re: 75 years ago right now....The city of Hiroshima disappeared from the face of the earth....

"Nazi Germany didn't have shite on the Japs". Yet the majority of Japanese war criminals were not prosecuted. MacArthur made that decision, further infuriating the vets who served in the Pacific. Whereas the majority of war crimes the Nazis committed were against the populations of concurred countries, including the Jews of course, a lot of the war crimes committed by the Japanese were directly against Allied POW's. Yet MacArthur let them walk.

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"Nazi Germany didn't have shite on the Japs". Yet the majority of Japanese war criminals were not prosecuted. MacArthur made that decision, further infuriating the vets who served in the Pacific. Whereas the majority of war crimes the Nazis committed were against the populations of concurred countries, including the Jews of course, a lot of the war crimes committed by the Japanese were directly against Allied POW's. Yet MacArthur let them walk.

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The majority of Jap war criminals killed themselves before the war ended. He didn't try Hirohito because he thought he needed Hirohito's help to push the country forward. In retrospect, he was right. Hirohito became a well respected world leader in the years following WW2 and was an instrumental part in pushing them into becoming the world's second largest economy through democratic and capitalistic methods.

A very good friend of mine, a retired USMC 2 star, held a pretty high position at the Air & Space Museum at Dulles, Virginia. He took me around the museum a few times on a golf cart and explained a lot to me about the aircraft in the museum.

One of his highlights was when Paul Tibbets visited the museum to see his B-29, Enola Gay. He asked to get back in the pilot seat and my friend went into the aircraft with him and sat in the co-pilot seat.

The job that those men did 75 years ago was amazing. The destruction that the bomb caused was horrific. I do believe that dropping that bomb and the second bomb saved millions of American, Allied, and Japanese lives. I am convinced that an invasion of Japan would have cost many more lives than those lost in the bombings.

That said, I pray that no country ever drops another atomic bomb.

A few years ago one of our local congressman asked that the Enola Gay be removed from the Air & Space Museum. When I heard that I laughed and said that that would be unthinkable as it is a part of history. Now, I'm not so sure it wouldn't happen. Our country has gone crazy.

I have photographs my father took walking the streets of Hiroshima only a few weeks after the bomb was dropped. There were people asking among the devastation. For the sake of accuracy, the city didn’t disappear, the complete devastation was probably a square mile, with buildings damaged, but still standing beyond that, with damage decreasing as the distance from ground zero increased.

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we are all waaayyyy past those in destructive capabilities

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Yeah, I was just using a generic term.

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I have photographs my father took walking the streets of Hiroshima only a few weeks after the bomb was dropped.

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Was he serving in the postwar occupation force?

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Nazi Germany didn’t have shite on the Japs.

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Given the chance, I recommend visiting the Nuclear Science and History Museum in Albuquerque. One of my takeaways from my visit there was just how many German Jewish defectors were involved in the Manhattan Project. Hitler hated the Jews but they could have given the world a whole new history if he would have had the unfortunate foresight to keep them on his pathetic side.

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Was he serving in the postwar occupation force?

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I never got a real explanation of why he was there, he was also at the Bikini Atoll bomb tests “Operation Crossroads”. He was in the Navy at the time, and had a lot of technical training. I suspect he was involved in measuring and recording the effects of the bombs. It was likely all Top Secret stuff, and he was of the generation that unless told otherwise the secrets were carried to the grave. I only discovered he was at Operation Crossroads after he passed away, and found some of his Navy records.

Would’ve been cooler had they been vaped 12/8/41.

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How long ago did you have this post teed up to submit at the exact right time?

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About 15 minutes actually.