President Eisenhower, the Allied commander in Europe during World War II, recalled in 1963, as he did on several other occasions, that he had opposed using the atomic bomb on Japan during a July 1945 meeting with Secretary of War Henry Stimson: "I told him I was against it on two counts. I was not taught to make war in that fashion, and wars cannot be won by destroying women and children." The Japanese were already defeated and ready to surrender." Moreover, Leahy continued, "n being the first to use it, we had adopted an ethical standard common to the barbarians of the Dark Ages. Leahy wrote in his 1950 memoirs that "the use of this barbarous weapon at Hiroshima and Nagasaki was of no material assistance in our war against Japan. William Leahy, White House chief of staff and chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff during the war. Tibbets was dead wrong.Ĭontrary to conventional opinion today, many military leaders of the time - including six out of seven wartime five-star officers - criticized the use of the atomic bomb. Through his many public statements Tibbets reinforced the widely held notion that only untrustworthy revisionists or members of the irresponsible 1960s generation have criticized the atomic bombings. For the last twenty years or so of his life, Tibbets repeatedly denounced "revisionists" for questioning the necessity or morality of the atomic bombing of Japanese cities.
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Many Americans agree.įor Tibbets, history was unambiguous: Unleashing nuclear weapons was justified all criticism of the atomic bombing was suspect. Tibbets insisted that the nuclear obliteration of Hiroshima (and Nagasaki, destroyed by a second atomic bomb just three days later) was absolutely necessary to bring about Japanese surrender before a bloody American invasion of the Japanese home islands. He went so far as to reenact the Hiroshima bombing in 1976 at a Texas air show. Truman - the president who made the decision to drop the atomic bomb - Tibbets, whose job it was to implement the presidential directive, claimed never to have lost any sleep over the bombing. Tibbets stridently defended the atomic bombing of Hiroshima for the rest of his life. He'll forever be remembered for what he unleashed the morning of August 6, 1945. Tibbets Jr., retired brigadier general and former businessman, died on Nov. Thus began the nuclear age - an age that grows ever more dangerous with the continuing spread of nuclear weapons.
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Those victims also included American and Allied POWs and thousands of Koreans forcibly conscripted by the Japanese as wartime labor. Most of the bomb's victims were women, children, the elderly and other civilians not directly involved in the war. Many others were scarred and injured for life. The blast, fire and radiation killed 140,000 people. That day Tibbets's B-29 - christened the "Enola Gay" after his mother - dropped an atomic bomb on the Japanese city of Hiroshima.