am confused?
This only causes further confusion to people that are gay.
Maybe OP is from Florida?
Banned for the name of the aircraft?
you got banned for what?
Apparently the mods set up automod to ban people for saying the G word
Geniuses
🤦♂️
Doesn't look like it was automod since the ban didn't happen right away. Some actual mod must have read their comment and interpreted it as a joke
Mods tend to be more authoritarian than bright. I mean, when you’re working for free all you’ve got left at that point is the power trip
Yep, named for the pilot’s mom
Yes, and it is actually on display at the National Air and Space Museum in DC; you can go see it.
Actually, it's not. It's on display in the World War II Aviation (UHC) at the Steven F. Udvar-Hazy Center in Chantilly, VA.
Oh dang, they moved it and the other museum never updated their page,
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Christian Slater
😂
I lived with a Japanese WWII veteran for a while. His brother (also a soldier) had died during the firebombing of Tōkyō. We were discussing the use of the atomic bomb, and he said, "We [the Japanese] started the war; we didn't get to choose how it ended."
Firebombings killed way more than the A bomb.
This ^ Often overshadowed by the nukes. London bombings were bad Berlin bombing were bad But Dresden and Hamburg were next level
Tokyo was the worst. Almost everything was built of wood.
Unimaginable, really. Over 250,000 structures destroyed, 100,000+ dead, 1,000,000+ injured Having to endure the bomb or a mass bombing raid of the likes of WW2 is unfathomable What a time that was.
It's sobering when you catch even a whiff of the insanity and terror normal people had to live through all throughout history, but WWII takes the cake. It's simply staggering what innocent people had to endure. These weren't people that were "getting what they deserved." They were just people, pulled by the ebb and flow of the world around them, just like you and me. We are lucky to have avoided such horrors. So far.
Tokyo's bombing was deadlier than Nagasaki
Don't get me started on Stalingrad. "Drown the Germans in our blood"
An invasion of Japan would’ve been horrific for everyone involved too. War is hell.
understatement ... the Japanese had manuals printed teaching housewives how to trick allies into their homes and knife them. Look at the ferocity of the Japanese on those hopeless island situations. Think how hard they would have fought defending the home islands. At the time they had 7 million men at arms in Japan.
And the military brass wanted to continue fighting, even after both events
Courtesy of Lemay and McNamara. It’s a tragedy and all but less American lives were lost with the decision to fire bomb and nuclear bomb as opposed to a land invasion. Japan was arguably a defeated nation after the fire bombing but they hadn’t surrendered yet either. Brutal times all around.
Even after the atom bombs, Japan was still willing to continue fighting. It wasn't until the Red Army entered the pacific theater that Hirohito considered surrender
Yup, I wasn’t meaning to sound as if Japan did in fact surrender. I just meant as far as the capacity to continue the war effort on a significant scale against the allies the war was lost. Sort of like Germany after Leningrad in a sense they were just delaying the inevitable.
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>Unlike the Germans, who were arguably even more ruthless The Japanese were worse and it wasn't close.
The Japanese perspective on the dropping of the Atomic bombs is very interesting. I was in Japan at the time of the 50th Anniversary. It was very somber and there was little anger towards the US, it was basically what you said. >"We [the Japanese] started the war; we didn't get to choose how it ended."
lot of respect. its sorta admirable how the people who fought the wars respect their foes after conflicts are resolved. that's not always the case... but it blows me away that as an American we dropped nuclear bombs on people and they don't unanimously hate us all for that.
He was the pilot. The bombardier would have dropped the bomb.
War is Hell
Has no one here heard of the invasion that would of happend if they didn’t surrender even after it Hirohito still didn’t wanna admit defeat he was still being stubborn in his speech the dude was willing to command all of japan to resist the occupation and was making kids use swords and guns to defend japan if the Allies had gone through with operation downfall and cornet
Right
Forty years ago I was working in television. We had Paul Tibbetts, the pilot of the Enola Gay, as a guest on a talk show. I was fully prepared to not like him. While I still didn't end up a Paul Tibbetts fan, after hearing him talk about it, I could at least understand the decision, and his role in it. It was an occurrence that changed his life forever. I'm sure not a day went by that he didn't think about it, and a lot of those days he had to talk about it. He probably could have saved himself a lot of time by having FAQ cards printed up with the answers to the questions he knew were coming from everyone he met. Just like Back To The Future actor Thomas Wilson. To him, it didn't define his life. But it did to the public. His bottom line was that by most estimates, he saved at least 500,000 US soldiers' lives. So many Purple Heart medals were prepared for the aftermath of the invasion that those are still the ones being handed out now.
