Can we just talk about this for a bit?
One of the more sobering visits we had was to the North Airfield on Tinian island. This was the busiest and biggest airfield in THE WORLD in 1945. It was also from this airfield in the middle of the Pacific Ocean that the B-29 Superfortress Enola Gay carried the first atomic bomb (nicknamed Little Boy) that was dropped on Hiroshima Japan on August 6 1945.
Opinion was divided. Was this the way to end the war early, and get there before the Russians did? Was the loss of 200,000 civilian lives worth it? How many lives would be lost in a conventional land war, and how long would it take? Whatever side you take, it happened. And we stood on the airstrip where that B-29 bomber took off from.
