Soldiers Do Have a Choice

August 7, 2024

On August 6, 1945, the United States detonated an atomic bomb (“Little Boy”) over Hiroshima, Japan. Another atomic bomb (“Fat Man”) was dropped on Nagasaki on August 9. It was the first and only time that nuclear weapons were used as weapons of war.

The bombs did not drop themselves. The first bomb was dropped by an extensively modified B-29 (“Enola Gay”) with a crew of twelve and piloted by Colonel Paul Tibbets (1915-2007). The second bomb was dropped by a similar B-29 (“Bockscar”) with a crew of ten and piloted by Major Charles Sweeney (1919-2004). Both planes were accompanied by other B-29s for observation and photography.

The result of the bombing, as succinctly summarized by historian Ralph Raico, was barbaric: “Probably around two hundred thousand persons were killed in the attacks and through radiation poisoning; the vast majority were civilians, including several thousand Korean workers. Twelve US Navy fliers incarcerated in a Hiroshima jail were also among the dead.” War, Christianity, and... Laurence M. Vance Best Price: $8.95 Buy New $9.95 (as of 09:10 UTC - Details)

Sweeney decried “cuckoo professors” and the “cockamamie theories” of those who believed the atomic bombing of Japan was unnecessary. He stated: “There’s no question in my mind that President Truman made the right decision.”

Many high-ranking military officers at the time disagreed.

Adm. William Leahy, Truman’s chief of staff, wrote in his 1950 memoir I Was There that “the use of this barbarous weapon at Hiroshima and Nagasaki was of no material assistance in our war against Japan. The Japanese were already defeated and ready to surrender.… In being the first to use it, we…adopted an ethical standard common to the barbarians of the Dark Ages. I was not taught to make war in that fashion, and wars cannot be won by destroying women and children.”

Fleet Adm. Chester Nimitz, the commander in chief of the Pacific Fleet, stated in a public address at the Washington Monument two months after the bombings that “the atomic bomb played no decisive part, from a purely military standpoint, in the defeat of Japan.”

Gen. Dwight Eisenhower stated in his memoirs that when notified by Secretary of War Henry Stimson of the decision to use atomic weapons, he “voiced to him my grave misgivings, first on the basis of my belief that Japan was already defeated and that dropping the bomb was completely unnecessary, and secondly because I thought that our country should avoid shocking world opinion by the use of a weapon whose employment was, I thought, no longer mandatory as a measure to save American lives.” He later publicly declared, “It wasn’t necessary to hit them with that awful thing.”

In an interview with Tom Ryan in 1989, Tibbets expressed no remorse or second thoughts about dropping an atomic bomb:

Ryan: Have you ever had any regrets or any psychological problems as a result of this, or suffered any guilt feelings? Do you feel that what you did was right? You got a lot of flak over that, didn’t you?

Tibbets: Yes, after the fact there was quite a bit. This was basically a result of Russian propaganda, who took the position that nobody but a crazy man would do that for any country. With that situation, I am supposed to have lost sleep over what I did, have a certain amount of morose, and so forth. I can assure you, I have never lost a night’s sleep on the deal.

Ryan: General, let me ask you. Are you proud of what you did?

Tibbets: Yes, I am. Because a military man starts out his career with the idea of serving his country and preserving the integrity of that country. I feel that I did just that very thing. I have to say we cannot look at the so-called grimmer aspects of it because there is no morality in warfare, so I do not dwell on the moral issue. The thing is it did what it was supposed to do. It brought peace to the world at that time.

Tibbets concluded the interview by saying:

Tibbets: The first time I dropped bombs on a target over there, I watched those things go down because we could do it in B-17s. I watched them go down. Then I watched those black puffs of smoke and fires in some instances. I said to myself, “People are getting killed down there that don’t have any business getting killed. Those are not soldiers.”

Well, then I had a thought that I had engendered and encountered for the first time in Cincinnati when I was going to medical school. I lived with a doctor. He would tell me about previous doctors, some that had been classmates of his, who were drug salesmen. That is, they were selling legalized drugs for drug houses and so forth and so on, because they could not practice medicine due to the fact that they had too much sympathy for their patients. They assumed the symptoms of the patients and it destroyed their ability to render medical necessities. I thought, you know, I am just like that if I get to thinking about some innocent person getting hit on the ground. I am supposed to be a bomber pilot and destroy a target. I won’t be worth anything if I do that.

I made up my mind then that the morality of dropping that bomb was not my business. I was instructed to perform a military mission to drop the bomb. That was the thing that I was going to do the best of my ability. Morality, there is no such thing in warfare. I don’t care whether you are dropping atom bombs, or 100-pound bombs, or shooting a rifle. You have got to leave the moral issue out of it.

In never losing any sleep over what he did, Tibbets was merely taking the advice of President Truman. After returning to the United States after the end of the war, Tibbets received an invitation from President Truman to visit the White House. Said Truman: “Don’t you ever lose any sleep over the fact that you planned and carried out that mission. It was my decision. You had no choice.”

Truman was wrong, soldiers do have a choice.