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PAUL TIBBETS
Brig. Gen. Paul W. Tibbets Jr, pilot of the Enola Gay, has died at 92. Some background on his training here.
What pisses me off to no end is the assumption that he had something to apologize for.
Posted by Mr. Bingley on 2007 11 01 at 06:55 PM • permalinkI didn’t realize that Brig. Gen. Tibbets had written any books until I read the article you linked, Tim. I just checked the website of the L.A. Public Library hoping to find his book “Flight of the Enola Gay” and, surprise, they DON’T HAVE IT (even though it was published nine years ago). Of the four books he authored - this info per Amazon - the LAPL carries only one, “The Tibbets’ Story.”
Now I’m going to order it and give it to my dad after I’ve read it.
He did his duty and in my mind has nothing to apologise for. The dropping of the atomic bombs saved hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of lives, both Japanese and Allied.
Posted by Matthew Lawrence on 2007 11 01 at 07:02 PM • permalinkHe did the right thing; as did all the (fighting) allies.
Posted by Wimpy Canadian on 2007 11 01 at 07:05 PM • permalinkAccording to thissy here,
The period since the end of World War II is the longest interval of uninterrupted peace between the major powers in hundreds of years;
Not to downplay the tragic aspects of what Brig Gen Tibbets had to do, I would say he played his part in this outcome.
As to the lingering effects of radiation on Hiroshima survivors, lookie here.
Posted by Margos Maid on 2007 11 01 at 07:17 PM • permalinkI guess Tibbets has been wrongfully maligned, much as the great British hero, Arthur ‘Bomber’ Harris has been in recent years.
A Harris quote:
“The Nazis entered this war under the rather childish delusion that they were going to bomb everyone else and nobody was going to bomb them. At Rotterdam, London, Warsaw, and half a hundred other places, they put their rather naive theory into operation. They sowed the wind, and now they are going to reap the whirlwind.”
“I do not personally regard the whole of the remaining cities of Germany as worth the bones of one British Grenadier.”
Posted by walterplinge on 2007 11 01 at 07:34 PM • permalinkVale, General Tibbets. You did your duty, and saved millions of lives. That you carried your burden so well speaks well of you.
Posted by The_Real_JeffS on 2007 11 01 at 07:40 PM • permalinkIt’s because of gentlemen like Gen. Tibbets that I can order sushi in English. For that I’m eternally grateful.
Posted by Infidel Tiger on 2007 11 01 at 08:25 PM • permalinkI would argue that Gen. Tibbets did a service to mankind. By dropping the first atomic bomb, one of a relatively small explosion and fall out, he enabled the world to see the horrors of atomic warfare. The fact that the US, the Soviet Union, the West, and even developing countries like India and Pakistan could see for certain the carnage created by the detonation of a WMD moved them to avoid firing the first nuclear missile.
Posted by wronwright on 2007 11 01 at 08:25 PM • permalink#8MM
Wifey and self visited Hiroshima in 1994. The place has been completely rebuilt. On the same site. I remember wondering at the time, if the whole bomb thing was going to result in an uninhabitable wasteland for 250,000 years, how come about 50 years later all these people were living here in a new city ?Me still confused.
OT - paco’s comment on a previous thread about actors who spoke against the threat of Communists made me think of Ward Bond.
Gruff, burly American character actor ... He attended the University of Southern California, where he got work as an extra through a football teammate who would become both his best friend and one of cinema’s biggest stars: John Wayne. Director John Ford promoted Bond from extra to supporting player in the film Salute (1929), and became another fast friend. An arrogant man of little tact, yet fun-loving in the extreme, Bond was either loved or hated by all who knew him. His face and personality fit perfectly into almost any type of film, and he appeared in hundreds of pictures in his more than 30-year career, in both bit parts and major supporting roles. In the films of Wayne and Ford, particularly, he was nearly always present. Among his most memorable roles are John L. Sullivan in Gentleman Jim (1942), Det. Tom Polhaus in The Maltese Falcon (1941) and the Rev. Capt. Samuel Johnson Clayton The Searchers (1956). An ardent but anti-intellectual patriot, he was perhaps the most vehement proponent, among the Hollywood community, of blacklisting in the witch hunts of the 1950s, and he served as a most unforgiving president of the ultra-right-wing Motion Picture Alliance for the Preservation of American Ideals.
Of course, the fact that he was John Wayne’s drinking buddy and the star of “Wagon Train” also makes him a great guy to me.