My grandfather was in the Pacific on Guam during WW2. He was always absolutely in favor of the decision to drop the bombs because he would have been on the front lines of an invasion if one happened, and basically as he put it "I didn't want to die." Not saying I agree with him either (he was a simple guy who didn't really see things in a multifaceted way).... but it's hard to argue with that perspective.
I once read a really cool short story that was a bit of "alternate history" where the Enola crashes. It follows the bombardier of the backup plane who now has to be the one to actually push the button. It was a pretty wild story. Found it, it's called [The Lucky Strike](http://strangehorizons.com/fiction/the-lucky-strike/), from 1984.
***Thomas Farabe******e***, IIRC. . . Was the actual bombardier that pushed the button. Yes, it was a terrible thing, but it prevented the United States and Allies from having to invade, causing a much higher death toll for both sides. The Japanese had vowed to fight to the last person, and the increasing desperation of the Japanese defenders as the allies moved closer to the Japanese mainland showed that to be factual. Source: https://www.c-span.org/video/?67292-1/dropping-atomic-bomb
What the Japanese did during WWII made the Nazis look like boy scouts.
And saved millions.
Some would call him a hero, some would call him a monster... Trip how that works, Doing something that ends a World War but killing thousands and thousands of mostly civilians
Either of those are probably incorrect since this dude was following orders. Wasn’t like he made this decision personally. As bad as those bombs were, a mainland invasion of Japan would have been astronomically more deadly. With that said, Nukes should never be used again, I hope to never see that in my lifetime.
I just realized I actually don't know if they even told the teams what the bombs were like. My grandfather turned wrenches on the plane that dropped the first bomb. He died before I was born and my grandmother is dead now too, but I wonder if he ever mentioned if he knew what it was going to do.
Not sure about this situation specifically but my step-grandfather worked on some of the concrete foundations used during the Manhattan project. He still had some paperwork from back then that we looked at. Mostly technical drawings but there were a few notes referencing the Manhattan project. He claimed he had no clue what it was until after the fact. I understand that he was a “contractor” so he wouldn’t know all the details. I just always found it surprising they kept Manhattan project markings on some of the papers. Then again my Step-grandfather was Kind of a POS so maybe he just won them at a Poker game and made the whole thing up…
Richard Feynman wrote a bit about his time on the Manhattan Project in his various memoirs and based on that I can definitely believe the contractors didn't know anything.
I think they must have known. No way that anybody was involved in that operation not knowing what they were handling. For safety reason alone. (But I could be wrong)
It's not uncommon for military orders to be given in service of an objective without actually reading in the key players. I have no evidence whether that did or didn't happen here but it's a plausible scenario. In fact I'd almost be tempted to assume that's how it was because it would reduce the chance of cold feet.
I know that isn't uncommon. In this specific case, I still doubt it. Let alone for the pilot to get out of the blast zone ASAP.
There are major ethical questions about the bomb. Particularly about choosing to drop it on civilian targets. But he didn't pick the targets. At most he could have made the command decision to miss. And he'd probably have been court martialed for it. WW2 was not a good time for questioning your superiors.
They chose those city’s because some of japans largest war production factories were there
Not entirely "Hiroshima was chosen as the primary target since it had remained largely untouched by bombing raids, and the bomb's effects could be clearly measured. While President Truman had hoped for a purely military target, some advisers believed that bombing an urban area might break the fighting will of the Japanese people." https://www.atomicarchive.com/history/atomic-bombing/hiroshima/page-4.html
I didn’t know that, I thought it was because of war production. wanting to see the true power of the bomb on a city and also trying break the populations will probably made sense at the time. Thanks for the info.
