Soldiers have a choice - Bondiewithlove

On August 6, 1945, the United States detonated an atomic bomb (“Little Boy”) over Hiroshima, Japan. Another atomic bomb (“Fat Man”) was dropped on Nagasaki on August 9. This was the first and only time nuclear weapons were used as weapons of war.

The bombs did not drop themselves. The first bomb was dropped by a heavily modified B-29 (“Enola Gay”) with a crew of twelve and piloted by Colonel Paul Tibbets (1915–2007). The second bomb was dropped by a similar B-29 (“Bockscar”) with a crew of ten and piloted by Major Charles Sweeney (1919–2004). Both aircraft were accompanied by other B-29s for observation and photography.

The toll of the bombings, succinctly summarized by historian Ralph Raico, was barbaric: “About two hundred thousand people were probably killed in the attacks and by radiation poisoning; the vast majority were civilians, including several thousand Korean workers. Twelve U.S. Navy airmen incarcerated in a Hiroshima prison were also among the victims.”

Sweeney denounced the “crackpot professors” and “crazy theories” of those who believed the atomic bombing of Japan was unnecessary. He said, “There is no doubt in my mind that President Truman made the right decision.”

At the time, many high-ranking military officers disagreed.

Truman’s chief of staff, Admiral William Leahy, wrote in his 1950 memoir, I Was There, that “the use of this barbarous weapon at Hiroshima and Nagasaki was of no material assistance in our war against Japan. The Japanese were already defeated and ready to surrender…. In being the first to use it, we… adopted an ethical standard common to the barbarians of the Middle Ages. I was not taught to wage war in this way, and you cannot win a war by destroying women and children.”

Admiral Chester Nimitz, commander in chief of the Pacific Fleet, said in a public speech at the Washington Monument two months after the bombings that “the atomic bomb played no decisive role, from a purely military point of view, in the defeat of Japan.”

General Dwight Eisenhower stated in his memoirs that when Secretary of War Henry Stimson informed him of his decision to use atomic weapons, he “expressed his grave misgivings, first because he believed that Japan was already defeated and that it was entirely unnecessary to drop the bomb, and second because he felt that our country should avoid shocking world opinion by using a weapon whose use was, in my opinion, no longer necessary to save American lives.” He later stated publicly, “There was no need to hit them with that horrible thing.”

In a 1989 interview with Tom Ryan, Tibbets expressed no remorse or hesitation about dropping an atomic bomb:

Ryan:Have you ever had any regrets or psychological problems because of this, or felt a sense of guilt? Do you think what you did was right? You were heavily criticized for it, weren’t you?

Tibbets:Yes, in hindsight there were quite a few. It was mainly the result of Russian propaganda, which believed that no one except a madman would do that for a country. In that context, I am supposed to have lost sleep over what I did, to be a bit morose, etc. I can assure you that I never lost a single night of sleep over this affair.

Ryan:General, let me ask you: are you proud of what you have done?

Tibbets: Yes, I am. Because a military man starts his career with the idea of serving his country and preserving its integrity. I feel that I have done exactly that. I have to say that we cannot dwell on the darker aspects of war, because there is no morality in war. So I do not dwell on the moral issue. The fact is that the war did what it was supposed to do. It brought peace to the world at the time.

Tibbets concluded the interview by saying:

Tibbets:The first time I dropped bombs on a target there, I watched those bombs fall because we could do it with B-17s. I watched them fall. Then I saw those clouds of black smoke and fires in some cases. I thought, “People who have no business being there are getting killed out there. These aren’t soldiers.”

So, I had an idea that I had first encountered in Cincinnati when I was in medical school. I was living with a doctor. He was telling me about previous doctors, some of whom were his classmates, who were drug pushers. That is, they were selling legalized drugs for drug houses and so on, because they couldn’t practice medicine because they were too sympathetic to their patients. They were assuming the symptoms of the patients and it was destroying their ability to provide them with the medical care they needed. I thought, you know, that’s the way I am when I start thinking about an innocent person getting hit on the ground. I’m supposed to be a bomber pilot and destroy a target. I’m not going to be any good if I do that.

I decided then that the morality of dropping this bomb was none of my business. I had a military mission to drop this bomb. That’s what I was going to do to the best of my ability. There’s no morality in war. I don’t care whether you drop atomic bombs, 100-pound bombs, or whether you shoot guns. You have to leave the moral question aside.

By never losing sleep over what he was doing, Tibbets was only following President Truman’s advice. Returning to the United States after the war ended, Tibbets received an invitation from President Truman to visit the White House. Truman told him, “Never lose sleep over the fact that you planned and carried out this mission. That was my decision. You had no choice.”

Truman was wrong, soldiers have a choice.