Site Ed. Note: The front page reports that the world's first deployed atomic bomb had hit Hiroshima at 7:20 p.m., Eastern War Time, on Sunday night, 8:20 a.m. on this date, Hiroshima time. It had hit with the force of 20 kilotons of TNT, the equivalent of the ordinary bomb loads of 2,000 B-29's or 2,000 times the explosive force in TNT of the British "Grand Slam" bomb, the largest bomb previously developed, delivering approximately 11 tons of force.

President Truman's prepared statement, prepared by the War Department and approved by him with corrections on July 30, accompanied by the instructions to release it "when ready but no sooner than August 2", was released this date to the press at about 11:30 a.m. Washington time, some sixteen hours after the bomb had been dropped. The bulk of it is printed on the front page.

The President was still en route across the Atlantic aboard the Augusta and so would not make any statement via radio until Thursday.

Not yet reported, the B-29 which delivered the bomb was piloted by Col. Paul Tibbets of Illinois. He had named the plane on Sunday for his mother, "Enola Gay". The bombardier on the flight, whose picture is below, was Major Thomas Ferebee of Mocksville, North Carolina. The co-pilot was Captain Robert Lewis of New Jersey. The navigator was Captain Theodore Van Kirk of Pennsylvania. In all, the crew of the dangerous mission consisted of twelve men. The plane had departed from Tinian with its load at 2:45 a.m. local time.

As indicated, there were four permissible target cities, Kokura, Niigata, and Nagasaki, in addition to Hiroshima, selected for their being among the few key industrial centers with harbors which had not already been virtually destroyed by incendiary bombing, pummeling Japanese cities in strength since February, significantly increased since July 1 after the public warning of same had been given by General Curtis LeMay. Final selection of the targets among the four cities was discretionary with the commanders at Guam, based on weather and visibility, only Niigata having been eliminated as a possible target. The final decision among the three was left to Colonel Tibbets based on visibility at time of the drop over the target. Had none of the targets been available for the drop, the plane would have needed to return to Tinian and land, without detonating the bomb, with a provisional remedy of dropping the load in the ocean.

The bomb, itself, dubbed "Little Boy", was untested as a device. The bomb detonated at Trinity below Alamogordo in New Mexico on July 16 had been an implosion-type bomb, the type of device to be dropped on Thursday over Nagasaki. Little Boy was a fission weapon utilizing Uranium-235 as a "bullet" fired down the cylinder to set in motion a nuclear chain reaction. The bomb had used most of the supply of U-235 available at the time.

Thus, it was still uncertain, at the time of deployment, that the device would work. It did.

As reported, the blast was nearly seven times that of the largest man-made blast ever recorded in history to that point, that of December 6, 1917 in Halifax, Nova Scotia, when two ships, the Mont Blanc, a French cargo vessel loaded with munitions, and the Imo, a Norwegian vessel, collided in the harbor, killing 1,500 persons, injuring 4,000, and rendering 20,000 homeless while destroying an area of 2.5 square miles with a force of 3,000 tons of TNT.

Harry Golden, writing from Charlotte on the previous Friday, oddly selecting that day to set forth the history of the eruption of the volcano of 1883 on Krakatoa, explained that it was the largest explosion ever known to man from any source, carrying an estimated yield which had dwarfed all the bombs deployed in World War I and World War II put together. Its estimated explosive force, 200 megatons, was about 10,000 times that of the Hiroshima bomb, and nearly four times the yield of Tsar Bomba, the Soviet Union's hydrogen bomb of October, 1961, the largest man-made bomb ever detonated, with a yield of 58 megatons.

Howard Blakeley, Associated Press science editor, informs that the bomb was conceptually based on the nuclear chain reactions which produce the perpetual heat and light of the Sun. He explains that in an ordinary fire, molecules are broken down releasing energy in the form of heat, light, and various rays, including X-rays. In a nuclear explosion, by contrast, the atoms comprising the molecules are broken down, releasing arithmetically increased amounts of energy, including radiation. Atomic theory had been around for some time, but being able to harness the energy from it into any useable form was the trick which had now been accomplished.

