Eighty years ago today, a B-29 bomber named "Enola Gay" dropped "Little Boy", a uranium-fueled atomic bomb, on the city of Hiroshima. The bomb was not as destructive as the firebombing of Tokyo, a few month before, but it was a hell of a lot faster and had a lot more lingering effects.
Don't count me amongst the brigade of hand-wringers over the use of the bombs. I am here, my siblings, nieces, nephews and cousins are here because of the use of atomic bombs. My father was in the Army in the Pacific; he had been trained to defuse Japanese ordnance. One of my uncles was in the Pacific, a two-invasion Marine. Another uncle was in the ETO. a fourth was coming up on draft eligibility. All would have been sucked into the greedy maw of the meatgrinder that would have been Operation Downfall.
It would have been a series of very bloody battles, as, unlike the fighting in Europe, the fighting in the Pacific was largely a no-quarter contest. Likely a million or more Allied servicemen would have been killed, with Japanese casualties of ten to fifty times as high, including a good percentage of the civilian population. A goodly part of Japan would have been turned into ruins.
Every dog has its day
32 minutes ago
1 comment:
I've long suspected that it was the imagery of the ruins of those two cities that was the deciding factor in causing those who could have ordered a nuclear launch, to refrain instead.
We were lucky that most of those cities were wood, making the destruction worse. Notable that the one steel and concrete building in the blast zone ended looking pretty much like every other building in Nazi Germany that got bombed.
Had Hiroshima and Nagasaki looked like that, we'd probably have had a nuclear exchange by now.
I worry that those images no longer have the impact they did at the time, making the unthinkable less so.
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