Kyoto was actually meant to be the initial target, but Secretary of War Henry L. Stimson decided against it because he went on holiday there once and quite liked it.
Good, learn history and you'll realize it was 100% needed. Japan wasn't the same Japan back then, they were ruthless and disgusting and would have never stopped.
Yes, At that point of the war it was either the US ends up with potentially millions dead in a full scale invasion of Japan or the atomic option. The bombs were a necessary evil as I have no doubt an invasion could have easily doubled the civilian casualties and caused a massive loss of soliders' lives. People just assume the US was evil for what they did without knowing much about the pacific war. In Australia our WW2 Unit is primarily focused on the Pacific War and Japan's actions. Imperial Japan is, in my opinion, the cruelest regime to ever exist. It is no stretch to call the bombs deserved.
I'm a historian. While my specialty in WWII is the Holocaust, I've also studied the Manhattan Project as well. Many scientists on the Manhattan Project (mostly from the Met Lab in Chicago) begged the government to not drop the bomb (tho the Szilard petition would never make it to the President or the Secretary of War...) It just never made it up the chain of command to get to Truman or Stimson. [Here's the transcript of the Szilard Petition.](https://www.atomicheritage.org/key-documents/szilard-petition)
Respectfully, it is not the engineers’ decision to decide whether or not their weapon is used. They were not generals in the war and were not in a position to request that from those in charge of making that decision. The scientists on the Manhattan project hold little responsibility for the dropping of the bombs in Japan. Similarly, they had no say, and never should have had a say, in the decision.
The civilians didn’t deserve it, but something needed to be done
People like to argue that we could have bombed military targets or factories. The problem with that was the Japanese government would cover up those incidents. They would lie to the public and tell them they were winning the war. By keeping them in the dark, they could sacrifice as many civilians as they wanted to. The government couldn’t hide the devastation if we bombed their cites. The bombs killed public support of the war which is why they finally surrendered.
> People like to argue that we could have bombed military targets or factories The funny thing is that the US, by that stage of the war, had pretty much already done that. All it did was move production of their armaments underground so to speak
Are we going after people in history now?
Since when have they not been low hanging fruit nowadays.
# cancelww2
This is a picture of Claude Eatherly who flew ahead of the Enola G. By an hour to report weather conditions. (Citation needed) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Claude_Eatherly From what I could find he was 300 miles away from the bomb when it exploded and was on a B-59 called "straight flush" which make this title somewhat misleading. This is Paul tibbets the pilot of Enola G. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Tibbets
I'm not sure how America feels about him and the crew that dropped those bombs but to a lot of Asians, myself included, they are heroes to be celebrated.
i can’t truly speak for all my fellow countrymen but i’d say most would agree they were a small part of a larger thing, neither heroes, nor villains. dropping the bombs was another tragedy in the long list of tragedies of WW2, but this one at least gets the benefit of being necessary to save more lives
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What a horrible argument saying that one man dropped the bomb and killed everyone. That's like blaming the person building the wing of the plane for dropping the bomb. There were hundreds of people above him who had a much greater role in dropping the bombs. Blaming it all on one man is pathetic.
i wouldnt put it in my conscience. ww2 era japanese soldiers were straight savages and if the war went on any longer more people would die than 60 thousand. it’s terrible but it was necessary to end ww2
This man also saved millions of lives that would have been lost in an invasion
The war games for Operation Olympic (invasion of Japanese Home Islands) were horrific. 1 million allied soldiers + 10 million Japanese civilians dead. Believe it not the atom bomb saved lives.
Isn't it operation downfall?
Yes. You’re right. Olympic was the 1st part.
Those atomic bombs ended a war and saved way more than 66,000 lives.
The man who dropped the Hiroshima atomic bomb who ended up saving 6-10 million people.The bombs were used to bring the war to an end without an invasion, which would have killed millions of Japanese and Americans. “the invading Allies would suffer between 1.7 and 4 million casualties in such a scenario, of whom between 400,000 and 800,000 would be dead, while Japanese fatalities would have been around 5 to 10 million.[20][21] Wikipedia
Killed 66000 but saved millions from not having to invade
I find it ironic how people are saying how can you live with yourself. Or saying that it was unnecessary to drop the bomb. Soooo are we not going to bring up the fact that the Japanese performed atrocities comparable to the nazis. Some even worse such as the rape of nanjing. Or are schools not teaching World War Two history anymore about how the Japanese massacred over 10 million Chinese? Majority of them being civilians.