Secretary of War Henry Stimson, of course, refused to comment on the particular mechanics of the bomb, but explained that it was based on uranium ore, U-235 being a particularly unstable isotope. He also indicated the belief that the bomb would hasten the end of the war with Japan.

The damage assessment on Hiroshima could not yet be made because the cloud from the bomb did not permit any visibility of the target after the blast. Effectively, of course, Hiroshima was obliterated. No one really knows the death toll, but it has been estimated at around 100,000, up to 150,000, many of the deaths coming in the aftermath from radiation sickness or burns from the blast. For the most part, there were no bodies of the dead to be counted as they were simply vaporized in the blast. About 70 percent of the city was destroyed, 4.7 square miles.

Millions upon millions of words have been written about this event in the 67 years since this terrible force was unleashed on the world with its persistently imminent threat continuing through the Cold War, which effectively ended in 1989.

We do not propose to add a great volume here to those words, moralizing about its use. There are those who condemn it as a criminal act against humanity. That is an emotional reaction built on superficial thinking without realization of the times then extant or the context of the deployment. It blinks the reality that America did not start this terrible war. The Japanese and the Germans, under the respective leadership of General Hideki Tojo, with at least complacent acquiescence by Emperor Hirohito, and Adolf Hitler, started the thing in motion. Obviously, had either nation acquired the atomic bomb before America, it would have had no compunction in using it, limited only by its ability to deploy it. Indeed, there had been an attempt in the closing days of the European war to ship two Japanese scientists aboard a U-boat from Germany with the work completed thus far by German scientists on the atomic bomb and a cache of fissionable uranium. The U-boat, with the Japanese scientists having committed suicide, surrendered to American authorities after VE-Day.

The Japanese had no compunction about undertaking a completely unprovoked attack in stealth on Pearl Harbor, killing 2,390 men and women, including some children, on December 7, 1941. The key to remember is that the attack on Pearl Harbor was unprovoked. No act of American military aggression had ever taken place against Japan. That attack was a criminal act, not an appropriate act of war. It was every bit the criminal act that Hitler's invasion of Poland had been on September 1, 1939, that Japan's invasion of Manchuria in 1931 had been.

The rest is warfare, tit for tat, until one side is forced to surrender. That America was able to marshal much greater strength industrially and develop ultimately superior weapons, though starting the war in an inferior position in terms of armament, should not have been very surprising to anyone who understood America and its vast wealth of resources, both natural and human.

There are also those who contend that the American people were lied to at the time by the Government about the necessity to use the bomb, that the war could have been won in a matter of weeks without its use. We defy those espousing such views to read the actual accounts in the public press daily for the entire war and then tell us that the American people were lied to systematically by the leadership, even for short periods, and especially in these latter months of the war. While not perfect in terms of disclosure of facts when any conceivable need for secrecy had expired, the Government at the time was largely transparent, and the facts were generally disclosed as they occurred, with the exception of military secrets. The Fourth Estate of the day insisted upon it. The contrary assertion matches the rhetoric of the times which belonged to the likes of Robert Rice Reynolds, the America Firsters, the American Bund, and other such notorious groups. It is baseless verbiage, which is contradicted by the facts as they were disclosed at the time and as still regarded true. We have found no glaring example at any time during this war where, with actual documentation extant, there was a major variation between the Government official report of an event at the time and its facts insofar as they are now known. There are obviously things, as with any historical events, which have come to light since, which were simply not known then within the fog of war, which may elucidate some individual stories of the war. But that is a different thing than to say there was actual deliberate obfuscation of the facts or deliberate falsification. We have found no such major variation. There were friendly fire incidents which appeared to have been soft-peddled or covered up by the Army for a time, but even those were exposed finally by the press, by the Army press, Stars and Stripes. But no major event, such as the basis for a major policy decision or the rationale for a major military action, was sold to the public as something different from what it was. And certainly not regarding the use of the atomic bomb, which became as transparent as possible immediately, save the formula for its actual development.

This report from a contemporary Notre Dame history professor is completely consistent with that which we have read and found to be accurate in the daily accounts of the war.

