Pilot Who Dropped Hiroshma Bomb Dies

[ace diamond]

oops!
i fucked up
:D

[Nickdfresh]

Originally posted by naturochem
I was actually addressing the queen of the cap lock...Ballytwat

He's not the sharpest knife in the drawer. I don't know how many times I've posted this:

[Nickdfresh]

Originally posted by thome
I don't need to read about a subject that has no way of being resolved you just punish yourself trying to understand these thing..go ahead. have at it.

Read away.

Here have a hand-up. The debate is over what's done is done and you cannot understand any of it, your OP's are wrong you weren't there.

The man is dead you have no ability to ask him all else is BS.

Dec 7th 1941

Payback is a bitch .

That was where I closed on this question over 30 years ago.

Have at it.

Thome, you barely literate mouth-breather...

The bomb wasn't dropped, or the bombs weren't dropped, in retaliation for Pearl Harbor, as the killing of 3000 mostly military personnel is no justification for the instant killing of 78,000 (mostly) civilians, as that would just be sick. The bomb was dropped to prevent this:

Operation Downfall

[LoungeMachine]

Originally posted by Blackflag

It's possible this guy just thought nothing every night...who knows.

Possible, but I doubt it....

1945 these guys weren't trained for missle silos and Nukes.

This was just another pilot on a mission.

And I bet he wrestled with this.

[LoungeMachine]

Originally posted by Nickdfresh
Thome, you barely literate mouth-breather...

Have you noticed he's become EXACTLY what he accuses others of now?

He slips in and out of his shtick faster than the blind sheik, and now just trolls for mod fights/attention.

sad, really.

[LoungeMachine]

Enlist then, Modboi

[LoungeMachine]

He was a pilot.

He followed an order.

He was no more / less a Hero than the other millions who served.

Certainly not more than those who died.

We owe them all.

We also owe it to their memory not to become what they were fighting against.

Imperialist agressors who started wars and occupations in the name of the Homeland.

[Seshmeister]

Originally posted by ace diamond
bally, when emeror hirohito signed the surrender, the ENOLA GAY was in the air over TOKYO,JAPAN with a-bomb #3 awaiting orders to deploy.

the united states told the emperor if he refused to agree to the terms of surrender that the united states put forth in 1945, tokyo would would be eliminated from the face of the earth and that japan would cease to exist.

they were not joking.

i agree it was a very sad day indeed,but it was a necessary evil.

without the A-bomb, we would not have won the "GREAT WAR".

The Great War was WWI.

[Seshmeister]

It's understandable that a lot of you take on board the the recieved wisdom/propoganda about the bombs to be to save a million US troops in an invasion of the Mainland.

I used to think that too but it doesn't really stand up.

http://www.doug-long.com/letter.htm

ENOLA GAY EXHIBIT
THE HISTORIANS' LETTER TO THE SMITHSONIAN


--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Mr. I. Michael Heyman
Secretary
The Smithsonian Institution
Washington, D.C. 20560
July 31, 1995

Dear Secretary Heyman:

Testifying before a House subcommittee on March 10, 1995, you promised that when you finally unveiled the Enola Gay exhibit, "I am just going to report the facts."[1]

Unfortunately, the Enola Gay exhibit contains a text which goes far beyond the facts. The critical label at the heart of the exhibit makes the following assertions:

* The atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki "destroyed much of the two cities and caused many tens of thousands of deaths." This substantially understates the widely accepted figure that at least 200,000 men, women and children were killed at Hiroshima and Nagasaki. (Official Japanese records calculate a figure of more than 200,000 deaths--the vast majority of victims being women, children and elderly men.)[2]

* "However," claims the Smithsonian, "the use of the bombs led to the immediate surrender of Japan and made unnecessary the planned invasion of the Japanese home islands." Presented as fact, this sentence is actually a highly contentious interpretation. For example, an April 30, 1946 study by the War Department's Military Intelligence Division concluded, "The war would almost certainly have terminated when Russia entered the war against Japan."[3] (The Soviet entry into the war on August 8th is not even mentioned in the exhibit as a major factor in the Japanese surrender.) And it is also a fact that even after Hiroshima and Nagasaki were destroyed, the Japanese still insisted that Emperor Hirohito be allowed to remain emperor as a condition of surrender. Only when that assurance was given did the Japanese agree to surrender. This was precisely the clarification of surrender terms that many of Truman's own top advisors had urged on him in the months prior to Hiroshima. This, too, is a widely known fact.[4]

