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However, each event is experienced one person at a time, and each person has an individual story to tell. War affects governments and groups of people on such a large scale that it can be overwhelming.
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World War II was the largest human-made catastrophe in history, affecting almost every country in the world and touching the lives of every family in the United States. I think we saved thousands and thousands of lives." - Vince Ortman. We would have had to kill off all the Japanese, and there would have been a lot of Americans killed in the meantime. The Japanese were never going to give up unless we had something like that. "I thought at the time and I still do, that we saved an awful lot of lives. (Germany, of course, had surrendered months earlier.) Nebraskans celebrated V-J Day wholeheartedly on August 15. Notice a space has been left for the name of the city. Instead of 12 men on the Enola Gay, people would think there were only nine.Excerpt from announcing the dropping of the atomic bomb. Jeppson was worried that without some addition, the importance of his role, along with that of Navy Capt.
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On February 25, 1937, Paul enlisted as a flying cadet in the Army Air Corps at. Jeppson was concerned because he learned his name, along with two others, would be absent from a list of crew members long-ago stenciled on the side of the infamous B-29 bomber by the military. Tibbets is the son of Paul Warfield Tibbets and Enola Gay Tibbetts (ne Hazard). The new Udvar-Hazy Center at the Smithsonian’s National Air and Space Museum was about to open with the Enola Gay on display. It was 2003 when Jeppson felt compelled to come forward. Today he lives in Las Vegas with his wife, Molly, retired after a career spent at the helm of a handful of high-tech companies and working as consultant for the Department of Energy. Jeppson turned to graduate studies at University of California, Berkeley, after leaving the military. Now 90, Tibbets lives in a modest brick home in a well-kept neighborhood in Columbus and travels occasionally for air shows and veterans’ ceremonies. Most of the lives saved were Japanese,” the 84-year-old said from his suburban Atlanta retirement home near the base of Stone Mountain, where a large relief memorial carved out of the bare rock depicts Confederate heroes Jefferson Davis, Robert E. “I honestly believe the use of the atomic bomb saved lives in the long run. The 9,000-pound bomb fell down toward the city as the Enola Gay banked away, the crew hoping to escape with their lives.ĭespite decades of controversy over whether the United States should have used the atomic bomb - which left some 140,000 dead in Hiroshima and 80,000 in Nagasaki three days later - Van Kirk remains convinced it was necessary because it shortened the war and relieved the Allies of having to mount a land invasion that might have cost far more lives on both sides. Under cover of night, he guided the bomber nearly exactly as planned - the plane was just 15 seconds behind schedule. It was a perfect mission, Van Kirk recalls. Van Kirk, then 24, was the navigator on the Enola Gay, the B-29 Superfortress that dropped “Little Boy” - the world’s first atomic bomb - over the Japanese city of Hiroshima on Aug.