My retrospective

My Retrospective

On my eighteenth birthdayI (January 24, 1943) I was an undergraduate engineering student who went to my draft board to volunteer for the Army. I was concerned that they might draft me for the Navy and I didn't think I could swim well enough when in trouble but could dig a fox hole as well as anyone.   I was mysteriously deferred (as a convenience to the government) and told to stay in engineering school until called.

Eventually I wound up at Los Alamos, helping cast lenses for the Fat Man  In recent years at the end of a presentation on my experience, I am frequently asked if the use of atom bombs were the right thing or the wrong thing to do.  I then describe this as a question with moral connotation and killing is always wrong.  However, I prefer also to answer this mathematically, if it were the correct or incorrect thing to have done  This usually ends the discussion --  something can  be morally wrong but surely mathematical correct.

Where I grew up in Nashville, neighboring mothers on all sides had Gold Stars in the windows.  My older brother was in the Air Corps but remained in the US on another science project.  Harry Denham from the home immediately on the left was a Marine who survived Guadalcanal but was killed at Tarawa.  Bill Hager, across the street, survived D-Day with serious injury. Johnny Ozier immediately to the right was on a B-17 that did not return to base.  Conrad Jamieson, immediately behind us was killed on D-Day.  Across the street and down three houses lived John Manchester, a Navy Aviator like George Bush Senior, except he didn't make it back to his Carrier.

I could not have been more exhuberant  when Japan surrendered and we immediately stopped making the lenses for the Fat Man.   Who could possibly imagine (at that time!) that we would ever need a single bomb that could destroy a whole city!

2025 Canyons Resort Drive

Park City, Utah 84098

January 6, 2006

Mr. Daniel Bankston

Fidelity Investments

Mail Zone WB3Y

One Destiny Way

Westlake, Texas 76262

Dear Daniel,

Thanks so much for your helping me earlier today. Your directing the resetting of

preferences apparently did the trick and I am once again able to work with my Fidelity account.

If I am overloading you with my story, you can always pitch it! But it is historical (some

young folks may think it pre-historical!). The long letter to Ms. Cindy Kelly resulted from a

program I caught on TV in the Spring of May, 2000. She had started the Atomic Heritage

Foundation to set aside certain locations from the Manhattan Project of WW 11 as historical

sites. The very first one was S-Site where I worked as a GI in 1945 and 1946. Her first

publication is a short VHS tape called “A Handfull of Soldiers” which shows exactly what I was

doing in casting high explosive lenses which caused the implosion of the Plutonium bomb

(dropped on Nagasaki). The bomb dropped on Hiroshima was one of a kind, made with

Uranium 235. This isotope of Uranium worked (obviously) but was not available in any

quantity.

I tell you all this because I want young people to realize how naive I was at 20. I want

them to realize how easy it is to be naive when it comes to the possibility of thinking that the

world is so much better now that such idiocy as Hitler or Stalin could not arise in our

enlightened time in the 21st century. If we, in that earlier generation, had not been so naive we

might have denied Chamberlain the “peace in our time” folly and stopped Hitler before the

holocaust got out of hand.

I wrote many letters home during my two years in the military--saved by my mother. I

am enclosing one I wrote when I happened to be in New York when the war in Europe ended,

shortly after Roosevelt died. I will never forget passing by the Stature of Liberty the first night

it had been lighted in several years. The hair still stands up on the back of my neck when I think

about it. The second letter home was written the morning after the Uranium bomb was dropped on

Hiroshima and I was free to let my mother know what we had been doing in such secrecy at Los

Alamos. (I was known as Buddy) This letter was written in two parts--after the Hiroshima

bomb but before the Nagasaki bomb. Japan had not surrended yet and Russia had not yet

declared war on Japan.

I am also enclosing for fun a poem I had written when were still in total

secrecy before the first bomb was dropped.

Be not afraid but be not naive!!

Sincerely yours, Ralph Gates

Tinian

Sent from a friend whose husband is a retired AF Pilot.

While flying combat missions out of Guam I had a couple of days off so I flew over to Saipan.  I stood on the edge of Bonsai cliff and thought of all the Japanese civilians who committed suicide by leaping to their deaths instead of surrendering to US forces.  Years later I had lunch at the Pentagon with Paul Tibbets - a gentleman’s gentleman.  History - amazing things that happen today and are tomorrow history.  