Posted by wronwright on 2007 11 01 at 08:37 PM • permalink#18 -
anti-intellectual patriot
Something to add with pride to my business card.
Posted by Infidel Tiger on 2007 11 01 at 08:52 PM • permalinkEndless debate over the rights and wrongs of dropping the bomb.
But no discussion about the rights and wrongs of Japan’s leadership launching a brutal war of conquest in 1937 - and then persisting in that war when it was obviously lost. Nor about the kind of society that would go along with this war, and then willingly commit mass suicide if told to.
A common charge is that Japan was ‘on the verge of surrender’ anyway, so the bomb was unnecessary. Unmentioned is just how ‘on the verge’ it was. If it was a matter of saving face by not surrendering before the Germans, then that no longer applied. And they were warned in the Potsdam Declaration to expect ‘prompt and utter destruction’ unless Japan surrendered - pretty unambiguous. After the first bomb, they still didn’t surrender. It was only after the second that they finally did. Yet no-one criticises this delay.
It took an Australian General, Horace ‘Red Robbie’ Robertson, to point out the unpalatable facts on the 3rd anniversary of Hiroshima in 1948.
Posted by David Morgan on 2007 11 01 at 09:02 PM • permalink#18: I always did like Ward Bond.
I remember a couple of great lines from The Quiet Man, starring John Wayne as an Irish-born boxer who has returned to the auld sod. He encounters Ward Bond, who plays a priest, and the latter says to Wayne, in a sardonic tone of voice, “I knew your grandfather; he died in a penal colony. Aye, and your father; he was a good man, too.”
What Col. Paul W. Tibbets and his airmen prevented: Operation Downfall. The bloodbath that would surely have ensued would have been truly appalling. Yes, it is cojmpletely safe to say that the Bomb saved the lives of at least a million Japanese.
And one other note: every last Allied POW held by the Japanese was to be executed the moment athe first Allied soldier set foot on a Japanese beach.
Posted by Spiny Norman on 2007 11 01 at 09:29 PM • permalinkI visited Hiroshima a couple of years ago. In the museum and indeed in the surrounding area there are lots of written plaques about peace and the actions of ‘others’ but no mention as to exactly how Japan got into that situation in the first place. A lot of the arguments used at the museum centre around Hiroshima not being a ‘military site’ and being chosen as an example with which to conduct an experiment upon.
As per usual, the finger of indignation points solely at the US. It says nothing of the brave men and women who lost their lives fighting a war that enabled the actual aggressor to pontificate about the importance of peace. They weren’t saying that in early 1945.
Indeed, greene #21. This post ain’t the place for the debate about weapons. (But then it’s not my place.) Okay, a little:
I met General Tibbets in Albuquerque, New Mexico, USA at the National Atomic Museum for a book signing and heard him talk at Albuquerque’s Technical Vocational Institute in Y2K. Called him to his face the hero he was as he signed his book. He said, among other things, “thanks.”
Do read his books (you don’t have to buy them if you don’t want to—they’re in the library) to learn that the general didn’t just drop the bomb. He formed and trained the strike force, and contemporarily knew the consequences. Positive, those consequences were as he knew they would be, totally, in his and my views.
A lot of the arguments used at the museum centre around Hiroshima not being a ‘military site’ and being chosen as an example with which to conduct an experiment upon.
Not true. Hiroshima was the last operating port in Japan that could service the Japanese Navy. It also had some of the few remaining munitions plants in operation, mostly because it had not been bombed before to any great extent. John Toland wrote in great detail why Hiroshima was chosen more than 30 years ago.
Posted by Spiny Norman on 2007 11 01 at 09:37 PM • permalinkI visited Hiroshima a couple of years ago. In the museum and indeed in the surrounding area there are lots of written plaques about peace and the actions of ‘others’ but no mention as to exactly how Japan got into that situation in the first place. A lot of the arguments used at the museum centre around Hiroshima not being a ‘military site’ and being chosen as an example with which to conduct an experiment upon.
Well when I visited 2 years ago the museum had a section on exactly the topic of how Japan had gotten itself into that situation. Furthermore it made very clear that Hiroshima was an important military target. There was also coverage of Japan’s atrocities including Chinese government estimates of nubmer of civillians killed by Japanese forces etc.
