Colonel Paul Tibbets, who piloted the Enola Gay, had named his aircraft for his mother “Enola Gay Tibbets” (1893–1983) who herself was named after the heroine of the novel "Enola; or, Her Fatal Mistake."
Posted on 08/01/2021 12:40:44 PM PDT by Retain Mike
And you completely leave out the role Churchill had in getting the U.S. Churchill basically manipulated Roosevelt and got the Allies to become Stalin's butler. Churchill screwed over the U.S. more than any leader during WWII.
“According to one site, it means “black fox” in the Cherokee language,”
Interesting...never heard that before.
Heh. ;-)
Colonel Paul Tibbets, who piloted the Enola Gay, had named his aircraft for his mother “Enola Gay Tibbets” (1893–1983) who herself was named after the heroine of the novel "Enola; or, Her Fatal Mistake."
Japan’s Secret War: Japan’s Race Against Time to Build Its Own Atomic Bomb by Robert K Wilcox
Mine, too.
I cannot read the article or comment on it because it is not imperative to me. I wish that the thread would just go away because every time that I see the title I feel a bit ill inside.
My uncle was killed in the battle of Midway by a Kamikaze attack... and I hold no ill-will. Those days are over, Japan survived and modernized. They went from an agrarian royalty-based system to a modern royal-figurehead democracy. But without the Bomb, the war would have stretched out for years, and they would still be worshiping a god-king.
“Thank God for the Atom Bomb”
essay by Paul Fussell, The New Republic August 1981
Many years ago in New York I saw on the side of a bus a whiskey ad I’ve remembered all this time. It’s been for me a model of the short poem, and indeed I’ve come upon few short poems subsequently that exhibited more poetic talent. The ad consisted of two eleven-syllable lines of “verse,” thus:
In life, experience is the great teacher.
In Scotch, Teacher’s is the great experience.
For present purposes we must jettison the second line (licking our lips, to be sure, as it disappears), leaving the first to register a principle whose banality suggests that it enshrines a most useful truth. I bring up the matter because, writing on the forty-second anniversary of the atom-bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, I want to consider something suggested by the long debate about the ethics, if any, of that ghastly affair. Namely, the importance of experience, sheer, vulgar experience, in influencing, if not determining, one’s views about that use of the atom bomb.
The experience I’m talking about is having to come to grips, face to face, with an enemy who designs your death. The experience is common to those in the marines and the infantry and even the line navy, to those, in short, who fought the Second World War mindful always that their mission was, as they were repeatedly assured, “to close with the enemy and destroy him.”
Destroy, notice: not hurt, frighten, drive away, or capture. I think there’s something to be learned about that war, as well as about the tendency of historical memory unwittingly to resolve ambiguity and generally clean up the premises, by considering the way testimonies emanating from real war experience tend to complicate attitudes about the most cruel ending of that most cruel war.
“What did you do in the Great War, Daddy?” The recruiting poster deserves ridicule and contempt, of course, but here its question is embarrassingly relevant, and the problem is one that touches on the dirty little secret of social class in America. Arthur T. Hadley said recently that those for whom the use of the A-bomb was “wrong” seem to be implying “that it would have been better to allow thousands on thousands of American and Japanese infantrymen to die in honest hand-to-hand combat on the beaches than to drop those two bombs.”
People holding such views, he notes, “do not come from the ranks of society that produce infantrymen or pilots.” And there’s an eloquence problem: most of those with firsthand experience of the war at its worst were not elaborately educated people. Relatively inarticulate, most have remained silent about what they know. That is, few of those destined to be blown to pieces if the main Japanese islands had been invaded went on to become our most effective men of letters or impressive ethical theorists or professors of contemporary history or of international law. The testimony of experience has tended to come from rough diamonds—James Jones’ is an example—who went through the war as enlisted men in the infantry or the Marine Corps.
...more at the link...
