On August 6, 1945, the United States dropped an atomic bomb on the city of Hiroshima. The bomb was known as “Little Boy;”it was a uranium “gun-type” bomb that was chosen for first operational use because all the science to explode it was thoroughly known by the scientists of the Manhattan Project, making it the “safe” option.
The Boeing B-29 Superfortress bomber, 'Enola Gay', with its powerful nose, surrounded by windows, and shining in the sunlight, calls up the bombers surrounding us-US now. They are America's, Enola Gay. They are the enemy within, with the help of others. They are white supremacy, greed, self-interest, capitalism gone mad, lying, dishonesty, Dark Money, cruelty, propaganda, and the angry ignorant anti-government anti-regulation anti-taxes grievance plagued mass -- unleashed.
At the National Arboretum there is a beautiful bonsai tree which was planted in the 17th century, not long after Shakespeare's death. It had been cared for by one Japanese family for all those centuries. It survived the bombing of Hiroshima, and was presented to the people of the United States in 1976, in honor of our bicentennial, by the surviving family members. It is majestic, although less than three feet high. I think of it every August 6, and of the courage, grace and hope that tree represents. Thank you for this sobering reminder of what the U.S. did on August 6, 1945.
Tayama, I am so sorry about your grandmother’s experience, both the horror and pain of being close to that apocalyptic destruction, and her death at 63 from cancer. I hope you, your siblings, and all your families are well.
Far too many people died on that day and likely for many years after that. It should have taught all humans a lesson - to never have that happen again - ever!! Should have!
Although I feel this was a necessary evil of war that had you cut to bring that war to an abrupt end, the aftermath, death, cancers, and many other terrifying consequences were not fully thought out back then as they are today.
That being said, I send my condolences to you, and your family on the suffering , and loss of your great grandmother. I too lost family members during that war, as well as Korea, Vietnam, and very close friends during the Afghan conflict. So I know what losing a close friend or loved one to war feels like. Hopefully your children remember her as she lived. Not as she suffered. Especially the stories she conveyed upon them.
Thank you for your words of condolences. I send mine to to you as well.
She was on the train that morning. She survived because she had dropped her umbrella and when she bent down to pick it up, the bomb went off. She was below the window line and surrounded by other humans.
Now there is Peace Park in Hiroshima. It’s dedicated to remembering the horrors of war so it never happens again.
So sorry for your loss. To have a direct connection to such a catastrophic event and being told your grandmother's story before she died, it brings up so many emotions in me, it's hard to put to words.
I cannot put a heart on this post. It is so painful to read about the death of innocents and the destruction to the environment. May no one, anywhere, ever unleash this force again. Blessed are the peacemakers, the tikkun olam, the repairers of the world.
Samm-did you know the Enola Gay is @ the the Steven F. Udvar-Hazy Center, at Dulles International Airport branch of the Smithsonian Museum? That Branch is considerably larger than the National Mall branch. If one is fascinated with aviation, it's well worth the visit.
I've heard so many arguments from so many sides, emphasizing so many different points of view (and matters of "fact") that I don't think I have enough good information to have an opinion about the decision to drop the bomb(s). I know what I was taught in school, but I also know that a lot of it was bullshit. we all DO know that in 1962, LeMay was a trigger-happy scumbag during the Cuban Missile Crisis, which I DO recall as being just about the weirdest bunch of days I ever lived through.
Interestingly, Robert S. MacNamara was on LeMay's staff as an operations analyst. At the conclusion of the war he and LeMay had a conversation about it, in which LeMay said that - if the Japanese had won - "We might be the ones labeled war criminals." In light of later history of each of them, that's an interesting conversation.
I, for the life of me, just cannot hit the "like" button, though I thoroughly appreciate Tom's writing of this and bringing it alive for all of us. To see what destruction was wrought by both bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, is chilling. The Enola Gay is now housed at the Smithsonian Institution's Steven Udvar-Hazy Air & Space Museum, at Washington's Dulles Airport. It us merely an object, with nothing but a footnote to describe its place in history. Maybe there should be an interactive display that shows the moment of the bombing and the aftermath. Or would that upset too many people? (That's a rhetorical question, by the way.)
In 2003, when the airplane was first put on display, there was a full explanation of the bombing, which All True American Congressional Patriots hated, since the recitation of the facts does not put us in a good light, and in the frenzy the guy at the Smithsonian who led the project got fired and the explanation was taken down. Can't have people misbelievin' the Official Mythology, can we?
Thanks, TC, for your explanation of the Smithsonian's Air & Space Museum decision with reference to display of 'Enola Gay'. It is another example of the USA's mythmaking, otherwise known as hiding from the truth.
