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RIP: Brig. Gen. Paul Tibbets, USAF (ret)

Discussion in 'Sports and News' started by Colonel Angus, Nov 1, 2007.

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  1. hondo

    hondo Well-Known Member

    There were essentially two sides in that war: the US. and its allies on one side and the Axis on the other. Which side do you think was in the right? Which side would you have had wanted to win?
    Is this disdain of the U.S. so extreme that you're now going to retroactively say we were in the wrong in fighting and winning WWII?
     
  2. hondo

    hondo Well-Known Member

    I didn't miss it. But it sure sounds like he thinks we shouldn't have been so mean as to actually try to win the war with the weapons we had at our disposal.
     
  3. pallister

    pallister Guest

    Bubs, you seem to have staked out some moral high ground of your own. How's the view?
     
  4. buckweaver

    buckweaver Active Member

    Hmm. Sounds to me like he's saying "let's not book our ticket to heaven for it."

    I agree that we shouldn't ever have to worry about sleeping well at night, but let's not going around thinking it was some great thing we did. We had to drop the bombs because we had to drop the bombs. Doesn't mean we should feel good about all that destruction. It was something we had to do, nothing more.
     
  5. Bamadog

    Bamadog Well-Known Member

    War, in case you haven't realized it, is horrible by its very definition. As Sherman said, it is Hell.

    There are no rules of war (spare me the prattle on the Geneva Conventions that no one, save the free world, follow) except one: kill more of the other folks. Since people in Dresden worked in munition and armament plants, they were legit targets. Every bullet, Messerschmitt and Panzer they build killed our grandfathers. Just like those folks in Nagasaki and Hiroshima. Just like in Tokoyo. Contributing to the war effort makes you a legit target. When we tell an enemy where we will not bomb, you get the idiocy that was pathetic air campaign against North Vietnam. Obstensibly protecting civilian lives killed thousands of our finest of North Vietnam, something I can not forgive.

    We were the good guys! We could go on and on and on and on with Nazi atrocities, Japanese atrocities and even some atrocities from the bungling clowns that were the Italian military. We didn't seek to wipe out a whole people. We didn't have "comfort women." We treated POW's with due respect under the Geneva Conventions, something that our enemies have never followed, ever. We were not aiming to take over the world. Germany, Japan and those Facist dorks in Italy did.

    We're not perfect by any stretch, but who is? We may not be perfect, but we liberated millions from the oppression of Nazism, Facism and the military junta that ran Japan. We also rebuilt Europe and Japan after the war! That sounds pretty damned good to me.

    This is a classic example of moral equivalency at its finest. No right, no wrong, just motives. Sure. ::)

    RIP Gen. Tibbets. You are a hero (anyone who flew in B-29's, a bomber way ahead of its time with some fatal flaws that were later fixed, was a hero) and you can go to your rest secure in the knowledge you did your duty for God and country. It's a shame they can't have a memorial to him because of all of the little socialist, America-hating, whiney, defeatist cowards who would deface it because it offended their precious, mindless sensibilities.
     
  6. andyouare?

    andyouare? Guest

    For God and country? Are you serious? Yeah I'm sure God was absolutely proud of his child that dropped a bomb that killed tens of thousands. Where was God for the tens of thousands that were incinerated?

    And a hero? For what, following orders? That was truly one of the most pathetic posts I've read. Was dropping the bomb necessary? Maybe. I don't know. No one really knows. It's a sick twisted world when we have to use elementary math to decide that x number of people killed is okay because x number of people would have been killed otherwise. Pathetic.
     
  7. markvid

    markvid Guest

    I have to agree about the false label of hero.
    He was told to go fly the mission, he did. If he said no? Someone else flies the mission.
    If it had been an impulse act that save thousands of lives, that's a hero.
    He flew, pushed a button, flew home.
     
  8. Mitch E.

    Mitch E. Member

    I wasn't going to respond, because I'm new here and I've already seen how angry these threads can get and I don't want to get pushed into a pissing war.

    But, really? He flew, pushed a button, flew home??

    And he risked his life flying that mission, and probably risked his life flying how many other missions? Please.
     
  9. Bubbler

    Bubbler Well-Known Member

    It's great.

    From up here, I can see that Curtis LeMay (or SSgt. Barry Sadler, one or the other) lives in the guise of Bamadog, who is seemingly the only person left on Earth who thinks the firebombing of Dresden was justified.
     


  10. Nope.
    You're not worth it.
    Look at the dialogue above. You made a couple of ahistorical assertions -- on Germany's nuclear program and on the controversies surrounding the bomb -- because you either didn't know any better or didn't care, or haven't read widely enough. I corrected both of them and you start spitting like you're on the playground in third grade.
    Pass.
     
  11. markvid

    markvid Guest

    I'll grant you that, but again, it's not like an impulse act that saved many lives.
     
  12. HejiraHenry

    HejiraHenry Well-Known Member

    If I didn't know any better, and in your case I don't, you seem to be suggesting that some outcome other than an Allied victory in World War II would have been a good thing?
     
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