What do Joe Lockhard from Williamsport, Ted VanKirk from Northumberland, the Ordinance Project in Allenwood, and J. Robert Oppenheimer all have in common? The bombing of Hiroshima.
Granted, Lockard's role was the furthest removed - he simply was the first to see the planes coming in to Pearl Harbor - the bombing that precipitated the war with Japan that ended with the atomic bombs in 1945.
His concerns about the approaching planes were dismissed. And then the bombs fell. [Read more here]
J. Robert Oppenheimer was an American theoretical physicist. A jew, he was said to be motivated to help the U.S. develop and perfect an atomic bomb, before the Nazis perfected theirs. During the Manhattan Project, Oppenheimer was director of the Los Alamos Laboratory and responsible for the research and design, and as such, he is known as the “father of the atomic bomb.”
Uranium turnings, or waste, from the Manhattan project in New Mexico were shipped across the country and stored in the cement bunkers that had been recently constructed for the TNT plant built on confiscated farm land in and around the town of Alvira, in central Pennsylvania. Although no one is certain exactly which of the bunkers may have stored the waste, many of the TNT Bunkers can still be visited on the State Game Land property. [Read more about the Alvira Bunkers here]
And Ted "Dutch" VanKirk, from Northumberland? He was the navigator in the Enola Gay, the plane that dropped the bomb on Hiroshima.
Seeking to curb Japanese aggression and force a withdrawal of Japanese forces from Manchuria and China, the United States imposed economic sanctions on Japan. Faced with severe shortages of oil and other natural resources, and wanting to displace the United States as the dominant Pacific power, Japan decided to attack the U.S. and British forces in Asia and seize the resources of Southeast Asia.
Then on December 7, 1941, Japan launched a surprise attack on the U.S. Pacific fleet at Pearl Harbor. The purpose of the attack was to keep the American fleet from interfering with Japanese Empires expansion plans. And for a short time, it worked.
In response, the United States declared war on Japan. Four days after the attack, in what is described as "offhand, with almost no consultation", Hitler declared war on the U.S., who had, until then, remained neutral in that conflict.
After Germany's declaration of war on the United States, the United States also declared war on Germany.
Two separate declarations of War - seemingly unrelated, but not completely so. Japan and Germany had that Tripartite Pact. It did not actually include the scenario where Japan attacked another country and expected Germany to join them - but this was Hitler. And he didn't think much of the U.S. Military, they were not a real threat in his mind. Still, his declaration of war with the US is thought by many historians to be Hitlers "most puzzling" wartime decision.
So began the U.S. involvement in World War II - the deadliest military conflict in history.
By the end of WWII, 407,316 U.S. Soldiers were killed in and another 671,278 were wounded.
During that war, Germany was working on perfecting an atomic bomb.
OPPENHEIMER & THE MANHATTAN PROJECT
On October 9, 1941, two months before the United States entered World War II, President Franklin D. Roosevelt approved a program to develop an atomic bomb. A year later, Julius Robert Oppenheimer was recruited to work on that "Manhattan Project", and the following year he chose a location in New Mexico as centralized, secret research laboratory.
In the early morning hours of July 16, 1945, near Alamogordo, New Mexico, the work at Los Alamos culminated in the test of the world's first nuclear weapon - The Trinity.
"Dr. Oppenheimer, on whom had rested a very heavy burden, grew tenser as the last seconds ticked off. He scarcely breathed. He held on to a post to steady himself. For the last few seconds, he stared directly ahead and then when the announcer shouted "Now!" and there came this tremendous burst of light followed shortly thereafter by the deep growling roar of the explosion, his face relaxed into an expression of tremendous relief."
GERMANY SURRENDERS - JAPAN CONTINUES THE WAR
In May of 1945, A little more than 3 years after the attack on Pearl Harbor, the nazis surrendered.
One part of World War II was over.
But, Japan was not done fighting.
When Germany surrendered , Manhattan project scientists questioned the bombs relevance. Oppenheimer, however, believed using it would quickly end the ongoing war in the Pacific, saving Allied lives.
President Truman tasked a committee of advisers, chaired by Secretary of War Henry Stimson, to deliberate on whether to use the atomic bomb on Japan. “At the time, there was a wide consensus in support of the decision to strike among the members of the committee. Stimson was very adamant that the bomb be used.”