Posted by Just passing by on 2007 11 01 at 09:50 PM • permalinkMy father fought against the Germans and Italians for 2 years, and against the Japs until the end. He’s gone now, as are most of them. Never had a good word to say about the nips, or the japs. 10, 20, 100 more bombs, if needed would not have worried him one iota.
A mate of his, a senior cop in later life, then a digger who was captured in Java, would drive all over Melbourne to seek out a non-Japanese light globe. Easy now, tough to find in the 50s and 60s. He always had a big box of candles. The idea, say, of him driving a Toyota was unthinkable!!
#29 Just passing by
Since Hirohito died, the Japanese seem to be more willing to confront their recent past with a little more honesty than they had before. Not enough honesty for some (like the Philipinos, the Chinese and the Koreans), but still…
Posted by Spiny Norman on 2007 11 01 at 09:54 PM • permalink#28 Spiny Norman,
You may know about this, or have more success than I finding details on the web, but I recall that the surrender nearly didn’t happen due to a plan by a small group of military officers to ignore the emperor’s orders and fight on.
IIRC, there was a show on the Military Channel a few years ago that discussed how close they came to wrecking the surrender.
Truman was given quite a lot of grief late in life by some who couldn’t understand how he was unable to feel guilt over ordering the dropping of the bombs. The points made by Nic, Spiny and others, above, demonstrate why he was right and his critics were wrong - especially when one recalls that practically the entire Japanese nation was being called upon to throw itself into the fight to defend the homeland. Just imagine another one million U.S. casualties, on top of the ones we had already sustained, and a bloody house-to-house, town-to-town fight across all of Japan. Imagine some multiple of the deaths in Hiroshima and Nagasaki on the Japanese side.
#34 Retread
Yep. They planned to kidnap the Emperor and destroy the recording of the surrender announcement before it could be played on the radio. I read about the attempted coup in Toland, also. The most amazing thing about it was that it was foiled by an USAAF bombing raid on Tokyo and the ensuing blackout.
Posted by Spiny Norman on 2007 11 01 at 10:05 PM • permalinkBut on the lighter side:
In the all-important 2008 presidential election, there is an alternative (click on the first video for rousing, inspirational message).
#36
Maybe- I don’t recall. I was, however, very surprised to see the extent to which Japan’s culpability was covered as I had often heard / read comments along the lines of those of nic above. The best way to find out, of course, would be to go and see it for yourself.
Posted by Just passing by on 2007 11 01 at 10:15 PM • permalinkCurtis LeMay thought that if he had been allowed to continue his (fire) bombing technique, a ground invasion would have been considered unnecessary because of the tremendous damage that he inflicted. Former Japanese prime minister Fumimaro Konoe’s statement that, fundamentally, the thing that brought about the determination to make peace was the prolonged bombing by the B-29s, lends support to this view.
Adds to the view that nuking shortened the war/civvie deaths.
Hiroshima and Nagasaki saved one hell of a lot of Allied AND Japanese lives.
Anyone who disagrees with this should consider what the Japanese civilian population of Saipan did and then think about what an invasion of mainland Japan might have looked like.
The dropping of the bomb was an amazing achievement on so many levels.
-Brave & dedicated personnel such as Tibbets.
-The B29 itself was an increadible achievement, some calculate that the B29 program actually required more industrial effort than the A bomb program itself.
-The A bomb program.
-The long island hopping fight to capture Tinian and then construct the airbase there.
-The Political fortitude and forsight to have the mission completed.#39,
Yes, there is information about Japan’s wartime activities though is fairly insignificant when looking at the overall themes expressed within the museum, front page Main Building Gives you some idea.East Building.
The Lancet weighs in to Australian politics:
Lancet launches scathing attack on PM
http://au.news.yahoo.com/071102/2/14tv2.htmlHopefully The Lancet is as wrong on this as it was on the Iraqi body count… If it is, it looks good for John Howard!
The Germans were as fanatical in their beliefs, as The Japanese were in theirs. Don’t really know how many the Japanese were responsible for eradicating…but one thing that’s certain, the Japanese did not do this.
In today’s world, I’d take the Japanese as a reliable ally, over the Germans.
In all honesty (and of course I could be wrong) the Chinese fear the arming or rearming of the Nationalist Chinese and Japan as much or more then they fear the U.S. and Australia.
#44
I sure wouldn’t claim that Japan’s war time atrocities were a major theme by any stretch of the imagination. I simply point out that they are covered and in the context of how the bomb came to be dropped.
