Editorials – 24-26
Heard Round the World
Our Answer to Japan
Science and the Bomb
Veteran of Isolationism
Topics of the Times
http://www.etherit.co.uk/month/7/07.htm
August 7th, 1945 (TUESDAY)
UNITED KINGDOM: The secret of Radio Direction Finding (RDF), now called radar, is revealed.
BURMA: Cocos Islands: The last bombing missions by RAF Consolidated Liberators are flown by eight aircraft of No. 99 and three aircraft of No. 356 Squadron. (22)
KOREA: TAEGU, South Korea - Flying crippled after an aborted night raid over Japanese-occupied Korea, the B-24 bomber “Lady Luck II” slammed into a mountain. All 11 aboard were killed when the bomber struck Mangwoon Mountain on Namhae island, off Korea’s southern coast.
The crew were Staff Sgt. Thomas G. Burnworth; Staff Sgt. Walter R. Hoover; 2nd Lt. Ronald L. Johnson; 1st Lt. Edward B. Mills Jr; Staff Sgt. James E. Murray; 2nd Lt. Joseph M. Orenbuch; Staff Sgt. Henry C. Rappert; 2nd Lt. Nicholus M. Simonich; Sgt. Warren E. Tittsworth; and Sgt. Steven T. Wales.
31-year-old Kim Duk Hyung witnessed the crash and was impressed by Japanese troops into going with them to find and loot the crash site. Kim later returned to bury the crew. He worked after the war to build a monument to the crew. This monument was finished on May 11, 1956, almost 11 years after the fatal crash. Made of hand-hewn, natural granite, it stands 11 feet tall.
It was unveiled at a ceremony Nov. 30, 1956. An envoy of then- President Eisenhower, and U.S. and South Korean officials attended.
At a Pentagon ceremony 30 years later, in November 1986, the U.S. secretary of the Army presented Kim a distinguished civilian service medal. (Brooke Rowe from http://ww2.pstripes.osd.mil/01/oct01/ed103101c.html)
Sea of Japan: The USS Billfish torpedoes a small freighter. (Henry Sirotin, 101)
JAPAN: The Japanese Supreme Council for the Direction of the War, meets to discuss the bombing of Hiroshima. The SCDW is know as the Big 6 of the Japanese Cabinet. PM, FM, War Minister, Navy Minister, Army CofS, Navy CofS. The Military members refuse to concede that this might be an atomic bomb. They insist on sending investigating teams. The Commander of Eta Jima Naval Academy is selected by the Navy and the Army sends Dr. Asada a professor of physics at Osaka University.
154 B-29 Superfortresses of the USAAF Twentieth Air Force fly a bombing mission during the day and 30 B-29s fly a mining mission during the night of 7/8 August; 1 B-29 is lost.
- Mission 317: 124 B-29s, escorted by VII Fighter Command fighters, bomb the naval arsenal at Toyokawa. 1 B-29 is lost. After escorting the B-29s on their bombing mission, P-51s attack railroad targets and shipping in and near Magarimatsu, Chofu, Atsugi, and Sagami.
- Mission 318: During the night of 7/8 August, 29 B-29s, escorted by FEAF P-47s, drop mines in Shimonoseki Strait, at Miyazu, Maizuru, Tsuruga, Obama and at Najin; 1 other mines an alternate target.
In Japan, FEAF B-24s and A-26 Invaders over Kyushu pound Tsuiki Airfield and other B-24s start fires at Omura; B-25s hit bridges and other targets at Matsubase and Kawajiri and bomb a convoy off Pusan, Korea; other B-25s hit Chiran and Izumi Airfields. fighter-bombers attack and considerably damage communications and transportation facilities throughout Kyushu.
The Nakajima Kikka, a Japanese copy of the Messerschmitt 262, makes its maiden flight.
KURILE ISLANDS: USAAF Eleventh Air Force dispatches 5 B-24s based in the Aleutian Islands to bomb Kataoka Airfield on Shimushu Island.
COMMONWEALTH OF THE PHILIPPINES: Organized Japanese resistance ends on the island of Mindanao.
Submarine USS Apogan left base for her eight war patrol in the Marcus Island area. While Apogan was on patrol Japan capitulated on 15 Aug 1945. On 2 Sept 1945 Apogan returned to Pearl Harbor.
CANADA: Minesweeper HMCS Suderoy V (ex whaler of same name) paid off.
