World War II

Today is the 62nd anniversary of the dropping of the nuclear bomb euphemistically named “Little Boy” on the Japanese city of Hiroshima. Seventy-thousand people died and almost 70 percent of the city was turned into a wasteland. In the months that followed another 60,000 died of their injuries and from the effects of radiation.

One hundred and thirty thousand dead from a single device that ushered in the nuclear age. That’s a staggering statement and one that still causes the hair on the back of my neck to stand up. You see, I grew up during the Cold War. Oh, not the height of it. Not the days of “duck and cover” drills. I was still in my Mother’s womb during the Cuban Missile Crisis.

But still there was a pervading sense of “us and them,” the comments my Dad would make about how we should have gone ahead and whipped the Russians when we had the chance, and the anti-communist rhetoric that seemed a staple of political addresses well into the Reagan administration. When the Berlin wall came down I remember thinking that in a way it really signalled the end of World War II, the easing of a degree of global tension that had overshadowed the world since that morning in Hiroshima.

As a young person I really did worry that the world would end in a nuclear conflageration. Now I fear other methods of our global demise but I’m also old enough to know that if it is destined to end, there’s not much I can do about it.

Paul Tibbets, the man who was at the stick of the Enola Gay sixty-two years ago once said, “I knew when I got the assignment it was going to be an emotional thing. We had feelings, but we had to put them in the background. We knew it was going to kill people right and left. But my one driving interest was to do the best job I could so that we could end the killing as quickly as possible.”

Today, pause for a moment to remember the people of Hiroshima, the men who dropped the bomb that day, and all of us who have been effected by the shadow of those events these many years. Let’s hope that of all the legacies of World War II the use of nuclear weapons as a means to “resolve” conflicts is not one that will endure.

WWII, Hiroshima, Enola Gay, Paul Tibbets, Cold War