After the war, Paul Tibbets walked through Nagasaki. He had commanded the mission, been handpicked and promoted young, and been let in on the one secret that could end the war. He wanted to see Hiroshima, but the airfield there was too wrecked to land, so he went to the second city instead. He found nobody, only streets and quiet, and he said later that it frightened him.
The man at the center of it, trained for years for exactly this, did not grasp what had happened until he stood in the ash. I keep that in mind before deciding the whole thing was obvious.
Eighty-one years ago this month, two aircraft lifted off a coral island in the Pacific and ended the deadliest war in human history. The argument over whether it had to happen has never closed. Colonel Gerry Tertychny spent our last Heroes' Path evening on it, and I walked in thinking I knew the story.
He took us from Pearl Harbor, which the men who understood it best quietly counted as a Japanese failure, through the decision to beat Germany first, to the bombers that could not hit Japan with the precision America had staked its air war on. One night of firebombing over Tokyo killed more people than Hiroshima, and almost nobody has heard of it. Purple Hearts struck in 1945 for an invasion that never came were still being pinned on wounded Marines in Vietnam.
Harry Truman did not know the bomb existed until about two weeks after he was sworn in. Nagasaki was not the target that morning. A third bomb was being readied, and someone stopped it. Even after two atomic weapons, a handful of Japanese officers came close to keeping the war going. One man was in Hiroshima on the sixth and Nagasaki on the ninth and lived into his nineties.
Gerry would not pretend any of it was easy, or that eight decades of hindsight make us wiser than the men watching the kamikazes come in at the end of Okinawa. A decision made at the top always comes to rest on someone young and far away. Charles Sweeney flew the plane that dropped the second bomb. Years later he said he had no doubt Truman was right, and that as the man who flew the last atomic mission, he prayed he would keep that distinction forever.
By the end of the evening I realized how little I had actually known.
Read the full essay on Substack: https://heroespath.substack.com/p/the-decision-that-ended-a-war-and