Thank you for your essay about this day in 1945. I would not be writing this if it hadn't happened, and that is something I have lived with most of my life. My father was on his way back from Okinawa where he had been fighting to get trained on taking off and landing on aircraft carriers so he would be better able to attack the Japanese islands where we were projecting to loose a million men. The bombs stopped the war, his war was over in an instant. He married my mother and 9 months later I showed up. You all are beneficiaries of my life project, which likely wouldn't have happened if we had attacked the Japanese islands like we had planned. I saw Oppenheimer the day after it opened, and cannot recommend it more, it needs to be seen on the largest screen you can find. It was still playing in my head a week after watching it, not many movies have managed to do that. I don't drink and it was sobering, as was your essay today Tom. What we are living through today was totally preventable had the US Senate acted honorably, they chose not too. Many things transpired that brought the world 2 World Wars, which in turn gave us the bomb, once we were on that path; the bomb was a result of our knowledge at that point, now they are everywhere, hanging overall of us like the Sword of Damocles. I wonder if we honestly think that sanity will save us, it has until now, but if history is any guide, we can't count on it. What a mess!
I have a photograph of me, playing with my dog Michael, on my first birthday in July 1945. In the background, there is a ghostly figure in Navy Chief's khakis. My father. In 1978, when I helped them pack stuff out of the house I grew up in for their coming move, I opened a box and found an envelope addressed to me. In it was a letter written to me by my father, that day. He had survived the sinking by the kamikazes of a radar picket destroyer off Okinawa and been home on survivor's leave. He had that morning received orders to report to another radar picket destroyer. He didn't think he would live to be my father, so he wrote this letter telling me who he was and why he had decided to become a father in the middle of a war, and what he hoped for me. I didn't know how to tell him I had found it, so it went home with me. In what turned out to be our final face-to-face conversation nine years later, I did tell him. He told me I hadn't turned out anything like what he had hoped; I'd turned out better (by this time I was a successful screenwriter, doing the one thing the man with 150 independent patents in his name had really wanted to do and couldn't - he was my biggest fan). It was a great conversation; if I had known it would be the last, it couldn't have been better.
The thing is, what he and your dad and all the other dads and would-be dads couldn't know at the time was that it had been determined we couldn't do the invasion. Which is why we threw the bombs at them in our frustration. But as he once said - he hated the bomb and everything i meant - the only good thing he could think of about it was that he was there alive, to hate it.
Yea there has to be a lot of us who are offspring of the men, and they were mostly men, who were engaged in the meat grinder that was WWII, and survived it long enough to have children.
Thanks for a terrific summation of one of the darkest days in world history.
In my Master's studies I took a course on the first half of the US 20th century. I think there were 7 in class. Our professor mentioned that there were rumors ( ever confirmed?) the Japanese were preparing for a last massive attack and had enough planes and pilots to massively increase US deaths
Never found out if it was true. Those of us in class ( late 1980's I was probably the oldest at 30+ years old) believed we should have never dropped the bombs in Hiroshima and Nagasaki
Tom, with your knowledge and background what do you think?
Believe me I don't want to turn this into a brawl. Truman: right or wrong? Thanks again
The Japanese did in fact have some 7,000 kamikazes in the home islands, which would have been deployed had the Kyushu invasion happened. However, at the end of June after the Okinawa campaign (the second bloodiest naval campaign of the war, after the Guadalcanal campaign), Admiral Nimitz wrote to the Joint Chiefs, withdrawing the Navy's support for the invasion on the grounds they could not withstand the losses that would have been incurred. So the bombs were sort of a tantrum of frustration, that the US leaders knew they couldn't do the invasion.
Okinawa was a dress rehearsal for the coming attack on the Japanese islands. I recommend "Goodby Darkness" by William Manchester for a taste of what the coming battles were going to be like.
Judy, if I may attempt to give you an educated answer. I dint hold a Master’s degree in anything. Just a 2 year degree in Criminal Justice.
This being said, here goes nothing.
I don’t regret what the United States did to try to end World War II. It’s what it took. If you think about the innocent people that the Japanese soldiers killed in every country they fought in, along with the Germans, and all the other nations that had entered that war, it is something that had to be done to give the ‘shock-and-awe’ affect to the entire world.
I deeply regret the massive loss of life sustained in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. But it had to be done to stop the upcoming massive attack that was imminent to the United States, and our freedom. But, on the flip side f the coin, if we had sent a squadron of B-52 bombers with a squadron of fighter planes to protect them, we would nit have had the same affect, nor end the war.
