Posted on 11/01/2007 11:58:06 AM PDT by pabianice
When I was a child, my mother had one of the early coffee table books on display in the living room. “The Family of Man” (http://www.amazon.com/Family-Man-Greatest-Photographic-Exhibition/dp/B000J1AMR6/ref=sr_1_1/103-5108515-2439061?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1193940207&sr=1-1) was, to a kid in grade school in the mid-50s, a fascinating book. There was little TV in those days, few magazines for kids, and of course, no video games, computers, or cell phones. This book’s 500 or so black and white pictures, taken from many magazines, showed a vast array of people from many nations engaged in a wide variety of activities. I spent hours and hours staring at the pictures, fascinated.
I thought of this book again today at the news that COL Paul Tibbets, pilot of the B-29 “Enola Gay” that helped end World War II by dropping the fission bomb on Hiroshima, had died at the age of 92. Tibbets died at his Columbus home after suffering from diseases of old age for several months. The article noted that Tibbets had requested no funeral and no headstone because of the unavoidable demonstrations and defacing by today’s Left who, in their continuing love of their fellow man, miss no opportunity to act like savages when addressing their political enemies. I thought of “The Family of Man” because of a picture it had published, allegedly of Tibbets, showing a stubble-covered, bleary-eyed, shaking wreck of a man who was clearly insane, staring into the camera. My mother instructed that this was the picture of Paul Tibbets, who had plunged into alcoholic madness from the guilt and shame over his infamous mission. I loved my mom, but politically, she was the ideological mother of Nancy Pelosi.
According to a more reliable report, Tibbets had said, "I'm not proud that I killed 80,000 people, but I'm proud that I was able to start with nothing, plan it and have it work as perfectly as it did… You've got to take stock and assess the situation at that time. We were at war. ... You use anything at your disposal… I sleep clearly every night.''
Rest in peace, Colonel. May the country always benefit from men like you and your fellows, despite the misunderstanding and forthright mendacities from those who live the carefree life of Eloi despite the Morlocks who would, were it not for the world’s Paul Tibbetses, eat them while they sleep.
Tibbets (center) and his crew before their famous mission
I’d wager most of the idiots who condemn Tibbets and the atomic bombing of Japan would show blank faces if you asked them about the victims of the Bataan Death March and who perpetrated it.
I remember “The Family of Man” and the picture of Tibbetts. This book of photographs was published about 20 years after the war. I did not trust the motives of the photographer or the editor. The photograph did not justly serve the memory of Tibbetts or his comrads in arms who gave all they could to deafeat Imperial Japan. Whether or not Tibbetts descended into alcoholism, plenty who made it back did. As I was growing up, I can’t remember a single one that was pointed out as a victim.
All you need to know is that on March 8-9, 1945, 334 B-29s killed over 100,000 Japanese, mostly civilians, in the first firebomb raid on Tokyo. Sixteen square miles of the city was leveled, and a million people were made homeless. And that was just the first of dozens of low-altitude firebomb raids that Curtis Lemay’s Twentieth Air Force did over the next five months. Hiroshima and Nagasaki were among a very few major cities that hadn’t already been partially or totally leveled by the B-29s dropping M69 napalm bombs.
The only difference between Tokyo in March and Hiroshima in August is that Tokyo took 334 planes, and Hiroshima took three. That’s about it.
}:-)4
bump
Rest in peace, Colonel Tibbets.
I trust middle America is different. But I don't think the majority of Americans live there.
Wow! What a difference. Here in my hometown, just last week, we lined Main St. with American flags as half the town filled the sidewalks to say goodbye to a local soldier killed in Iraq as the hearse carried his coffin to the cemetary. Flags throughout the county are flying at half mast out of respect for his honor and duty as I write.
Most folks here have "support our troops" bumpers stickers and the ladies and girls at our local schools and churches make yellow ribbons and put them along our main street while there are handmade signs of support for our troops posted on fences, telephone poles and shopkeepers windows. Of course this is middle America out West here.
