My dad was nine at the time and credits the bomb with saving the lives of a) probably his Uncle Victor and b) certainly his brother Bob. Bob had just turned 18 and had graduated HS early, in January 1945; he and his class were promptly marched down to the Kingsbridge Armory in the Bronx to be sworn into the armed forces. Bob ended up a gunner in the Pacific in the last days of the war and would probably have been in the first wave of Operation Downfall. Vic was in the Phillipines and had to deal with seeing the horrible effects the Japanese occupation had had on the civilians.
Dad said today, while reading Tibbett’s obit, that even to a kid the example of Okinawa loomed large; the 150,000 estimated civilian casualties there were well-known, and had been taken into account as the country braced for Downfall. He had no problem calling Tibbetts a hero.
I must say, without as much cheerfulness as he had, that I agree.
Unfortunately, that is the truth, and, I’m sure, the only way a lot of guys made it through the rest of their lives. They could not be selective, like the guys nowadays with their “smart” bombs. They did what they could with what they had to end their war. If the deaths of civilians crossed their minds, they made that fateful balance with the lives of their own. This was not like Auchwitz. They were not killing captives, but people who would be arrayed against soldiers invading Japan and people whose work was furthering the aims of the people who were trying to kill the fliers trying to kill them. The recognition that a modern NATION at war was the enemy, not just the soldiers immediately fighting the war, was how modern, total warfare differed from warfare in the past.
[aside] On a tour of the Air Force Museum, I was allowed aboard Bockscar because a member of my club had been its navigator. I was impressed not by its role in history, but by it being exactly like every other B-29 built. Arendt’s “banality of evil” came to my mind; that this aircraft, by which so many people had been killed, was just another airplane. THAT was what was creepy. [/aside]
Also, I suspect there is a divide between those of us who realize we would quite possibly be here today had The Bombs not been dropped and those a generation removed who do not realize the same. “Would,” not “could;” there is a STRONG chance that my father would’ve been retrained to fly the B-29 and those whse dads were on the ground stood a MUCH LOWER chance of survival. The Japanese people were preparing for it. Study your history, kids, of ALL the sides, before you cast judgement.
My understanding is that the crews of the Enola Gay and Bock’s Car followed their planes along the assembly line as they were being built. They knew from the beginning that Something Big Was Up[sup]TM[/sup].
It was, however, not the missions which dropped the atomic bombs on Japan that ended the war (though without them the ending would have come much later), it was this one.
Tibbets was a hero in the sense of everyone who enlists in the military and risks their life for their country is a hero.
Off-topic, but in the interest of fighting ignorance: It’s not true that the Indianapolis was “sacrificed” for the sake of the secrecy of the atomic bombs. She was lost because she had a bunch of really bad luck. Nobody at Leyte, her destination, knew she was coming (or at any event, nobody knew or believed he was responsible for seeing when she would be overdue), thanks to a garbled radio transmission. She received no escort because such was considered unnecessary. She was hindered by a comparatively slow speed for a single ship transfer – 16 knots, on orders from fleet command. She didn’t apparently get off a radio report of her hits, at least nobody picked it up, and that about explains it…she ran into a bunch of bad luck coupled with serious bureaucratic problems in the Navy’s operations.
I once studied the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki pretty intensely, and wrote my high school seniors thesis on them. Both cities had military and industrial targets that were important to the Japanese war effort; American targeters purposefully decided not to bomb the ancient capital city of Kyoto, for instance, because of its social and historical significance. President Truman appointed an Interim Group led by the president of Harvard, IIRC, which evaluated other options short of actual deployment of the bombs (including a demonstration off the Japanese coast, and inviting Japanese scientists and top officers to New Mexico for a demo there), but these ultimately were dropped as impractical.
I’m convinced that the bombings were militarily necessary, and that they ultimately saved lives. The Japanese were militarizing their entire society - bamboo spears were being issued to civilian teenagers to meet the invader. Okinawa and Iwo Jima had shown that suicidal attacks, and the purposeful choosing of suicide over surrender, would be widespread. Starvation would probably have also killed far more had the war dragged on, and overall casualties would have been far greater had the Allies invaded. It would have been a terrible bloodbath, from the bottom to the top of the Japanese archipelago.
Even after the first A-bomb fell, the Imperial War Cabinet was still split, meaning the war would grind on. It was only after word came of the second bomb that the Emperor personally intervened and said he had reluctantly decided that they must surrender. Even then, as noted above, there was an attempted military coup by die-hards who wanted to fight to the end.
Tibbets was a hero in that he was directly responsible for the military operation which helped bring the war to a much speedier conclusion (his earlier service in the war also give him a fair claim to the title “hero”). I don’t for a moment minimize the destruction and suffering caused by the A-bombings, but I’m certain that they ultimately saved lives. Tibbets did not see himself as a hero, but as a guy just doing his job, and that was much to his credit.
Quoting Enterprise:
“Off-topic, but in the interest of fighting ignorance: It’s not true that the Indianapolis was “sacrificed” for the sake of the secrecy of the atomic bombs. She was lost because she had a bunch of really bad luck. Nobody at Leyte, her destination, knew she was coming (or at any event, nobody knew or believed he was responsible for seeing when she would be overdue), thanks to a garbled radio transmission. She received no escort because such was considered unnecessary. She was hindered by a comparatively slow speed for a single ship transfer – 16 knots, on orders from fleet command. She didn’t apparently get off a radio report of her hits, at least nobody picked it up, and that about explains it…she ran into a bunch of bad luck coupled with serious bureaucratic problems in the Navy’s operations.”
I certainly agree with your bad luck assessment of the ship's fate,but the circumstances surrounding the occurence beg the question of Indy's involvement with shuttling the Bomb,and this isn't an original idea on my part.
Was watching Discoverys"Weird Weapons of WW2"and it said that the Japanese wanted to develop the A Bomb themselves but lacked the technology to carry it out.
In view of their record I wonder if they would have agonised about wether to A bomb American cities?