Posted on 08/08/2015 6:20:03 AM PDT by Homer_J_Simpson
John Toland, The Rising Sun: The Decline and Fall of the Japanese Empire, 1936-1945
Only 60%?
http://www.etherit.co.uk/month/7/08.htm
August 8th, 1945 (WEDNESDAY)
UNITED KINGDOM: Aircraft carrier HMS Ocean commissioned.
GERMANY: Nuremburg: The trial of Nazi war criminals by a four-power military tribunal will open in Nuremburg, the traditional setting for the Nazi Party rallies and the city where the infamous decrees for the persecution of the Jews were promulgated. The top Nazis, now under arrest, are accused of planning to make war in violation of international treaties, violating accepted laws and customs of war, murder, extermination, enslavement and deportation. Acting under orders will not be accepted as a defence.
Britain is represented by Lord Jowitt, the lord chancellor in the new Labour government; the United States, the Soviet Union and France are represented by supreme court judges.
JAPAN: The U.S.S.R. declares war on Japan. It cites the failure of Japan to accept the terms of the Potsdam Declaration.
The USAAF’s Twentieth Air Force dispatches 381 B-29 Superfortresses on 3 missions, 2 during the day of 8 August and 1 during the night of 8/9 August; 7 B-29s are lost.
- Mission 319: Shortly before 1200 hours, 221 B-29s drop incendiaries on Yawata destroying 1.22 sq mi (3.16 sq km), 21% of the city; 6 others hit alternate targets; 1 B-29s is shot down by Japanese fighters and 3 are lost to mechanical reasons.
- Mission 320: Late in the afternoon, 60 B-29s bomb an aircraft plant and arsenal complex at Tokyo; 2 others hit alternate targets; 2 B-29s are lost to flak and 1 to mechanical reasons (these are the last B-29s lost in action by the Twentieth Air Force).
- Mission 321: During the night of 8/9 August, 91 B-29s hit Fukiyama with incendiaries destroying 0.88 sq mi (2.28 sq km), 73.3% of the city; 1 hits an alternate target.
In Japan:
- 100+ USAAF Twentieth Air Force fighters from Iwo Jima hit airfields, factory buildings, barracks, and rail installations in the Osaka, Japan area.
- USAAF Far East Air Force (FEAF) Okinawa-based B-24s, B-25s, A-26 Invaders, P-51s, and P-47s carry out numerous strikes against targets on Kyushu; targets include the Usa and Tsuiki Airfields, communications and transport targets all over Kyushu, shipping between Kyushu and Korea, and targets of opportunity in the Ryukyu Islands, on the China coast, and on Formosa. P-47s escorting Twentieth Air Force B-29s claim 10 Japanese planes downed.
The crew of the USN destroyer USS Cassin (DD-372) boards the Japanese hospital ship Kiku Maru northwest of Marcus Island but finds no violations and lets the ship proceed.
509BG perform another Pumpkin Raid. [See properly formatted chart by following the link at the top of this post - HJS]
Ops. Miss. Date Aircraft Cdr. Crew Bombing Target Lat Long Result
38 15 08/08/45 44-27296 Price B-7 Primary Visual Conv. Textile Mill, Yokkaichi
38 14 08/08/45 44-27299 Devore A-3 Aborted
38 14 08/08/45 44-27300 Westover A-4 Secondary Visual Tsuruga Chemical Plant
38 15 08/08/45 44-27302 Eatherly C-11 Primary Visual Heavy Industry, Yokkaichi Harbour
38 14 08/08/45 44-27303 Wilson B-6 Secondary Visual Assembly Plant, Uwajima
38 14 08/08/45 44-27304 Lewis B-9 Opport. Visual Light Industry, Tokushima
CANADA: Destroyer HMCS Assiniboine paid off.
U.S.A.: President Truman signs the UN Charter.
The motion picture “Over 21” is released in the U.S. today. Based on the Ruth Gordon play, this comedy is directed by Charles Vidor and stars Irene Dunne, Alexander Knox and Charles Coburn. The zany plot has middle-aged Knox trying to complete Officers Candidate School in World War II with help from his wife (Dunne).
Submarine USS Cobbler commissioned.