Posted by Just passing by on 2007 11 01 at 10:44 PM • permalinkAOL/Time Warner News, in its usual ham-fisted way, has a secondary headline: Didn’t Regret The Killing of 80,000. Of course, when you actually read the article, it quotes Gen. Tibbets as saying he wasn’t proud of the loss of life, but he did what he had to do, and never regretted that.
He was one of a sadly vanishing breed of men who weren’t afraid of the ineffectual sniping of lesser men. Would that we had more of that ilk.
I’ll probably simply echo others but…
The battle of Okinawa had 7000 Japanese surrender but over 60,000 Japanese soldiers fought to the death (with over 12,000 American killed). In preparation for the invasion of Japan the Japanese were training 10 year olds to use bamboo spears to defend the homeland.It can’t be stressed enough : if they were already planning on surrendering then they would have before the second bomb was dropped. They knew the devastation of Hiroshima but chose not to surrender. Frankly, the people who criticize the bombings tend to either have a serious lack of history or are vile propagandists (or both).
Posted by Col. Milquetoast on 2007 11 01 at 11:00 PM • permalink#49 RebeccaH
He was one of a sadly vanishing breed of men who weren’t afraid of the ineffectual sniping of lesser men. Would that we had more of that ilk.
Sad to say, but within a generation or so, once the surviving WWII vets whose lives were spared by Col. Tibbets and the bomb he dropped are gone, Hiroshima and Nagasaki will be grimly portrayed as “pointless and vengeful American war crimes” by school curricula and the popular media.
We’re close to that already.
Posted by Spiny Norman on 2007 11 01 at 11:01 PM • permalinkAs was stated by an anti-intellectual patriot on another thread.
Let’s not forget the valor of Col. Charles Sweeney and the crew of Bock’s Car that flew the other mission over Nagasaki a few days later.
All that time in the air (Tinian to Japan is a bunch) knowing you are going to vaporize an entire city takes more cajones than I probably have.
Col. Sweeney died in 2004 I believe. He had no regrets either, nor should he.
Lest we forget.
Can’t believe there’s even any debate taking place. If it wasn’t for those maginificent men and their bombs, we wouldn’t be enjoying the Wii, the Tamagotchi or extreme hard cord anime porn.
Posted by Infidel Tiger on 2007 11 01 at 11:05 PM • permalink#57 yojimbo
Yes, of course. Thanks for the reminder.
Posted by Spiny Norman on 2007 11 01 at 11:06 PM • permalink#55
At least some younger children were being trained to commit suicide to prevent the shame of capture.There isn’t any nice neat way out of that sort of situation.
Posted by Just passing by on 2007 11 01 at 11:09 PM • permalinkThe Japanese had a reputation for dying instead of surrendering (ie Iwo Jima out of 21,000 troops on the island over 20,000 fought to their deaths and less than 300 surrendered) Despite that, only 3.67% of Japan’s population died in WW2. Germany didn’t surrender until 10.77% of the population had died. It could have been so much bloodier.
Posted by Col. Milquetoast on 2007 11 01 at 11:10 PM • permalinkHell Spiny, in another generation I wouldn’t be surprised if kids were being taught that we started the war.
With regards to whether it was necessary. We vaporized(bigtime) two of their major cities and their War Council was still tied as to whether they should surrender or fight on. The Emporer had to break the tie. Given that, what chance do you think there was of a surrender without the nukes. Zero, zip, nada and no f**king way come to mind for me.
#52 Nude Girly Pigs
Kae, what about a hog? Or girl pigs only?
Posted by Col. Milquetoast on 2007 11 01 at 11:22 PM • permalinkAn excellent account of events here including of Tibbets meeting the President.
Posted by Margos Maid on 2007 11 01 at 11:41 PM • permalink#52, 60 & 64
To ward off something…. I’m sure she’ll explain when she’s around…
Y’know, like garlic to ward of wampyres….
When I was stationed in Korea I had a house lady who had been born in Japan and lived near Nagasaki until she was 12, when her family was repatriated to Korea at the end of the war. She was one of the schoolgirls training with sharpened bamboo sticks to fight US GIs and Marines. I always figured she was one life saved by the bombs anyway.
We also had working on base a Korean man who, as a teenager, was in training to be a Kamikaze pilot. Another life saved.
Mind you, that these people were Korean was of no consequence to the Japanese. Even today there is tremendous resentment in Korea towards the Japanese.
