Posted on 08/15/2015 11:52:17 PM PDT by 2ndDivisionVet
A week after Nagasaki, Tokyo had still not surrendered. A third weapon was already on its way and a dozen were to follow.
LONDON — American military archives reveal that if the Japanese had not surrendered on August 15, 1945, they would have been hit by a third and potentially more powerful atomic bomb just a few days later and then, eventually, an additional barrage of up to 12 further nuclear attacks.
Documents highlighted during commemorations to mark the 70th anniversary of the bombings of Hiroshima on August 6, and Nagasaki on August 9, which forced the end of World War II, show the determination of the United States to make Japan surrender unconditionally.
In the spring of 1945, the U.S. Army set up a special target committee to debate key Japanese cities to attack as officials believed their regime had already made it perfectly clear they were not willing to surrender at any price.
Confidential reports added that “even after two atom bombs, they preferred to fight on till they are all dead. Death or glory.”
It was a belief shared by British Prime Minister Winston Churchill, who attended talks with Allied leaders Harry S. Truman, the new American president, and Soviet leader Joseph Stalin at Potsdam in July 1945, where he gave consent to using atomic weapons following the successful “Trinity” test.
“There was unanimous, automatic, unquestioned agreement around our table,” Truman later admitted in his memoirs. “Never did I hear the slightest suggestion that we do otherwise.”
There was no reference though to the number of bombs under consideration, although Churchill casually initialed a minute telling U.K. officials to go along with what the Americans decided....
(Excerpt) Read more at thedailybeast.com ...
There really wasn’t any one “secret” to the atomic bomb. What the Rosenbergs, and other atomic spies did was shorten the Russian’s development efforts.
I see.. The Rosenberg’s WERE INNOCENT?....
They convicted them of nothing and it was inevitable and just scientific openness..
What the Rosenberg’s gave away was not that important..
AND... Oppenheimer was not involved?.. and ideologically complicit?
How do you know this?..
Yeah, I’ve never understood where the stuff about there only being two bombs came from. I’ve never seen that documented in any of the books I’ve ever read on the subject. Starting with my circa-1977 copy of “Enola Gay” by Gordon Thomas and Max Morgan Witts.
What is well-documented is that more bombs were on the way, with serial production having really begun. Also that a third mission would have targeted the “Tokyo area” (I figured it would be Yokosuka/Yokohama - close enough to make an impression on the Japanese leadership, while still leaving them alive in order to surrender) and after the debacle of the Nagasaki mission would have been commanded by Tibbets himself.
Reading comprehension skills slow to wake up this morning? That post simply said that there wasn’t any one secret, and that what they did served to shorten timelines. There was no “one secret blueprint” to steal, and Russia was working on the same idea at the same time. He never said that what they did was not wrong, he did not say that they were unjustly convicted, and he did not say that it was unimportant.
Thanks. That’s a big “Duh” moment.
No, the Rosenbergs were as guilty as Hell and deserved to die, and I’m glad they did. That’s not the point. It is foolish to talk about the “secret” of the atomic bomb. Soviet physicist Andrei Sakharov, widely considered the “Father of the Soviet H-Bomb”, openly admitted that Soviet scientists and engineers were all in possession of Russian translations of the Los Alamos “Black Book”, essentially the Handbook of Nuclear weapons design.
The Soviets understood the physics, the spies provided them practical engineering data based on U.S. tests and experiments. The Soviets could have reconstructed the “Black Book” themselves, the spies saved them billions of dollars and about two years of development work.
Ah!
Thanks.
“Archival records show a third bomb was under assembly at Tinian in the Mariana Islands where the Enola Gay and Bockscar had flown from, with the main plutonium core about to be shipped from the U.S.”
From reading the Operation DOWNFALL operations order (and other related documents), I had known that other atomic bombs were to be available to support the invasion (starting with Operation OLYMPIC that November). I had not known until last week that two more were already in the process of being assembled on Tinian for possible use in late August.
The readiness and willingness to immediately continuing using these bombs without pause was a bit of a shock. The more so because I am married to a Japanese woman whose family was living in separate households at the time both in Tokyo proper and the countryside outside the city (were her mother and other siblings had moved after the firebombings earlier in 1945).
She was not born until after the war, so an atomic bomb attack on Tokyo...
BTW, the Rosenbergs were out and out communists and Soviet sympathizers, it had nothing to do with intellectual freedom, or open scientific discussion.
He never said that what they did was not wrong, he did not say that they were unjustly convicted, and he did not say that it was unimportant.
