In spring 1945, the war in Europe drew to a close while the battle in the Pacific raged on and an allied invasion of Japan seemed imminent. He remained friends with bombardier Tom Ferebee and pilot Paul Tibbets until their deaths in 20 respectively. But I just could not see how they could continue the war and subject their people to that." "Look, we did what we had to do," he says. The bomb killed an estimated 100,000 Japanese, but it ended the war and precluded an invasion of Japan, and Mr Van Kirk says he has no regrets. Just that maybe it would shorten the war." "We didn't know at first what we were going to do. "I looked out the window and saw the just-rising sun and thought about what a beautiful morning it was over the Pacific," he recalls, sitting in his home office surrounded by pictures, books, model planes, awards and mementos marking the mission. On the morning of 6 August, 1945 he, two of the closest friends and nine other Americans took off for the flight that launched the world into the nuclear age. To his family and friends, the elderly man in a little retirement community in Georgia is just "Dutch".īut 65 years ago on Friday, Lt Theodore Van Kirk was flight navigator for the Enola Gay on its mission to drop the atomic bomb on Hiroshima. I shall write peace upon your wings, and you shall fly around the world so that children will no longer have to die this way.Just found this on the BBC website, I found it really interesting.īBC News - World News America - Enola Gay navigator has 'no regrets'Īs the Japanese city of Hiroshima marks the 65th anniversary of the world's first atomic bomb attack, a member of the US crew that dropped the weapon talks to the BBC's Kristin Wilson about his memories of that day. In one version, Sadako wrote a haiku that translates into English as: The tale of Sadako has been dramatized in many books and movies.
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Every year the statue is adorned with thousands of wreaths of a thousand origami cranes. While her effort could not extend her life, it moved her friends to make a granite statue of Sadako in the Hiroshima Peace Park: a young girl standing with her hand outstretched, a paper crane flying from her fingertips. She was buried with a wreath of 1,000 cranes to honor her dream. However, when she saw that the other children in her ward were dying, she realized that she would not survive and wished instead for world peace and an end to suffering.Ī popular version of the tale is that Sadako folded 644 cranes before she died her classmates then continued folding cranes in honor of their friend. Hearing the legend, she decided to fold one thousand origami cranes so that she could live. By the time she was twelve in 1955, she was dying of leukemia. She was then a hibakusha - an atom bomb survivor. Sadako was exposed to the radiation of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima as an infant, and it took its inevitable toll on her health. The origami crane has become a symbol of peace because of this legend, and because of a young Japanese girl named Sadako Sasaki.
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Legend says that anyone who folds one thousand paper cranes will have their heart’s desire come true. In the museum you could read several letters related to the Manhattan Project, for example these two from brigadier general Leslie Groves (in charge of the project) and Albert Einstein:Īs I did in a post I wrote 3 years ago, in order to explain her story I will paste below an excerpt from Wikipedia‘s article on the history of origami (paper birds): Some parts of the museum are truly shocking. You can spend several hours in the museum: from reading about the life in Hiroshima prior to the war, during the war and before the bombing, about the Manhattan Project, learning from specific cases of victims of the bomb, several testimonies, replicas from wounded people, etc. There we visited the Hiroshima Peace Site, museum and park. Luca and I, together with some friends visited Japan during the summer of 2008. However, I thought of writing this post in order to connect several points related to the story, some of which I have only discovered quite recently… I guess you have had the chance to read about it in several places along the day. Today, August 6th, in 1945 the Boeing B-29 Superfortress “Enola Gay” dropped over Hiroshima (Japan) the first nuclear bomb, “ Little Boy“, used in combat.