It's a small island, less than 40 square miles, a flat green dot in the vastness of Pacific blue. Fly over it and you notice a slash across its north end of uninhabited bush, a long thin line that looks like an overgrown dirt runway. If you didn't know what it was, you wouldn't give it a second glance out your airplane window.             On the ground, you see the runway isn't dirt but tarmac and crushed limestone, abandoned with weeds sticking out of it. Yet this is arguably the most historical airstrip on earth. This is where World War II was won. This is Runway Able:         On July 24, 1944, 30,000 US Marines landed on the beaches of Tinian .... Eight days later, over 8,000 of the 8,800 Japanese soldiers on the island were dead (vs. 328 Marines), and four months later the Seabees had built the busiest airfield of WWII - dubbed North Field -enabling B-29 Super fortresses to launch air attacks on the Philippines, Okinawa and mainland Japan.   Late in the afternoon of August 5, 1945, a B-29 was maneuvered over a bomb loading pit, then, after lengthy preparations, taxied to the east end of North Field's main runway, Runway Able, and at 2:45 am in the early morning darkness of August 6, took off.   The B-29 was piloted by Col. Paul Tibbets of the US Army Air Force, who had named the plane after his mother, Enola Gay. The crew named the bomb they were carrying Little Boy. 6 hours later at 8:15am Japan time, the first atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima ..   Three days later, in the pre-dawn hours of August 9, a B-29 named Bockscar (a pun on "boxcar" after its flight commander Capt. Fred Bock), piloted by Major Charles Sweeney, took off from Runway Able. Finding its primary target of Kokura obscured by clouds, Sweeney proceeded to the secondary target of Nagasaki, over which, at 11:01am, bombardier Kermit Beahan released the atomic bomb dubbed Fat Man. Here is "Atomic Bomb Pit #1" where Little Boy was loaded onto Enola Gay:       There are pictures displayed in the pit, now glass-enclosed. This one shows Little Boy being hoisted into Enola Gay's bomb bay.         And here on the other side of ramp is "Atomic Bomb Pit #2" where Fat Man was loaded onto Bockscar.                    The commemorative plaque records that 16 hours after the nuking of Nagasaki , "On August 10, 1945 at 0300, the Japanese Emperor, without his cabinet's consent, decided to end the Pacific War."   Take a good look at these pictures, folks. This is where World War II ended with total victory of America over Japan . I was there all alone. There were no other visitors and no one lives anywhere near for miles. Visiting the Bomb Pits, walking along deserted Runway Able in solitude was a moment of extraordinarily powerful solemnity   It was a moment of deep reflection. Most people, when they think of Hiroshima and Nagasaki , reflect on the numbers of lives killed in the nuclear blasts - at least 70,000 and 50,000 respectively. Being here caused me to reflect on the number of lives saved - how many more Japanese and Americans would have died in a continuation of the war had the nukes not been dropped.   Yet that was not all. It's not just that the nukes obviated the US invasion of Japan , Operation Downfall, that would have caused upwards of a million or more American and Japanese deaths. It's that nuking Hiroshima and Nagasaki were of extraordinary humanitarian benefit to the nation and people of Japan .   Let's go to this cliff on the nearby island of Saipan to learn why:   Saipan is less than a mile north of Tinian . The month before the Marines took Tinian on June 15, 1944, 71,000 Marines landed on Saipan . They faced 31,000 Japanese soldiers determined not to surrender.   Japan had colonized Saipan after World War I and turned the island into a giant sugar cane plantation. By the time of the Marine invasion, in addition to the 31,000 entrenched soldiers, some 25,000 Japanese settlers were living on Saipan, plus thousands more Okinawans, Koreans, and native islanders brutalized as slaves to cut the sugar cane.    There were also one or two thousand Korean "comfort women" (kanji in Japanese), abducted young women from Japan 's colony of Korea to service the Japanese soldiers as sex slaves. (See The Comfort Women: Japan 's Brutal Regime of Enforced Prostitution in the Second World War, by George Hicks.)   Within a week of their landing, the Marines set up a civilian prisoner encampment that quickly attracted a couple thousand Japanese and others wanting US food and protection. When word of this reached Emperor Hirohito - who, contrary to the myth, was in full charge of the war - he became alarmed that radio interviews of the well-treated prisoners broadcast to Japan would subvert his people's will to fight   As meticulously documented by historian Herbert Bix in Hirohito and the Making of Modern Japan, the Emperor issued an order for all Japanese civilians on Saipan to commit suicide. The order included the promise that, although the civilians were of low caste, their suicide would grant them a status in heaven equal to those honored soldiers who died in combat for their Emperor.   And that is why the precipice in the picture above is known as Suicide Cliff, off which over 20,000 Japanese civilians jumped to their deaths to comply with their fascist emperor's desire - mothers flinging their babies off the cliff first or in their arms as they jumped.   Anyone reluctant or refused, such as the Okinawan or Korean slaves, were shoved off at gunpoint by the Jap soldiers. Then the soldiers themselves proceeded to hurl themselves into the ocean to drown off a sea cliff afterwards called Banzai Cliff. Of the 31,000 Japanese soldiers on Saipan , the Marines killed 25,000, 5,000 jumped off Banzai Cliff, and only the remaining thousand were taken prisoner.   The extent of this demented fanaticism is very hard for any civilized mind to fathom - especially when it is devoted not to anything noble but barbarian evil instead. The vast brutalities inflicted by the Japanese on their conquered and colonized peoples of China , Korea, the Philippines and throughout their "Greater East Asia