My first reaction of the paper today is something of a surprise. There was a lot of detailed information published the day of the announcement regarding the development of the bomb, where it was built, and the like. Much more than I would have expected for immediate release of such a closely held secret. I wonder if the news people had not been given some advance notice.
The other thing I notice is how quickly people realized that the world had fundamentally changed forever but this one event.
"Little Boy" dropped on Hiroshima was a smaller "gun-type" assembly, which yielded "only" about 15,000 tons TNT equivalent.
"Fat Man" heading towards Nagasaki is the more advanced implosion type with plutonium core.
It will, indeed, yield around 21,000 tons equivalent.
A scale model of "Little Boy"
Contrast to "Fat Man"
Normally as wise as they come, Baldwin loses it here.
He says, "Its use will probably save American lives, may even shorten the war materially, may even compel Japanese to surrender."
Baldwin does not begin to understand either the immediate effects -- Japanese surrender -- or the bigger picture of hundreds of thousands of American, and potentially millions of Japanese, lives saved.
Nor does he yet grasp that future terror of these weapons will help preserve the peace amongst rational human beings for generations to come.
Indeed, Baldwin seems already to be suffering from a severe case of what I yesterday called "victor's guilt" regarding the huge number of enemy civilian casualties inflicted by American bombing.
What he may never grasp is that deaths inflicted on Japanese by US bombing totaled only a small fraction of the deaths inflicted by Japanese on civilian populations they had conquered.
Doubtless Baldwin is concerned & feeling guilty about the fact that our civilians never suffered as Germans and Japanese did.
But our allies' civilians did suffer, terribly.
Overall the number of allied deaths (military & civilian) compared to axis deaths approached ten to one.
Among the communist or communist-sympathizing left in the United States, there are certain “truths” that are religiously clung to; Saccho and Vanzetti and the Rosenbergs were innocent, socialized medicine is the wave of the future, and my favorite, the United States dropped the atomic bombs on Japan only to intimidate Russia. The leading American proponent of this argument was a pseudo-historian Gar Alperovitz, a communist professor of history at the University of Maryland. He has written a few books on the subject: The Decision to Use the Atomic Bomb and Atomic Diplomacy; Hiroshima and Potsdam. Alperovitz should receive his award as Hero of the Soviet Union, except that his beloved USSR no longer exists. His books are filled with distortions and half-truths to promote an agenda.
The essentials of this theory are this: Japan was ready to surrender, and would have done so in the very near future. The use of the bombs was not necessary in the purely military sense against Japan, so there must have been another motive. That motive was to intimidate the USSR in the post-war world. This was entirely the creation or fault of the Truman administration. Before Potsdam, we were looking at a wonderfully peaceful world where the USSR would be a fully cooperative member of the world community, and peacefully rebuild after the war. Instead, Truman deliberately concealed the existence of the atomic bombs, used them to intimidate the USSR, and then proceeded to launch the Cold War by going down a policy path that was inimical to the USSR. As a result, the USSR could not peaceably rebuild, but instead her citizens suffered privation from having to create a military power structure to defend itself against American aggression.
When looking at the historical record of Stalin’s policies in Eastern Europe starting in 1944, it’s patently obvious this theory is bunk. Where would such an idea come from? Well, for an American communist history professor, the answer is pretty obvious. He is parroting the Party Line, the official dogma he was given by his communist masters in Moscow. And that’s because there is a very simple reason the Soviets came up with the theory that the bomb was intended to intimidate them.
It’s because that’s exactly what it did.
The best source of this observation was in Alexander Werth’s book Russia At War, originally published in 1963. Werth was a British citizen who was born in St. Petersburg, and then returned to the USSR as a correspondent for the Sunday Times and the BBC. Werth was a British socialist and true lefty, no doubt about it. And for that, during the war the Soviets gave him access most other western journalists could only dream of. His book is well worth the read, although like Shirer’s Collapse of the Third Republic you have to cut through the leftist slant to get to the historical nuggets. And Werth’s book has plenty of them. The last chapter of Russia At War deals with the end of the war, the “Summer of Peace” in 1945 between the fall of Berlin and the invasion of Manchuria, and most of all, The Bomb.
