But nationalist, friendship and familial passions cloud people's ability to reason out even the simplest of truths.Īnd anyone who thinks the Japanese would not have used the A-bomb if they had the capability is simply No, I don't think the unborn Japanese babies killed at Hiroshima and Nagasaki were capable of dropping A-bombs on anybody. The bombardment of civilian cities is a war crime.
The idea that he is a "war criminal" is A cold, calculation killer is no better than an emotional, raging one. 2Įverything I've read about this bloke shows him to be a deeply thoughtful, intelligent man who did what he had to do without a moment of malice. It takes a brain asleep to believe the two can be fairly equated.
Hiroshima was a city full of unarmed civilians and estimates are that over 100,000 were killed. Whatever your feelings about sneak attacks without a declaration of war, Pearl Harbor was a military base full of military personnel and only 2,403 people died. And one of the most ridiculous parts of it is the attempted equating of Pearl Harbor with Hiroshima. Its helps people accept their history of baby killing. VanKirk and the bomb he helped guide ended the war? That is a myth that in America, is practically a religion. Many committed suicide rather than accept defeat, which was imminent even without the bombs. There was actually a coup to attempt to keep the war going AFTER both bombs. Yet it still took six days for the emperor to go on the radio and announce surrender! And they got bomb two at the same time as they got the Soviets. But when the Soviets entered the war, they knew the emperor was in jeopardy and so did the emperor himself. And that is why they did not flinch at bomb number one. They armed the populace with bamboo spears as if that was any match for machine gun fire. They actually increased Kamikaze attacks even after it was clear the surprise wore off and the allies had developed tactics to reduce their effectiveness to weak at best. They did so during the Battle of Okinawa. They were prepared to throw them away like garbage. I am sure he is alive hidden somewhere to have his final sayĮven if it did, I do not believe that the Japanese leadership gave a fig about the populace. He will be buried in Northumberland next to his wife, who died in 1975. Interviewing VanKirk for the book, she said, “was like sitting with your father at the kitchen table listening to him tell stories”.Ī funeral service was scheduled for VanKirk on 5 August in his hometown of Northumberland, Pennsylvania. VanKirk was energetic, very bright and had a terrific sense of humor, Dietz recalled on Tuesday. VanKirk’s military career was chronicled in a 2012 book, My True Course, by Suzanne Dietz. “I didn’t even find out that he was on that mission until I was 10 years old and read some old news clippings in my grandmother’s attic,” Tom VanKirk said. Like many second world war veterans VanKirk didn’t talk much about his service until much later in his life when he spoke to school groups, his son said. He later moved from California to the Atlanta area to be near his daughter. Then he went to school, earned degrees in chemical engineering and signed on with DuPont, where he stayed until he retired in 1985. VanKirk stayed on with the military for a year after the war ended. You’ve got to leave the moral issue out of it.But if anyone has one,” he added, “I want to have one more than my enemy.” I don’t care whether you’re dropping atom bombs, or whether you’re dropping 100-pound bombs, or you’re shooting a rifle. Morality, there is no such thing in warfare. I was instructed to perform a military mission to drop the bomb and that was the thing that I was going to do to the best of my ability. Tibbets added, “I made up my mind then that the morality of dropping that bomb was not my business. I’m supposed to be a bomber pilot and destroy a target. So, I thought, you know, I’m just like that if I get to thinking about some innocent person getting hit on the ground. They assumed the symptoms of the patients and it destroyed their ability to render medical necessities.
That is, they were selling legalized drugs for drug houses and so forth and so on, because they couldn’t practice medicine due to the fact that they had too much sympathy for their patients. And he was telling me about previous doctors, some that had been classmates of his, who were drug salesmen. “Well, then I got a thought that I had engendered and encountered for the first time in Cincinnati when I was going to medical school. “The first time I dropped bombs on a target over there, … I said to myself, ‘People are getting killed down there that don’t have any business getting killed. In the 1989 interview, Tibbets also spoke of a lesson he learned in Cincinnati about doing his job: