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 did append "Supposedly" because I couldn't find the original source, and I knew the source had retracted some parts of the "story", but I remembered it being about adding tritium to Little Boy as insurance.
BRAVO!!!!!!!
The amazing fact about Little Boy is that he was never tested. His development was basically an insurance policy in case the more difficult but more elegant implosion design could not be made to work in time. The scientists were so sure he would work that they didn't think a test was needed. The implosion design was tested at Alamogordo on 16 July 1945. Little Boy was a one-of-a-kind, at least among first-world nuclear powers. All subsequent weapons are based on the implosion design.
As far as the dual survivor question, this obit on Mr Yamaguchi asserts that there were actually 165 people who survived both attacks, Japanese government official recognition notwithstanding.
I live in Richland, WA near where the Nagasaki special material was produced (my father employed as a Los Alamos machinist at the time, then moved to Hanford).
One of the high schools here still has a B-29 mural painted on an outside wall of the original high school.
I try to avoid the whole issue as much as possible.
The Atomic Bomb, Built in America, Tested in Japan!!!
Actually there were 3 that survived both bombs.
You make a good point. However, the Hiroshima bomb was not that sophisticated. A TNT explosion slamming two masses of U-235 together. The real hard part was separating the 235 from the 238. Amazing that we were able to do that almost 80 years ago.
It’s true that the use of the nukes saved American lives, and saved Japanese lives as well, but the fact is, it was a war, and neither the Japanese nor anyone else has any complaint coming regarding the use of nukes.
I recall reading that, for one of the bombs (probably the Hiroshima bomb) a two-conductor connector that was designed to be idiot-proof had been wired backwards, such that the bomb wouldn’t go off (apparently accidentally). This was discovered while the bomb was in transit and a couple of scientists were going over a checklist. Rather than report the problem, they just unsoldered the connector, switched it around, and resoldered it.
Anyway, here’s the page on Bock’s Car, the plane which ended WWII, and which (unlike Enola Gay) is displayed intact.
http://www.nationalmuseum.af.mil/factsheets/factsheet.asp?id=527
Very good point!
Well said. AFAIC, Japan got off light.
The Day a Half Ton of Nazi Uranium Entered Portsmouth Harbor
http://www.wrightmuseum.org/explore-world-war-ii/the-archive/112-the-day-a-half-ton-of-nazi-uranium-entered-portsmouth-harbor.html
The surrender of U-234 - 14 May 1945
http://www.uboatarchive.net/U-234PhotoSutton.htm
http://www.uboatarchive.net/U-234SuttonNews2.jpg
How U-234 Brought Its Deadly Secret Cargo to New Hampshire
http://www.ussvance.com/Vance/nazisub.htm
Tales from the Atomic Age—
Paul W. Frame
http://www.orau.org/ptp/articlesstories/u234.htm
German submarine U-234
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_submarine_U-234
http://uboat.net/boats/u234.htm
The Last Mission: The Secret History of World War II’s Final Battle
http://www.amazon.com/The-Last-Mission-Secret-History/dp/0767907795
There probably wouldn’t have been a Korean War — Korea would have been given up; the Japanese would have turned on the US if (for example) northern Japan had been occupied by the Soviets, who’d have fanned the militaristic flames, and the US defeated the Japanese almost singlehandedly (their long land war in China was expensive but not a huge source of losses). That might have changed the US attitude toward similar partition deals, for example in Indochina.
The Soviets never wanted Chiang Kai-Shek involved in wartime conferences, and since they played a far larger wartime role in the defeat of the Axis, they got their way; but after victory, their own occupation of Korea, and partial occupation of Japan, they’d probably not have given Mao their unconditional backing, either, preferring to keep two separate regimes in check, one against the other.
Interesting to speculate, regardless. :’)
The flash is bright enough to blind, but doesn’t necessarily get caught on film because it is so brief. Mid-air detonation is done to maximize damage to the target — the Tunguska blast was a natural event, consisting of a circa 100-foot object blowing apart before ground impact, and trees were knocked down for miles. Right under the mid-air explosion a stand of trees was left, dead, with all their limbs and branches gone; a similar phenom directly under the blast at Hiroshima was called a “telegraph pole forest”.
My brother had a barber who thinks he witnessed the transportation of one of the atomic bombs. He was standing guard and not privy to the details of the cargo but he knew that there was a lot of something going on.
I disagree. By 1941, it was possible to ride Japan Government Railroad (JGR) trains from Hiroshima to Nagasaki, though of course the passenger would have to change trains several times (remember by 1941 the Japanese built the Kannon Tunnel between Honshu and Kyushu islands and extended the rail line from Hakata (Fukuoka) to Nagasaki).
The real hard part was arming the thing in flight.
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