In the end, Japan had every opportunity to surrender. No one except the recalcitrant leadership, and especially Emperor Hirohito, who, after all, was the common denominator through three changes of Premiers, Tojo, Koiso, and Suzuki, each of the latter two being supposedly moderate by comparison to Tojo, were responsible for the dropping of all of the bombs on Japan, including the atomic bombs. It was not the Americans who must bear that historical burden. The only alternative was either to allow Japan to remain a threat, with another war sure to follow later, or to disarm it completely. There was no middle ground acceptable, given the plain tendency to aggression demonstrated not just once, in Manchuria in 1931, not just twice in China in 1937 and onward, not just three times, with Pearl Harbor, but numerous times in the aggression demonstrated to form the Imperialistic plan under the Greater East Asia Prosperity Sphere.

Obviously, that said, one cannot blame all of the Japanese people for that plan and for that ruthless implementation of it in 1937-42.

By mid-1944, with the advent of the B-29 on the scene, a plane which flew too high to be reached by Japanese fighters, it was clear to any fool that Japan was going to lose the war. It became even more clear after Germany was defeated.

It was, in the end, therefore, simply stubborn saving of face which caused the war to be extended beyond any rational hope of even stalemate to reach this terrible result, with deployment of the worst weapon ever created by man.

Yet, the scientists who labored dutifully to develop it, Robert Oppenheimer, Edward Teller, Leo Szilard, Ernest Lawrence, and others, in addition to the many workers at Oak Ridge and Hanford and Los Alamos, who built the constituent parts and developed the research for it, most, outside the principal scientists, without knowing the full import of what they were building or doing, were heroes to mankind.

As were, obviously, the brave men of the Enola Gay and the crews of the other planes which accompanied it, as were the men of the Indianapolis who delivered the parts for Little Boy.

For, had it not been for this terrible weapon and its terrible effects in one fell swoop and then another the following Thursday, the war obviously would have dragged on for months, possibly years. The Japanese were determined to fight to preserve their homeland from invasion, and the Emperor, giving that encouragement, had a profound grip on many of his subjects, who believed unquestioningly in the tradition that he possessed divinely inspired, infallible wisdom. He misled his people. He was a disgrace to mankind and should be held in lasting historical contempt, never honored. He was a tyrant who cloaked himself in royal benevolence. He was every bit the monster that Hitler was, perhaps even worse for his seeming innocence and his thorough refusal to take responsibility for the welfare of his people or the actions of his military. That he was able finally to surrender only shows that he could have done so much earlier, certainly after the fall of Tojo a year before. He was not simply the puppet of military masters. He was the Master puppeteer.

It was this Japanese imperialistic-warring mentality which led to production of the atomic bomb, that plus, obviously, the same mindset in Nazi Germany. Remove that from the equation and there would have been no war, no atomic bomb, no bombs of any sort.

So, to say that America has blood on its hands for the deployment of this weapon is poppycock. It is to say that Hitler and Tojo were absolutely right and justified in what they did. For, in the end, the only way finally to stop it, without useless continuing bloodshed and death on both sides, including what would have been hundreds of thousands of additional Japanese soldiers and civilians dead, was the use of this terrible weapon, as one grand demonstration of power.

Anyone who believes that the Japanese were about to surrender does not read their history thoroughly but only selectively. The Japanese would have surrendered, but only while retaining their heavy industries and not allowing any form of occupation or oversight to insure that no further war capability could be mustered. But that was obviously, by this point, unacceptable. It meant war down the road and against a re-fortified enemy.

Once the weapon was developed, it would have been criminal for President Truman not to have used it under the circumstances which then prevailed, requiring a bloody invasion of the homeland, with the lesson of Okinawa and its 12,000 American dead ineradicably fresh in the memories of the American people. And Okinawa, it was known, was child's play compared to the prospects for invasion of the main islands of Japan, Honshu and Kyushu.

And, again, it has to be stressed that conventional incendiary raids would have continued apace to obliterate everything possible from the air which could be obliterated, which was a legitimate military objective. The Japanese propaganda arm had promised during the prior two weeks that millions of dead Americans would result from an invasion. And, they would have sought to make that promise a reality. Suicide for the Emperor was part of the Japanese Imperial culture, the Bushido complex.

