64 Years Ago

On this day in 1945 the airplane you see below made an historic flight:

That's the Enola Gay, a B-29 bomber now on display at the Smithsonian's Air and Space Museum at Dulles Airport. This is the ship that dropped the first atomic bomb on Hiroshima.

For some odd reason pollsters are asking today if the decision made 64 years ago was correct. 61% said yes, with overwhelming support among those who are 55 or older. The younger the respondent the less likely they were to agree with Harry Truman's decision. The people in the older age group either remember WWII firsthand or had a parent that told them about it.

The results don't particularly surprise me. For the younger crowd it's always easier to oppose historical decisions when you have no firsthand knowledge of the times in which they were made. Political correctness today would demand opposition to the use of nuclear weapons, even if we know they ended the war and saved untold millions of people who would have been killed in the invasion of the Japanese home islands. Logic and political correctness rarely operate in harmony.

As for me, I'm firmly in the "Give 'em hell, Harry" category.