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Ric |
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Plankowner Posts: 9165 Location: Upper lefthand corner of the map. | Subject: Aug 6, 1945 Hiroshima bomb dropped. The beginning of the end. The death toll from the Hiroshima attack has reached nearly 260,000, with thousands of victims dying of the effects of the blast in the succeeding years. Three days after Hiroshima, the United States dropped a second atomic bomb on the city of Nagasaki, killing at least 70,000 people. Japan surrendered six days later, officially ending World War II. Some died, Millions didn't because of the bombs. | ||
| Ric |
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Plankowner Posts: 9165 Location: Upper lefthand corner of the map. | Subject: ..on the same note. Sort of... http://www.ess.uwe.ac.uk/GENOCIDE/reviewsw54.htm Joseph M. Scalia. Germany's Last Mission to Japan: The Failed Voyage of U-234. Annapolis: Naval Institute Press, 2000. xxiv + 296 pp. Photographs, appendix, notes, bibliography, index. $29.95 (cloth), ISBN 1-55750-811-9. Reviewed for H-War by Charles C. Kolb Endowment for the Humanities [Disclaimer: The opinions expressed herein are those of the reviewer and not of his employer or any other federal agency.] Fortuitous Failure -- The Mission of U-234 from Germany to Japan Untersee boot U-234 was built between 1 October 1941 and 2 March 1944 at Kiel by F. Krupp Germaniawerft AG. Originally designed in 1938, it was intended to be one of a total of eight Type XB ocean-going mine-layers. It was instead refitted as a transport submarine and assigned to the perilous Germany-to-Japan run. This was the largest type of German U-boat ever constructed at 1763 tons displacement, 2710 tons submerged and fully loaded, and 89.9 meters in overall length. Under the command of Kapitanleutnant (Kptlt., e.g. Lt. Cdr.) Johann-Heinrich Fahler, U-234 was originally designed to carry 66 SMA mines. It had only two stern torpedo tubes and carried a maximum of fifteen torpedoes.[1] A newly-designed breathing and exhaust mast, the Schnorchel, permitted the U-234 to travel submerged for extraordinary distances. U-234 departed Kiel on its maiden voyage on 25 March 1945, bound for Kristiansand, Norway. There it loaded important cargo and personnel and departed on 15 April for a submerged voyage which was to take them around the Cape of Good Hope, eventually concluding in Japan. That transit was never completed. Among the three hundred ton cargo was three complete Messerschmitt aircraft, a Henschel HS-293 glider-bomb, extra Junkers jet engines, and ten canisters containing 560 kg (1,235 lbs.) of uranium oxide (U235). The uranium oxide was to be used by the Japanese as a catalyst for the production of synthetic methanol used for aviation fuel. Other cargo consisted of one ton of diplomatic mail and 6,615 pounds of technical material including drawings of ME 163 and ME 262 aircraft, plans for the building of aircraft factories, V-1 and V-2 weapons, naval ships (destroyers of classes 36C and Z51, and M and S boats), and submarines (Types II, VII, IX, X, XI, XXI, and XXIII). German fire-control computers, Lorenz 7H2 bombsights, Lufte 7D bombsight computers, FUG 200 Hohehtweil airborne radars and bomb fuses were also included in the manifest along with other military equipment and personal luggage. Previous examinations of the voyage of U-234 have centered on the cargo carried by the vessel. The presence of the uranium oxide, for example, has generated much interest and conjecture. Scalia, however, shifts this focus, and argues that the submarine's greatest value lay not in her cargo, but in the individuals who were accompanying the material to Japan. The twelve passengers included a German general and his staff, four German naval officers, civilian engineers and scientists, and two Japanese naval officers. The latter were Lt. Cdr. Tomanaga Hideo, a naval aviator and submarine specialist who had come to Germany by Japanese submarine I-29 in 1943, and Lt. Shoji Genzo, an aircraft specialist and former naval attach in several European countries. Luftwaffe General (General der Flieger) Ulrich Kessler, a Prussian-born diplomat and military strategist, was originally a naval officer, but resigned his commission in 1933 and became commander of Luftwaffe Stuka squadrons operating in Poland, Norway, and France. He was disliked by Goering and rumored to