A Very Public Breakdown

Blogger kayinmaine (of the aptly named site "White Noise Insanity") has this to say about Paul Tibbets, commander of the Enola Gay, the plane that dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima and ended WWII, who passed away yesterday:

Paul Tibbets died a coward today at the age of 92...I spit on him.

Of course, a search of kay's site reveals that she waited for Tibbets to die before libeling him. Coward.

UPDATE: Bozoer Rebbe remarks on Tibbets in The Jawa Report comments:

The irony of calling Paul Tibbets a "coward" is that Tibbets was assigned the Hiroshima mission in great part because he was considered the finest bomber pilot in the US Army Air Force. He piloted the lead B-17 in the first daylight bombing raid by an American squadron over Nazi occupied Europe in Aug. 1942 and later flew combat in the Mediterranean theater of operations. He personally shuttled Gen. Eisenhower from England to Gibralter prior to Operation Torch, the Allied invasion of North Africa.

Tibbets' commendations:

* Distinguished Service Cross
* Distinguished Flying Cross
* Air Medal
* Purple Heart
* Legion of Merit
* Commendation Medal
* European-African-Middle Eastern Campaign Medal
* Asiatic-Pacific Campaign Medal
* American Defense Service Medal
* American Campaign Medal
* World War II Victory Medal

Rusty Shackleford: "My grandfather was a Marine killed on a beach in the South Pacific. Tens of thousands--if not hundreds of thousands--of his comrades would have been killed in the invasion of the Japanese home island had we not dropped the Atomic bombs.

My other grandfather, like Tibbetts, was a pilot in WWII. Had the bomb not been dropped, I might have lost him as well."

My father was a Marine on Okinawa. He had already been wounded there at the time of the bombing, but his TBI wasn't recognized at the time (and would have been called a "concussion" then if it had been). He was finally medically evacuated after several months of occupation duty in Japan.

Thanks to Dr. Rusty Shackleford of The Jawa Report.