Posted on 07/13/2015 4:50:04 AM PDT by Homer_J_Simpson
Stephen E. Ambrose, Band of Brothers
http://www.etherit.co.uk/month/6/13.htm
July 13th, 1945 (FRIDAY)
ITALY declares war on Japan.
U.S.S.R.: Moscow: Japan may ready to do a U-turn on its refusal to surrender. Diplomatic sources believe that today’s hastily-arranged meeting between the Japanese ambassador in Moscow, Nataoke Sato, and the Kremlin’s commissar for foreign affairs, Mr. Molotov, included a Japanese request to the Soviet Union to sound out Britain and the US about negotiations for surrender.
The move came three days ago, as 1,022 American planes bombed the Tokyo area, and Allied battleships ten miles off the Japanese coast carried out a night bombardment of factories in the Hitachi area, 55 miles north-east of Tokyo. In Moscow as a special envoy with power to discuss Soviet-Japanese relations, especially the Manchurian issue.
The Kremlin response to the request - the second in two months - is cool. It believes that further talks without an offer of unconditional surrender, an essential Allied precondition to peace talks, are pointless. Marshal Stalin, however, will raise the matter at the talks in Potsdam next week.
JAPAN: The XXI Bomber Command in the Mariana Islands flies Mission 268, i.e., during the night of 13/14 July, 30 B-29 Superfortresses mine Shimonoseki Strait and waters at Fukuoka, Japan and ports at Seishin, Masan, and Reisui in Korea.
COMMONWEALTH OF THE PHILIPPINES: Task Force 95 consisting of the large cruisers USS Alaska (CB-1) and USS Guam (CB-2), four light cruisers and nine destroyers departs Leyte Gulf for an anti-shipping sweep of the East China Sea.
The scheduled attack by carrier-based aircraft of Task Force 38 against the Japanese home islands is postponed due to weather.
TERRITORY OF ALASKA: In the Aleutian Islands, the USN’s Task Force 93 under Rear Admiral John H. Brown, Jr., composed of the light cruisers USS Concord (CL-10) and USS RIchmond (CL-9) and five destroyers, commences an anti-shipping sweep off the Kurile Islands.
U.S.A.: The motion picture “The Story of G.I. Joe” is released in the U.S. This war drama based on Ernie Pyle’s books “Brave Men” and “Here Is Your War,” is directed by William Wellman and stars Burgess Meredith (as Ernie Pyle) and Robert Mitchum (in his first big movie role). The story is about Pyle following Company C, 18th Infantry Regiment in North Africa and later in Italy during the battles of San Vittorio and Cassino. The film is nominated for four Academy Awards including Best Supporting Actor (Mitchum).
Destroyer USS George K MacKenzie commissioned.
Japanese Hosptical Ship
Not all Japanese hospital ships were real. Look at this video.
http://www.britishpathe.com/video/jap-hospital-ship/query/HOSPITAL+SHIP
Here is info on another Japanese Hospital ship:
http://donmooreswartales.com/2012/01/02/harry-allcroft/
Interesting info on another Japanese Hospital ships
#8, the article about the food shortage: towards the end of the article is a mention of how Saburo Kurusu was living as a farmer in Karuizawa. Karuizawa is in the middle of the Japan Alps, about 100 miles each from Tokyo to the southeast and Kanazawa to the west. It was where Westerners who were not considered prisoners of war stayed in the last years of the war, from 1943-45. Kurusu was married to an American, Alice Little, whom he had met during WWI when he was studying in NY. She spent the bulk of her widowhood defending her husband's reputation, that he genuinely did not know of the impending attack on Pearl Harbor while special envoy at the Japanese Embassy in DC. (More on her here).
She was not the only American married to a Japanese diplomat there. Gwen Harold was married to Hidenari Terasaki, a junior diplomat at the Japanese embassy. Gwen went with her husband and their daughter to Japan after Pearl Harbor, and eventually ended up in Tateshina, the next village over from Karuizawa. One would assume that the two American wives would have contacted each other during their years in the mountains. More information as to what it was like to live there in the war years can be found here, in a memoir of a teenager who was there.