have been involved in anti-Hitler activities, including the infamous assassination plot. Kessler was being sent to assist the Japanese in combat tactics using squadrons of ME 262 and ME 163 aircraft against Allied bombers. Oberleutnant (1st Lt.) Erich Menzel, a Luftwaffe navigator and bombardier who was an aeronautical communications and radar expert, also had combat experience against the British, Americans, and Russians. Oberstleutnant (Lt. Col.) Fritz von Sandrart, a FLAK antiaircraft defense strategist, was assigned to enhance Japanese defense systems. There were four naval officers, each with different responsibilities. Fregattenkapitan (Lt. Cdr.) Gerhard Falcke, a naval architect and construction engineer who spoke fluent Japanese, was to use German naval blueprints to initiate new shipbuilding. Kptlt. (Lt. Cdr.) Richard Bulla, who had the unique distinction of serving as an officer in both the Luftwaffe and Kreigsmarine simultaneously, was an expert on armaments, new weapons, and carrier-based aviation. Oberleutnant Heinrich Hellendorn, a shipboard FLAK artillery officer, served as a German observer, while Kay Niescheling, an ardent National Socialist who was a naval judicial and investigative officer, was being sent to rid the German diplomatic corps in Japan of remnants of the Richard Sorge spy ring. Among the civilian scientists was Dr. Heinz Schlicke, a radar, infrared, and countermeasures specialist who was the director of the Naval Test Fields in Kiel. His task was to aid the Japanese in developing and manufacturing electronic devices and instruments. Two "men from Messerschmitt," August Bringewalde, Willi Messerschmitt's "right-hand man" who was in charge of ME 262 production, and Franz Ruf, an industrial machinery specialist who designed machines and appliances to manufacture aircraft components, were also among the notable passengers. The Tripartite Pact of 27 September 1940 for military and technical cooperation between Germany, Italy, and Japan required reciprocal exchanges of raw materials, equipment, and personnel. Germany and Japan encountered difficulties in their attempts to carry out this exchange, though. Axis blockade running vessels were being sunk with increasing frequency thanks to MAGIC intercepts and decrypts. When Germany invaded Russia in June 1941, shipping war material and personnel via the Trans-Siberian Railway ceased abruptly as Russia became an Anglo-American ally.[2] The fragile Japanese-Russian non-aggression pact forced a maritime exchange, although there was an alternative plan to fly the precious cargo and personnel across Russia to Japan in three Junkers aircraft. Between December 1940 and June 1941, five German merchant vessels departed Japan, with three arriving in Bordeaux. By February 1942, nine German and three Italian vessels had made the voyage, but three were sunk en route. Fifteen Axis blockade runners departed the Far East in the winter of 1942-1943, but only seven reached Europe, while in 1944 only one of five ships departing Japan reached Nazi-occupied Europe. In 1942, a Japanese submarine cruiser completed a mission from Japan to France and back but fell victim to a mine in Singapore harbor.[3] Hence, by July 1943, Axis submarines were pressed into transport service. Allied antisubmarine countermeasures resulted in severe losses, however. Three of seven reconfigured Italian submarines reached Japan from Bordeaux, but only one of four Japanese submarines sent to Europe completed the round trip. Because it was too late to build new transport submarines, other large U-boats were refitted. One reached Japan and was commissioned into the Japanese Navy, five boats out of eleven arrived at Penang, Malaya, and only six of eighteen Type IXD/2 boats that departed Penang from 1943 to 1945 ever reached Europe. (Roskill and Niestl provide additional documentation of these events [4, 5].) U-boats made the trip from the Nazi-held ports of Kiel, Bordeaux, and Kristiansand to Kobe, Japan via the Cape of Good Hope. On 9 February 1945, the U-864, which carried similar cargo and personnel to that of the U-234, was torpedoed and sunk with the loss of all hands off Bergen, Norway by the British submarine HMS Venturer. Raw rubber, molybdenum, tungsten, tin, zinc, opium, and quinine were typical cargoes destined for Germany. On 8 May, during the final days of the Third Reich, U-234 was ordered to either return to Bergen or continue