Lise Meitner - This is the second day she is mentioned. She does deserve credit but there were many others also. If I remember right from yesterday, she has a relative in New York, promoting her cause. Not saying she doesn’t deserve credit but there were many others. She was against the bomb and may have been the only one to talk?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lise_Meitner
When Adolf Hitler came to power in 1933, Meitner was still acting as head of the physics department of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Chemistry. Although she was protected by her Austrian citizenship, all other Jewish scientists, including her nephew Otto Frisch, Fritz Haber, Leó Szilárd and many other eminent figures, were dismissed or forced to resign from their posts. Most of them emigrated from Germany. Her response was to say nothing and bury herself in her work. In 1938, Meitner fled to the Netherlands and finally arrived in Sweden. She later acknowledged, in 1946, that “It was not only stupid but also very wrong that I did not leave at once.”[20]
Element 109, meitnerium, is named in her honour
Meitner refused an offer to work on the project at Los Alamos, declaring “I will have nothing to do with a bomb!”[31] Meitner said that Hiroshima had come as a surprise to her, and that she was “sorry that the bomb had to be invented.”[32]
After the war, Meitner, while acknowledging her own moral failing in staying in Germany from 1933 to 1938, was bitterly critical of Hahn, Max von Laue and other German scientists who, she thought, would have collaborated with the Nazis and done nothing to protest against the crimes of Hitler’s regime. Referring to the leading German nuclear physicist Werner Heisenberg, she said: “Heisenberg and many millions with him should be forced to see these camps and the martyred people.” She wrote to Hahn:
You all worked for Nazi Germany. And you tried to offer only a passive resistance. Certainly, to buy off your conscience you helped here and there a persecuted person, but millions of innocent human beings were allowed to be murdered without any kind of protest being uttered ... [it is said that] first you betrayed your friends, then your children in that you let them stake their lives on a criminal war – and finally that you betrayed Germany itself, because when the war was already quite hopeless, you did not once arm yourselves against the senseless destruction of Germany.
Hahn received this letter but it did not harm his friendship with Meitner, because he knew that she had no idea at all of the real existing situation in the Nazi era after her escape in July 1938.
Interesting...p3, under “Japan Keeps People in Dark on Nature of New Scourge,” the Japanese Domei news agency quoted “informed quarters” in Tokyo as saying “the U.S. was a destroyer of justice and mankind” and was “Public Enemy #1 of social justice.”
It’s seems modern Democrats were operating in Tokyo in WW II. Is this proof of time travel?
1/8 the area of Manhattan according to the article.
Thanks.
Thanks so much! Lot’s of fascinating information on the last days of WWII.
Baldwin has already mated the American atomic bomb with the German V2 as the new dominant weapons system. I’m not sure if this is the first time I’ve seen that.
The Vatican came out against the atom bomb fast.
It wasn’t as big in megatonnage as the later nukes
Synergistic thinking. Very insightful and creative--fifteen years ahead of his time.
Yes. That's very disappointing, indicative of shallow, uninformed, unrestrained thinking.
While we were enjoying our "negi", (eel) my host shared with me that, as a young lieutenant, he was one of the very first Japanese Army officers to actually enter and observe Hiroshima after the nuclear blast. His recollection was,
"The city was gone, and the suburbs were totally devastated -- and dazed, injured people were wandering about, everywhere..."
He then recounted how he had to hike several miles back along a rail line to finally find a working telegraph to send his report to Tokyo.
But his report (coming from a junior officer) was disbelieved and discounted by "Tojo Hediki, Ri Ku Gun", and his staff. It was the dropping of the second bomb on Nagasaki that finally forced them to face the stark, inescapable reality of defeat.
When I explained that I was only seven years old when the bomb was first used, he confided that, in his opinion, the two atomic bombs were the best things that could have happened to Japan at that time! His logic:
"If the US had not used those Atomic Bombs, we would not be having this congenial lunch together, today!""Otherwise, my grandchildren and your children would still be fighting senselessly in the mountains and hills of Nippon..."
I knew (in theory) that convincing Generalissimo Tojo and Emperor Hirohito of the inevitability of devastating defeat had prevented us from having to make a murderous (on both sides) invasion of the Japanese home islands.
But, it was that frank, honest, "first person" assessment by Takagi Sensei that suddenly made the historical fact personally real to me.
Thank you, HST and General Groves!
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