Plus, today, thus is why the President is the one that has access to the nuclear ☢️ button. It’s his decision to push it and end life n this planet as we now know it. So, no, no one wants, desires, or envisions another nuclear, or atomic weapons attack worldwide.
I have no idea if this explained anything, but I tried.
I see. Part if the history I wasn’t aware of. So, ‘Big Boy’ was frustration, payback, and “cleaning house” so to speak. Along with the hopes of ending the war.
Not exactly, but if that’s what’s necessary, so be it. I’d much rather send a few planes over a battlefield and bomb the enemy than send soldiers on the frown to be killed.
Thank you, Daniel. What you wrote was part of our discussion. Being at war is our lack of evolution. I appreciate you taking the time to reply. And just so ya know, I am not a pacifist. Not gonna happen in my lifetime
Neither am I, Judy. I spent iver 27 years in law enforcement and firefighting. War is war, no matter where it is. What shape it takes is what the people make it. In my profession, we fought a war every day against the criminal element of the country. Sometimes it ended badly fir them, but that was strictly their call, their choice.
We saw the film Oppenheimer yesterday and it will go down for me as one of the best films I’ve ever seen. Everything about it from the acting to the original soundtrack was totally amazing.
The Boeing B-29 Superfortress bomber, 'Enola Gay', with its powerful nose, surrounded by windows, and shining in the sunlight, calls up the bombers surrounding us-US now. They are America's, Enola Gay. They are the enemy within, with the help of others. They are white supremacy, greed, self-interest, capitalism gone mad, lying, dishonesty, Dark Money, cruelty, propaganda, and the angry ignorant anti-government anti-regulation anti-taxes grievance plagued mass -- unleashed.
And how do we defeat that enemy within, wrapped in and fiercely unwilling to leave their impenetrable bubbles?
eloquent as usual, Fern.
Thank you, David.
At the National Arboretum there is a beautiful bonsai tree which was planted in the 17th century, not long after Shakespeare's death. It had been cared for by one Japanese family for all those centuries. It survived the bombing of Hiroshima, and was presented to the people of the United States in 1976, in honor of our bicentennial, by the surviving family members. It is majestic, although less than three feet high. I think of it every August 6, and of the courage, grace and hope that tree represents. Thank you for this sobering reminder of what the U.S. did on August 6, 1945.
Thank you for sharing the history of that day.
My kids’ great grandma got blasted by that bomb.
She told me her story of that day before she passed from cancer at the age of 63.
Tayama, I am so sorry about your grandmother’s experience, both the horror and pain of being close to that apocalyptic destruction, and her death at 63 from cancer. I hope you, your siblings, and all your families are well.
Thank you! ❤️
Far too many people died on that day and likely for many years after that. It should have taught all humans a lesson - to never have that happen again - ever!! Should have!
Although I feel this was a necessary evil of war that had you cut to bring that war to an abrupt end, the aftermath, death, cancers, and many other terrifying consequences were not fully thought out back then as they are today.
That being said, I send my condolences to you, and your family on the suffering , and loss of your great grandmother. I too lost family members during that war, as well as Korea, Vietnam, and very close friends during the Afghan conflict. So I know what losing a close friend or loved one to war feels like. Hopefully your children remember her as she lived. Not as she suffered. Especially the stories she conveyed upon them.
We'll be talking about how the bombs did not in fact end the war next week, after I post "The Forgotten Bomb" on Wednesday.
Tom, does this account on nationalinterest.org tally with your more extensive research?
https://nationalinterest.org/blog/buzz/atomic-bombings-japan-did-not-produce-its-surrender-204074
The historical facts are accurate - the far right political horse shit is , well, far right political horse shit.
Ah. Thank you for alerting me that nationalinterest.org is a far right site. I should have checked.
Thank you!!
Thank you for your words of condolences. I send mine to to you as well.
She was on the train that morning. She survived because she had dropped her umbrella and when she bent down to pick it up, the bomb went off. She was below the window line and surrounded by other humans.
Now there is Peace Park in Hiroshima. It’s dedicated to remembering the horrors of war so it never happens again.
Amen. Hopefully this world will learn to live in peace. That’s shag I ray for anyway.
So sorry for your loss. To have a direct connection to such a catastrophic event and being told your grandmother's story before she died, it brings up so many emotions in me, it's hard to put to words.
Thank you so much. I shared the story with my kids so they would know their history. Hopefully war will someday only be history too.
So sorry, Tayama!
A sobering account TC, written with quiet clarity and perfect precision.
