A Great and Terrible Day
Oklahoman Published: August 6, 1995
The world changed 50 years ago today.
On Aug. 6, 1945, a silver B-29 bearing the name of its pilot's mother, Enola Gay, dropped a cylindrical atomic bomb called "Little Boy" on Hiroshima, Japan. Capt. Charles W. Sweeney was there, piloting a plane that measured the blast. Three days later he flew to Nagasaki to drop a second bomb.
Writing in The Wall Street Journal recently, Sweeney recalled Hiroshima: "The sky was bleached a bright white, brighter than the sun. It was a sight that no human being had ever seen before. " More than 78,000 Japanese were instantly killed. Total casualties topped 150,000. Hiroshima proper was left a scorched, flattened rubble field. On Aug. 14, five days after Nagasaki, Japan gave up.
The advent of the atomic age was tragic for Imperial Japan. In the dawn of the age the United States ascended to the superpower status it has enjoyed - and wrestled with - for five decades. The bomb was a terrible weapon, but war, as Gen. William Tecumseh Sherman growled, "is all hell. " President Harry Truman and his generation knew this well.
Considering the bomb's power to force Japan's surrender, Truman was right to use it. He never apologized for it, but today some think he should have. The revisionists, many of them self-absorbed in doubt spawned by Vietnam, judge their forebears outside their historical context.
They question the bomb's morality - as if any weapon is moral - and see the Japanese as victims instead of aggressors.
Revisionism fails in two key areas, says syndicated columnist Charles Krauthammer. First, today's taboos on using nuclear weapons did not exist in 1945. Those bombs were much smaller; Truman had no sense of causing the globe's utter destruction.
Second, Hiroshima critics try to distinguish between death caused by a nuclear blast and U.S. fire-bombings that in March of 1945 turned 16 square miles of Tokyo into charcoal with losses of up to 120,000. It's a distinction without a difference.
The lasting legacy of Aug. 6, 1945, surely should not be shame.
A just war needed ending. The bomb did that. We should respect what those Americans went through. Time prevents us from complete empathy. Sweeney, a retired Air Force general, bristles when questioned by people who know little about the war.
"I believed then and continue to believe today that President Truman made the right decision to drop the bomb," he wrote. "As the father of 10 children and the grandfather of 21, I am certainly grateful that the war ended when it did. And it is my fervent hope that there will never be another atomic mission. Ever. "
