Enola gay crew killing himself
Silence in such matters, especially by a public body like the American bishops, is a stamp of approval. To the best of my knowledge no American cardinals or bishops were opposing these mass air raids. I was told the raids was necessary told openly by the military and told implicitly by my Church's leadership. I was "brainwashed"! It never entered my mind to publicly protest the consequences of these massive air raids. Yet I never preached a single sermon against killing civilians to the men who were doing it. Yes, I knew civilians were being destroyed. The man knew that in a few seconds the child would be burned to death by napalm which had already been released. He told me that he had been on a low-level bombing mission, flying right down one of the main streets of the city, when straight ahead of him appeared a little boy, in the middle of the street, looking up at the plane in childlike wonder. He was in the hospital on Tinian Island on the verge of a complete mental collapse. I remember one young man who was engaged in the bombings of the cities of Japan. "Many of these planes went to Japan with the express purpose of killing not one child or one civilian but of slaughtering hundreds and thousands of children and civilians - and I said nothing.Īs a chaplain I often had to enter the world of the boys who were losing their minds because of something they did in war.
That would be mortally sinful," he said.īut in 1945 on Tinian Island in the South Pacific, where the atomic bomb group was based, three planes every minute would take off around the clock, Zabelka said. "If a soldier came to me and asked if he could put a bullet through a child's head, I would have told him absolutely not. In a 1980 interview with theologian, peace advocate and later Catholic priest Charles McCarthy in Sojourners magazine, a Christian social justice and peace publication, Zabelka said during war, the destruction of civilians was always forbidden by the church.
George Zabelka, the Catholic chaplain to the 509th Composite Group - the atomic bomb group.
Three days later, a second atomic bomb was dropped on Nagasaki, immediately killing an estimated 40,000 people, with tens of thousands dying later from the bombings because of radiation poisoning.īlessing the crews and their two missions was Fr. 6, 1945, the single most destructive weapon ever unleashed upon human beings and the environment - the atomic bomb - was dropped by an American B-29 bomber on the Japanese city of Hiroshima, killing approximately 80,000 people instantly. More than 75,000 people were killed in Hiroshima when the United States dropped the bomb near the end of World War II. 6, 2012, on the Motoyasu River facing the gutted Atomic Bomb Dome on the 67th anniversary of the bombing of Hiroshima, Japan. A girl prays after releasing a paper lantern Aug.