Paul Tibbetts has died. If you don’t recognize the name, you were not living during WWII or studied it very much in school. General (then Colonel) Tibbetts was the pilot of the Enola Gay, the plane that dropped the first atomic bomb on Hiroshima that, along with the bomb dropped on Nagasaki, lead to the end of the war.
I pray we never see another atomic bomb dropped anywhere. I pray for peace. I hate the thought of war and all the loss of life.
People will argue until their dying breath that the bomb should never have been dropped. General Tibbetts never felt that way. He did the job he was trained to do and felt it was the right thing to do. It ended the war much sooner than it would have otherwise.
Thousands of Japanese people died in those two bombs. Over 50 MILLION people died in the whole war. Would the Japanese have stopped the war without the bomb? Not at that time. They were trained to fight to the death, never surrender.
Decades later Japanese fighters were still being found on outer islands, still fighting the war. They would not believe that Japan could lose the war. That mentality would have kept the war going for a long long long time.
Paul Tibbetts actions did allow for the war to come to an end. Many men and women did not die because of what he did. Many men and women did die because of what he did. It’s history.
