Paul Tibbets dies at 92

[BarTopDancer]

Story
(http://www.nydailynews.com/news/wn_report/2007/11/01/2007-11-01_enola_gay_pilot_paul_tibbets_dies_at_92.html)
"I'm not proud that I killed 80,000 people, but I'm proud that I was able to start with nothing, plan it and have it work as perfectly as it did," he said in a 1975 interview.
"You've got to take stock and assess the situation at that time. We were at war. ... You use anything at your disposal."

He added: "I sleep clearly every night."

History is ugly - but without studying it we are bound to repeat it.

[blueerica]

You know, coming from a family that was directly affected by this - I think my grandma's pretty okay with things. I had family on both sides of that war, both in the Pacific arena. Before they died, they all seemed pretty okay with things.

Of course he has to sleep clearly every night - it was what it was, and it is now a part of the past. Yes, something to study and learn from. Right or wrong, war is never easy, never something to be taken lightly, but it's always something to be learned from and moved forward from.

Nice link, BTD, I probably wouldn't have noticed otherwise. :)

[Gemini Cricket]

I know I'm having an all around glum kinda day, but this part hit me hard:

At least 70,000 people died instantly and countless others were injured. Two-thirds of the Japanese city of Hiroshima was demolished.
On Aug. 9, the U.S. dropped a second nuclear bomb on the city of Nagasaki, killing an estimated 40,000 people. A day later, Japan surrendered.
There are times when I feel like I don't belong in this world and that none of it makes sense. And when I read that, it confirms my feeling.
Wow.
:(

[Snowflake]

My dad fought in the Pacific, though he did not fight as far as I know it, he repaired and serviced the planes on an aircraft carrier. It was a different time and I think Tibbetts voiced it well, they did what they had to do at the time. As horrible as it was and still is, how many lives, Japanese and American were saved by the bombings in Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

I've long wanted to go to the peace memorial in Hiroshima and offer up my prayers for those who died, the women, the children, the innocent people.

[Capt Jack]

my dad was 19 at his first duty station. Pearl Harbor, December 1941. He'd been there two weeks at the time of the attack. USS Raleigh took at least one torpedo but didnt sink.
I've tried a zillion times to imagine such an event through the eyes of a 19 year old. I've also tried to imagine myself in Gen Tibbets position more than once. Again, nearly impossible to imagine being in such a position in world events.
Yeah. It was a different time


http://members.cox.net/capt_jack/image/USS%20Raleigh.jpg

R.I.P. General Tibbets

[DreadPirateRoberts]

It was a different time. The casualty estimate (http://home.kc.rr.com/casualties/) in US lives was somewhere between 500,000 and 1,000,000 lives to invade Japan.

I was in kindergarten in 1970, and I remember some researchers coming into our classroom, and they tried to explain to us that that Truman had a difficult choice to make. Do you take X amount of Japanese lives? or Y amount of American lives. Does the decision change if X is > or < Y? What if some are your relatives? Which do you choose?

Apparently it made an impression on me, as I remember it to this day.

I had a great uncle who was in both Iwo Jima and Okinawa, and I'm guessing if they had invaded Japan, he would have been one of the 500,000 to 1,000,000.

[Alex]

The debate about the morality of dropping the bombs, for me, doesn't really have anything to do with the number of people killed. It has to do with the nature of the people killed.

Total war is, in my opinion, immoral. Which means that killing 40,000 foreign civilians to prevent the deaths of 100,000 American soldiers is unacceptable. Using the a bombs was not immoral, the targets were. But killing 1 million Japanese soldiers to prevent the death of 100,000 American soldiers would be palatable.

This is not, of course, to say that the Japanese were any more "clean" in their treatment and respect of noncombattants. But two wrongs, so they say, don't make a right.

But that is an easy position to take when I'm not the one sending those 100,000 American soldiers into battle.

And even if the act were right, I don't know that being able to sleep soundly after killing that many people is necessarily a good thing. Being able to live with it is fine but to not be bothered by it?

[Gemini Cricket]

I think that that's what bothered me a great deal was the civilian death toll.
And the whole sleeping soundly thing kinda bugged me too. I mean, it implies no remorse. :(

[Gemini Cricket]

And this is going to sound funny but it's not meant to be.
I killed a cricket (yes, I know... the irony!) the other day because it was loud and annoying and drowning out my TV set. I tried to catch it but it was underneath my water heater... so I just sprayed the sh!t out of the area and it died. I felt really bad about it.
Ask iSm and zappp. I felt so guilty afterwards.
I can't imagine what I would have felt if I was Tibbets.

[Strangler Lewis]

Easy to feel bad about one dead cricket. Harder to get one's mind around tens of thousands of civilians. It's also probably impossible to attain a nuanced peace of mind by parsing out the people that it was appropriate to nuke from those that it wasn't. Either you go mad or you put it out of your mind.

