Posted on 08/14/2018 3:58:59 AM PDT by P.O.E.
On Aug. 6, 1945, the United States dropped an atomic bomb on the Japanese city of Hiroshima. It was the first time a nuclear weapon had been used in warfare.
There were three strike planes that flew over Hiroshima that day: the Enola Gay, which carried the bomb, and two observation planes, the Great Artiste and the Necessary Evil.
Russell Gackenbach was a second lieutenant in the U.S. Army Air Corps and a navigator on the mission. Today, the 95-year-old is the only surviving crew member of those three planes.
(Excerpt) Read more at npr.org ...
May G-d bless him and keep him.
5.56mm
“but it’s a fool’s errand to believe they started the World Wars.”
No, it is a fools belief that foreign policy has no consequences that should be directly attributed to those policies.
Democrats are notoriously weak on foreign policy and get us into wars.
Yes...and no. Mid level Japanese diplomats were trying to work through the Japanese embassy in Moscow to get Stalin to broker a deal. Of course, Stalin wasn't going to be an honest broker as he'd already promised to enter the war against Japan. However, the "conditional surrender" these Japanese had in mind was that the Japanese would continue to occupy China, there would be no demilitarization of the Imperial armed forces or occupation of the Home Islands. In addition to being a total non-starter, it never had the endorsement of the Japanese government. Therefore, that plan, or any plan, was never formally offered.
It was only after the bombs (and yes, it took two to convince the Japanese that the first one was not a one-off deal) that the Japanese then offered unconditional surrender, that does not abrogate the prerogatives of the Emperor. Or something like that, which we accepted. The best source of the end of the war against Japan is Richard Frank's "Downfall," where he lays all this out in great detail.
Just about every technically advanced country in the world had a "nuke program" in the 1940s. What that meant was that the country had nuclear physicists who realized that atomic fission could create a bomb. The Russian physicist Kurchatov and German physicist Heisenberg were two of them. The Japanese had a physicist as well. What they lacked was the gigantic engineering and industrial capacity to take uranium and either separate the isotopes or breed it into Plutonium in sufficient quantity to make a bomb. Only the United States had that capacity during a war that strained every other economy past its limit to make the weapons they needed to survive. We had the capacity to make atomic weapons because we could. The Japanese nuclear program was working on a lab experiments in Uranium Hexaflouride in the gaseous diffusion isotope separation process. They were never close to building a massive K25 gaseous diffusion facility like we had at Oak Ridge, which is what was needed to make a Uranium bomb.
The Germans under Heisenberg were dicking around with a prototype reactor, which Heisenberg called a "burner," to make Plutonium. But never he came close to making it operational. Kurchatov was only working on theories because the USSR simply didn't have anything to spare on nuclear testing during the war.
and even reportedly tested a nuke in North Korea several months before we tested ours.
The test to which you refer, if it happened, was a conventional explosion involving uranium with the idea that the explosion would spread radioactivity. It was a chemical weapon, and not at all a nuclear weapon. There was no nuclear fission involved.
“...The battle for Japan would be won by what Simon Bolivar Buckner, a lieutenant general in the Confederate army during the Civil War, had called ‘Prairie Dog Warfare.’... “ [DuncanWaring, post 18]
The forum owes DuncanWaring our thanks for posting the details. But the above passage is in error; one hopes it was merely a cut-and-paste mistake.
Simon Bolivar Buckner could not have ventured an assessment of World War 2 combat. He died in 1914.
His son, Simon Bolivar Buckner Jr, entered West Point in 1904 and rose to three-star general in the US Army. As commander, 10th Army, he led the ground-force invasion of Okinawa in April 1945. Killed in action there about three weeks after the landing force began to hit the beach, he was the highest-ranking American soldier lost to enemy fire during the war.
It’s very important to cast a careful eye onto several details in the material DuncanWaring posted.
The original-content author noted that not until postwar evaluations and interviews were conducted, did Allied planners learn that they had seriously undercounted the number of aircraft remaining in the Home Islands of Imperial Japan, many of which would have been expended in suicide attacks against any invasion force. Lots more than their estimates.
Brief mention was made of suicide attacks from Imperial Japanese Naval vessels, and that large numbers of small boats were also being readied for suicide attacks. Civilians were being trained to use them against landing craft.
Can’t recall just now if the Japanese were preparing to employ ground vehicles in suicide attacks. The original author did mention the 28,000,000-strong National Volunteer Combat Force and their weaponry, including swords, bows, axes - even bamboo spears.
A few years ago, Public TV, Smithsonian Channel, American Heroes Channel etc aired newly-produced material on the occasion of the 70th anniversary of Allied victory in WW2. Unsurprisingly, they aired several segments on the employment of atomic bombs and the Japanese surrender. What came as a surprise were interviews with Japanese survivors, who were children in 1945. Several spoke of combat training being conducted for civilians - down to the level of preteen schoolgirls.
Only after the Allied occupation forces traveled the Home Islands was it discovered that large numbers of war-materiel production activities had been dispersed, with some key operations moved underground. No knowledge of these was available to American targeting planners before surrender.
Over the course of 24-1/2 years on active duty, I was involved in support for and operations of combat aircraft of all types from each and every armed service, including weapons effects and targeting. During my final tour of duty, it fell to my lot to analyze and evaluate operations plans of all types, at some pretty elevated levels. So I had to develop something of a fingertip-feel for the viability of any particular war plan.
Applying techniques and rules of thumb from that job, I have come to the conclusion that any Allied invasion of Imperial Japan would have been more costly than any pre-invasion estimate, in terms of casualties. By a factor of three to five.