I watched a professor from UNC a few weeks ago who talked about it.
It was on C-SPAN.
Nope. Read what I said carefully. The read American Betrayal.
Nope.
Kamikaze attack at Midway? Sounds a bit early.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kamikaze
The attacks began in October 1944, at a time when the war was looking increasingly bleak for the Japanese. They had lost several important battles, many of their best pilots had been killed, their aircraft were becoming outdated, and they had lost command of the air.
Before the formation of kamikaze units, pilots had made deliberate crashes as a last resort when their planes had suffered severe damage and they did not want to risk being captured, or wanted to do as much damage to the enemy as possible, since they were crashing anyway.
One example of this may have occurred on 7 December 1941 during the attack on Pearl Harbor.
First Lieutenant Fusata Iida’s plane had taken a hit and had started leaking fuel when he apparently used it to make a suicide attack on Naval Air Station Kaneohe.
Before taking off, he had told his men that if his plane were to become badly damaged he would crash it into a “worthy enemy target”.
Another possible example occurred at the Battle of Midway when a damaged American bomber flew at the Akagi’s bridge but missed.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kamikaze#History
"The Japanese had developed an atomic weapon."
WRONG! They hadn't even figured out how to make U-235, and they had exactly ZERO nuclear reactors. No reactors, no Pu-239. So not only did they NOT have an atom bomb, they hadn't even developed the technology to produce fissile material.
That was back in the day when the word gay had a completely different meaning before the queers hijacked it.
I feel the same way. My father had just finished Navy boot camp when the first bomb had dropped. A month later he was on a ship clearing mines in Japanese waters.
#1:
The Japanese military command killed more of its own forces than the Allies did. Whenever they left Japanese troops to die, to defend to the last man, as was the case at places like Iwo Jima (and which was a frequently-used tactic), they received no further resupply. Those troops were completely abandoned. In the end, the failure to supply these troops in the field resulted in massive numbers of deaths from privation (disease, starvation, and dehydration). Those numbers, combined with mass suicides, exceeded the number killed in combat by the Allies.
The significance of these facts was not lost on the decision-makers in DC.
#2.
Despite all of the defeats the Japanese had suffered at the hands of the Allies, their Army was still virtually intact because all the defeats had been involved primarily naval forces and naval infantry. They still had a virtually full-strength army at their disposal to defend the homeland.
#3:
The commander of the Japanese armies was General Anami Korechika. General Korechika was so radical that when Emperor Hirohito addressed the nation by radio to tell them they had lost the war (which was his way of burning the bridges and undermining the cause of those who wanted to keep fighting), he committed sepuku (ritual suicide). If you think a man so committed to the sovereignty of Japan that he would cut out his own guts to protest not following through with plan to resist at all cost would not have employed that relatively intact army to inflict maximum casualties on the invading allies, you do not understand the Code of Bushido as it had been re-interpreted by the mid-20th Century Japanese professional military.
#4:
The first phase of Operation Downfall, the Allied invasion of the Japanese islands, was to have begun with putting 705,000 Allied soldiers ashore on the southern island of Kyushu. That’s five times as many men as went ashore on D-Day. So the Allied Command anticipated resistance so fierce that it would take five times as many soldiers to overcome as the invasion of Europe. Five times more men than D-Day.
But that wasn’t the end of it. There was another phase still to come. Six months later, another 1.2 million soldiers were to have put ashore at Tokyo.
That’s nine times more than D-Day. Combined with the Kyushu invasion, the Allies were looking to commit fourteen times more men than D-Day to the invasion of Japan.
#5.
Allied intelligence estimated a total Japanese force of 350,000 would be defending Kyushu island. Except that (because of its proximity to Okinawa) the Japanese guessed (correctly) that the initial Allied landing would be at Kyushu and began reinforcing their contingent there. By the time of the surrender, there already were 735,000 Japanese soldiers on Kyushu and in just a few more weeks the number probably would have been more than a million.