to Japan, but when the European war ended, the Japanese severed relations with defeated Nazi Germany. On 10 May the Allies ordered all U-boats to surrender. Because U-234 had two Japanese nationals aboard and Japan had already bought and paid for the uranium oxide, Kptlt. Fahler faced a dilemma. He conferred with General Kessler and the two Japanese officers. The latter had the knowledge to scuttle U-234, but had been deeply affected by German comradeship and goodwill. Fahler decided to bypass the Canadian Navy and Halifax where he had been ordered, and chose instead to surrender to the Americans. The Japanese committed suicide by ingesting lethal amounts of Luminal and were buried at sea with full military honors along with their secret papers and Tomanaga's samurai sword. Fahler jettisoned all of the new acoustic torpedoes and microfilms of sensitive documents to prevent the Americans from obtaining them, but failed to dispose of secret war documents or the U-234's war diary (Kriegstagebuch), which was later recovered by the U.S. Navy. The USS Sutton (DE-771) stationed at Argentia, Newfoundland, was on antisubmarine warfare patrol and intercepted U-234 on 15 May. Four days later the Sutton turned the U-234 over to the USCG Cutter Argo which escorted her to Portsmouth, New Hampshire, which also was the port of surrender for U-805, U-873, and U-1228. Because of the intelligence potential of U-234's cargo and passengers, the surrender of this boat was classified, but information leaks caused press sensationalism and media frenzy. The Navy spent two years disassembling and recording in detail the technical equipment aboard U-234. The book has chapters devoted to most of the principal characters, providing mini-biographies that emphasize the efforts of these men during the war, their cooperation with the Office of Naval Intelligence and Office of Naval Research, and subsequent repatriation to Germany in 1946. Project Paperclip also came into play. Many of the repatriated had lived in what became Soviet-occupied Germany and, therefore, chose to return to the United States. Schlicke, for example, had worked on sound and electrical absorption materials (early stealth technology) for submarines, and infrared detectors and homing devices. After 1946 he continued these efforts at the U.S. Office of Naval Research and later in the private sector. Bringewald and Ruf also returned from Germany to America. The former had assembled the ME 262, which flew at Wright Field in Dayton, Ohio in May 1945, and became significant to the American effort to develop jet-powered aircraft. Bringewald became the project manager for the American F-105 Thunderchief. Likewise, the HS-293 glider bomb and V-weapons were indispensable to the American effort to develop guided missiles. The fate of the U-234 was less glorious. After dismantling, the hull was taken to a location forty miles east of Provincetown, Massachusetts where, on 19 November 1947, she was struck by two torpedoes from the USS Greenfish (SS-351), and sank to the ocean floor six miles below. The story of the fate of the uranium oxide has never been clarified. Scalia notes that one rumor holds that it was used in American atomic research at Oak Ridge, while another contends that it was sent to a warehouse in Brooklyn or a storage facility in Kansas (one has visions of the "Ark of the Covenant" being stored at the climax of Spielberg's Raiders of the Lost Ark). Scalia provides some very new and exciting facts, observing that the primary records themselves differ as to when the containers were unloaded, where they were sent, and even if the supposedly gold-lined containers held refined uranium oxide ore or fissile material, or as Scalia conjectures, a radium compound or cadmium alloy which would have required such lined containers. We are still uncertain, although transfer to Oak Ridge seems likely, though likely too late to process into components for the atomic weapons used against Japan in August 1945. | ||
| dex armstrong |
