On August 6, 1945, the United States detonated an atomic bomb (“Little Boy”) over Hiroshima, Japan. Another atomic bomb (“Fat Man”) was dropped on Nagasaki on August 9. It was the first and only time that nuclear weapons were used as weapons of war.
The bombs did not drop themselves. The first bomb was dropped by an extensively modified B-29 (“Enola Gay”) with a crew of twelve and piloted by Colonel Paul Tibbets (1915-2007). The second bomb was dropped by a similar B-29 (“Bockscar”) with a crew of ten and piloted by Major Charles Sweeney (1919-2004). Both planes were accompanied by other B-29s for observation and photography.
The result of the bombing, as succinctly summarized by historian Ralph Raico, was barbaric: “Probably around two hundred thousand persons were killed in the attacks and through radiation poisoning; the vast majority were civilians, including several thousand Korean workers. Twelve US Navy fliers incarcerated in a Hiroshima jail were also among the dead.”
Sweeney decried “cuckoo professors” and the “cockamamie theories” of those who believed the atomic bombing of Japan was unnecessary. He stated: “There’s no question in my mind that President Truman made the right decision.”
Many high-ranking military officers at the time disagreed.
Adm. William Leahy, Truman’s chief of staff, wrote in his 1950 memoir I Was There that “the use of this barbarous weapon at Hiroshima and Nagasaki was of no material assistance in our war against Japan. The Japanese were already defeated and ready to surrender.… In being the first to use it, we…adopted an ethical standard common to the barbarians of the Dark Ages. I was not taught to make war in that fashion, and wars cannot be won by destroying women and children.”
Fleet Adm. Chester Nimitz, the commander in chief of the Pacific Fleet, stated in a public address at the Washington Monument two months after the bombings that “the atomic bomb played no decisive part, from a purely military standpoint, in the defeat of Japan.”
Gen. Dwight Eisenhower stated in his memoirs that when notified by Secretary of War Henry Stimson of the decision to use atomic weapons, he “voiced to him my grave misgivings, first on the basis of my belief that Japan was already defeated and that dropping the bomb was completely unnecessary, and secondly because I thought that our country should avoid shocking world opinion by the use of a weapon whose employment was, I thought, no longer mandatory as a measure to save American lives.” He later publicly declared, “It wasn’t necessary to hit them with that awful thing.”
Hellbound and Down 