So the cost to take Kyushu island alone would have been staggering, and that landing force might have been too degraded to have any ability to support the second phase of the invasion at Tokyo.
#6.
All western accounts of the conditions in the Japanese homeland (including Louie Zamparini’s “Unbroken”) support the contention that the Japanese were preparing to fight to the last man.
When the war ended and their guards abandoned the prison camp where he was being held, Zamparini and the other escaped prisoners hijacked a train and rode more than a hundred miles across the Japanese countryside to reach the nearest Allied base.
One detail Zamparini notes in his book is that the only males he saw while on this journey were the elderly and infants or toddlers. Because all adult men and older boys had long since been conscripted. But by that time they also were conscripting pre-schoolers to train them as ammo-bearers for when the invasion finally came. Because even a child of four or five could be employed to pull a Radio Flyer-style wagon loaded with ammunition from one Japanese defensive position to the next.
Even men who had been spared military service because their work had been deemed too vital to the war effort were being trained as suicide bombers. The were given the WWII equivalent of a suicide vest and trained how to dig a hole to hide in so they could wait for an Allied tank or other military vehicle to pass. Then they were supposed to crawl under this passing vehicle and detonate the exploding vest.
#7.
Relentless US carpet bombing of the Japanese islands already had destroyed all cities with a population of more than roughly 50,000, yet the Japanese continued to fight on as if there was a chance they might yet win. But the higher-ups knew better. Even before Hiroshima, they knew the war was lost.
But they still believed the American will to fight was weak. That Americans were too soft-hearted, and if they could kill enough of them when they tried to invade the Japanese homeland, there would be such a great hue and cry from the American citizenry that the American government would be forced to offer Japan lenient terms for a surrender.
And to achieve that objective, they would willingly have killed every man in Japan apart from the royal family.
Taking Japan by force doubtless would have been the bloodiest operation of the entire war and almost certainly would have cost more American lives in particular than the rest of the war did.
Truman, BTW, did NOT order the bombing of Hiroshima or Nagasaki. He simply left in place orders already issued by FDR to do so. Those orders detailed the first two strikes in particular but then stated that if the Japanese had not surrendered, the bombings should continue as readily as more bombs could be made available.
By December of 1945, the two new nuclear reactors Leslie Groves had overseen the building of in Washington state were producing enough Pu-239 each month to build four more atom bombs the size of the Nagasaki bomb. So beginning in 1946, the US would have been nuking another Japanese city every week, forever, if necessary.
Thanks for the post. The estimates I found did not include the possibility or probability that the Imperial Japan War Faction would spirit the Emperor to a remote location and continue the war long after the Tokyo/Yokohama region had been conquered. I computed that Kyushu and Honshu at over 100,000 rugged square miles mathematically enabled at least 500 complex fortifications comparable to that used to inflict most losses on Okinawa.
That so-called "experimental nuclear device" could not have been even what we now refer to as a mere "dirty bomb." I could have - at best - been some kind of "proof of concept" mock-up. To make this bold statement without more context is highly deceptive.
Yellow cake - even if finely dispersed by a conventional chemical explosion in the air above a large city - would have a miniscule radiological effect. Natural uranium is 99.7% U-238, with a half-life of 4.5 billion years and hence very low in radioactivity.
Modern "dirty bombs" (which have yet to be deployed, so we can only speculate) would undoubtedly by loaded with highly radioactive and biologically active (i.e., quickly resorbed) radioisotopes derived from the waste of nuclear reactors.
Japan, in 1945, didn't have the resources to manufacture a "dirty bomb" - and it certainly didn't have the know-how and resources necessary to manufacture a working atomic bomb - which would require enriched uranium (or plutonium, which is even more difficult to produce). (Remember that the Manhattan Project cost some $2 billion, and involved scores of the top scientists of the era - Japan had nothing comparable.)
Regards,
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