“The recent experience in the battles in Iwo Jima and Okinawa was very costly in terms of US and Japanese casualties, despite the destruction of the Japanese air force and navy.. There was a widespread belief among American military planners that the Japanese would fight to the last man.” - Archivist Sam Rushay
After years of sacrifice, countless deaths and suffering, and dwindling resources, the atomic bomb seemed to offer a potentially magical solution that would finally bring the war to an end.
The US military was unwilling to say it could win the war without the bomb.
And so, having completed the Trinity Test, it was determined that the "Little Boy" atomic bomb was ready for delivery to Japan.
TED "DUTCH" VANKIRK & THE ENOLA GAY
On August 2, Hiroshima was specified as the primary target, with Kokura and Nagasaki as alternates. During preparation for the first atomic mission, Colonel Paul Tibbets assumed command of the aircraft and named it after his mother, Enola Gay Tibbets.
Tibbets called Theodore VanKirk, a native of the town of Northumberland, in Northumberland County Pa, who had flown nearly 60 bombing missions over Germany And Italy, and credited Tibbets with saving his life more than once.
In Tibbets view, there "just wasn't anybody in the same class as Dutch when it came to accurate navigation."
“He [Tibbets] told me, ‘We’re going to do something that I can’t tell you about right now, but if it works, it will end or significantly shorten the war.’ And I thought, ‘Oh, yeah, buddy, I’ve heard that before.’ ”
Theodore “Dutch” Van Kirk, navigator on the Enola Gay, describes arriving at Wendover Field, Utah and figuring out that he would be taking part in a mission to drop an atomic bomb.
"I sat up and played poker, along with some other guys,” Vankirk recalls. “How do you expect to get some sleep after they tell you you’re going out to drop the atomic bomb?”
“Our crew … was taking it like it was another regular mission. When we got out to the plane, we found out it was like a Hollywood premier. There were lights all over, picture cameras … more generals and admirals than I had ever seen in one place in my life.”
In the predawn hours of Aug. 6, 1945, the Enola Gay, carrying a crew of 12, took off from Tinian in the Mariana Islands with the uranium bomb that had been built under extraordinary secrecy in the vast Manhattan Project.
Captain Van Kirk spread out his navigation charts on a small table behind Colonel Tibbets’s seat in the Enola Gay. From that spot, at the end of a long tunnel atop the bomb bays, he took the plane’s bearings, using a hand-held sextant to guide with the stars, VanKirk guided the bomber through the night sky, just 15 seconds behind schedule.
When they reached the targe, Major Ferebee released the bomb, and as the 9,000-kilogram bomb nicknamed "Little Boy" fell toward the sleeping city, he and his crewmates hoped to escape with their lives.
They didn't know whether the bomb would actually work and, if it did, whether its shockwaves would rip their plane to shreds. They counted — one thousand one, one thousand two — reaching the 43 seconds they'd been told it would take for detonation and heard nothing.
43 seconds later, at 1,890 feet above ground zero, it exploded in a nuclear inferno
"The first atomic bomb was dropped from an altitude of 30,600 feet. It exploded 43 seconds later, 1800 feet above Hiroshima. The city was essentially destroyed but millions of lives, both Japanese and Allied were saved. WWII soon ended and the killing stopped. Dutch Van Kirk, Navigator-Enola Gay, Hiroshima-6 Aug. 1945."
Their curiosity satisfied and their mission accomplished, the fliers turned east for the flight back to Tinian. “When the tail-gunner said, `I can’t see the cloud … anymore,’ we were at about 10,000 feet and I estimated about 160 miles from Japan.”
Over two-thirds of Hiroshima's buildings were demolished. The hundreds of fires, ignited by the thermal pulse, combined to produce a firestorm that had incinerated everything within about 4.4 miles of ground zero.
The US dropped another bomb on Nagasaki, Japan, on August 9, 1945, killing up to 80,000 people.
Japan unconditionally agreed to accept the terms of surrender on August 14.
By the end of 1945, the bombing had killed an estimated 140,000 people in Hiroshima, and a further 74,000 in Nagasaki. In the years that followed, many of the survivors would face leukemia, cancer, or other terrible side effects from the radiation.
After the bomb dropped, co-pilot, Captain Robert Lewis, commented, "My God, what have we done?" But when when asked if he ever struggled with his conscience after the bombing, VanKirk answered that he did not.
“I always claim that if anybody takes the time and makes the effort to study the facts, why, they would have to conclude that the decision to drop the bomb was a correct one …”
Charles Maier, a professor of history at Harvard University, agreed. He said that while it was possible for Truman to have made another decision, he said “It would have been hard to justify to the American public why he prolonged the war when this weapon was available.”
