Paul Tibbets passes

Tibbets was quite a guy according to my late great-uncle George Marquardt, who served under Tibbets as operations officer for the 393rd Bomb Sq, 509th Composite Group during WWII.

Uncle George flew on all six missions out of Tinian, including both atomic missions, and was on orders to drop the 3rd atomic bomb himself before Japan surrendered. My avvy over there to the left is the nose art from his B-29.

Something that will probably blow most of you away, as it did me: Tibbets was only 29 when he assumed command of the 509th, and 31 at the time of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
 
I'll give him props, I wouldn't have had the balls to be the tool used to kill hundreds of thousands of men, women, and children. He was just doing what he was ordered, though. RIP.
 
ComplexHiAv8r said:
Did we have a 3rd bomb? I know of "Fat Man" and "Little Boy" , but not a third.
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The third weapon was rapidly being assembled at Wendover when Japan surrendered. My uncle had just reached San Francisco from Tinian on his way to pick it up when word of the surrender spread. The orders assigning him and his crew to drop that 3rd bomb remained classified until the 1960s, when he finally got a copy for posterity.
 
aloft said:
The third weapon was rapidly being assembled at Wendover when Japan surrendered. My uncle had just reached San Francisco from Tinian on his way to pick it up when word of the surrender spread. The orders assigning him and his crew to drop that 3rd bomb remained classified until the 1960s, when he finally got a copy for posterity.
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Thanks for the info!
 
mtsu_av8er said:
Some people can lock and load when the order comes. Other can't.
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Yeah, but I think these are pretty unique orders. There's a big difference between strafing insurgents and pulling the trigger on the single deadliest weapon ever used in human history. I wonder if any of them were conflicted.
 
I think most of the Americans who had seen 5 1/2 years of war and were anticipating perhaps 1 million casualties in the invasion of Japan weren't conflicted.

A lot of the A-bomb's effect was psychological, I think. Curtis LeMay was doing a pretty good job of killing tens of thousands people and leveling Japanese cities with conventional weapons.
 
Conflicted how....over the fact that they probably saved a 100,000 or more american causulties if Japan was invaded... or perhaps the MILLION Japanese they might have died trying to repel an invasion.....

Sobering perhaps....conflicted....probably not, but you never know.
 
HercDriver130 said:
Conflicted how....over the fact that they probably saved a 100,000 or more american causulties if Japan was invaded... or perhaps the MILLION Japanese they might have died trying to repel an invasion.....

Sobering perhaps....conflicted....probably not, but you never know.
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The "invasion theory" that has been thrown around as inevitable is actually much more debatable than people suggest. That's an argument for another time, however.

I'm just interested in the mindset of someone standing over a button that they know will incinerate thousands of children when they push it. I'm not casting any blame on the guy whatsoever. He didn't give the order. I just don't think I could have done it - no matter how much patriotism I felt.
 
I was thinking more along the lines of personal experience rather than patriotism, etc. If I were a U.S Army corporal in August, 1945 sitting on a boat waiting for the orders to invade Japan, perhaps having survived months of combat in Europe, and having heard of how determined the Japanese soliders were, I'd volunteer to push the button myself.

Of course, that's assuming the invasion was necessary, as you point out.
 
Murdoughnut said:
Yeah, but I think these are pretty unique orders. There's a big difference between strafing insurgents and pulling the trigger on the single deadliest weapon ever used in human history. I wonder if any of them were conflicted.
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If anything, I'd think they'd only be conflicted over the weapons' use against noncombatants. Otherwise, we're simply talking about a matter of scale.

My uncle never talked about it, and in fact, I didn't even know of his involvement until I was 18 or so. He was interviewed on CBS on the 50th anniversary of the bombing, and was very matter-of-fact about it. They had a job to do, they carried it out to the best of their ability.

To this day, people charged with delivery of nuclear weapons are psychologically screened in order to ensure that they'll carry out their orders when told to do so. The button-mashers and key-turners simply aren't permitted to inject their opinion into the go/no-go decision.
 
Murdoughnut said:
The "invasion theory" that has been thrown around as inevitable is actually much more debatable than people suggest. That's an argument for another time, however.

I'm just interested in the mindset of someone standing over a button that they know will incinerate thousands of children when they push it. I'm not casting any blame on the guy whatsoever. He didn't give the order. I just don't think I could have done it - no matter how much patriotism I felt.
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Well we could start it.... The million death theory was based on the invasion of Okinawa, It wasn't an appropriate model to apply to mainland Japan.
 
greaper007 said:
Well we could start it.... The million death theory was based on the invasion of Okinawa, It wasn't an appropriate model to apply to mainland Japan.
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Except invasion wasn't necessary - the Japanese's aggressive colonial tactics were in recognition of the fact that their island did not have the natural resources to sustain their economy. Once the Japanese were backed up onto their own soil, it was only a matter of time before their resources were depleted, and they became militarily impotent. A blockade would have ensured that this occurred in a more timely fashion. With their fleet practically destroyed, and no access to metal making products or fossil fuels, their war was already over. We just wanted to see what the bomb could do after dumping so much time and money into it.
 
JHines said:
I was thinking more along the lines of personal experience rather than patriotism, etc. If I were a U.S Army corporal in August, 1945 sitting on a boat waiting for the orders to invade Japan, perhaps having survived months of combat in Europe, and having heard of how determined the Japanese soliders were, I'd volunteer to push the button myself.

Of course, that's assuming the invasion was necessary, as you point out.
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That make sense - not to mention the PR tactics that all sides used to demonize the other. Easier to drop a bomb on "Japs" or "Nazis" than, say, Iraqi civilians caught up in that conflict.
 
aloft said:
If anything, I'd think they'd only be conflicted over the weapons' use against noncombatants. Otherwise, we're simply talking about a matter of scale.

My uncle never talked about it, and in fact, I didn't even know of his involvement until I was 18 or so. He was interviewed on CBS on the 50th anniversary of the bombing, and was very matter-of-fact about it. They had a job to do, they carried it out to the best of their ability.

To this day, people charged with delivery of nuclear weapons are psychologically screened in order to ensure that they'll carry out their orders when told to do so. The button-mashers and key-turners simply aren't permitted to inject their opinion into the go/no-go decision.
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That makes sense too - try and distance yourself from the decision as much as possible since you were the gun, and not the person behind the trigger. I know my great grandfather wouldn't talk about the stuff he did/saw in the 101st on D-Day, and later in a POW camp. He suffered from some pretty intense PTS which eventually killed him, though.
 
Murdoughnut said:
Yeah, but I think these are pretty unique orders. There's a big difference between strafing insurgents and pulling the trigger on the single deadliest weapon ever used in human history. I wonder if any of them were conflicted.
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I don't see ANY moral differance between dropping High Explosive and droping an Nuke.

Different results sure, but you are still droping bombs on a city.
 
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