Enola Gay and Bock's Car
At Building D, a facility a third the size of the Pentagon, both the "Enola Gay" and "Bock's Car" were built. Enola Gay dropped an atomic bomb on Hiroshima, and "Bock's Car" dropped another one on Nagasaki. As we saw in the last posting, the decision to bomb both cities was made all at once.
The Enola Gay was shipped around quite a bit over the past several years. As some sign of our equivocation about it, exhibitions of the restored airplane were sometimes targets of anti-war protests. As I understand it, it is now on exhibit at an extension of the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum near Dulles Airport in suburban Washington, DC.
One of my students flew in a restored B-29. He described it as cold, noisy and uncomfortable. Of late, a trend in recognizing the contributions of our military by memorial has been to depict them in such states. Look at the Korean memorial, for example. The attempt at realistic depiction of footsoldiers in fairly miserable circumstances is effective, especially if you visit there at night.
How should we exhibit the Enola Gay?
A small crew of men flew this noisy, cold and uncomfortable bomber at only a little over 300 mph for many, many hours. They flew it over hostile territory and almost certainly braved anti aircraft fire. They carried what at least Col. Tibbets, the commander, knew was the most deadly weapon ever devised. The bomb was set to detonate atmospherically, meaning that it was not to explode on contact with the ground. It was set to go off several hundred feet up, so that the blast would spread over as much area as possible, versus a narrow blast force emanating upward from a hole in the ground. If the plane had been hit, could the bomb have detonated right then and there? Or if the plane was hit and lost altitude, would the bomb detonate at its prescribed altitude, plane and all?
Tibbets and his crew were brave, honorable men. They deserve our respect for ending a terrible, bloody conflict that would have (as Marshall and Truman recited) cost many more lives on all sides of the conflict.
The purpose of declared war is to win, and to do so as quickly and expeditiously as possible. "Humane war" is awfully hard to manage.
But Tibbets himself offers the most telling insight into the mission he flew. They opened the bomb bay doors, Little Boy was released, and everything worked just like it was supposed to.
No Slim Pickens riding a piece of set dressing in front of a rear-projected reversed sequence of a missle launch.
Tibbets says, "Four and a half square miles of Hiroshima simply disappeared."
At that moment, we because the pre-eminent world power. Our possession of a weapon of such destructive potential made us the envy of all nations. The next phase of world history became "the cold war," largely cold because the prospect of a hot war with the United States was too awful to imagine.
15,000 midwesterners (soon to be laid off) and Albert Einstein and Robert Oppenheimer and Col. Tibbets and his crew and tons of other Americans made this happen.
Honestly, the only sane choice we have is to be proud of all of them. None of them was motivated by malice or spite. None of them, at least on the record, was racist. They defined the purpose of their life by their acts and sacrifices, done in the name of ending a war.
I'm proud of what they did, largely out of regard for their motives and their sacrifices. We should not protest the Enola Gay - it is a part of our history, and it epitomizes any act of war which has ever earned the description "noble."
I'd love to hear your thoughts...
The Enola Gay was shipped around quite a bit over the past several years. As some sign of our equivocation about it, exhibitions of the restored airplane were sometimes targets of anti-war protests. As I understand it, it is now on exhibit at an extension of the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum near Dulles Airport in suburban Washington, DC.
One of my students flew in a restored B-29. He described it as cold, noisy and uncomfortable. Of late, a trend in recognizing the contributions of our military by memorial has been to depict them in such states. Look at the Korean memorial, for example. The attempt at realistic depiction of footsoldiers in fairly miserable circumstances is effective, especially if you visit there at night.
How should we exhibit the Enola Gay?
A small crew of men flew this noisy, cold and uncomfortable bomber at only a little over 300 mph for many, many hours. They flew it over hostile territory and almost certainly braved anti aircraft fire. They carried what at least Col. Tibbets, the commander, knew was the most deadly weapon ever devised. The bomb was set to detonate atmospherically, meaning that it was not to explode on contact with the ground. It was set to go off several hundred feet up, so that the blast would spread over as much area as possible, versus a narrow blast force emanating upward from a hole in the ground. If the plane had been hit, could the bomb have detonated right then and there? Or if the plane was hit and lost altitude, would the bomb detonate at its prescribed altitude, plane and all?
