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!
Wow, I thought you were kidding.
That’s a neat website!
t
-— Our military had estimates of 500,000 to 1,000,000 American casualties that would we would have suffered from an invasion of the Japanese mainland. -—
That may be true, but that in itself would not justify the targeting of a purely civilian target (which Hiroshima and Nagasaki were NOT), because a good end does not justify evil means.
But there were significant military targets within those cities, which justified the action.
When I saw it at the theater I didn't know what was coming until I saw the B-29 (Bock's Car) make its final turn on its bomb run. My jaw dropped. I couldn't remember a single movie that contained scenes of the A-bombings of Japan. Having said that, 3 thoughts occurred regarding the accuracy ...
1. I would have thought the B-29 would have been flying at a higher altitude.
2. I got the impression from the Wolverine film that the Fat Man detonated at ground level. I thought it was set for an air burst at ~1,000 ft.
3. There were other B-29s in the Bock's Car flight. I would have thought they would have been close by.
A final note - I toured the USAF Museum at WP-AFB in 1994. The fuselage flight deck of Bock's Car was on display then while the rest was being restored.
Didn't know about Sakai.
Mitsuo Fuchida, 1902-1976, was a Japanese captain in the Imperial Japanese Navy Air Service and a bomber aviator in the INJ before and during WWII. He is perhaps best known for leading the 1st air wave attacks on Pearl Harbor on 12/07/1941. Working under the overall fleet commander, Vice Admiral Chūichi Nagumo, Fuchida was responsible for the coordination of the entire aerial attack.
After the war, Fuchida was called on to testify at the trials of some of the Japanese military for Japanese war crimes. This infuriated him as he believed this was little more than "victor's justice". In the spring of 1947, convinced that the Americans had treated Japanese POWs the same way and determined to bring that evidence to the next trial, Fuchida went to Uraga Harbor near Yokosuka to meet a group of returning Japanese POWs. He was surprised to find his former flight engineer, Kazuo Kanegasaki, who all had believed had died in the Battle of Midway. When questioned, Kanegasaki told Fuchida that they were not tortured or abused, much to Fuchida's disappointment, then went on to tell him of a young lady, Peggy Covell, who served them with the deepest love and respect, but whose parents, missionaries, had been killed by Japanese soldiers on the island of Panay in the Philippines. For Fuchida, this was inexplicable, as in the Bushido code revenge was not only permitted, it was "a responsibility" for an offended party to carry out revenge to restore honor. The murderer of one's parents would be a sworn enemy for life. He became almost obsessed trying to understand why anyone would treat their enemies with love and forgiveness.
In the fall of 1948, Fuchida was passing by the bronze statue of Hachiko at the Shibuya Station when he was handed a pamphlet about the life of Jacob DeShazer, a member of the 1942 Doolittle Raid who was captured by the Japanese after his B-25 bomber ran out of fuel over occupied China. In the pamphlet, "I Was a Prisoner of Japan", DeShazer, himself a former U.S. Army Air Forces Staff Sergeant and bombardier, told his story of imprisonment, torture and his account of an "awakening to God." This experience increased Fuchida's curiosity of the Christian faith. In SEP 1949, after reading the Bible for himself, he became a Christian. In May 1950, Fuchida and DeShazer met for the 1st time.
In 1951, Fuchida, along with a colleague, published an account of the Battle of Midway from the Japanese side. In 1952, he toured the U.S. as a member of the Worldwide Christian Missionary Army of Sky Pilots and wrote another book, From Pearl Harbor to Gologoth in 1953. Fuchida remained dedicated to a similar initiative of the group for the remainder of his life. During his travels he met the pilot of the B-29 Enola Gay, Col. Paul Tibbetts, and told him that he did the right thing by dropping the atomic bomb because the Japanese people would not have stopped fighting when American forces were scheduled to invade the Japanese home islands in late 1945.
They still are.
PJTV Video: "Jon Stewart, War Criminals & The True Story of the Atomic Bombs"
video run length = 00:16:46 minutes
Exactly. Had Truman not used the Bomb and proceeded with Downfall, it would have been a bloodbath. Sooner or later, the American people would have found out. I believe impeachment would have been the least of Truman's worries. He would have been assassinated, in political terms.
While the broadcast is well-known to older Japanese who heard it, at first many Japanese could not understand what was spoken, since the dialect of Japanese used by the Emperor in the speech was no longer in formal use by 1945.
