Today, Aug. 6 is the anniversary of the first use of an atomic bomb. 67 years ago, the B-29 Enola Gay dropped the bomb on Hiroshima and killed about 140,000 people directly, with some additional who died later.
Two days later Bocks Car was sent to Nakasaki with the second bomb, with about 70,000 killed there initially.
Hard to believe that such a devastating genie was put back in the bottle and not used again all these years. And weapons now are much more powerful.
Originally Posted by Bill Greenwood
Anniversary of Hiroshima, I walked outside this morning and a B-29 flys directly overhead about 6000 ft. Not something you see everyday, much less today.
What are the odds?
I don't believe I would call it a sad day, when we kill 210,000 enemy which convinces our enemy to surrender, saving an estimated halve a million American military, trying to invaded the home islands of Japan.
Gen Sweeney spent his retirement years living just south of Boston, a few miles from me. He flew the instrument airplane behind the Enola Gay and then flew the bomb to Nagasaki. Sweeny's airplane was the Great Artiste which carried the scientific instruments to gather blast data. He and his crew swapped to fly Bock's Car to Nagasaki. I heard Gen Sweeney speak and I have to say that he made a very good case for why those two bombs saved a lot of American lives. The planners for the invasion of Japan were expecting many more lives to be lost than the total that the two crude bombs killed. War decisions are trade-offs and if you look at how the casualty count went up as each island closer to Japan fell to the Marines and Army, you can start to get a little understanding of what the trade-off was. Sweeney pointed out that more Japanese died from one firebombing of Tokyo than were killed at Nagasaki. So which form of death and destruction is really worse?
Interestingly, Sweeney launched to bomb Kokura, and the weather gods decided that Kokura would be left alone that day. No radar bombing with that payload. The bombardier had to see the target visually or they were to bring the bomb home. With clouds obscuring Kokura, the alternate was Nagasaki. Mother nature almost spared Nagasaki but just as Sweeney was deciding to turn back to Saipan, a gap in the clouds opened and the rest is history.
The good news is that two of the nations that were the source of horror during the 1930's and 1940's were knocked down and are now much better world citizens. The soviets took longer, but that problem is mostly taken care of.
I have also heard Edward Teller, the driving force behind the hydrogen bomb, speak. He is another individual who believed that the US could be trusted with that kind of force and the totalitarian governments could not. But that is a topic for another post.
We should enjoy our freedom to fly as we please and speak american english rather than a language from another place. Many good men and women made very hard decisions to get us here. Dropping two bombs was one of them.
Thank you,
Wes
N78PS
Last edited by WLIU; 08-06-2012 at 06:20 PM.
Tom, maybe your values as a human being are different than mine, but I would not and don't take joy in killing 210,000 people, most of whom were civilians and women and children, not the militarists than started the war or the soldiers that persued it.
Maybe a necessary step,( or maybe not) but still a sad one that shows the horrors of all out war, with no restrictions on weapons and targets.
And as for the Bomb saving a half million American men, that figure is as much propoganda as fact. I have seen estimates of U S losses if we invaded from as little as a few thousand to over a million. If you totaled up all the actual Allied losses in all the invasions from Normandy on it would not be anywhere close to a half million. No less than Gen Eisenhower said that Japan was finished as an offensive power and there was no need to invade at all.
Wes, as for as "totalitarian governments not being trusted with nuclear weapons" they certainly have them now, Russia and others.
Last edited by Bill Greenwood; 08-06-2012 at 07:06 PM.
I swing the other way. I was age 6 when the bomb dropped and had two uncles in the theater. Another finishing up in ETO. One was a SeaBee waiting aboard a ship almost in sight of Japan.
My military training (from Paris Island through Army Command & Staff) told me that those casualty estimates were lowballed. As an Army Medical Department Officer flying helicopter ambulances during the southeast Asian wargames late 60's, reinforced those beliefs. We would have lost untold more in Japan because only one helicopter medevac had ever been made during the entire war. Evac within the "Golden Hour" saves lives. BTW, the Order of Battle that I recall involved around 2 million troops. I respect your input Bill.
Bob
"Wes, as for as "totalitarian governments not being trusted with nuclear weapons" they certainly have them now, Russia and others"
And Edward Teller asserted that it was very important that we, the good guys, got the baddest weapons first so that the evil guys would fear making use of theirs. You can not restrain technology, but you can get there first and counterbalance those who will misuse it. My Russian friends are happy that the Iron Curtain and the Soviet empire collapsed. We even have former communist pilots in the US who spent their military careers on alert for the evil Americans to come. They are happy to discover that their propaganda was lies and America is the land of plenty and you can fly a small airplane anywhere you want. If the Germans had built the bomb and we had not, the world would be a very different place. Did you know that Heisenberg was the head of the German nuclear program?
"The greatest generation" made some tough choices. There was and is no joy in any of it. And trying to assume some sort of guilt at this distance is pointless. The Japanese people did some very evil things. Read up on the Bataan Death March some time. I understand that the markers where men died are still on the road to Balanga. The Americans who made the decision to launch the raid that burned 16 square miles of Tokyo and killed 100,000 people took no joy in that result. They did it because the road home went through Tokyo and they wanted to end the war as quickly as possible. The Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombs were enough to get the job done. No more. No joy.
Gen Sweeney took no joy in leveling Nagasaki. He wanted to end the war and go home. He, and a lot of other good guys, including my father, got to do that.
Thanks,
Wes
N78PS
It is interesting that the countries we fought to a surrender are better off today than the countries we tried to perform "nation building" in. Making hard decisions is... hard. So far the new politically correct way of waging "war" seems pretty inefficient in comparison to waging "real" war.
I do not believe our values are that much different, I take no joy in war, but I see no sadness in victory.
those two bombs were nothing but a means to the end.
I believe that without the examples of Hiroshima and Nagasaki the United States and the Soviet Union would most certainly have gone to war with each other, with the destruction of much of the rest of civilization through "conventional" means -- even if the atomic bomb had never been developed. The balance of terror did, after all, provide a tenuous peace that enabled the eventual collapse of the Soviet Union without going to war. Without the visible example of what that could mean, with the destruction being purely theoretical, the likelihood of using going to war and using those weapons would have been much higher.
Aside from that, the available information from Japan was that they were hoping for a land invasion. They felt that the casualties inflicted on the allied force would have been so severe that we would have been forced into a negotiated peace. The Japanese -- and not just the leadership -- were driven by Bushido ethics. These are completely alien to Western thought about war -- even Clausewitz's concept of "Total War" (which he believed to be only a theoretical model and not to be even attempted.) Thankfully, and due to an unprecedented act by their Emperor, this did not come to be and Japan has truly transformed. This transformation is so complete that the situation of Japan in the period before 1945 seems unbelievable today.
Having been in two wars and having seen the aftermath in two "peacekeeping" operations, I can say from personal experience that war is truly horrible and the death of others should not be celebrated. That act, however, of overwhelming force ended the world war, kept untold more from dying over a longer period of time, and perhaps precluded a third world war. For these reasons, it should be appreciated.
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