>> The only difference between Tokyo in March and Hiroshima in August is that Tokyo took 334 planes, and Hiroshima took three. That’s about it.
Yep... it’s a wonder that that didn’t bring them to their knees, but it didn’t. And there’s no way to know for sure, but I’m not sure any amount of “conventional” firebombing would have.
BTW, I like your tag line!
Rest in peace Paul Tibbets. You were a great man.
Colonel Paul Tibbets deserves the eternal respect and gratitude of this Nation.
He commanded the B-29 squadron that conducted the mission which saved the lives of several hundred thousand GIs and an untold number of Japanese.
Semper Fi, Colonel.
Shedding innocent blood is one of the few things that God says He hates. One of the very few. And it doesn't matter whether you do it with abortion, a bomb, or a baseball bat.
Joshua at Jericho?
The bombs at Hiroshima and Nagasaki saved more Japanese lives than they took. Not to mentioned the many American lives saved and the prisoners and slaves freed from at least another year of oppression.
So if God wanted to, He could have shed innocent blood by consuming Hiroshima with earthquake, tsunami, meteor strike. He is sovereign.
But it is clear and explicit from Scripture, verbatim, what God Himself finds abominable.
Deuteronomy 19:10
Do this so that innocent blood will not be shed in your land, which the LORD your God is giving you as your inheritance, and so that you will not be guilty of bloodshed.
Deuteronomy 19:13
You must purge from Israel the guilt of shedding innocent blood, so that it may go well with you.
Proverbs 6:16-17
These things the Lord hates: ...haughty eyes, a lying tongue, hands that shed innocent blood.
Jeremiah 19:4
For they have forsaken me and made this a place of foreign gods; they have burned incense in it to gods that neither they nor their ancestors nor the kings of Judah ever knew, and they have filled this place with the blood of the innocent.
Jeremiah 22:3
This is what the LORD says: Do what is just and right. Rescue from the hands of their oppressors those who have been robbed. Do no wrong or violence to the foreigner, the fatherless or the widow, and do not shed innocent blood in this place.
Joel 3:19
But Egypt will be desolate, Edom a desert waste, because of violence done to the people of Judah, in whose land they shed innocent blood.
Joel 3:21
Shall I leave the shedding of innocent blood unpunished? No, I will not."
And many other words of the Lord terrible and unmistakable.
Understand that I do not consider myself to be morally superior to Paul Tibbets or to anyone else. People do terrible things goaded by terrible circumstances. I just think the voice of God must be heard, though we hate like hell to hear it.
I bow my head as one who has no reason to boast.
Did you ever consider that God used America as His agent of divine retribution on an empire that shed an ocean of innocent blood from 1937-1945?
Farewell and Godspeed, General Tibbets.
That's possible. It still doesn't justify the decision to firebomb cities (Did God appear to Truman and give Him a personal heads-up? No.) It makes me wonder what retribution God will have against us, who have shed the blood of 50,000,000 unborn babies since 1973.
Just from the gut - I don’t think the terms “alcoholic” and “92-year-old” are a match made in heaven...
I understand your viewpoint. Curtis Lemay made his decision to use firebombs on Japanese cities almost out of desperation. His B-29s were trying to use European-style “precision” bombing (which killed quite enough civilians as it was, ask the residents of Dresden) but they were running into the jet stream over Japan, and the 200+ mph winds at altitude were shoving them miles off target.
The Army knew that Japanese cities were mostly wood and paper. Lemay took a gamble—that if he switched to incendiary bombs, flew the planes in at night, between 5,000 and 10,000 feet, and without any defensive gunners to allow for extra bombload, that he could do decisive damage to the Japanese industrial infrastructure and maybe, just maybe, cow them into surrender. He did the first, but not the second.
