Not With a Whimper, But With a Bang

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.