How deftly you overlook the cabal of communists in FDR’s administration..
most of whom were never found and exposed.. and were “protected”..
not that FDR wasn’t himself a malicious and evil ENEMY of the republic.. and Truman as well.. they were.. BOTH..
Although; It’s true Truman may have just been a moron..
Poor ol’ Joe McCarthy had no idea the scope he was dealing with..
present with us even today.. it’s NOT NEW.. socialist sedition..
My Airborne father was in Europe. His brothers and cousins were in the Pacific, USMC and Army.
One cousin never made it off Iwo Jima. He was 22 years old.
I’m sure that, if they were all still alive, they’d have said drop 20 A-Bombs on them if it stopped the war.
I remember “The North Star” too.
It comes on Turner Classic every once in a while.
There were 4, 3 and 4 were named able and Baker. My father got to see them work at bikini atol.
On this date 70 years ago they apparently completed the 3rd Fatman bomb (1 had been used in Japan)
So I guess they had a couple around.
Thank you for your post.
I’d have dropped them on military bases. And the Emperor’s palace. The Emperor should have been beheaded, deal or no.
The only reason libs don’t skewer Truman as a “mass murderer” is because he was a dem. If President Dewey had been in office I think there would be a lot of criticism today from libs.
You have to ask yourself why Stalin wanted to wait 90 days after the war in Europe ended, early May 1945, when his Eastern Army was ready to go at any time but was held back by Stalin for a long time.
Typical communist tactic was to let the other fellow (Chiang Kai-shek, the Americans, Indians, etc) do the fighting which would wear them out, thus being unable to stop any Communist movements elsewhere.
Stalin’s attack on Manchuria had very little to do with winning the war because his forces could have had the same victory 3 months earlier.
Tito played the same game in Yugoslavia, letting the Chetniks do a lot of the fighting against the Germans, then attacking them from the rear, or even making localized agreements with the Nazis. These agreements, an almost unknown facet of WW 2 in Yugoslavia, had Tito’s Partisans agree not to attack the Germans, but allowed the Germans to attack the Chetniks of Mihailovic. Then Tito’s forces joined in the attack on the Chetniks. too.
A lot of research must be done on this very important aspect of Communist anti-German and anti-Japanese policies during WW2, which ranged from Ho Chi Minh not attacking the Japanese occupiers in any serious manner, while betraying other nationalist forces, to Tito’s tactics of betraying the Chetniks, and the French Communists betraying non-communist or anti-communist leaders of the “Resistance” known as the “Marquis”.
The leader of the French Communist Party during WW2, Jacques DuClos (also a COMINTERN agent), was accused of betraying a major French Marquis leader whose name I have forgotten. Perhaps Marchand?
DuClos is mentioned in Romerstein & Breindel’s “The Venona Secrets: Exposing Soviet Espionage and America’s Traitors”, Regnery Publishing, 2000.
In Italy, the Communists often interfered with Allied efforts esp. on the waterfronts until the US made a devil’s deal with the Mafia (Lucky Luciano) to have his “friends” clean up the docks, which they did (probably in a very messy but telling way).
Communists will betray anyone to serve their own cause, which is how Ho Chi Minh helped finance the founding of the Vietnamese and Indochinese Communist Party in 1925-30 by betraying nationalist leaders like Phan Boi Chau to the French Serete’ for the reward money.
Very rarely did the Communists, anywhere, do anything against a foreign enemy if they could avoid it and, instead, let the non-communists carry the burden of combat.
This is just how they operate. Always have, always will.
Japan was every bit as bad as the jihadists. Total and punitive annihilation and forcing any survivors to renounce their belief system or be killed is how you deal with this kind of cancer.
Agreed.
Whether the Far Eastern Front was ready to go is problematic. Since December 1942,it had the lowest priority for manpower and equipment. The divisions transferred from the Far East to fight the Germans had not been replace. The Japanese had scrupulously adhered to the terms of the 1939 armistice with the Soviets. Why start a war on a second front, when you do not have to. Far East Commanders in May 45 had not had to deal with fighting on their front in over 5 years. In the 90 day time frame the Soviet Army moved nearly 1 million men, 20,000 Artillery pieces and 4,500 tanks over the Trans Siberian railway. In addition the Reds move 20,000 aircraft to that theater. All this was done with considerable secrecy avoid raising Japanese suspicions. When the assault was launched in Aug 45, it was probably the best example of text book Blitzkrieg during the war.
Dr. Rummel puts the Germans 4th on the leader board.
20TH CENTURY DEMOCIDE
http://www.hawaii.edu/powerkills/20TH.HTM
A worthwhile resource to bookmark and read.
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