Posted by Steve Skubinna on 2007 11 01 at 11:52 PM • permalinkThe more you read of this bloke, the more you like him. From the same interview, some further classic quotes near the end.
A few things I didn’t know - the Enola Gay was named after his mum, and the mushroom cloud wasn’t really a mushroom cloud.
There really ought to be some kind of memorial for this guy.
Posted by Margos Maid on 2007 11 02 at 12:15 AM • permalinkHalf your luck 1.6 - don’t get sunburnt now.
Posted by Margos Maid on 2007 11 02 at 12:43 AM • permalinkspeaking of travel, i’m off to the land of the long white cloud for 2 weeks - South Island only. Taking along my little sweetie before she can crawl / walk, and really looking for ward to 2 weeks full time with her, my wife, and the holiday. no work for 2 weeks sounds great too!
I read Mr Tibbet’s speech on the plane, and it was a beauty.
It was a tragedy that it required such a message to get an end to the war. The US still hasn’t gone through the purple hearts they minted for the battle of japan (some 300,000 - still using them in Iraq etc), or so I heard. Shows what the military expected re casualties.
I have heard General Tibbets speak and read many of his many magazine articles and books, and the one thing that consistently shines through is his absolute and unwavering coviction that dropping the A-bombs on Japan was the right thing to do.
A man of courage and conviction, and I am desolated that, in accordance with his own wishes, there will never be a memorial to him among his comrades at Arlington.
RIP, Sir.
Posted by Pedro the Ignorant on 2007 11 02 at 12:54 AM • permalinkThe beauty of the atomic bomb is that it showed to even the most fanatical that the US’ had the ability and the will to defeat Japan.
It should not be forgotten that the most deadly bombing raid on Japan was not the atomic bombings, rather it was the fire bombing of Tokyo on 29 March 1945 which killed in the order of 100,000. Did they surrender then? I think not.
PBS produced a well-balanced (surprisingly, for PBS!) account, ‘Victory in the Pacific’, that ‘chronicles the dreadful and unprecedented loss of life and the decisions made by leaders on both sides that finally ended the war.’
I recommend this 2-hour video to all.
Posted by Michael Sheehan on 2007 11 02 at 01:29 AM • permalink#63, yojimbo
Thanks for bringing this up. People forget, or more likely, were never taught, that we killed many more civilians in Tokyo when we fire-bombed the place (NOTE: I see that lingus4 at #77 has already mentioned this). These people had already had warning after warning. Their military had had it. The damage they did to the fleet at Okinawa was caused by kamakazes, most of whom had never been taught how to land their plane. They had no air force left.
The same “no surrender” mindset of the leadership that caused the horrible mass deaths of their troops, planned for equal destruction of the population in the homeland. Like Hitler, the leadership would rather have seen the death of every last Japanese rather than surrender or leave the enemy anything.
On a related note, the deep thinkers at the American Prospect think the US should abolish the US Air Force.
String together some ridiculously ignorant assumptions, a few well-worn stories of interservice rivalries, stew in a broth of general anti-war pabulum, sprinkle in some legitmate, but over-blown complaints from the First Gulf War and presto! just shut the damn thing down.
Morons.
Posted by Spiny Norman on 2007 11 02 at 03:25 AM • permalinkRIP a great and good man, one of many who were part of that great victory. What he was part of was not only not wrong, it was utterly right.
Go with God, General Tibbets.Posted by Simon Darkshade on 2007 11 02 at 03:26 AM • permalinkFurther to what Col Milquetoast has already mentioned, the soldiers losses on Okinawa were only a portion of it. Civilians suffered terribly with estimates well in excess of 100,000 deaths. An invasion of Japan would have been absolutely horrific.
I don’t think anyone would relish knowing they were consigning tens of thousands of men, women and children to their deaths. Its a terrible equation to kill now to save more later. It takes real guts and fortitude to do that. It would be too easy to not do the job and then at least the future deaths you can pretend weren’t your responsibility.
And I have more respect for these guys that they didn’t take the mea culpa route - again a moral easy-out. They knew the equation and what had to be done and lived with doing it.
At least twice a year, I sit quietly, alone, in a very small space off the main WWII exhibit galleries at the Australian War Memorial: that remarkable shrine, museum and acrhive.
It is a the simplest exhibit there.
It is the best exhibit there.