I cannot put a heart on this post. It is so painful to read about the death of innocents and the destruction to the environment. May no one, anywhere, ever unleash this force again. Blessed are the peacemakers, the tikkun olam, the repairers of the world.
I didn’t know the the Enola Gay was named after the commander’s mother nor that the bomb was called Little Boy.
The irony of just those two items sent daggers into my heart.
I thought: opposable thumbs, what we have done.
I’m feeling deeply embarrassed to be a number of our ‘superior specie’ as I watch this blue planet being destroyed by our greed and needs.
But thank you Tom for reminding me of this deadly anniversary.
P.S. If you haven’t seen or heard of Butoh, look up Sankai Juku on the internet.
Samm-did you know the Enola Gay is @ the the Steven F. Udvar-Hazy Center, at Dulles International Airport branch of the Smithsonian Museum? That Branch is considerably larger than the National Mall branch. If one is fascinated with aviation, it's well worth the visit.
Barbara, I did it know that.
Thank you for the info. Now stored in the shrinking gray matter for a visit to Texas!
Best summary I’ve read of that day.
I've heard so many arguments from so many sides, emphasizing so many different points of view (and matters of "fact") that I don't think I have enough good information to have an opinion about the decision to drop the bomb(s). I know what I was taught in school, but I also know that a lot of it was bullshit. we all DO know that in 1962, LeMay was a trigger-happy scumbag during the Cuban Missile Crisis, which I DO recall as being just about the weirdest bunch of days I ever lived through.
Interestingly, Robert S. MacNamara was on LeMay's staff as an operations analyst. At the conclusion of the war he and LeMay had a conversation about it, in which LeMay said that - if the Japanese had won - "We might be the ones labeled war criminals." In light of later history of each of them, that's an interesting conversation.
Both had a lot to atone for in my opinion
Major General Curtis Fucking LeMay, I might have guessed.
I, for the life of me, just cannot hit the "like" button, though I thoroughly appreciate Tom's writing of this and bringing it alive for all of us. To see what destruction was wrought by both bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, is chilling. The Enola Gay is now housed at the Smithsonian Institution's Steven Udvar-Hazy Air & Space Museum, at Washington's Dulles Airport. It us merely an object, with nothing but a footnote to describe its place in history. Maybe there should be an interactive display that shows the moment of the bombing and the aftermath. Or would that upset too many people? (That's a rhetorical question, by the way.)
In 2003, when the airplane was first put on display, there was a full explanation of the bombing, which All True American Congressional Patriots hated, since the recitation of the facts does not put us in a good light, and in the frenzy the guy at the Smithsonian who led the project got fired and the explanation was taken down. Can't have people misbelievin' the Official Mythology, can we?
Thanks, TC, for your explanation of the Smithsonian's Air & Space Museum decision with reference to display of 'Enola Gay'. It is another example of the USA's mythmaking, otherwise known as hiding from the truth.
Same.
Thank you for your essay about this day in 1945. I would not be writing this if it hadn't happened, and that is something I have lived with most of my life. My father was on his way back from Okinawa where he had been fighting to get trained on taking off and landing on aircraft carriers so he would be better able to attack the Japanese islands where we were projecting to loose a million men. The bombs stopped the war, his war was over in an instant. He married my mother and 9 months later I showed up. You all are beneficiaries of my life project, which likely wouldn't have happened if we had attacked the Japanese islands like we had planned. I saw Oppenheimer the day after it opened, and cannot recommend it more, it needs to be seen on the largest screen you can find. It was still playing in my head a week after watching it, not many movies have managed to do that. I don't drink and it was sobering, as was your essay today Tom. What we are living through today was totally preventable had the US Senate acted honorably, they chose not too. Many things transpired that brought the world 2 World Wars, which in turn gave us the bomb, once we were on that path; the bomb was a result of our knowledge at that point, now they are everywhere, hanging overall of us like the Sword of Damocles. I wonder if we honestly think that sanity will save us, it has until now, but if history is any guide, we can't count on it. What a mess!
I have a photograph of me, playing with my dog Michael, on my first birthday in July 1945. In the background, there is a ghostly figure in Navy Chief's khakis. My father. In 1978, when I helped them pack stuff out of the house I grew up in for their coming move, I opened a box and found an envelope addressed to me. In it was a letter written to me by my father, that day. He had survived the sinking by the kamikazes of a radar picket destroyer off Okinawa and been home on survivor's leave. He had that morning received orders to report to another radar picket destroyer. He didn't think he would live to be my father, so he wrote this letter telling me who he was and why he had decided to become a father in the middle of a war, and what he hoped for me. I didn't know how to tell him I had found it, so it went home with me. In what turned out to be our final face-to-face conversation nine years later, I did tell him. He told me I hadn't turned out anything like what he had hoped; I'd turned out better (by this time I was a successful screenwriter, doing the one thing the man with 150 independent patents in his name had really wanted to do and couldn't - he was my biggest fan). It was a great conversation; if I had known it would be the last, it couldn't have been better.