First I should offer a little bit of background information here gained from Werth’s book. One thing that surprised me when I first read it was how much emphasis Werth put on public opinion in the USSR; the beliefs and opinions of the “ordinary Russian.” By this, I don’t mean the average peasant starving on the kolkhoz. That guy didn’t mean jack and Werth didn’t rub shoulders with him. I’m talking about the intelligentsia in the major cities. Those were the Russians Werth dealt with, and whose opinions Werth recorded. We all think of Stalin’s USSR as a giant ant hill/slave labor camp where the masters had the whips and the people were slaves. It pretty much was like that, but the Party cared a lot about the opinions of the educated citizenry in the cities. That’s why propaganda was so important. That’s why they worked so hard to shape those opinions.
So what was the general mood in the USSR between May and August, 1945? It was a sense of joy, of relief, of accomplishment, and above all, pride. They had narrowly survived an existential threat to their nation, triumphed over their hated foe who destroyed much of their country, and in so doing forged the mightiest land army the world had ever seen. True, there was a lot of work to be done to get the country back on its feet, but the boys were coming home and they had earned certain liberties from the state because of their sacrifice. Or so they thought. Most important, the USSR, previously shunned as a pariah state, was now strong and powerful, a force in world affairs and because of the might of the Red Army, a country whose word had to be respected.
Don’t forget one other aspect of the Russian psyche, in addition to their well-known national paranoia, which Werth didn’t really touch upon directly, but nonetheless it is very real. The paragraph I wrote above reveals much about one character trait of the Russians that has always been there and is still there today. They have a tremendous inferiority complex when it comes to Western Europe and the United States. This is particularly pronounced in technical, scientific and industrial fields. The victory over Germany made them feel our equals, or even our betters, as a great salve to that inferiority complex.
But all that changed on August 8, 1945, when they learned of the atomic bomb. Werth recorded the reactions of the “man on the street.” They immediately realized it was a “new thing.” The pessimists among them said their sacrifices to defeat Germany were “as good as wasted.” The Red Army, that great instrument of national power, was instantly made irrelevant and obsolete. And the Russians were pissed. They were mad at the United States. We came up with this new wonder weapon just to cheat them out of their rightfully won place in the world. And they took it personally. The use of the bomb touched every raw nerve in the Russian psyche; the paranoia, the fear, and the inferiority complex.
And having the bomb did exactly what the Russians thought we intended it to do. It did allow us to maintain a paper army in Germany for many years while the Red Army stayed with a high level of combat power. The USSR did a lot of damage around the world, but far less than they could have. Because we had the bomb, and they didn’t. On August 6, 1945, it immediately became the “Great Truth” about atomic/nuclear weapons that you didn’t have to use them, you just had to have them.
To the Russians, our exclusive possession of the bomb is what caused the Cold War, not Stalin breaking every promise he made at Yalta. It was the bomb that caused the Party to clamp down on the liberties they’d enjoyed during the war, not Stalin’s paranoia that caused the Purges and Collectivization in the 1930s. It was our possession of the bomb that forced them back into the factories and mines to make weapons and not blue jeans and toasters, not Stalin’s continuation of his brutal Five Year Plans begun before the war. Yes, we became the scapegoat for all their ills. It was a neat way for the Party to create the boogeyman to maintain their control over public opinion.
And that’s where the American leftist/communist mantra came from. They believe we dropped the bomb just to intimidate Russia. And the reason they were told this by their Moscow masters is because those masters were in fact intimidated.
By the way, the best refutation of Alperovitz is Richard Frank’s Downfall; the End of the Imperial Japanese Empire, which Frank wrote explicitly to refute Alperovitz, and he did a masterful job in so doing.
War Department calls it a cosmic bomb.
Terminology is still being defined. Yesterday is was an automic bomb in Nimitz report. Today it is a cosmic bomb.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cosmic_bomb_(phrase)
“Cosmic bomb” was another name for the atomic bomb. It was used for a short period of time in 1945 and 1946. The first New York Times story about the bombing of Hiroshima referred to “this terrible new weapon, which the War Department also calls the ‘Cosmic Bomb.’”[1] Another articles noted that “what the Army has called the ‘cosmic bomb’ was not regarded by those responsible for winning the war against Japan as the factor which, of itself, would give the war its finishing touch”,[2] and a headline reported “Secret War Nipped Reich Cosmic Bomb.”[3]
Thomas Pynchon uses the phrase several times in his 1973 novel Gravity’s Rainbow, which is set roughly in the period during which the term was current.
The term rapidly fell into disuse as applied to weaponry, soon yielding to “atomic bomb”