“Suicide attacks are fairly common today, [but] at the time, the Japanese use of suicidal Kamikaze attacks had made a strong psychological impact on US military decision-makers who reckoned that the whole country would be mobilized to defend the home islands.” - Maier, in an interview with CNN
“We were fighting an enemy that had a reputation for never surrendering, never accepting defeat,” VanKirk said. “It’s really hard to talk about morality and war in the same sentence.”
"Where was the morality in the bombing of Coventry, or the bombing of Dresden, or the Bataan Death March, or the Rape of Nanking, or the bombing of Pearl Harbor? I believe that when you’re in a war, a nation must have the courage to do what it must to win the war with a minimum loss of lives.”
In another interview, VanKirk said:
"I honestly believe the use of the atomic bomb saved lives in the long run. There were a lot of lives saved. Most of the lives saved were Japanese," But it also made him wary of war.
"The whole World War II experience shows that wars don't settle anything. And atomic weapons don't settle anything," he said. "I personally think there shouldn't be any atomic bombs in the world -- I'd like to see them all abolished.
"But if anyone has one," he added, "I want to have one more than my enemy."
In 1952 MGM released the movie Above and Beyond about Tibbets and the Enola Gay, starring Robert Taylor and Eleanor Parker.
In 1958, the City Council of Hiroshima passed a resolution condemning Truman for refusing to express remorse for using atomic bombs and for continuing to advocate their use in an emergency situation. The resolution said the city’s residents “consider it their sublime duty to be a cornerstone of world peace and no nation of the world should ever be permitted to repeat the error of using of nuclear weapons.”
Truman responded to the Hiroshima resolution by writing a letter to the Council’s chairman, saying that “the feeling of the people of your city is easily understood, and I am not in any way offended by the resolution.” However, Truman stressed the necessity of the decision referencing how the US had “been shot in the back” in the Pearl Harbor attack by Japan and saying that the decision to use the two nuclear bombs saved the lives of 250,000 Allied troops and 250,000 Japanese by helping to prevent an invasion. “As the executive who ordered the dropping of the bomb, I think the sacrifice of Hiroshima and Nagasaki was urgent and necessary for the prospective welfare of both Japan and the Allies,” Truman concluded.
The US remains the only country to ever use an atomic bomb in war.
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Uranium Waste At Alvira
It shocked him to find out the uranium turnings, or waste, had been shipped across the country from New Mexico where nuclear experiments were taking place, he said.
The link to the Manhattan Project was Brig. Gen. Leslie Groves and Col. Kenneth Nichols, both of whom were directly responsible for the construction of the ordnance works, he said.
Groves became head of the Manhattan Energy District and Nichols headed up the Oak Ridge Lab in Tennessee, he said.
One was a 1943 Army Engineers tally sheet showing 36 barrels of uranium turnings totaling 19,211 pounds would be received at the ordnance works that September.
A second document notified the ordnance works that a fourth and final shipment of 17,000 pounds of radioactive debris would be received in the next three to four weeks.
There is no apparent record of the first two shipments that totaled 32,000 pounds, Huddy said. He said he believes the War Department lost track of its shipments of the radioactive waste.
By October 1943, removal of the radioactive material had begun, according to Huddy. Records he has seen state the final shipment was April 26, 1944, or 11 days after the ordnance works was decommissioned.
There's actually one more Central Pennsylvania connection to Hiroshima/the Manhattan Project that you missed. But don't worry: most people do, and I didn't even know about it until about ten or fifteen years ago, when I read a history on the 509th Composite Group. And notwithstanding the fact that I was educated in the local government schools, I didn't know about Van Kirk until i was chatting with my grandmother as a senior in college, and she told me about him and his role in history. Apparently, he had bought a car from my grandfather (Ellwood Schreffler) after the war. When I met Van Kirk at the Dulles Gun Show a few years back, I had asked him if he remembered my grandparents' restaurant in Norry before the war, and he said "Who were your grandparents?" When I told him, he said, "Well, I don't remember the restaurant, but I bought my first Pontiac from your grandfather." This thrilled my son --- their great-grandson --- who has fond memories of his beloved great-grandparents.
ReplyDeleteIn any case, the man who selected Paul Tibbets to lead the 509th Composite Group was Gen. Uzal G. Ent ... also of Northumberland (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uzal_Girard_Ent). The local VFW Post is named in his honor.