'Military objectives and soldiers and sailors are the target and not women and children. . . . The target is a purely military one."
So wrote U.S. President Harry S Truman in his diary on July 25, 1945, of the atomic bomb that the United States was to drop on Hiroshima less than two weeks later. An estimated 140,000 people in Hiroshima were dead by the end of that year as a direct result of the bomb having been dropped on that "purely military target."
William Downey, chaplain for the 509th Composite Group of the U.S. Army Air Force, blessed the group in this way: "Killing is the name of the game; those who do not accept that have to be prepared to accept the alternative -- defeat." The Enola Gay, the plane that, on Aug. 6, carried the bomb to Hiroshima, was in Bomber Group 509. (The plane was named by the pilot, Col. Paul W. Tibbets Jr., for his mother, Enola Gay Tibbets.)