Black Hills Professor, Hiroshima Anniversary, and Today’s Drones
Retired Black Hills State University professor Victor Weidensee enlisted in the Army Air Corps right after Pearl Harbor. He eventually joined the American effort to retake the Philippines, part of a guerrilla special operations behind enemy lines with the 3rd Commando Group.
The horrors of warfare really came home to him most forcefully when he flew over the Japanese city of Hiroshima not long after the Enola Gay had leveled it on August 6, 1945, killing 80,000. He recalls that the devastation was well beyond anything he had even seen or heard of, such as “The shock when I first saw the destruction of Hiroshima by the A bomb–and later to see how the bombing of Japan had destroyed everything. My mindset has since been against war as a solution to anything,” he reported to the Black Hills Veterans Writing Group.
In fact, the tide of war might have turned dramatically against the US if Germany or Japan had been first to deploy the weapon. Both countries were in stages of development–a German U-boat loaded with the necessary uranium actually heading to Japan at war’s end.
Countries at war have always looked for a deterrent massive attack against the enemy to end fight once and for all, thus saving lives that later attrition might claim. The US had earlier tried the fire-bombings of Tokyo, but to little avail.
Hiroshima stands out because it reaffirmed the overwhelming advantage of research and development. Invest in technology and wars can be shortened–and the implications for human suffering that go with that.
But Hiroshima gave us something even more apropos for America today. The B-29 known as Enola Gay established the lone air warrior as a model: a single warplane taking out an enemy city. Americans wanted fewer body bags coming home, an emotional response that hampered victory in later wars.
Drones have become today’s weapon of choice, assassinating enemy leaders as carefully as possible while minimizing collateral human damage. No body bags at all. They will remain a tour de force of US technological investment–at least for the near future.