We do not like the atomic bomb or the hydrogen bomb. We would like it to be forever put back in its box. But, we also must give the Devil its due, given man's persistent aggressive instinct collectively, that it has acted as a hedge against world war since its first deployment this date in history.

Perhaps the names of the B-29's which accompanied the Enola Gay, the Straight Flush, the Full House, the Jabit III, the Great Artiste, Top Secret, and the Necessary Evil, provide some insight into the thinking of the men themselves who delivered this terrible device. And that insight, assuming it more or less consistent with what we have laid forth, was the only practical thinking available at the time.

There was no other practical alternative to avoid even greater bloodshed into the future.

It is easy enough to pluck this episode out of its context and find it deplorable. But it did not occur pursuant to a vacuum of events. It was justifiable under the circumstances.

That, of course, is not to say that the innocent Japanese civilians who lost their lives or were maimed or burned deserved that fate. Obviously, they did not. It was a cruel lesson for all of mankind.

But, truth be told, with few exceptions, none of us deserve to die. Yet we do, every single one of us, sooner or later, believe it or not. Life, itself, is unfair and hateful and unjustified. Nature is wrong to be so cruel and indiscriminate. But it is. Storms, floods, typhoons, earthquakes, all kill indiscriminately and without apparent rationale. So do disease and the various other forms of natural causes of death.

War itself is unnatural. It runs counter to the basic instinct of man for survival, for it is ultimately suicidal. We have to blame war and that instinct for fight or flight inherent in man and not sufficiently controlled in some, as the basic problem, the reason for this terrible war, for any war, at its base seed, the desire for something one does not have and the decision to rationalize thievery and physical aggression to try to obtain it.

Otherwise in the news, Senator Hiram Johnson of California, aging isolationist Senator who had been in Congress for 33 years, had died at age 79. Despite his isolationism, which included opposition to American involvement in World War I, he did not vote against ratification of the U. N. Charter, though he had expressed reservations about it.

It was expected that the bill to provide for a peacetime draft was headed for defeat in Congress. President Truman had refused to comment on it, and insiders suggested that, when he would do so in October, it would likely be to suggest instead an increased National Guard in lieu of a year of compulsory military training for all males between 18 and 21.

Hal Boyle appears with a piece on the page, the first of two, regarding a visit to the home of Ernie Pyle, who had been killed on Ie Jima, just off Iwo, just after his arrival from the European theater, on April 18. Mr. Boyle tells of meeting Mr. Pyle's Aunt Mary on the family farm.

And, in addition to the atomic bomb, 580 B-29's attacked four more Japanese cities, Nishinomiya, Maebashi, Imbari, and Saga, dropping 3,650 tons of incendiary bombs, as well as hitting a coal liquefaction company at Ube. Only one B-29 failed to return. A single Japanese jet was observed during the raid on Maebashi, coming within 500 feet of one of the B-29's.

Another 100 Mustangs raided Tokyo as well.

It was reported that the two B-29 raids of August 2 had dropped 10,500 tons of bombs, about half the equivalent yield of the single atom bomb of this date. It was announced that aerial photographs had shown that Toyama, with a population of about 127,000 and location of Japan's largest aluminum plant, had been completely obliterated in the strikes. Dropping of mines also continued, in Wakasa Bay on the west coast of Honshu between the Inland Sea and Osaka Bay.

Since March 3, the conventional bombing raids had wiped out about 160 square miles of Japanese industrial cities, 32 times that destroyed by Little Boy.

Still, however, there was no surrender.

In any event, should you ever have to answer on a quiz the date for the atomic bomb drop on Hiroshima and you bobble it by saying August 5, you have a plausible argument to make in response to your teacher, that you were basing your answer on Eastern War Time, like any good American ought—the 1,338th day since the attack on Pearl Harbor, not the 1,339th.

On the editorial page, prepared before the news of the Hirsohima bomb, "Their Bob" finds the series of articles published the previous week by Eugene Segal of the Scripps-Howard newspapers to have been convincing that former North Carolina Senator Robert Rice Reynolds was up to no good with his Nationalists Party and its attempts to attract membership through race hatred, alien-baiting, and praise of dictatorships.

