Meanwhile, the situation around Kustrin and Frankfort are becoming more clear to the Germans, and it is clearly not good. The Soviets are in fact across the Oder, and the fight is on to keep open the corridor to the fortress city of Kustrin:
Posted on 02/08/2015 4:43:17 AM PST by Homer_J_Simpson
Meanwhile, the situation around Kustrin and Frankfort are becoming more clear to the Germans, and it is clearly not good. The Soviets are in fact across the Oder, and the fight is on to keep open the corridor to the fortress city of Kustrin:
Yalta was what it was. The Red Army was going to occupy Eastern Europe and bring the Commissars with it. They were not going to leave voluntarily.
Nothing was going to change that.
I would say it was a false sighting. There were only a few carriers left to Japan. They were sitting idle in home waters due to lack of fuel.
Well, how do any decent people sit down with Barack Obama, Nancy Pelosi, or Harry Reid? Aren’t they viscerally revolted? I was brought up to have good manners, but I could never shake hands with “punished with a baby.”
I’m sure the family was relieved that he was out of the fighting, but concerned that he was hospitalized, “and will be for a while yet,” without an idea of what he was suffering from. As far as I know it was the effects of a month of combat in the Philippine badlands, aggravated by lack of food and shelter from when his company was out of supplies and cut off.
It is one of the odd footnotes to history that for all Hitler's fascination with "wonder weapons" he never had much interest in a nuclear bomb.
Hitler never “got” nuclear physics. To him, it was “Jewish science” anyway.
As for the German bomb effort, they never seriously considered isotope separation to build a Uranium bomb. The industrial scale of such a project was clearly beyond their means. In fact, it was beyond everyone’s means, except for the United States.
Instead, Heisenberg knew that you could produce Plutonium in sufficient quantity to build a bomb, if you could control the transmutation process in what we called a reactor, but he called a “burner.” Heisenberg’s problem was that the “burner” needed a moderator to control the reactions, and he picked the wrong one. The obvious choice to physicists was graphite, but naturally occurring graphite has a high Boron content. Boron is a great neutron absorber (reactor control rods are often made of Boron.) When Heisenberg tested graphite, the absorption cross-section was too high, so he decided to try heavy water instead. Our physicists tried pure graphite will all the Boron removed.
The result was we built reactors that produced enough Plutonium to build a bomb about every 60 days or so. Heisenberg never really got very far with his “burner.”
I combed the carrier records at Combined Fleet and the only carriers left to the IJN were small escort types. And they were stuck in home waters for either repairs which could not be done or no fuel.
http://www.combinedfleet.com/cv.htm
Like henkster I would guess a false sighting based on a large tanker???
Regards
alfa6 ;>}
There's a nice blast from the past - the destruction of the Norwegian heavy water plant. I read somewhere that the Norwegian commandos weren't told just what heavy water was used for and didn't learn about the magnitude of what they'd done until the U.S. nuclear bombs were exploded.
I doubt very much the Germans could have built an A-Bomb even with the plant fully operational, but no one could take that chance, could they?
The Germans had the delivery system of the future, but not the warhead.
People tend to overlook the fact that there were two types of atomic bombs; Uranium 235 and Plutonium 239. The Uranium 235 was obtained by the painstaking process to isotope separation, and for that we had to build the gigantic K-55 gaseous diffusion plant at Oak Ridge. We also took the entire government silver bullion supply (most of which came from the silver mined at the Comstock Lode in Virginia City Nevada) and made gigantic electromagnets for another separation technique.
Plutonium, in theory, was far easier to get. You make a pile of pure graphite blocks and pass slugs of U238 through it. The U238 “burns” in the pile, and a portion of the U238 transmutes into Pu239, which can then be chemically separated. Sounds easy, doesn’t it? Except that Pu239 is one of the most toxic materials known to man. But hey, it’s Plutonium.
Given the limited resources available to Germany, they were never going to make Uranium bombs. They weren’t going to make a gaseous diffusion plant on the scale of Oak Ridge, and they didn’t have the Comstock Lode. But you only need a couple “burners” to make enough Plutonium. The real problem with a Plutonium bomb is getting it to go off. Critical mass is easy to achieve with U235, and we never seriously doubted the Uranium bomb would work. Even with the huge industrial apparatus at work in Uranium isotope separation, it took months to get enough U235 to make a bomb. Testing the Uranium bomb would have used up all of the available Uranium 235.
