Pilot of plane that bombed Hiroshima dies

Paul Tibbets died today.

Paul Tibbets, who piloted the B-29 bomber Enola Gay that dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima, died Thursday. He was 92 and insisted almost to his dying day that he had no regrets about the mission and slept just fine at night.

I must admit, I'd probably sleep just fine at night myself. Maybe I'm cruel, but when you're fighting a war, you use whatever you have at your disposal to win, and win quickly. Maybe there were better alternatives then using the bomb, but we had asked Japan to surrender dozens of times and were always met with a big "screw off".

So, do we invade Japan and kill many times more people in the process? Many of you out there wouldn't be alive today if we didn't drop the bomb. Your grandfathers might have died in the ensuing battles and your parents might never have been born.

But of course, there's always people who want to second guess everything. God knows how many people would truly have been killed had we invaded rather than dropped the bomb. Maybe it would be more then the 200,000 people killed by the bomb, maybe not.

But one thing is certain, Japan's surrender a few days later certainly made it clear they weren't going to fight someone who was killing 10's of thousands of people in one swipe. Thus, the war ended quickly, and everyone went home and raised families.

Travis
travis@rightwinglunatic.com
http://forums.rightwinglunatic.com