"Silly Season" remarks that, with the beginning of Dog Days on August 2 and the accounting by the guardians of Christopher Smith Reynolds, son of Libby Holman Reynolds Holmes and the late Smith Reynolds, who had died in 1932 of a mysterious gunshot wound on the balcony, possibly suicide, possibly murder, one night during a party—just a stone's throw from where we grew up—the Silly Season had begun.

We were nowhere near that balcony that night, incidentally. We have no idea what happened. Don't ask. We might tell you.

Anyway, the money paid for the general support of Christopher, age 12, during the prior fiscal year had come to $83,333.23. The piece concludes that children were a joy but expensive. The only consolation was that Christopher one day would turn 21.

Another Silly Season article came from Marshal Petain's trial, the snoozer. Pierre Laval had testified that he was only trying to fool the Germans by broadcasting, "I desire victory for Germany." He had done a good job of fooling, says the piece, including fooling many Frenchmen, most especially the 150,000 he had sent to forced labor camps in Germany, many of whom died there.

"Down to Cases" comments on the idea, liked by Secretary of Labor Lewis Schwellenbach, that, as proposed by Senator Arthur Vandenberg of Michigan, there should be a labor peace conference called to work out and coordinate the many issues surrounding reconversion to a peacetime economy.

The excerpt from the Congressional Record has Congressman Stephen Pace of Georgia remarking of his desire to have the G.I. loan assistance program passed to enable low-cost loans to veterans, but was struck by the fact that it was the first instance in which the loans would be guaranteed by the Government without investigation of the value of the property securing the loan.

Drew Pearson discusses the new Assistant Secretary of the Navy, John L. Sullivan, to become Secretary in 1947 when Secretary James Forrestal would become the first Secretary of Defense. Mr. Sullivan had just returned from a voyage on the Shangri-La, flagship of Admiral John McCain's task force, coming within 170 miles of Japan's coast. He had gleaned from the voyage that the best weapons of war the Americans possessed were its fighting men. He said that they would be loafing on deck as if without a care and then the planes would come in and everyone would spring to immediate action, performing their duties with perfect efficiency and coordination. The ingenuity and productivity at home which had built the many new ships of the fleet also received the Assistant Secretary's praise.

Marquis Childs comments on the reaction by some journalists to the Potsdam Declaration, that it contained nothing but gibberish. He reacts by saying, that while a lot went unsaid, it had to be borne in mind that these three men were mortals trying their best to hammer out a solution to problems which had beset man for time immemorial, and, more temporally, for the previous 25 years since the rejection of Versailles by the U.S. Senate.

Samuel Grafton suggests that the ensuing couple of months would find an ongoing debate between whether the Government should lead the way on reconversion or simply let it take its own course. Should Government pay the $25 per week for 28 weeks unemployment to displaced war workers as requested by the President? Should price and supply controls by OPA continue as a hedge against inflation? Should Government ease manufacturers back into peacetime production, incrementally providing the supply of goods they would need for slow increase of production? Or should Government do none of those things? Those were the questions.

A Private of the 26th Infantry Training Battalion, stationed at Camp Croft in South Carolina, forwards from his 1st Platoon, Co. C, an intriguing philosophical question which was being debated among his fellow soldiers: Does a horse push or pull a wagon when it is hitched to the front of it and the wagon and horse are in motion?

Nah, nah. You're both wrong. The horse is standing still the whole time as is the wagon. It is the earth's rotation which provides the illusion of movement underneath the wagoner. Seen from space, this concept would become wholly apparent.

Another letter attacks the tobacco tax imposed on the South, to the tune of a billion dollars during the previous twelve months, says it was unfair, and that if tobacco were grown in the North, it would not be so, that the publishers of the North thumbed their noses at Tobacco Road while thumbing a free ride for themselves.

Harry Golden quotes from Shakespeare's Henry VIII, as homage to Winston Churchill's leadership during the war. The quote from Cardinal Wolsey in the play concludes: And from the full meridian of my glory, I haste now to my setting.

Yet, not so, with the valiant warrior, Mr. Churchill. He would not go gentle into that good night, but would have yet another full day to fight.