--

"Be glad of life, because it gives you the chance to love and to work and to play and look up at the stars."  Henry Van Dyke

Virus-free. www.avast.com

American War Cemeteries in Europe

European Cemeteries . . . . Awesome   Every time I see this, I experience emotions of pride of patriotism, anger and anguish, and a bit of shame in knowing that no other nation of people have ever sacrificed anything near to that of our American nation's military fighting force's willingness to fight for freedoms and the rights for 'all' people to live free and worship in accordance with their own concience and by their since of moral conduct of life.    There are approximately 96, 606 American, buried in France and another approximately 40,000 in other European Countries. And these numbers don't include those that are still listed as "missing in action" in various parts of the world. May Almighty God continue to bless the United States of America and forever keep Her strong.                                                                                                                                                                      Paul Our European "arrogance" In alphabetical order 1. The American Cemetery at Aisne -Marne, France... A total of 2289  2. The American Cemetery at Arden nes, Belgium... A total of 5329  3. The American Cemetery at Brittany, France... A total of 4410  4. Brookwood, England - Americ an Cemetery... A total of 468  5. Cambridge, England... A total of 3812  6. Epinal, France - American C emetery... A total of 5525  7. Flanders Field, Belgium... A total of 368  8. Florence, Italy... A total of 4402  9. Henri-Chapelle, Belgium... A total of 7992  10. Lorraine , France... A total of 10,489  11 . Luxembourg, Luxembourg... A total of 5076  12. Meuse-Argonne... A total of 14246  13 . Netherlands, Netherlands. .. A total of 8301  14. Normandy, France... A total of 9387  15. Oise-Aisne, France... A total of 6012  16. Rhone, France... A total of 861  17. Sicily, Italy... A total of 7861  18. Somme, France... A total of 1844  19. St. Mihiel, France... A total of 4153  20. Suresnes, France... A total of 1541  Apologize to no one. Remind those of our sacrifice, and don't confuse arrogance with leadership. The count is 104,366 dead, brave Americans.  And we had to watch Obama, an American elected leader, who Apologized to Europe and the Middle East that our country is "arrogant"! HOW MANY FRENCH, DUTCH, ITALIANS, BELGIANS AND BRITS ARE BURIED ON OUR SOIL... AFTER DEFENDING US AGAINST OUR ENEMIES? WE DON'T ASK FOR PRAISE... BUT WE HAVE ABSOULUTELY NO NEED TO APOLOGIZE! Americans, forward it! Non-patriotic, delete it! Most of the protected don't understand it. DO THINK ABOUT THIS. THANK YOU. ****************