HIROSHIMA-ENOLA GAY
CHINA-IMPERIAL ARMY ATROCITIES
Posted on 08/18/2003 9:44:42 AM PDT by Moose4
Edited on 04/29/2004 2:02:59 AM PDT by Jim Robinson. [history]
A friend of my father was a docent at Garber for a number of years. In the late '70s we spent a memorable Sunday afternoon looking through that great collection of ancient and unusual aircraft. The Enola Gay was in a dim, dusty warehouse, completely unrestored, its wings stowed parallel to the fuselage. I remember sitting in the pilot's seat thinking, this airplane changed the history of the world...
An invasion of the home islands would have been an utter blood bath. We were faced with the lesser of two evils, both choices being bad , but I don't see any other way it could have been done. The Japanese were not like the Germans, and were quite prepared to commit national suicide.
HIROSHIMA-ENOLA GAY
CHINA-IMPERIAL ARMY ATROCITIES
No, some of us need reminding that the dropping of the two A-Bombs actually saved hundreds of thousands of American and Japanese lives by bringing the war to a quick end.
Enola Gay, the aircraft that dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima, Japan, is shown to the media at the Smithsonian's Air and Space Museum annex, August 18, 2003. The newly-reassembled B-29 bomber was unveiled on Monday in a giant hangar at the museum's Steven Udvar-Hazy Center near Dulles International Airport. (Herman Beals/Reuters)
I think the writer is confused. The 15 special B-29s modified to drop atomic bombs had special engines, propellers and faster-acting pneumatic bomb bay doors.
All B-29s were pressurised, and the B-29 fleet as a whole was the first successful large-scale use of pressurized crew compartments.
So9
A good way would be to include pictures of all of the hospitals setup on the various Pacific islands to handle the hundreds of thousands of expected casualties had we invaded Japan. Either the History Channel or Discovery had a show on "what if we invaded Japan", and they had pics of huge hangar-style hospitals being prepped all over the islands we were capturing, in order to handle the invasion. Staggering to say the least.
Yeah. big plane, here's some comparison photo's
Note the B-29 parked next to it! 
A B-24 flying underneath
Admins: Thanks for deleting my badly formatted post #49
"The Thing"????
That's Cecil, the Seasick Sea Serpent!
Please ...
Yea that was another nick name ...But I despised Beanie & Cecil when I was a kid...
Grew up near the old North American plant in Downey and knew some North American people ... got to see it once in the early 60' when I was a little kid... forget where
I posted a seperate thread since it's a broader topic/article.
I remember an interview with Harry Truman late in his life, when he talked about the decision to use the Nukes on Japan. First FDR and then Harry had been trying to get the Russians to help us because a land invasion would take a huge number of forces and invasion sites to insure success. We were not sure we could defeat them alone. Truman had issued orders to send nearly all of our European combat troops to Asia to invade Japan and he was at a summit meeting in Eastern Europe trying to bribe Stalin to help us when he learned the Atomic bomb worked.
Had we gone in to Japan by land we certainly would have needed the Russians to help us, much like we needed them to enable us to defeat Hitler. From Truman's account of the negotiations we know Stalin's price to help us would have been a lot more of Western Europe and most of Asia. It would arguably have been enough of price to cost us the cold war. Had that happened when they said they would bury us they would not have been lying. Secondly General Marshall, and MacArthur both agreed that over a million of our men would die in a conventional attack on Japan.
If they really want to show the results how good Nukes are, we would need to show the million Americans who would have died. The truth is we would have lost a million people in a ground attack, and the Japanese would have lost 3 million in the defense. A good case can be made that the Nuclear weapons used on Japan saves over 3 million lives.
Today's generation could not have survived WWII. Few today think there are things worth dying for and fewer still think there are things worth killing for.
In a generation or two the United States may very well be conquered by an inferior force with a superior will. Our stomachs are becoming much to queasy to long endure.
Thanks for posting this. Perhaps I'll make it to the museum one day.
The real cost would have been very great for you. You would not exist. And that is a huge cost indeed.
Remember the Japanese were as ideological as today's Muslims if not worse. Their Kamakazi warriors believed that if they purposely gave their life in battle for the Emperor, they would instantly go to heaven There was no shortage of Kamikazi volunteers. They also believed that if they surrendered that when they died they would go to hell. There was no redemption from an eternity of torture if a Japanese surrendered. They were to committ Hari Kari(suicide) if they had no means to fight. Their culture demanded that a military officer who was defeated could only atone for his defeat by suicide. That would be a partial atonement, but fighting to the death was the only real way to honor.
For the typical japanese soldier fighting to the death resulted in an instant trip to heaven and surrender ment a slower trip to Hell with the only chance for heaven was suicide.
I remember a story from the 1970's of a Japanese soldier found on deserted Island in the Pacific. He had lived for nearly 30 years after the war ended alone forging for food and living in a cave on deserted island. When a westerners landed on the Island he tried to kill them rather than surrender. He did not want to go to hell.
That kind of belief system is hard for people to believe today. At least to believe it about the Japanese. But people who think we can not change the Muslim world would have been certain that our military could not change Japanese culture. We did it in about seven years.
Had we gone in on an attack similar to to our attack in Normandy the destruction would have been worse. It is only a few short miles across the english channel. Human beings swim it. It is not far. But it was hundreds of miles from the nearest assembly area to Japan itself. There could be no surprise. The Germans at best had an hour or so of warning before the D day invasion.That was not enough to move even mechanized troops more than 40 or 50 miles. But the trip by our attacking armada going to Japan would have taken days. They would have tracked our move and have sunk many of our ships while still far at sea.
One of the reasons the japansese treated Americans they took prisoner so badly was they had nothing but contempt for any soldier that surrendered. It was the worst possilbe disgrace and proof that the troops who surrendered were unfit to live. The japanese did not surrender much in WWII.
MacArthur thought we would lose a minimum of one million men in the attack. The chances of success were not certain either. They were just a bit over 50 percent. If we had to try 2 or 3 attacks over a year or two, we might have lost 2 or 3 million men or more. With our loses in Europe we may very well have lost an entire generation of young men. Germany in its defeat lost almost an entire generation.
To insure the victory of a land invasion of Japan Stalin would have demanded that Japan be split in two parts. They would have demanded the larger part be theirs. They wouldhave dmanded most of China and a lot of the Arab world for soviet states. Remember all of arabia belonged to the allies at the end of the Eurpean war.
What if we had given Stalin the middle easterrn oil lands and half of the Japan industrial complex for help defeating Japan. We did not have a lot of leverage.
Had we found it necessary to give in to Stalins demands t win against Japan, our chances of winning the cold war would have been next to Zero. In that case your Dad may have been the lucky one. What would my life be like if I had spent the last 30 or 40 years as a slave in a Soviet puppet state. That could very well have been a fate far worse than death.
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