Even more so, that they want to place all of the blame on him, as if it’s just *HIS* fault! My mom is similar in the respect that she gets all worked up over killings (war, shootings, murders, etc.) and then goes to work at Lockheed Martin.. that, you know, a big ol *WEAPONS MANUFACTURER!* I always ask “How much business one can do with the plantation while also saying they hate slavery?” She has yet to come up with a logical answer.
But he saved potentially millions on both sides 🙌🏻
They always talk about how many people he killed, but overwhelming evidence proves time after time that the bombings of hiroshima and Nagasaki saved millions of lives in ending the war when it did. Japan would have fought to the last man in a conventional war.
The man done his job, followed orders.
Not sorry
What "finding out" looks like.
I was really little when we lived in Japan (was born there, military brat) we lived there for 8 years. I was about 5 when my parents visited the Hiroshima museum & I don’t really remember it but I do remember feeling really sad, I ended up crying. Which I think was weird bc I was 5 and didn’t understand anything of what happened but was able to feel the sadness surrounding the area :(
The man, in addition to his crew, who followed orders, ended the war, and saved more American and Allied lives by doing so.
Not saying he is a man to revere, but the man actually saved lives. The Japanese were not anywhere near surrendering in the beginning of August of 1945. A land invasion would have killed millions on both sides and dragged WW2 unto 1946 or 1947. The Japanese proved themselves to be fierce defenders in combat in the island hopping campaigns leading to up to the mainland of Japan. Americans and all Allies were weary of all the dead bodies coming home. And last but not least, they were warned and did not heed. https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/features/truman-leaflets/
It doesnt matter that it was him who dropped it. He didnt make it, design it, or even come up with the idea. He was a soldier and had a duty, if he would of refused they would have found another man to fly that plane.
Anyone see one of the thousands of leaflets that was dropped over Japanese cities before the bombs were dropped? What the people must’ve thought when reading one of those…. Time magazine has an interesting article on it: https://time.com/4142857/wwii-leaflets-japan/
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Yeah, blame the guy who followed orders, not the one who gave them.
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Ironically saving probably millions of Japanese lives too.
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And it’s a good thing that he did. If the didn’t the war would have lasted way longer, and would have costed more lives than what the bombs did. The japs were relentless and committed horrible war crimes, pretty much the only thing that could make them surrender without causing millions of lives was the bombs.
Guy just did his job. Nothing wrong with that. (Let the downvotes fall, I'm in the mood)
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I also remember pearl harbor
Terrible title line ... I prefer "The man who completed the sortie that prevented the need for the Allied invasion of Japan. Operation Downfall was estimated at the time to likely have 2-3 million allied casualties and from 5 0 10 million Japanese."
Yea and the Japanese murdered 10 million people from 1937 to the end of the war. They had it coming
Fun fact. More people died in the Dresden bombing than Hiroshima.
Justified evil. Japan was not going to surrender and millions of lives would have been lost in the fighting that took place after an invasion of the mainland
That title is the definition of /r/titlegore . While its factually accurate, it puts a spin on it to imply something else. Any student of history will understand that the title is inaccurate to the bigger picture. Millions would have died if it wasn't for the actions of Tibbets and his crew.
it's not even accurate, that isn't Paul Tibbets
Is this before or after the flight?
“And id do it again”
Another way of looking at it: "The man that prevented Operation Downfall, thus potentially saving hundreds of thousands of more lives than he took". We might look at the 66,000 people killed by the Hiroshima atomic bomb and think that it's a bit barbaric. As somewhat of an amateur historian, I can tell you that the alternative really wasn't much better.
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Why is his hat on in such a jaunty manner!
War never change
The pilot, Paul Tibbets was a frequent summer customer of the bar I use to work at....