Paul Tibbets, the pilot of the Enola Gay, died this week at the age of 92. He correctly believed that dropping The Bomb on Hiroshima was the right thing to do, and ultimately saved countless lives. Flying the specially modified B-29 out of Tinian, by the way, was not an easy thing to do. To have enough fuel to fly to Japan, the B-29s had to be overloaded, which meant that many crashed on takeoff, and since the bombing raids required huge numbers of planes to take off at once like a conveyor belt, pilots in the back of the line were sometimes taking off right over others who had crashed in front of them. There was a real possibility of the Enola Gay crashing on takeoff, which would not have been a good thing. Highly recommended on this subject is Richard Rhodes’ The Making of The Atomic Bomb and Stephen Walker’s Shockwave: Countdown to Hiroshima.
It’s fashionable nowadays—mandatory in some circles—to say that dropping The Bombs was the wrong thing to do. This seems absurd to me. Just look at the casualties the Allies took in the island-hopping campaign. An infantry invasion of Japan would have been a horrifying slaughter like nothing else in the war, and conventional bombs had not induced the Japanese to surrender. Indeed, even the first Bomb didn’t get them to surrender. Dropping The Bomb was the fastest and most effective way of attaining victory, and if a war is justified, then I would think the fastest and most effective way of attaining victory is necessarily justified also.
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