Tibbets and his crew were brave, honorable men. They deserve our respect for ending a terrible, bloody conflict that would have (as Marshall and Truman recited) cost many more lives on all sides of the conflict.
The purpose of declared war is to win, and to do so as quickly and expeditiously as possible. "Humane war" is awfully hard to manage.
But Tibbets himself offers the most telling insight into the mission he flew. They opened the bomb bay doors, Little Boy was released, and everything worked just like it was supposed to.
No Slim Pickens riding a piece of set dressing in front of a rear-projected reversed sequence of a missle launch.
Tibbets says, "Four and a half square miles of Hiroshima simply disappeared."
At that moment, we because the pre-eminent world power. Our possession of a weapon of such destructive potential made us the envy of all nations. The next phase of world history became "the cold war," largely cold because the prospect of a hot war with the United States was too awful to imagine.
15,000 midwesterners (soon to be laid off) and Albert Einstein and Robert Oppenheimer and Col. Tibbets and his crew and tons of other Americans made this happen.
Honestly, the only sane choice we have is to be proud of all of them. None of them was motivated by malice or spite. None of them, at least on the record, was racist. They defined the purpose of their life by their acts and sacrifices, done in the name of ending a war.
I'm proud of what they did, largely out of regard for their motives and their sacrifices. We should not protest the Enola Gay - it is a part of our history, and it epitomizes any act of war which has ever earned the description "noble."
I'd love to hear your thoughts...
posted by John Bernat @ 6:17 PM
3 Comments:
At Fri Dec 02, 04:45:00 PM PST,
Anonymous said…
I'd like to buy yer a drink!
At Fri Dec 02, 09:54:00 PM PST,
John Bernat said…
Well, hello, and howdy-doody!
At Sat Dec 31, 08:56:00 PM PST,
Anonymous said…
I am proud to say that I come from the town of Quincy, Illinois. Probably one of the most important people ever to come from Quincy is Paul W. Tibbets, though it's very likely that even most Quincians wouldn't know his name. In fact, Col. Tibbets is the man who trained the crews and commanded the mission that dropped the atomic bomb over Hiroshima. There is a books called "Return of the Enola Gay" which is is Col. Tibbets' story, told in his own words.
To be honest, though I very much wanted to like this book, I was surprised at how much I enjoyed it. Col. Tibbets prose is somewhat unpolished but his folksy, colloquial style is in the classic storytelling tradition and it is very readable. Reading this book, I often felt like I was sitting at my grandfather's feet, listening to stories of the war. He may come across as a little arrogant at times (like most of the great soldiers) but Tibbets' stories are always worth hearing.
And stories are something that Col. Tibbets has in great supply. The heart of the story is the organization and training of the squads that will ultimately compose the strike forces dropping "fat man" and "little boy" and, certainly, hearing Col. Tibbets describe his experiences on August 6, 1945, is gripping. However, Col. Tibbets was involved with many other important figures and events of World War II of which I was not even remotely aware. He trained (and shot skeet) with George Patton before the war. He piloted the first daylight bombing raids over Nazi occupied Europe. He flew Eisenhower and other important soldiers crucial to the Allied invasion of North Africa and flew a number of raids there.
And even though the stories of war might be enough to make a good book, Col. Tibbets does much more. He tells us the story of his life--the moving around, military school, leaving medical school to become a pilot, his years after the war and his ultimate retirement from the air force. He gives us insight into many of the famous and important people he met, like Patton and Doolittle. He describes how the Nagasaki bombing and the first nuclear test at Bikini atoll were near disasters. In particular, I was fascinated by his insights into the politics of the military, how certain people earn promotions and assignments. All in all, it is an absorbing account of an important period of American history told by a man who lived it.
A warning: an anti-war reader looking for an apology for the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki will have to look elsewhere. Col. Tibbets is proud of his role in what he often points out are the attacks that ended World War II, likely saving the lives of millions of Allied and Japanese soldier despite what revisionist "historians" would like to say. And, though I am leery of American tendencies to jump into war, I also think that Monday-morning quarterbacking 60 years later is an easy way to get up on a soapbox for people who didn't have to make the hard choices. I am proud to have Col. Tibbets as a sterling representative of my hometown and its values, well-reflected in this book.
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