The thing is, what he and your dad and all the other dads and would-be dads couldn't know at the time was that it had been determined we couldn't do the invasion. Which is why we threw the bombs at them in our frustration. But as he once said - he hated the bomb and everything i meant - the only good thing he could think of about it was that he was there alive, to hate it.
Yea there has to be a lot of us who are offspring of the men, and they were mostly men, who were engaged in the meat grinder that was WWII, and survived it long enough to have children.
Sanity, bad time to ask that
Thanks for acknowledging that. That was history I didn't learn until grad school.
Thanks for a terrific summation of one of the darkest days in world history.
In my Master's studies I took a course on the first half of the US 20th century. I think there were 7 in class. Our professor mentioned that there were rumors ( ever confirmed?) the Japanese were preparing for a last massive attack and had enough planes and pilots to massively increase US deaths
Never found out if it was true. Those of us in class ( late 1980's I was probably the oldest at 30+ years old) believed we should have never dropped the bombs in Hiroshima and Nagasaki
Tom, with your knowledge and background what do you think?
Believe me I don't want to turn this into a brawl. Truman: right or wrong? Thanks again
The Japanese did in fact have some 7,000 kamikazes in the home islands, which would have been deployed had the Kyushu invasion happened. However, at the end of June after the Okinawa campaign (the second bloodiest naval campaign of the war, after the Guadalcanal campaign), Admiral Nimitz wrote to the Joint Chiefs, withdrawing the Navy's support for the invasion on the grounds they could not withstand the losses that would have been incurred. So the bombs were sort of a tantrum of frustration, that the US leaders knew they couldn't do the invasion.
Okinawa was a dress rehearsal for the coming attack on the Japanese islands. I recommend "Goodby Darkness" by William Manchester for a taste of what the coming battles were going to be like.
Judy, if I may attempt to give you an educated answer. I dint hold a Master’s degree in anything. Just a 2 year degree in Criminal Justice.
This being said, here goes nothing.
I don’t regret what the United States did to try to end World War II. It’s what it took. If you think about the innocent people that the Japanese soldiers killed in every country they fought in, along with the Germans, and all the other nations that had entered that war, it is something that had to be done to give the ‘shock-and-awe’ affect to the entire world.
I deeply regret the massive loss of life sustained in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. But it had to be done to stop the upcoming massive attack that was imminent to the United States, and our freedom. But, on the flip side f the coin, if we had sent a squadron of B-52 bombers with a squadron of fighter planes to protect them, we would nit have had the same affect, nor end the war.
Plus, today, thus is why the President is the one that has access to the nuclear ☢️ button. It’s his decision to push it and end life n this planet as we now know it. So, no, no one wants, desires, or envisions another nuclear, or atomic weapons attack worldwide.
I have no idea if this explained anything, but I tried.
Check my above post and hold on for Wednesday's post and those next week around August 15. I will be taking a sledgehammer to the Official Mythology.
I see. Part if the history I wasn’t aware of. So, ‘Big Boy’ was frustration, payback, and “cleaning house” so to speak. Along with the hopes of ending the war.
Well, America seems to have a deep-seated belief that "more bombing" will finally bring the desired result, despite the fact it never has.
Not exactly, but if that’s what’s necessary, so be it. I’d much rather send a few planes over a battlefield and bomb the enemy than send soldiers on the frown to be killed.
Thank you, Daniel. What you wrote was part of our discussion. Being at war is our lack of evolution. I appreciate you taking the time to reply. And just so ya know, I am not a pacifist. Not gonna happen in my lifetime
Neither am I, Judy. I spent iver 27 years in law enforcement and firefighting. War is war, no matter where it is. What shape it takes is what the people make it. In my profession, we fought a war every day against the criminal element of the country. Sometimes it ended badly fir them, but that was strictly their call, their choice.
Thank you.
Tom, you repeated a paragraph.
actually no - there are however two similar paragraphs near each other - bad writing.
We saw the film Oppenheimer yesterday and it will go down for me as one of the best films I’ve ever seen. Everything about it from the acting to the original soundtrack was totally amazing.
I agree Liz, it was an excellent movie. Tom, your post is very powerful and portrays the tragic reality of it all.