Incidentally, the number of Westerners who either lived or spent summers in Karuizawa before, during, and after the war led to more than the usual number of churches and Christian organizations in the area, up to and including today. Here is one, and here is another--the office is in Yokohama, but the honcho, Tim Cole, lives and works out of Karuizawa, and his late father was an evangelical missionary there.
By this time the Nips have been having a really bad June & July.
But wait; it gets worse...
We really pulverized those nips in ‘45.
After ground training for the combat crews, the 509th began operations on 30 June 1945, with a calibration flight involving nine of the B-29s on hand. During the month of July and the first eight days of August the thirteen bombers of the 393d Bombardment Squadron flew an intensive training and mission rehearsal program that consisted of:
While this training was taking place, the components of the first two atomic bombs were shipped to Tinian by various means. For the uranium bomb code-named "Little Boy", fissile components consisted of a cylindrical target and nine washer-like rings that made up the hollow cylinder projectile. When the bomb detonated, these would be brought together to create a cylindrical core.[56] The uranium-235 projectile and bomb pre-assemblies (partly assembled bombs without the fissile components) left Hunters Point Naval Shipyard, California, on 16 July aboard the cruiser USS Indianapolis, arriving 26 July.[57] The Little Boy pre-assemblies were designated L-1, L-2, L-3, L-4, L-5, L-6, L-7 and L-11. L-1, L-2, L-5 and L-6 were expended in test drops. L-6 was used in the Iwo Jima dress rehearsal on 29 July. This was repeated on 31 July, but this time L-6 was test dropped near Tinian by Enola Gay. L-11 was the assembly used for the Hiroshima bomb.[58][59] On 26 July three C-54s of the 320th Troop Carrier Squadron left Kirtland Army Air Field, each with three of the uranium-235 target rings, and landed at North Field on 28 July.[60][61]
The components for the bomb code-named the Fat Man arrived by air the same day. The bomb's plutonium core (encased in its insertion capsule) and the beryllium-polonium initiator were transported from Kirtland to Tinian by C-54 in the custody of Project Alberta couriers. Three Fat Man high explosive pre-assemblies designated F31, F32, and F33 were picked up at Kirtland on 28 July by three B-29s, two from the 509th and one from the 216th AAF Base Unit, and transported to North Field, arriving 2 August.[62] The B-29s were Luke the Spook and Laggin' Dragon of the 509th, and 42-65386, a phase 3 Silverplate of the 216th AAF Base Unit. F33 was expended during the final rehearsal on 8 August, and F31 was the bomb dropped on Nagasaki. F32 presumably would have been used for a third attack or its rehearsal.[60]
The final item of preparation for the operation came on 29 July 1945. Orders for the attack were issued to General Carl Spaatz on 25 July under the signature of General Thomas T. Handy, the acting Chief of Staff of the United States Army, since General of the Army George C. Marshall was at the Potsdam Conferenc
I’m ready.
Tommorrow, or July 15 in Japan, those TF 38 attacks on northern Honshu and Hokkaido are going to bag a significant strategic result for the Americans, and very bad news for Japan.
Teaser.
It really was evil for the militarists to put the Japanese people through this. Even more so handing these same starving people bamboo sticks and telling them they will be using them to fight the most modern army on earth.
Spoiler Alert!
Konoye’s audience with the Emperor yesterday was revealing. He flat out told His Imperial Majesty the war was lost, the people knew it and were ready to quit, and the longer it went on the more likely they would blame His Imperial Majesty.
I think those sentiments are working in Hirohito’s head, and may be preparing the ground for the decision he will make to end the war. Until now, he’s been pretty well isolated from the feelings of his nation.
I agree the increasing deterioration of life in the Home Islands must be weighing on him until he gets the final shock.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.
