"I do not regret what we did that day," he said. In a 2018 NPR interview, Gackenbach expressed no second thoughts about the annihilation of most of Hiroshima's inhabitants. Russell Gackenbach, who flew as a navigator on both the Hiroshima and Nagasaki missions, told the Voices of the Manhattan Project in 2016. "We had to go out and kill every one of them," former Army 2nd Lt.
Before then, he recalled what he thought while aboard a B-29 named Necessary Evil as the bomb dropped from another warplane, the Enola Gay. The last surviving member of the crew that flew over Hiroshima that day died in November. If they do not now accept our terms, they may expect a rain of ruin from the air, the like of which has never been seen on this earth."
"Let there be no mistake we shall completely destroy Japan's power to make war," President Harry Truman, who ordered the attacks, declared in a speech to the nation hours after the bombing of Hiroshima. 15, 1945, and the end of World War II.Īt the time, the morality and legality of those nuclear attacks were hardly the subject of public debate. The dropping by American warplanes of that first atomic bomb, code-named Little Boy - and another, code-named Fat Man, three days later in Nagasaki - led to Japan's surrender on Aug. An estimated two-thirds of that population - nearly all civilians - would soon be dead. on a Monday, the start of another workday in a city of nearly 300,000 inhabitants. The dawn of the nuclear age began with a blinding, flesh-melting blast directly above the Japanese city of Hiroshima on Aug.
Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe bows Thursday in front of a memorial to people who were killed in the 1945 atomic bombing of Hiroshima.