And I’ve made the further guess that Simon Buckner Jr was wrong in assuming the Allies would have been victorious.
“...it is a fools belief that foreign policy has no consequences that should be directly attributed to those policies.
Democrats are notoriously weak on foreign policy...” [CodeToad, post 62]
Democrats (prior to 1972 at any rate) cannot be branded as that much less clued-in to the conduct of foreign understanding of foreign policy.
The words George Washington spoke in his Presidential farewell address are not Holy Writ. They do not appear in any Founding document nor have they been written into any Federal statute. Times have changed in the two-hundred-plus years that have passed since. His advice has never been Absolute Truth. Obeying such a diktat would not only be a bad idea, it would have been impossible then and is less possible now. Trading nations cannot cut themselves off from the rest of the world.
World Wars One and Two entangled every major US trade partner before American entry into either conflict. The notion that America could stay out was never realistic - even if the nation (having been blocked from trade with the Central Powers, and later with Nazi Germany, by British naval supremacy) had declined to trade with the Allies out of a sense of “justice.”
I read where a Japanese General gave this message to his troops (roughly): "Yes, things look pretty bad now, if we try hard enough, we can still win this war."
This was after the second Bomb dropping was known.
Another reason to drop the bomds was that General Hideki Tojo was responsible for the policy to "Kill All the Prisoners" upon invasion of the homelands or imminent danger.
“Hiroshima and Nagasaki were at best 2nd rate, if not 3rd rate, targets. Curt LeMay had already taken care of everything else with B-29 incendiary raids...” [FreedomPoster, post 20]
Partly the case.
XXI Bomber Command (the B-29 outfits flying from Guam, Saipan, and Tinian, under command Heywood Hansell, then Curtis LeMay after 20 January 1945) was not able to strike every possible target in the Japanese Home Islands. Hokkaido - northernmost of the four - and the northernmost part of Honshu were beyond the B-29’s combat radius.
The first area bombing campaign ended in June 1945; 40 percent of the urban areas of 66 of large Japanese cities were destroyed by the area attacks. General H H Arnold, chief of USAAF, approved a campaign against 25 smaller cities in June. At times, as much as 3/4 of the total XXI Bomber Command sortie count was directed against southerly targets in support of the invasion of Okinawa. Precision strikes against industrial and military targets never really ceased; the largest single air attack of the entire war was conducted on 1 August: 836 B-29s dropped 6145 tons of munitions on four cities.
In addition to direct air attacks on land targets, the B-29s air-dropped mines in Japanese coastal waterways and harbors. Beginning in late March 1945 and continuing past the end of June, the mining effort completely closed major harbors, disrupted domestic waterborne traffic, and accounted for 9.3 percent of all merchant-vessel losses during the war, at a greater rate and at less cost and risk than the US Navy’s submarine interdiction effort.
XXI Bomber Command was ordered not to strike certain cities. They were not told why; the real reason was that the cities were being reserved for the atomic strikes (assuming “the gadget” worked), and the Joint Targeting Group did not want the data to be adulterated by damage from earlier strikes. Hiroshima was on that list but I don’t recall the rest.
Carrier aircraft of US Navy did stage some attacks against coastal targets but these were minor. On their very best day, the Fleet’s airplanes acting all together could deliver 200 tons of bombs; an average day for the B-29s delivered 3000 to 3500 tons (note that “average” was a moving figure in this case: total delivery capability increased as more and more B-29 units arrived in theater, week after week). Also, the carrier aircraft lacked the range to strike far inland. And the USN carriers did not enter the Sea of Japan while the war lasted.
The US Strategic Bombing Survey concluded that Imperial Japan would have surrendered by the end of 1945, due to the combined effects of the air raids and the naval blockades - without employing atomic bombs and without intervention by the USSR. This ex-post-facto “prediction” was seconded by some senior USAAF leaders, but was strongly opposed (perhaps not surprisingly) by some senior leaders of the other US armed services. Atomic strikes were condemned by ADM William Leahy in his memoirs.
“You can’t convince that the 200,000 Japanese dead by nuclear blast is better that 10,0000,000 Japanese and 1,000,000 Americans killed by bullets, bombs, suicide and starvation.” [Blood of Tyrants, post 27]
No one is talking “better.” It is arguable that 200,000 is less bad than 11,000,000.
The real world of decision-making often boils down to unhappy choices: poor alternatives, or poorer alternatives. People who recite the phrase “The lesser of two evils is still evil” and congratulate themselves on their moral discernment have given up all claim to seriousness.
#18 Just wow! All this built in just a few years and this was not all of it either!
Excerpts; The 3,000 ship Fifth Fleet, under Admiral Raymond Spruance , would carry the invasion troops. Several days before the invasion, the battleships, heavy cruisers and destroyers would pour thousands of tons of high explosives into the target areas.
Waves of Helldivers, Dauntless dive bombers, Avengers, Corsairs, and Hellcats from 66 aircraft carriers would bomb, rocket and strafe enemy defenses, gun emplacements and troop concentrations along the beaches.
I googled: total number of united states of all types ships in ww2
How many ships did US have in ww2?
At its peak, the U.S. Navy was operating 6,768 ships on V-J Day in August 1945, including 28 aircraft carriers, 23 battleships, 71 escort carriers, 72 cruisers, over 232 submarines, 377 destroyers, and thousands of amphibious, supply and auxiliary ships.
Naval history of World War II - Wikipedia
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naval_history_of_World_War_II
Great story thanks I’ll mention it to my friend.
Good one!
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