The Emporia Gazette

May 27, 2012

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The story is that before Abraham Lincoln called Gen. U.S. Grant back east to take command of the Army of the Potomac, the president said he had to find a general who could “stand the arithmetic.” He needed a general who, unlike his predecessors in command, was willing to fight and to keep on fighting, in spite of terrible losses.

Grant was that kind of soldier — willing to carry the burden of the human cost of war along with the burden of command.

Paul Tibbetts carried that burden, too.

As the pilot of the B-29 Enola Gay, he commanded the mission on Aug. 6, 1945, that dropped the first atomic bomb used in war on the Japanese city of Hiroshima. The resulting blast killed 70,000 to 100,000 people, most of them civilians.

Three days later, another B-29 dropped another bomb on Nagasaki, killing 40,000 people.

The bombing raised a moral question that has never been resolved: Is such destruction ever justified?

Tibbetts, who died last week at his home in Columbus, Ohio, said he never let the question bother him. In his life, he was both lauded and demonized, but it did not seem to bother him.

“I knew when I got the assignment it was going to be an emotional thing,” he told The Columbus Dispatch two years ago. “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.”

Thirty years earlier, he had said, “I’m not proud that I killed 80,000 people, but I’m proud that I was able to start with nothing, plan it and have it work as perfectly as it did.”

Tibbetts, like Grant, was not cold and uncaring. Also like Grant, he did what he thought had to be done to bring the war to an end and stop the killing.

When the bombs were dropped, the United States was preparing to invade the Japanese home islands. The Japanese were preparing to make the Americans pay for every inch of ground. U.S. planners estimated that the campaign could cost the lives of a million American soldiers. Japanese losses could have run into the tens of million.

A few days after the bombs were dropped, the Japanese surrendered. None of those lives was lost.

Tibbetts’ arithmetic — as terrible as it was — proved to be correct.