I thought that the flash should have been a lot brighter. Instead all the damaage seemed to come from the shock wave. But that may be just the higher yield H-bombs. And I think I recall it being an air burst as well because of Nagasaki’s hilly terrain.
As a matter of fact I recall reading about Hiroshima victims who were instantly blinded by looking directly at the explosion, so I suppose the flash should have been brighter in the movie.
All nuclear detonations are air burst, usually at around 1,500 feet. Unlike a conventional demolition bomb witch has a detonator cap on the nose of the bomb a nuclear weapon has an electronically triggered detonation, a kind of ‘’shotgun’’ effect where the positive charged hydrogen atoms collide with the negative charged atoms and all hell breaks loose. You can’t have something that sophisticated and delicate smashing into the ground at around two hundred miles an hour.
My Dad was 21 and on the troop transports that were amassing the invasion force when the bombs were dropped ending the war. He became part of the occupation force in Japan after the war and brought home a Japanese silk parachute which became my Mom’s wedding dress!
My brother was killed on Okinawa in April 1945. In Aug. 1945 I was about 7th in line at the supply warehouse to get my battle gear on Leyte for the invasion of Japan. I can truly say I had mixed emotions when a Lt. came out and told us to go back to our tents as the fighting was over. One thought was that even knowing the likelihood of death as a infantry man I would never get the opportunity to avenge my brothers death; on another thought was that I should be glad that as a 19 year old I would be certain to live some more years to go back to college as my brother expressed for/to me. It took a few more years to reconcile the feelings and I did get my university degree. War is hell even if your just a substitute on the sidelines.
Ground burst bombs have been in inventory for various special purpose roles, and of course there are the deep penetrating bunker busters.
That may be true, but that in itself would not justify the targeting of a purely civilian target (which Hiroshima and Nagasaki were NOT), because a good end does not justify evil means.
Depends on what you mean by evil.
Some people who take their religions very seriously say it is evil to kill any number of people, even one (not necessarily Christianity, though there are sects that do).
Such people would also probably view the bombing of munitions factories to be heinous as well. The workers are not killing anyone themselves; they are merely assembling machinery. To bomb them would be the same as executing a pistol factory worker when a gun they make is used in a murder.
Besides, we had already been evil by your criteria. The Tokyo firebombings killed about as many civilians as the Hiroshima bomb.
Perhaps we should fall down and lament our evil, as the liberals are always eager to do.
My 90 year old Father’s go to line;
Remember pearl harbor
What a different world it would be now if we hadn’t dropped the bomb. As I am obviously alive to write this, I say thank you, glad they did it.
I agree that using the bombs was necessary to end the war. I had a cousin and a neighbor fighting in Europe and they were preparing to be sent to The Pacific to fight there.
I meant to get across that at that young age I actually cheered when 100,000 people,mostly civilians (women, elderly,and children),were killed. To me,in retrospect,there is something sad about that.
.
The same women, children and elderly who would be running a bamboo spear through your cousin or my Dad, who was due to be called up if the Bomb had not been dropped. I’m not a ‘’war lover’’ nor do I hate the Japanese or the Germans of this day and age. (I do hate Muslims though). What I will not tolerate under any circumstance is moral and/or historical revisionism and moral equivocation that always seeks to advance either outright or subliminally that somehow America was wrong to use the Atomic Bomb and that bombing the German city of Dresden was a ‘’war crime’’. I had a number of uncles who fought in Europe and the Pacific, some were wounded but thank God they all made it home. They’re all gone now. I have also had the honor of getting to know quite a number of other WW2 veterans and it is in their interest that as long as there is breath in me I will challenge loudly and long ANY attempt at moral and historic revisionism or equivocation concerning Americas conduct in winning World War Two. And I’m not in the habit of being gracious about it either. I once told some stupid old peacenik hag over the phone that if I could I’d reach through the phone and pull her lungs out. She had written a letter to our local paper here in NJ(owned by the Gannett news Org) and it was filled with the usual crap about America being a terrorist for using the Bomb and all that other bs. These vets and my now deceased family members fought through a six-year cataclysm to give us and others the freedoms we enjoy. Believe me, to a man and woman they sure would have wished to have been doing something else in the halcyon days of their youth then what they had to do but they knew it had to be done and thank God they did it. The least we can do for them is make sure the story is told straight since many of them are no longer here to tell it themselves.
My condolences for the loss of your brother. My thanks to him and you for my freedom.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.