My dad was part of a flamethrower unit on "anything that moved" duty around the caves of Okinawa. He didn't care for it, and would occasionally talk about it, but this wasn't tens of thousands people.

[BarTopDancer]

And even if the act were right, I don't know that being able to sleep soundly after killing that many people is necessarily a good thing. Being able to live with it is fine but to not be bothered by it?

In the article linked, Tibbets talked about rumors that he went crazy, became a drunk or committed suicide. None of those thoughts would be unreasonable to think. His options came down to accept it and live with it for it is what it is vs. live with it and be bothered by it, the first is really the only way to stay sane.

[flippyshark]

I'll be visiting Peace Park in Nagasaki in February, for reasons I plan to write about later, but expect a trip report in a few months time.

[Gemini Cricket]

I don't know if this is urban legend or not, but I remember reading/hearing a story about a woman who had the stitched design of her kimono burned into her skin. For some reason, that image is burned into my mind.

[Gemini Cricket]

Okay, one last thing and then I'm done with this thread. I'm getting all gloomy...

Little Boy, which had been dropped from the Enola Gay at 8:15:30, exploded 43 sec. later, at 1,900 ft. above Hiroshima, creating a blinding bluish-white flash and, for a fraction of a second, unearthly heat. Temperatures near the hypocenter, the ground point immediately below the explosion, surged to figures ranging from 5400 degrees F to 7200 degrees F; within a mile of the hypocenter, the surfaces of objects instantly rose to more than 1000 degrees F. Those caught in the middle of this maelstrom were the lucky ones. They died instantly, vaporized into puffs of smoke or carbonized into small, blackened, smoking corpses, mummified in their last living gesture.
People farther away from the source of the thermal wave were destined for longer agonies. The intense heat melted the eyeballs of some who had stared in wonder at the blast; it burned off facial features and seared skin all over the body into peeling, draping strips. The survivors who first emerged out of the roiling inferno that the center of Hiroshima had become walked like automatons, their arms held forward, hands dangling. In shock, they instinctively tried to keep their burned skin from touching anything, including themselves. They stumbled toward the riverbanks, some crying out, "Mizu, mizu!" (Water, water); the temperature and their injuries had left them severely dehydrated. Because light colors reflect heat and dark ones absorb it, some bomb victims had the images of their clothing tattooed on their flesh: the pattern of a kimono on a woman's back, the unburned swath left by a sash around the waist of an otherwise charred man. "Big black flies appeared and tried to lay eggs on human flesh," says survivor Michiko Watanabe, now 65. "The injured were so weak that they couldn't brush away the flies that nestled in their hands and necks. Some were black from a blanket of flies that covered them."
Source (http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,134511,00.html)

[Kevy Baby]

I killed a cricket (yes, I know... the irony!) the other day because it was loud and annoying and drowning out my TV set.Come over to our place some time. We buy full grown crickets 1,000 at a time, every two weeks.

I don't know if this is urban legend or not, but I remember reading/hearing a story about a woman who had the stitched design of her kimono burned into her skin. For some reason, that image is burned into my mind.I found this (http://www.tate.org.uk/servlet/ViewWork?cgroupid=999999961&workid=20983&searchid=9885)

[Capt Jack]

my mom was living in one of the primary targets for the first (or maybe it was the 2nd) nuke dropped but was passed over for bad weather.

if not for that, I'd be ...well....non-existant

[blueerica]

CJ - I'll have to talk to you about where your mom was living. It's an amazing story, and from what I understand, I have some family I haven't met from there...

To me, as I stated earlier, you can't change the past and we must live in the present. To me, I spend probably too much time pondering the imponderables, like weather, like an idea to do something to possibly prevent something... how that could have changed history is about as interesting as history, itself, is it not?

[Capt Jack]

Three days after Hiroshima, the B-29 bomber, "Bockscar" piloted by Sweeney, reached the sky over Kokura on the morning of August 9 but abandoned the primary target because of smoke cover and changed course for Nagasaki.

so yeah, guess it was the 2nd. she would have been 12 years old at the time

beyond knowing I have relatives there, I know nada about them. I think I saw one or two pictures of her family when I was little, but she was for the most part ostracized by the culture after marrying my dad. so pretty much the ties were broken eons ago.

[Tramspotter]

I met Gen Tibbets and interviewed several WWII Veterans in the pacific theater.
When Speaking on the topic Gen Tibbets Position on why he was at peace with the decision to drop the bomb was that the culture of the Japanese empire at the time allowed for no compromise, no surrender, and total aligance to their equally honor bound emperor they would have by most accounts fought to nearly the last civilian had we tried to take their homeland. The necessity for the second bomb proves at least the leadership willing to sacrifice vast civilian casualty's.

It was also generally agreed on by the vets that If our carriers weren't by happenstance all out of pearl harbor at the time of the attack the conventional naval war likely would have not been turned to our favor either.