{"id":108,"date":"2010-10-27T23:54:46","date_gmt":"2010-10-27T23:54:46","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/hist-118pinsker\/?p=108"},"modified":"2017-03-21T16:56:46","modified_gmt":"2017-03-21T16:56:46","slug":"almost-present-at-the-destruction","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/hist-118pinsker\/2010\/10\/27\/almost-present-at-the-destruction\/","title":{"rendered":"Almost Present at the Destruction"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a href=\"http:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/hist-118pinsker\/files\/2010\/10\/nagasaki.jpg\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"alignright size-medium wp-image-109\" src=\"http:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/hist-118pinsker\/files\/2010\/10\/nagasaki-300x236.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"236\" srcset=\"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/hist-118pinsker\/files\/2010\/10\/nagasaki-300x236.jpg 300w, https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/hist-118pinsker\/files\/2010\/10\/nagasaki.jpg 519w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 300px) 100vw, 300px\" \/><\/a><\/p>\n<p>Col. Paul Tibbets was the pilot in command of the <em>Enola Gay\u00a0<\/em>(a B-29 bomber named for his mother) that dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima, Japan on August 6, 1945. The city had a population of about 350,000 at that time. \u00a0The explosion immediately killed about 70,000 of those residents, destroying most of the city&#8217;s buildings. \u00a0Tens of thousands more died in the weeks afterward. \u00a0Tibbets was interviewed on camera, not long after he returned (August 19th).<\/p>\n<p><iframe loading=\"lazy\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/qFcymt8jmOo\" width=\"560\" height=\"315\" frameborder=\"0\" allowfullscreen=\"allowfullscreen\"><\/iframe><\/p>\n<p>Russell Baker was a young 19-year-old naval pilot originally from Virginia who was training to go overseas in the summer of 1945.\u00a0 He later became a Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist for the <em>New York Times <\/em>who recalled his coming of age during the Great Depression and World War II in a famous memoir, <em>Growing Up <\/em>(1982).<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>\u00a0\u201cOn August 9 the second atomic bomb was dropped at Nagasaki.\u00a0 Next night I wrote to my mother.\u00a0 \u201cWell, today, to all intents and purposes, the war ended.\u00a0 The feeling of extreme elation which I had expected, existed for a bare moment, then life subsided back into its groove and it was just another day\u2026.\u201d\u00a0 I didn\u2019t confess that I hated the war\u2019s ending.\u00a0 I knew she had been praying to God to save my skin; I could hardly tell her I was sorry her prayers had been answered\u2026 Still there was no hint in either my mother\u2019s correspondence or mine that the arrival of the nuclear age interested us much.\u00a0 My mother, also excited about premature news that the war was over, had less cosmic things on her mind.\u00a0 The night after the Nagasaki bombing she wrote:\u00a0 \u201cI\u2019m still hoping that you\u2019ll go to college when the war is over and study journalism; that is, if you\u2019re still interested in that kind of work.\u00a0 Don\u2019t lose hope and get married at this stage of the game.\u201d (Russell Baker, <em>Growing Up, <\/em>p. 230)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<div id=\"attachment_457\" style=\"width: 531px\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\"><a href=\"http:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/hist-118pinsker\/files\/2015\/03\/Potsdam-e1426705699752.jpg\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" aria-describedby=\"caption-attachment-457\" class=\"wp-image-457 size-full\" src=\"http:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/hist-118pinsker\/files\/2015\/03\/Potsdam-e1426705699752.jpg\" width=\"521\" height=\"652\" \/><\/a><p id=\"caption-attachment-457\" class=\"wp-caption-text\">Churchill, Truman and Stalin at Potsdam, July 1945<\/p><\/div>\n<p>John Lewis Gaddis of Yale University is one of the nation\u2019s leading historians of the Cold War era.\u00a0 In this excerpt, he challenges the widely-held view that President Harry S Truman never hesitated and never questioned his decision to authorize the dropping of two atomic bombs on the Japanese in 1945.<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>\u201cIt took leadership to make this [containment of atomic war] happen, and the most important first steps came from the only individual so far ever to have ordered that nuclear weapons be used to kill people.\u00a0 Harry S Truman claimed, for the rest of his life, to have lost no sleep over his decision, but his behavior suggests otherwise.\u00a0 On the day the bomb was first tested in the New Mexico desert he wrote a note to himself speculating that \u2018machines are ahead of morals by some centuries, and when morals catch up perhaps there\u2019ll be no reason for any of it.\u2019\u00a0 A year later he placed his concerns in a broader context: \u2018[T]he human animal and his emotions change not much from age to age.\u00a0 He must change now or he faces absolute and complete destruction and maybe the insect age or an atmosphereless planet will succeed him.\u2019\u00a0 \u2018It is a terrible thing,\u2019 he told a group of advisors in 1948, \u2018to order the use of something that \u2026is so terribly destructive, destructive beyond anything we have ever had \u2026. So we have got to treat this differently from rifles and cannon and ordinary things like that.\u2019\u201d (John Lewis Gaddis, <em>The Cold War<\/em>, p. 53)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Col. Paul Tibbets was the pilot in command of the Enola Gay\u00a0(a B-29 bomber named for his mother) that dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima, Japan on August 6, 1945. The city had a population of about 350,000 at that time. \u00a0The explosion immediately killed about 70,000 of those residents, destroying most of the city&#8217;s [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":373,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[936],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-108","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-world-war-ii"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/hist-118pinsker\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/108","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/hist-118pinsker\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/hist-118pinsker\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/hist-118pinsker\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/373"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/hist-118pinsker\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=108"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/hist-118pinsker\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/108\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/hist-118pinsker\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=108"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/hist-118pinsker\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=108"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/hist-118pinsker\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=108"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}