It has a wall, covered in Army ID photographs. Just ordinary Australians.I sit on a small flat bench.
Behind me there is a TV, with a looped program running. It has the image of one old man, and then another, and they tell their story.
There were 2,434 men at Sandakan.
Their pictures are on the wall.
Six survived.
Their pictures are not on the wall.
This was what the japs intended for all Allied PoW.
Rest in peace, Sir. In doing your duty, you saved innumerable lives from a foul and dishonourable enemy, who were merely the lowest of cowardly murderers: the Imperial Japanese Army.
MarkL
CanberraThe most amazing assignment I had while with FEMA was working Super-Typhoon Keith. TNMI (Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands) is a US protectorate, so I was sent out there. I worked on Saipan, Tinian and Rota.
Tinian, of course, is where the B-29’s took off to bomb Japan. The pits the nukes were lowered into so the B-29’s could load them are still there and have simple plaques marking them with “Little Boy” and “Big Man” designations.
I’d be lying if I didn’t admit that I got nauseous. I know it ended WW II, saved countless allied lives… yadda, yadda, yadda. However, it was a horrific thing. An abjectly horrific thing.
Adding to the unease were the Japanese tourists, who left flowers there, and at all of the Imperial Japanese Army sites all over the islands.
Big time war is a suck-ass endeavor that is sometimes necessary, and I have a grim respect for the men who are willing to wage it (My dad was an Army Air Corps pilot in WW II, and later USAF in Korea and Viet Nam), and so I bid this inestimable spirit the rest he richly deserves.
If I just about lost my lunch thinking about it, I can’t even begin to guess what he went through living with it all these years. RIP and Godspeed, General Tibbets. You’ve earned your rest, and your reward.
Jesus wept.
What a salt-of-the-earth type this extraordinary man was. How sad that he has had to bear such a heavy burden all these years, even after death. He can’t even have a funeral service or a headstone!
I would never have been able to do the kind of thing guys like him did over Japan and Germany. God only knows where we would be today with too many like me ‘eh!I went to a Quaker college during the 1970’s. I can well remember the pacifist professors giving slide shows in class on Hiroshima Day, emphasizing the “depravity” of the dropping of the first atomic bomb. Although I was only 18, I knew this was leftwing bias. I think that might have been my first inkling that maybe, just maybe, the left have their collective head up their arse.
Posted by wronwright on 2007 11 02 at 05:34 AM • permalink#92. Mark L.
Mmmmm, there is more than one of us then.
One of the survivors in that video is Nelson Short. I have heard him described as “speaker for the dead”, because he was never allowed to forget. His whole life after WW2 was a constant parade of family members and descendants seeking him out for any information on their murdered kin.
He was always willing to help.
I also sit and watch the people visiting the tomb. Some of the actions of the visitors chokes me up.
There are now forces in the world who would use an atomic weapon, if they could, against civilians in America or elsewhere in the developed West. If the next round of elections in the USA does not produce a President and a Congress who will promise to visit destruction on state sponsors of such creatures (and we know who you are), then we all have reason to fear for the future.
Go with God, Sir! An American hero has left us.
The Japanese at that time regarded surrender as the ultimate cowardice IAW with the ethics of bushido. (One reason they treated Allied prisoners with such disdain). They would much rather die fighting or commit suicide than surrender. The closer we got to the Imperial Islands, the more fanatically they fought (and died). Dropping the atomic bomb was absolutely the best course of action. I would have recommended dropping it on Tokyo, but since it happened 19 years before my birth, I wasn’t asked.
well I hope he does get a monument, put it up on an airbase perhaps to avoid the kind of leftard peacenik protestors who disgaced themselves over the monument to Bomber Harris
Posted by eeniemeenie on 2007 11 02 at 06:17 AM • permalinkI’m sorry it happened.
I’m sorry so many innocent civilians, and POWs too, died.
I’m sorry it was necessary.
And I’m especially sorry that it didn’t happen nearly 10 years earlier, immediately after December 13, 1937#92 Mark L hear, hear
There were 2,434 men at Sandakan.
Their pictures are on the wall.
Six survived.
Their pictures are not on the wall.
This was what the japs intended for all Allied PoW.
And if the japs had had their way, I would have been without my lovely wife whose father was one of half a dozen from his regiment who came out of Ambon after three and a half years as a PoW of the Japanese.
