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!
He died in 2010, aged 93.
He was from Nagasaki but was in Hiroshima on business (he worked for Mitsubishi). After surviving Hiroshima, he made his way back to Nagasaki, reported to work, and was recounting his experience to his supervisor, when Fat Man exploded.
Not only did these bombs save American lives, but Japanese ones as well.
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.
Those would have been our soldiers, and while it’s a horrible number, we could have recovered, albeit slowly.
The estimated casualties on the Japanese side were 2 to 5 times the American estimations. And those would have included civilians, who would have suffered much worse in an extended conflict than in the one week of the atomic bomb attacks.
A body count of 150,000 versus 2,000,000 to 5,000,000, in addition to untold suffering. Harry Truman would have been considered a monster by the U.S. and Japan to allow such a thing to happen, once it was known he had the bomb but refused to use it.
Then, we could have gone the other way and not invaded from the sea, but allowed the Soviets to do so via China.
Either way, it’s a good possibility we’d only know about the Japanese from museums and history books had we not dropped those bombs.
I'm getting old and time is really starting fly by. 3 or 4 years ago isn't "recently".
According to Yamaguchi's Wikipedia article, he was the sole person officially recognized by the Japanese government as having survived both attacks.
What’s scary to contemplate is what if Tojo and Company knocked off the Emperor before he made his broadcast?
Pity. The Navy Ordinance Officer responsible for the arming of Little Boy was watching the B-29s take off the day before, and witnessed one, if not three, B-29s and crews, not surviving the take off.
The plan was for the A-bomb to be armed (4 cordite-containing bolts screwed into the nose) before take off.
He decided to hold off until safely airborne, and had the bomb loaded, and practiced the rest of the day, suited up, making his way to the bomb, and screwing/unscrewing the bolts in the confines of the bomb bay.
There isn't all that much in the way of structural integrity to stand upon in the bay...
I usually ask people to ponder how history would be different today if the Iron Curtain that fell across Europe were to have included Japan in the 1940's? That was a very likely outcome had we allowed the Soviets to get involved in the War in the Pacific. As it was, the Soviets were trying to play catch-up, having only very recently declaring war on Japan (August 8, 1945, between the bombings).
And imagine if the war extended beyond 1949, when Mao Tse Tung took over China.
The Chinese were going to join in and they were thirsty for revenge, to say the least.
Not to mention being colder than a witches....well, you know. I understand he had to be fairly quick about loading the triggers because his fingers were getting stiff.
The interaction between China and the USSR would have been...interesting.
Well they were pals for the first few years, at least on the surface.
What is scary to contemplate is that the war in Japan was ACTUALLY ended by a tape recorder. At the time of the broadcast, the emperor's palace was surrounded and he wasn't going anywhere. What the conspirators didn't know was that there had been great concern that the emperor couldn't get through the speech without choking up. So they recorded it the night before. The message played that day was actually a recording!
What did come out of this was that the conspirators, who were also the most hard line and wanted to continue the war no matter what, were completely embarrassed over their failure and most committed ritual suicide. That was the main reason the resistance fell apart and we did not have a long insurgency, as in Iraq.
I think that would be the subject of a great movie, “The Emperor’s Speech.”
Bfl
Fighting over the spoils of a war with Japan would have had quite the impact on that chumminess.
When I was a kid I met the pilot who flew the plane that the photographers were on. He said that he knew nothing about the bomb but was told to fly to certain coordinates and make a sharp turn and open the bay doors. I remember that his last name was Cline. Real interesting fellow.
My dad fought with Patton’s Third Army. Upon completion of Europe, he was sent back to the US to train for the invasion of...JAPAN.
When they heard of the Atomic bombs, they knew it was over and all breathed a sigh of relief.
That was the subject of the last episode of Band of Brothers, everyone was obsessed with getting enough “points” so as to avoid having to participate in the invasion of Japan. Pure unbridled joy when they learned of the bombs and the surrender.
very cool footage.
Thanks for posting it
Exactly correct, on all counts.
The Force is strong in you.
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