* The Smithsonian's label also takes the highly partisan view that, "It was thought highly unlikely that Japan, while in a very weakened military condition, would have surrendered unconditionally without such an invasion." Nowhere in the exhibit is this interpretation balanced by other views. Visitors to the exhibit will not learn that many U.S. leaders--including Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower[5], Admiral William D. Leahy[6], War Secretary Henry L. Stimson[7], Acting Secretary of State Joseph C. Grew[8] and Assistant Secretary of War John J. McCloy[9]--thought it highly probable that the Japanese would surrender well before the earliest possible invasion, scheduled for November 1945. It is spurious to assert as fact that obliterating Hiroshima in August was needed to obviate an invasion in November. This is interpretation--the very thing you said would be banned from the exhibit.

* In yet another label, the Smithsonian asserts as fact that "Special leaflets were then dropped on Japanese cities three days before a bombing raid to warn civilians to evacuate." The very next sentence refers to the bombing of Hiroshima on August 6, 1945, implying that the civilian inhabitants of Hiroshima were given a warning. In fact, no evidence has ever been uncovered that leaflets warning of atomic attack were dropped on Hiroshima. Indeed, the decision of the Interim Committee was "that we could not give the Japanese any warning."[10]

* In a 16 minute video film in which the crew of the Enola Gay are allowed to speak at length about why they believe the atomic bombings were justified, pilot Col. Paul Tibbits asserts that Hiroshima was "definitely a military objective." Nowhere in the exhibit is this false assertion balanced by contrary information. Hiroshima was chosen as a target precisely because it had been very low on the previous spring's campaign of conventional bombing, and therefore was a pristine target on which to measure the destructive powers of the atomic bomb.[11] Defining Hiroshima as a "military" target is analogous to calling San Francisco a "military" target because it has a port and contains the Presidio. James Conant, a member of the Interim Committee that advised President Truman, defined the target for the bomb as a "vital war plant employing a large number of workers and closely surrounded by workers' houses."[12] There were indeed military factories in Hiroshima, but they lay on the outskirts of the city. Nevertheless, the Enola Gay bombardier's instructions were to target the bomb on the center of this civilian city.

The few words in the exhibit that attempt to provide some historical context for viewing the Enola Gay amount to a highly unbalanced and one-sided presentation of a largely discredited post-war justification of the atomic bombings.

Such errors of fact and such tendentious interpretation in the exhibit are no doubt partly the result of your decision earlier this year to take this exhibit out of the hands of professional curators and your own board of historical advisors. Accepting your stated concerns for accuracy, we trust that you will therefore adjust the exhibit, either to eliminate the highly contentious interpretations, or at the very least, balance them with other interpretations that can be easily drawn from the attached footnotes.

Sincerely,

Kai Bird and Martin Sherwin
Co-chairs of the Historians' Committee for Open Debate on Hiroshima

(see the attached sheet for additional signatories)


References

1. "Enola Gay Exhibit to 'Report the Facts,'" Washington Times, March 11, 1995.

2. Hiroshima and Nagasaki: The Physical, Medical, and Social Effects of the Atomic Bombings, (New York: Basic Books, 1981), p. 364.

3. "Memorandum for Chief, Strategic Policy Section, S&P Group, OPD, Subject: Use of the Atomic Bomb on Japan," April 30, 1946, ABC 471.6 Atom (17 August 1945) Sec 7, Entry 421, Record Group 165, National Archives.

4. Joseph C. Grew, Turbulent Era: A Diplomatic Record of Forty Years 1904-1945, Vol. II (Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1952), pp. 1406-1442; U.S. Strategic Bombing Survey, Japan's Struggle to End the War (Washington, July 1946); Gar Alperovitz, "Hiroshima: Historians Reassess," Foreign Policy, Summer 1995, pp. 15-34; and, Martin Sherwin, A World Destroyed: Hiroshima and the Origins of the Arms Race, rev. ed. (New York, Random House, 1987), p. 225.

