Silent Nagasaki (“Raw” Footage of the Loading of the Fat Man Bomb)

Nuclear Secrecy ^ | February 7th, 2014 | Alex Wellerstein

[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!

[angryoldfatman]

it was a war

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Exactly.

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and neither the Japanese nor anyone else has any complaint coming regarding the use of nukes.

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If you're saying Western leftists and the Japanese have no legitimate basis on which to call America evil for dropping the bombs, I agree.

I was originally responding to the following post #9 by jmacusa, who mentioned the stupidity of the supposed pacifists:

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.

I was agreeing with this and expanding on why the leftist stance was so ignorant, stupid, and hypocritical.

[Telepathic Intruder]

Don’t you just light the fuse?

[Cyber Liberty]

Interesting to speculate, regardless. :’)

Ayup!

[jmacusa]

LOL!

[cynwoody]

Actually there were 3 that survived both bombs.

See #64. It seems the actual number of dual survivors may have been as high as 165.

[Hillarys Gate Cult]

Great links. To add to this were the news reports of the sub’s capture from that time were deemed as misinformation by the Japanese. They were still waiting for the sub on VJ day.

Plan was also for the uranium to be used for dirty bomb attacks on San Francisco using the German uranium and planes from their I-400 aircraft carrying subs on a one way trip. Story was this was also one of the reasons President Truman used in his decision to drop the bomb.

[Hillarys Gate Cult]

Just to add the 1500 ft altitude is optimum for the most effective blast for those type of nukes. A burst lower than that would still be devastating but cause a crater and severely reduce the blast radius. A nuclear explosion at ground level would actually force much of the explosive power upward and be a waste.

[Raven6]

Bflr

[jmacusa]

Yup. Again, the complex mechanism of a nuclear device isn’t going to work smashing into the ground like an artillery shell or a 500 lb. bomb dropped from a plane or jet. Air burst detonations of artillery shells are devastating against troops in the open, that’s for sure. An uncle of mine was wounded during The Battle of The Bulge in Belgium in early Jan.’45. Way he described it was his unit was assembling for an attack and were waiting in the open(bad move) to meet up with a company of some Sherman tanks. Kraut 88 saw them. Ground was frozen so that wouldn’t have done much damage so they fired an air burst. Damn near took my uncles head off. Said all he remembered was talking to the guy next to him and then waking up in a hospital in England ‘’with half my face torn off’’.