Tibbets believed it did. As the pilot in command of the B-29 that dropped the world’s first atomic bomb on Aug. 6, 1945, he unleashed “Little Boy’s” cataclysmic detonation at 1,890 feet above Hiroshima that led to Japan’s surrender and the end of World War II nine days later.
Tibbets was 92 when he died on Nov. 1, and had lived two-thirds of his life as “the man who dropped the bomb.” For more than half a century, his views of his duty as a military officer under orders, the morality of his world-changing act, and the aftermath of Hiroshima on humanity and himself didn’t vary, at least not publicly.
Judging from interviews spanning the period between his mission at the controls of the B-29 Superfortress named in honor of his mother, Enola Gay, and his final years, Tibbets was comfortable with himself and his place in history.
”I was anxious to do it,” Tibbets said in the documentary,’The Men Who Brought the Dawn’ made to commemorate the 50th anniversary of Hiroshima.
“I wanted to do everything that I could to subdue Japan… I have been convinced that we saved more lives than we took.”
Certain that the weapon released from his bomb bay doors – the culmination of the top-secret Manhattan Project authorized by President Franklin D. Roosevelt and utilized by President Harry S Truman – prevented the Allied invasion of Japan, Tibbets believed the destruction of Hiroshima, and Nagasaki three days later by another American atomic bomb, saved many more lives than the nuclear weapons destroyed.
There is no definitive number of Japanese dead and injured in the atomic bombings, but a U.S. government survey produced a year after the event indicated 70,000 were killed and 50,000 injured. Down through the years many more Japanese were diagnosed with radiation-related illnesses.
“It would have been morally wrong if we’d have had that weapon and not used it and let a million more people die,” he said in the film made to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the Hiroshima bombing.
In wartime, decisions are made by leaders looking through distorted prisms. It has been left to those who benefit from peace to second-guess whether “Fat Man” and “Little Boy” should have been unleashed on the world. Our views are skewed by our everyday enjoyments in a life far removed from combat.
Warriors in the heat of battle don’t have such luxury, nor the personal freedom to take action based on independent thought.
A continuum since Roman Legion times has been the Sacramentum, the allegiance once sworn by centurions to their emperors. Its modern evolution is the oath taken by our military enlisted personnel and their officers:
“I, (insert name here), do solemnly swear that I will support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic; that I will bear true faith and allegiance to the same; that I take this obligation freely, without any mental reservation or purpose of evasion; and that I will well and faithfully discharge the duties of the office on which I am about to enter. So help me God.”
Faithfully discharging duties means following orders, not questioning them. Obeying superiors, all the way up to the president as commander-in-chief, is the foundation of all military discipline. If there are doubts on the battlefield, they don’t last long when soldiers are faced with either killing or being killed.
In his novel “The Things They Carried,” Vietnam veteran Tim O’Brien wrote that in war “there is no clarity. Everything swirls. The old rules are no longer binding, the old truths no longer true. Right spills over into wrong. Order blends into chaos, love into hate, ugliness into beauty, law into anarchy, civility into savagery.”
Then one day, either the war ends or the warrior is sent home from it. Soldiers become civilians again, carrying their memories with them. For the most part, veterans compartmentalize their war service by locking the horror of what they have seen, and in many cases done, away in a secret place in their mind where only they can go.
“I feel guilty sometimes,” O’Brien wrote. “… I should forget (the war). But the thing about remembering is that you don’t forget.”
To the world, Paul Tibbets appeared at peace with memories of doing his duty. If he had any doubts, he kept them to himself and took them to his grave.
Yet as more Vietnam and Desert Storm veterans age, and battle-weary troops return in ever-greater numbers from Afghanistan and Iraq, the Veterans Administration is being overwhelmed with men and women who need professional help to cope with the psychological as well as physical damages of doing their duty.
A lifelong friend was an Army draftee who shipped out to Saigon in 1967, survived fierce Tet offensive battles in early 1968, and returned home to his childhood sweetheart determined to put the war behind him.
For the next three decades he was a model husband, father and farmer with a service record he never talked about. Then one day he got in his pickup, drove 120 miles to the nearest VA hospital, and diffidently asked to see a psychiatrist.
There he found a way to deal with the memories that still haunted him. He now gets regular one-on-one counseling and attends group therapy sessions.
My friend also has become the head of his local Veterans of Foreign Wars (VFW) honor guard at military funerals. Every few weeks he and other Vietnam vets pay their respects to a comrade-in-arms by assisting his family in laying him to rest in area cemeteries.
“Most of the World War II fellas are gone now,” he said. “We’re also coming to the end of the Korean War veterans, and I’ve lost several of my high school buddies who were in Vietnam with me.
“Someday it will be my turn, and the boys coming home from Iraq and Afghanistan will have to put me in the ground and play Taps over me,” he added.
“For now, I’m glad I’m able to be there to say goodbye to friends who understood what I feel because they felt it, too. This is a way for me to deal with what’s inside me. It’s a healing thing.”
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