But for Plutonium bombs we had to make the concave prism of exactly timed and fired high explosive to compress the Plutonium to get a reaction, and even then we needed a Polonium 210 “trigger” to get an initial burst of neutrons to fire it off. That what Los Alamos was created for; the Plutonium was manufactured in Hanford Washington but the detonation work was all done at Los Alamos.
And that was the part that the Germans might have had trouble with, and the Soviets didn’t thanks to Klaus Fuchs and the Rosenbergs. So when Truman was told we had a working atomic bomb in July when he was at Potsdam, he was only told about the Plutonium device. The Uranium device was yet to be tested. On the Japanese.
Getting back to the two bomb discourse, it was the second bomb that freaked out the Japanese. Their scientists had been doing nuclear research, and had done some limited experiments in gaseous diffusion with Uranium Hexaflouride. So when the bomb was dropped on Hiroshima, their scientists knew within 24 hours that we had built a Uranium bomb. But they told the government that, given what it would take to get enough Uranium 235 to build one, that was probably all we had.
Then came the second bomb three days later. And their tests showed that bomb used Plutonium. At that point, they were stunned. My God, they built both kinds. And they’ll have more. There is nothing they cannot do, and our weapons are useless against them.
No wonder their culture gave the world Godzilla.
No wonder their culture gave the world Godzilla.
It is a pretty obvious metaphor, isn't it? The monster we can't destroy that was set loose in a nuclear explosion over the Eastern horizon across the ocean.
The thing that has always bothered me about the Godzilla story is the Japanese are absolutely innocent victims of the monster - just like they act like innocent victims of the bombs, ignoring the fact that their own actions resulted in the U.S. armed forces being on their doorstep armed with nuclear weapons.
We tested a Plutonium bomb at Trinity. The Hanford reactors were fully operational by then, and I’ll have to check my sources at home but I think they were expected to produce enough Plutonium for a bomb every month or so.
As for the Japanese as innocent victims, that was a regrettable aftermath of how the war ended. The Japanese were never marched through their death camps as the German citizens were. The Germans were forced to accept their war guilt because we rubbed their noses in it. And it worked.
All of the Japanese atrocities were committed against indigenous peoples outside of Japan proper. There was no stinking death camp right next door. It made little difference to the average Japanese that millions of “sub-human” Chinese were murdered during their occupation. Or that American POWs were beaten and starved in the Philippines. Or that Australians taken prisoner in New Guinea were tied to trees, used for bayonet practice, and left with signs that said “he took a long time to die.”
The generation of Koreans, Chinese, Filipinos, Malaysians, Indonesians that experienced Japanese occupation during the war have no love for them. Probably the Vietnamese, too, but they had other games to play after the Japanese left.
The average Japanese citizen was allowed to believe they were “defending their unique culture” (a mantra repeated by leftist American revisionists who hate that we won the war), and they never had to personally confront the ugliness of their barbaric acts.
Despite the barbaric acts they committed during the war, I want to make clear that I have a great deal of respect for the Japanese and their culture. They are a hard working, bright and industrious people. I admire their well-ordered and homogenous society that doesn’t have the same social ills we do. But It’s hard to reconcile how one of their cruiser skippers could salute the USS Johnston as she sank after putting up a valiant fight at Leyte Gulf one minute, and they could machine-gun American sailors in the water the next.
Maybe it is a cross-cultural version of the golden rule.
That is some interesting history, henkster. So, one reason the Japanese didn’t surrender after Hiroshima was they thought we only had one bomb and it would take some time to make another?
Yes, one reason was that we showed them the bomb wasn’t a one-off deal. There was only a three day delay between the bombs so the Japanese didn’t have much time to process what they were dealing with. One of the most influential voices in the Japanese decision was Field Marshal Count Sugiyama. He was tasked with the land defense of southern Japan. Before the bombs, he was the typical militaristic hard-liner. After he saw the destruction caused by one bomb, he was ready to quit. After two he was more certain.
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