Posted on 02/08/2014 10:37:19 AM PST by nickcarraway
into the Bockscar plane on the island of Tinian, August 9th, 1945
Posted February 7th, 2014 by Alex Wellerstein Teaching and other work has bogged me down, as it sometimes does, but I’m working on a pretty fun post for next week. In the meantime, here is something I put together yesterday. This is unedited (in the sense that I didn’t edit it), “raw” footage of the loading of the Fat Man bomb into the Bockscar plane on the island of Tinian, August 9th, 1945. It also features footage of the bombing of Nagasaki itself. I got this from Los Alamos historian Alan Carr a while back. I’ve added YouTube annotations to it as well, calling out various things that are not always known.
You have probably seen snippets of this in documentaries and history shows before. But I find the original footage much more haunting. It was filmed without sound, so any sound you hear added to this kind of footage is an artifact of later editing. The silent footage, however, makes it feel more “real,” more “authentic.” It removes the Hollywood aspect of it. In that way, I find this sort of thing causes people to take the events in the footage more seriously as an historical event, rather than one episode in “World War II, the Movie.”
I posted it on Reddit as well, and while there was some share of nonsense in the ~700 comments that it accrued, there was also a lot of expression of empathy and revelation, and a lot of good questions being asked (e.g. Did the people loading Fat Man into the plane know what they were loading? Probably more than the people who loaded Little Boy did, because they knew what had happened at Hiroshima). So I think some learning has happened, and I think the fact that this has gotten +100,000 views in just a day is some sign that there is quite an audience out there for this sort of stripped-down history.
There is also Hiroshima footage, but it isn’t quite as good, on the whole. It is largely concerned with the crew of the plane taking off and arriving. Which is interesting, in a sense, but visually doesn’t mean much unless you know who everybody is.
There is a lot of Trinity test footage as well which I will upload and annotate in the future as well.
Until next week!
I don’t think I can watch it right now-—too disturbing.
That said,I was in my early teens when the bombs were dropped and we all cheered.
War is hell.
.
PING
I recently saw “The Wolverine” and the Hollywood version of the Nagasaki bombing. I wonder how realistic that was? Anyway, nuclear explosions are cool from a safe distance. Hiroshima and Nagasaki were military targets, in any case, intentionally set within civilian populations by the Japanese.
Thank God for the Bomb.
You can say that again.
My Dad was to turn 18 in November of 1945 and thanks to High School ROTC he was a qualified pilot with four years of experience in gliders and powered flight. If not for the bomb he probably would have been flying in the invasion of Japan.
And probably fighting in the “Japanese War”, when Red “North Japan” invaded “South Japan.”
That bomb saved my late father-in-laws life. He was a Marine wounded on Iwo Jima and were it not for that bomb he and millions of other American kids might not have lived to see their next birthday. I'm one American who is sick and f**king tired of hearing this bs about how horrible the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were. America didn't want war but Japan did and they paid the price for it. Do you think if the Japs had such a weapon and possessed it on Dec.7.1941 they would have hesitated to use it? F'ing world gets all weepy every time August 6th. and 9th. rolls around but it never gets weepy on Dec.7.
Ditto
My father was an aviation cadet due to graduate in Sept 1945
He was to pilot a B29.........
Still remembering the guy who died recently. He was at Hiroshima when it was bombed. He survived and headed home to Nagasaki. Survived that one too. What a bad week.
Perhaps even more to the point, if Japan had such a weapon would they have hesitated to use it in August of 1945?
I think not.
Thanks for posting! My best friend’s late father-in-law loaded the first one. I’ve gotta show him this one and see if he sees the guy.
Yea,lucky wang!
I found the commentary interesting. The “Trinity and Beyond” movies were good, but I see the benefit of the silent films.
Supposedly, about 125 high-value workers were railroaded from the aftermath of Hiroshima to Nagasaki just in time to experience it all over again.
That was CSA GEN Nathaniel Bedford Forrest who said that. And he was educated enough to use proper English.
Didn't know that about you but it's certainly true for me and many others. People still look at me like I have two heads when I say, "Thank God for the bombs at Hiroshima and Nagasaki."
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