5. See "Notes on talk with President Eisenhower," April 6, 1960, War Department Notes envelope, Box 66, Herbert Feis Papers, Library of Congress Manuscript Division; and, Gen. Andrew Goodpaster, "Memorandum of Conference with the President, April 6, 1960," April 11, 1960, "Staff Notes--April 1960," Folder 2, DDE Diary Series, Box 49, Dwight D. Eisenhower Presidential Library; and also, Dwight D. Eisenhower, Mandate for Change, 1953-1956 (Garden City, New York: Doubleday & Company, Inc.), pp. 312-313.

6. William D. Leahy, I Was There: The Personal Story of the Chief of Staff to Presidents Roosevelt and Truman, Based on His Notes and Diaries Made at the Time, (New York: McGraw-Hill Book Company, Inc., 1950), p. 441. See also his private diary (in particular the June 18, 1945 entry) available at the Library of Congress Manuscript Division.

7. Henry L. Stimson and McGeorge Bundy, On Active Service in Peace and War (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1947, 1948), pp. 628-629.

8. Joseph C. Grew, Turbulent Era, pp. 1406-1442; Martin Sherwin, A World Destroyed, p. 225.

9. See John J. McCloy interview with Fred Freed for NBC White Paper, "The Decision to Drop the Bomb," (interview conducted sometime between May 1964 and February 1965), Roll 1, p. 11, File 50A, Box SP2, McCloy Papers, Amherst College Archives.

10. Martin J. Sherwin, A World Destroyed, see Appendix L, "Notes of the Interim Committee Meeting, May 31, 1945," p. 302.

11. The papers of Gen. Leslie R. Groves, head of the Manhattan Project, are filled with his statements to the effect that he wanted a virgin target large enough so that the effects of the bomb would not dissipate by the time they reached the edge of the city. See for example the letter from Groves to John A. Shane, 12/27/60 on target selection, in the Groves Papers, Record Group 200, National Archives. See also, Martin Sherwin, A World Destroyed, pp. 229-230.

12. Martin J. Sherwin, A World Destroyed, see Appendix L, "Notes of the Interim Committee Meeting, May 31, 1945," p. 302.


List of Signatories

Kai Bird, co-chair of the Historians' Committee for Open Debate on Hiroshima

Martin Sherwin, co-chair of the Historians' Committee for Open Debate on Hiroshima

Walter LaFeber, Professor of History, Cornell University

Stanley Hoffman, Dillon Professor, Harvard University

Mark Selden, Chair, Department of Sociology, State University of New York at Binghamton

Jon Wiener, Professor of History, University of California, Irvine

William O. Walker III, Ohio Wesleyan University

Dr. E.B. Halpern, Lecturer in American History, University College London

John Morris, Professor, Miyagi Gakuin Women's Junior College, Sendai, Japan

Gar Alperovitz, historian and author of The Decision to Use the Atomic Bomb

Stanley Goldberg, historian of science and biographer of Gen. Leslie Groves

James Hershberg, historian and author of James B. Conant: Harvard to Hiroshima and the Making of the Nuclear Age

Greg Mitchell, author of Hiroshima in America

Gaddis Smith, Professor of History, Yale University

Barton J. Bernstein, Professor of History, Stanford University

Michael J. Hogan, Professor of History, Ohio State University

Melvyn P. Leffler, Professor of History, University of Virginia

John W. Dower, Professor of History, MIT

Priscilla Johnson McMillan, Author and Fellow of the Russian Research Center, Harvard University

Bob Carter, Senior Lecturer in Sociology, Worcester College of Higher Education, England.

