"I remember the shock to our nation that all of this brought. I remember Pearl Harbor and all of the Japanese atrocities." He was a radarman on the Enola Gay and performed the same duties on Bockscar.īeser would later write that "No, I feel no sorrow or remorse for whatever small role I played. Jacob Beser would be the only one to see the aftermath of both explosions. The Enola Gay passed over Saipan while cruising at 4,700 feet. local time on August 6, 1945, the Enola Gay pushed the ground away and lifted thunderously into the darkness for a rendezvous with destiny. 9, when a B-29 called "Bockscar" dropped another atomic bomb on Nagasaki.Īrmy Air Forces 2nd Lt. The Superfortress sniffed the tropical night sky and consumed almost the entire 8,500-foot-long runway, reaching 155 mph. The crew also hoped that the bomb would never be used again but it was, three days later on Aug. Such a terrible waste, such a loss of life." Theodore "Dutch" Van Kirk, of Northumberland, Pa., later said that "I honestly believe the use of the atomic bomb saved lives in the long run, but I pray no man will have to witness that sight again. troops who were then preparing for the invasion of Japan.Ĭapt. It had hastened the end of the war and saved the lives of U.S. Lewis, Caron and the others, however, would later say they had no regrets about dropping the bomb. "I honestly have the feeling of groping for words to explain this or I might say, my God, what have we done?" Everyone on the ship is actually dumbstruck even though we had expected something fierce." Most of those were due to RAF fire bombing. About a million German civilians died in Allied bombing over a period of several years.
The vast majority of these were after March 9 1945. ''If I live a hundred years, I'll never quite get these few minutes out of my mind. It is estimated that 600,000 Japanese civilians died In the B-29 campaign, 80 of those from non-nuclear attacks. He was keeping a log of the flight, scribbling on the backs of old War Department forms. It was about that time that Tibbets turned the airplane around, so that everybody could get a look at it." Flames in different spots would be springing up. SPAATZ - flew against Pancho Villa before US entered WW-I and became first Chief of Staff of the United States Air Force in 1947 these come from USAF Historical R. General Carl Spaatz flew over from Saipan GENERAL CARL A. "And fires, I could see fires spring up through this undercast, or whatever you would call it, that was covering the city. Answer (1 of 5): Great answers here, but none of them include photographs. It looked like bubbling molasses, let's say, spreading out and running up into the foothills, just covering the whole city." I could see the city, and it was being covered with this low, bubbling mass. You’ve got to leave the moral issue out of it."As we got further away, I could see the city then, not just the mushroom, coming up. I don’t care whether you’re dropping atom bombs, or whether you’re dropping 100-pound bombs, or you’re shooting a rifle. Morality, there is no such thing in warfare. I was instructed to perform a military mission to drop the bomb and that was the thing that I was going to do to the best of my ability. Tibbets added, “I made up my mind then that the morality of dropping that bomb was not my business. I’m supposed to be a bomber pilot and destroy a target. So, I thought, you know, I’m just like that if I get to thinking about some innocent person getting hit on the ground. They assumed the symptoms of the patients and it destroyed their ability to render medical necessities. That is, they were selling legalized drugs for drug houses and so forth and so on, because they couldn’t practice medicine due to the fact that they had too much sympathy for their patients. And he was telling me about previous doctors, some that had been classmates of his, who were drug salesmen. “Well, then I got a thought that I had engendered and encountered for the first time in Cincinnati when I was going to medical school. “The first time I dropped bombs on a target over there, … I said to myself, ‘People are getting killed down there that don’t have any business getting killed. In the 1989 interview, Tibbets also spoke of a lesson he learned in Cincinnati about doing his job: