Last crew member of Enola Gay dies aged 93

Dugganator said:
TLDR. Don't judge on hindsight on a different time era when these were the first time these were used.
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The lives lost in the bombing weren't any less precious than they would be today.

What has the era and whether it's the first time a nuke is used got to do with it. They knew they devastation it would cause and they knew it would be mostly civilians killed.

Let's hope you don't find yourself at the wrong end of a 'new' type of weapon, only to have people dismiss your demise so easily as you have theirs.
 
AGD said:
That's also a good excuse used by people carrying out atrocities.

'If I hadn't gassed those Jews, someone else would have'.

It may be true sometimes, but that doesn't absolve the individual of their responsibility for their actions.
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its not true sometimes, its always true in wartime. Youre also not taking into consideration that punishment in wartime for defying orders is execution on the spot by an officer. That would have made you think twice.

Serioulsy, what difference do you think one soldiers denial can make in all this madness called war, you simply cant stop the flow of events.
 
Roar87 said:
If you were alive for all of the events which led up to WW2, then heard of the atrocities that Japanese soldiers were committing, what they did to POW's and Civilians, you'd seen half the US Navy obliterated at Pearl Harbour and you'd also been exposed to huge amounts of anti-Japanese propaganda; would it be surprising that you wouldn't feel any regrets about bombing Japan and effectively forcing them to surrender?
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Of course people in this thread would, they are all experts in warfare and suffering, having spent their entire lives sitting at a pc giving expert advice and playing call of duty.

How can anyone even imagine what these people went through at the time, its a totally different era and the world is an entirely different place now, or at least for us in civilised countrys.
 
I think people are struggling with context.

They view it as an isolated event without taking into account anything else.

'Theodore van Kirk woke up one day and out of the blue was was given a choice by his superiors. His choice was to either have a rest that day, or go and drop a nuclear device that would wipe out 10s of thousands of people for no reason at all, achieving nothing. Theodore van Kirk chose the latter. He is a very bad person.'

Wake up people.
 
I would have preferred the US to drop the first bomb on a sparsely populated area as a warning. But in hindsight that would not have worked. Given they only had two bombs they had to make them count.

In a way those bombs may have saved a later much larger nuclear exchange. Had the devastation not occurred then the first use of nuclear may have been at a time when more than one nation had them.

RIP to an old man regardless of actions.
 
The indiscriminate slaughter of over 100,000 people (mostly civilians, women & children) should always be undesirable - even if it was for the overall 'good' & saved more lives in the long term (this isn't really proven either way as to if it's the case, it's easy to say after that fact what it may have prevented but this was not known at the time).

It wasn't a positive act & countless innocent people died as a result of it, at best it may have been necessary nothing more. Nobody involved should be celebrated either way.
 
Hades said:
I would have preferred the US to drop the first bomb on a sparsely populated area as a warning. But in hindsight that would not have worked. Given they only had two bombs they had to make them count.
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Nagasaki was actually pretty small, it was the alternate target as the primary had too much cloud cover for a drop.


Hades said:
In a way those bombs may have saved a later much larger nuclear exchange. Had the devastation not occurred then the first use of nuclear may have been at a time when more than one nation had them.
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That's actually the plot of Command and Conquer :P
 
He was doing his duty and just following orders.
Where have I heard that defense before, was it at the Nuremberg Trials?
 
ubersonic said:
Yeah flying a bomber into enemy airspace dodging AA positions and enemy fighters before dropping an experimental weapon which their not even sure you can out run is child's play, no guts involved.
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When you compare it to the calibre of people at the time, what he did was what most combatants did regularly.
 
TriedandTested said:
The lives lost in the bombing weren't any less precious than they would be today.

What has the era and whether it's the first time a nuke is used got to do with it. They knew they devastation it would cause and they knew it would be mostly civilians killed.