Pandora’s box - OMD
Tribute to Louise Brooks, whose ultra hot aforesaid 1928 silent movie was banned by Hitler.#98 Penguin, I am glad that there is more than one of us. If there are two, then there are more we do not know about, and that is good.
#103 Wand
I’d be without my best mate (his father was 8th Div).No, General Tibbets did Australia a hell of a service, and for that I am personally grateful. We got our men back alive.
MarkL
CanberraGreat article on what recently surfaced documents tell abt the decision to drop the A bombs.
Posted by arrowhead ripper on 2007 11 02 at 07:58 AM • permalinkI don’t know that saving lives entered in very much, except insofar as they were Allied lives.
The feeling was that all the Japanese on the island weren’t worth the live of a single American soldier, so long as we were at war.
They became owed consideration again as soon as they surrendered, because grudges aren’t part of the American character. You can always start over as a friend, which they did.
The A-bomb was a bluff, incidentally ; we only had the two, but neded to make the impression that there was an endless stockpile of them. Hence ``wasting’’ the second one in bad weather against a marginal target.
Tibbets lived only a few miles from me ; nice having him as a neighbor.
#106, That is a great article. It’s particularly interesting for this bit:
The Japanese called this strategy Ketsu Go (Operation Decisive). It was founded on the premise that American morale was brittle and could be shattered by heavy losses in the initial invasion.
Sound familiar? Like, for instance, the current strategy being used by Al Qaeda?The article also brings up an interesting fact that hardly anyone ever mentions: the hundreds of thousands of lives in the countries conquered by Japan that were saved by the dropping of the A-bomb. Having got away with the Rape of Nanking, there was no reason why the Japanese would ever have stopped with that, had they not been defeated.
“Patriotic Orthodoxy”, as opposed to just what, exactly? Anymore questions relating to the mindset of the academic community that has developed over the last few decades?
But I’m sure that this mindset will in no way prohibit the free flow and exchnage of ideas in an open sharing enviornment.
/sarcasm approaching unbound infinity..but one thing that’s certain, the Japanese did not do this.
You need to read up on the Rape of Nanking. Granted, that was not more than 300,000 murdered, versus 11 million for the Nazis. The Japanese lacked the necessary industrial base.
It’s no surprise Sweeney did not recieve the publicity of Tibbets, Aside from Tibbets being first, Sweeney kind of botched the second mission. Though perhaps we should not be too critical of a man trying to do his duty in difficult circumstances.
I think the best quote on Hiroshima, for perspective, came from Freeman Dyson:
Once we had got ourselves into the business of bombing cities, we might as well do the job competently and get it over with.
``Don’t really know how many the Japanese were responsible for eradicating…but one thing that’s certain, the Japanese did not do this.’‘
The link goes to a couple of Holocaust pictures, about which I can only say that they look an awful lot like the bodies (and emaciated survivors) found in the Japanese POW camps in the Philippines. Lots of Philippine dead too BTW: the Bushido Boys had equal-opportunity contempt for anyone who wasn’t one of their own.
RIP General Tibbets.
Posted by Sonetka's Mom on 2007 11 02 at 12:34 PM • permalinkI haven’t been to Japan, but I have been to the Thai-Burma railway and visited the Kanchanburi War Cemetery. 9,000 graves, and not one of them died in battle with a gun in his hand. All of them were starved, beaten or worked to death.
Hisoshima, Nagasaki . . . . fuck ‘em, they had it coming.
Posted by Young and Free on 2007 11 02 at 09:18 PM • permalinkFrom Giangreco’s definitive work on casualty planning for Operations Olympic and Coronet (the dual invasions of Jpan planned for late 1945):
The Army, as an institution, believed its soldiers would suffer extreme losses during an invasion of Japan, and all its actions in 1945 were based on that assumption.
When Specialist Martin J. Begosh of the 1st Armored Division was wounded by a land mine in Bosnia on 29 December 1995, he, like every soldier, airman, sailor, and Marine wounded in Korea, Vietnam, and the Persian Gulf War, received a Purple Heart for valor, a medal minted in preparation for the invasion of Japan in 1945.
And you can add to that, all those in Somalia and Iraq and Afhganistan. Any questions now?
Posted by Apparatchik on 2007 11 04 at 06:31 PM • permalink
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A warrior who did his duty.
As the bumper sticker of 1995(?)said “No more Hiroshimas….EASY!!...No more Pearl Harbours!!!
Theo Spark also has some info.