Douglas Haynes, Associate Professor of History, Dartmouth College

Bruce Nelson, Department of History, Dartmouth College

Walter J. Kendall, III, The John Marshall School of Law, Chicago

Patricia Morton, Assistant Professor, University of California, Riverside

Michael Kazin, Professor of History, American University

Gerald Figal, Asst. Professor of History, Lewis & Clark College, Portland, Oregon

R. David Arkush, Professor of History, University of Iowa, Iowa City

Barbara Brooks, Professor of Japanese and Chinese History, City College of New York

Dell Upton, Professor, University of California, Berkeley

Eric Schneider, Assistant Dean, College of Arts and Sciences, University of Pennsylvania

Janet Golden, Assistant Professor of History, Rutgers, Camden

Bob Buzzanco, Assistant Professor of History, University of Houston

Lawrence Badash, Professor of History of Science, University of California, Santa Barbara

Kanno Humio, Asociate Professor of Iwate University, Japan

Robert Entenmann, Associate Professor of History, St. Olaf College, Northfield, MN

Mark Lincicome, Assistant Professor, Department of History, College of the Holy Cross, Worcester, MA

Kristina Kade Troost, Duke University, Durham NC

Peter Zarrow, Assistant Professor of History, Vanderbilt University

Michael Kucher, University of Delaware

Lawrence Rogers, University of Hawaii at Hilo

Alan Baumler, Piedmont College

Timothy S. George, Harvard University

Ronald Dale Karr, University of Massachusetts, Lowell

Kikuchi Isao, Professor of Japanese History, Miyagi Gakuin Women's College, Sendai, Japan

Ohira Satoshi, Associate Professor of Japanese History, Miyagi Gakuin Women's College, Sendai, Japan

Inoue Ken'Ichiro Associate Professor of Japanese Art History, Miyagi Gakuin Women's College, Sendai, Japan

Yanagiya Keiko, Associate Professor of Japanese Literature, Siewa Women's College, Sendai, Japan

Sanho Tree, Research Director, Historians' Committee for Open Debate on Hiroshima

Eric Alterman, Stanford University

Jeff R. Schutts, Georgetown University

Gary Michael Tartakov, Iowa State University

W. Donald Smith, University of Washington, currently at Hitotsubashi University in Tokyo

[Nickdfresh]

Originally posted by LoungeMachine
He was a pilot.

He followed an order.

He was no more / less a Hero than the other millions who served.

Certainly not more than those who died.

We owe them all.

We also owe it to their memory not to become what they were fighting against.

Imperialist agressors who started wars and occupations in the name of the Homeland.

Exactly. He was a pilot possibly rated above average as far as pilots go. He did a job, and I doubt he'd claim to be anybody's hero. He simply resented being seen as some peoples' politicized, revisionist history, villain...

Especially of the Japanese who have assumed victim status regarding these bombings as often as possible to the point of near pseudo-martyrdom -yet- continually deny their own atrocities in China, The Philippines, Burma, etc...

[Nickdfresh]

Originally posted by Seshmeister
It's understandable that a lot of you take on board the the recieved wisdom/propoganda about the bombs to be to save a million US troops in an invasion of the Mainland.

I used to think that too but it doesn't really stand up.

http://www.doug-long.com/letter.htm

Actually, you're wrong. It's the revisionist history that doesn't stand up, Sesh...

While he might make some points, that article has been severally discredited...

* The Smithsonian's label also takes the highly partisan view that, "It was thought highly unlikely that Japan, while in a very weakened military condition, would have surrendered unconditionally without such an invasion." Nowhere in the exhibit is this interpretation balanced by other views.

Yeah, that would explain the attempted Imperial Japanese Army officer coup d'état to overthrow the Emperor EVEN AFTER the bombs had been dropped - in order to continue the War...

And as far as the Soviets entering the War, true they eviscerated the Japanese Army occupying Mongolia and Manchuria. But the USSR had little amphibious warfare capability making their contributions to a home island invasion very limited, if it were wanted at all...

[FORD]

I'm still waiting for the Republicans to demand that the history books change the name of the plane to the "Enola Straight".

[FORD]

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[Nickdfresh]

Originally posted by FORD
I'm still waiting for the Republicans to demand that the history books change the name of the plane to the "Enola Straight".

It's okay as long as it stays in the closet and doesn't try to marry another B-29...

[FORD]

Must be one Hell of a big closet.