Let's hope you don't find yourself at the wrong end of a 'new' type of weapon, only to have people dismiss your demise so easily as you have theirs.
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Ok couple of things I never said that they lives lost weren't important I even went on to say what's the difference between normal bombing and the use of a nuke so exactly that they kill just on different levels, I value all life. So don't jump to conclusion and only quote part of what I said. As someone said above whats the difference between a soldier doing his job aiding a war effort building stuff to one that kills people they all contribute to it in someway.

A different era has everything to do with it simply because it was the first time it was used was this going to be considered a standard weapon and the US would just nuke everyone on demand. Or did they learn from there mistakes. I think that the use of these weapons may have resulted in the reason they aren't used today as standard. As a race I hope we learn from our mistakes but clearly we haven't as normal wars rage on which are just terrible but at least they aren't using nukes!!

To be clear I have no love of war or these weapons so saying you hope that someone I care about isn't at the end of a new weapon is just stupid.

Once again hindsight being applied making it easy to jump after they happened. If the US dropped the first one and did advance studies on the fallout and affects would they have dropped the second one so quickly. I don't know the answer but war time era 1940s don't have the same processes we follow today. Horrible fact is most of those process are learnt from lesions learnt. A horrible way of finding things out if I'm honest.
 
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ubersonic said:
Saving millions by sacrificing thousands is a rational decision, albeit one that can and should cause a lot of conflict in the decision makers soul, but it was still the right decision.
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Considering that the war was pretty much ending, this was an over zealous act to show the "might" of the US. I do not think it was justified, and I find it horrendous.

elmarko said:
The indiscriminate slaughter of over 100,000 people (mostly civilians, women & children) should always be undesirable - even if it was for the overall 'good' & saved more lives in the long term (this isn't really proven either way as to if it's the case, it's easy to say after that fact what it may have prevented but this was not known at the time).

It wasn't a positive act & countless innocent people died as a result of it, at best it may have been necessary nothing more. Nobody involved should be celebrated either way.
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Perfectly summated.
 
Redz said:
He was doing his duty and just following orders.
Where have I heard that defense before, was it at the Nuremberg Trials?
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All allied bomber crew were doing they're duty and following orders. Are you trying to suggest that they were all war criminals?
 
Freefaller said:
Considering that the war was pretty much ending, this was an over zealous act to show the "might" of the US. I do not think it was justified, and I find it horrendous.
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It's this misconception that causes people to hate on the US over the bombings. The war in Europe may have ended however the war in the pacific was still ongoing and actually showing signs of heating up as the USSR was about to join in.

Japan had been preparing for the US/USSR land invasion and and casualties were estimated at 500,000-1,000,000 American, 5,000,000-10,000,000 Japanese and unknown Soviet.

To say it was pretty much ending when the war in the pacific was about to enter it's most violent stage is laughable.
 
AGD said:
That's also a good excuse used by people carrying out atrocities.

'If I hadn't gassed those Jews, someone else would have'.

It may be true sometimes, but that doesn't absolve the individual of their responsibility for their actions.
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You're comparing somebody paid to carry out orders to a dictator whose decisions would have altered the course of history. An idiotic comparison. If he had said 'no,' they would have found somebody else to do it because the decision for the US to bomb Hiroshima was not his choice. If Hitler had decided not to pursue his 'Final Solution,' it likely would never have happened because he was the de facto Fuhrer and nobody outranked him.
 
ubersonic said:
It's this misconception that causes people to hate on the US over the bombings. The war in Europe may have ended however the war in the pacific was still ongoing and actually showing signs of heating up as the USSR was about to join in.

Japan had been preparing for the US/USSR land invasion and and casualties were estimated at 500,000-1,000,000 American, 5,000,000-10,000,000 Japanese and unknown Soviet.

To say it was pretty much ending when the war in the pacific was about to enter it's most violent stage is laughable.
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I still feel it was unnecessary slaughter. I'm not denying it worked, but I don't think it was the right thing to do morally - it saddens me that we can be such destructive creatures, and we don't seem to be learning. It makes us so weak as a species and it's rather embarrassing.
 
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