The fact is, if the Japanese had not been bloodied to the point that Emperor Hirohito finally had to say, “Enough,” to his advisors (and even then, most of them wanted to continue fighting!), there would have been a land invasion of Japan. Millions of American troops, facing off against millions of Japanese civilians ready to die for their Emperor. It would have been a bloodbath that dwarfed any cruelty seen on the Eastern Front. Japan as a nation, and maybe the Japanese as a people, would have been all but destroyed.
It’s a tough moral call. And it’s definitely worth noting that two of the most controversial figures in the Allied military after the war weren’t the colorful, famous ones like Patton and Montgomery—they were Curtis Lemay and Arthur “Bomber” Harris.
}:-)4
God knocked down the walls of Jericho, but afterwards the Israelites went in and put the city to the sword, apparently with God's blessing:
Joshua 6:20
20 So the people shouted when the priests blew with the trumpets: and it came to pass, when the people heard the sound of the trumpet, and the people shouted with a great shout, that the wall fell down flat, so that the people went up into the city, every man straight before him, and they took the city.
21 And they utterly destroyed all that was in the city, both man and woman, young and old, and ox, and sheep, and ass, with the edge of the sword.
None was spared except for Rahab and her family.
And in Deuteronomy 20:16:
16 But of the cities of these people, which the LORD thy God doth give thee for an inheritance, thou shalt save alive nothing that breatheth:
17 But thou shalt utterly destroy them; namely, the Hittites, and the Amorites, the Canaanites, and the Perizzites, the Hivites, and the Jebusites; as the LORD thy God hath commanded thee:
Judging from the history in the Bible, there are times when God condones the destruction of cities and sometimes commands it. I'm not implying that the United States was acting on specifically on God's orders, but instead was doing everything that it could to end the war quickly and victoriously. Oceans of blood have been spilled in humanity's wars throughout history. The enduring lesson of war is that only decisive victory brings lasting peace. The United States is arguably the most humane nation that has ever existed on the planet by virtue of its enormous power of destruction and its sparing use of that power. That is perhaps what irks its detractors, that something so powerful must be at its heart, evil, and yet it is not.
I believe that a great many collateral casualties would have been justified in order to utterly destroy the Japanese war machine. They had butchered God-knows how many multitutes of people (I hesitate to put a numerical figure on it, but it was astronomical) and it was solidly probable that they would continue to do more of the same.
Even so-called "precision bombing" was in no way precise in WWII. It is jaw-droppingly horrifying to contemplate the number of civilian casualties even from bonbing runs that were legitimately intended for military targets. And yet the civilian casualties were (1) not directly intentional, inasmuch as sincere efforts were made to minimize noncombatant deaths, (2)unavoidable in the course of knocking out port facilites, arms factories, massed troops, and (3)grimly but truly proportionate, inasmuch as the Japanese military was overtly genocidal.
Are such things justified? I say yes. Those kinds of civilian casualties are not directly intended, they are unavoidable, and they are proportionate. Those are the key moral categories in a grim business such as this. I am not a pacifist, and I can see this.
However what is morally corrupt about Hiroshima and Nagasaki (and Dresden and Hamburg etc.) is that apparently by this time, all such moral fixed points had been swept away.
There is every indication --- as far as I can see -- that the civilian casualties were fully elective and strategically intended. If by some fantasyland fluke, Field Marshal Shunroku Hata's 2nd General Army Headquarters and the military transshipment facilities had been obliterated, but the civilian population left untouched, the atomic bomb --- let's face it ---- would have been considered a vast disappointment.
The purpose was to make a dramatic and psychologically traumatizing flambeau of civilian flesh. Hiroshima as such was a military target only if you can also say that New York City as such is a military target.
That is not justified by any warrior's ethic. George Washington would not have done it. Lee would not have done it. It is a violation of US law, international law, and the UCMJ. It is against God's law. Only God can judge the individual heart, and may He do so mercifully. But as a policy, it is damnable.
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