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COMSUBBBS Posts: 3202 Location: Alexandria, Virginia | Subject: RE: Aug 6, 1945 (Part 1) (With everyone's indulgence, I'm going to reply to this in installments.) Years ago....I can't remember when, I replied to a similar post on this anniversary and in so doing stepped in a cowpie the size of Oklahoma and in trying to extract myself created a firestorm that made the Chicago Fire look like a Zippo flame. Corabelle sunk a thirty foot harpoon right between my hippockets that took six men and a small boy to pull out. I got the entire Joan of Arc barbeque job with Cora supply the Kingsford and starter fluid. I need to supply some background as to why I was so supportive of the bastards who loaded up the Enola Gay and the second B-29 and parked those great big sonuvabitches in the center of both of those cities. I was a little kid during WWII....My Dad's existence lived in two photographs....one on my Mother's bedside table and the other on a round mahogany table in the living room beside two bronze pirate bookends that supported books with no pictures. I was a little kid who unravelled to Santa Claus, Easter Bunny, Brer Rabbit, Sandman and Paul Bunyan adult creations that shovelled BS to kids....I thought the supposed existence of my Dad was just more adult concocted bulls**t....Sure we got letters that began,"Sorry I can't write more often but...." I saw war movies, shooting bad guys didn't look that damn difficult to me....I hated Japs....We called them Japs, everybody did...Japs, Nips, Slant eyed sonuvabitches, Back stabbing yellow bastards. From Pearl Harbor until several years after 1945 there were no terms too derogatory to characterize the little rascals. I grew up on military posts....There were propaganda posters supporting the war effort on every verticle surface...Japs bayoneting nuns....Little slant eyed, grinning bucktoothed bastards driving over children....Grinning bucktoothed ToJo crushing mothers with babies in their arms. It doesn't take much to generate fear and hatred in a four year old kid....There was ToJo with blood dripping from his mouth, looking like he'd just made a meal out of a couple of kids...Tanks with people dangling from their treads....The posters were everywhere and the phrase REMEMBER PEARL HARBOR ran through everything as the central theme. Bugs Bunny, Donald Duck and Mickey Mouse were seen kicking Japs in the butt and telling you to buy War Bonds so "Our boys can crush Japan". Caskets got unloaded from box cars at the downtown train station filled with lads that the Japs had killed....Women holding each other and crying....Japs were evil hombres. To me, dropping those bombs was like those miserable bastards had had an appointment with the Orkin Man....It was simply bigtime rat extermination....It meant little kids dads could come home....and prove that those fellows in those picture frames were actually real people. In first grade, your personal worth was measured in Dead Japs...."My Dad killed fifty Japws."...."That's nuthin' my Old Man kilt a hundert sixty."...."My Old Man killed a couple of thousand bombing Germinie."...."Hey my Dad flew a B-17...flew 27 missions...Hell he blew up six or seven whole towns." Dead Jap inflation ran wild on East Tennessee elementary school playgrounds"....Being a BS artiste begins early in Tennessee. I had my Old Man up in the thirty thousand Dead Jap range when he turned up and I found out he didn't kill any....He was in Europe....Going to school and admitting your Dad didn't kill any Japs was like going to school telling everyone you were not only queer....you were a homo Communist who stomped kittens. Then I found out that his unit killed Nazis and I had to explain that one Dead Nazi equalled Fifty Dead Japs and I was, "back in the game." Then one day, me'n Tommy Zilky, Sammy "Hambone" Northingham, Hyter Haynes, Pete McCall, Gus Wood, and Felder forbes went to see SANDS OF IWO JIMA at the Rialto....at the end of the movie Wayne (in the guise of Sgt. Styker USMC....has just damn near single handedly take Mount Suribachie, and sits down to fire up a Lucky when some lousy stinking lowlife Jap sneak sniper shoots the Duke in the back just below his name stencil....That image seared itself im my memory and I hated the little yellow skinned sonuvabitches. Folks, at the time EVERYONE where I grew up thought dumping atomic bombs on Japan was a wonderful thing....A blessing that saved the nation from the massive casualty lists that would have attended the invasion of the mainland. And remember Oak Ridge where they were churning out the bombs was just up the road from Chattanooga. (End of Part 1...To be continued, if Cora doesn't put a hit man on me.) | ||
| Tom Conlon |
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| Old Salt Posts: 264 Location: Harrison, NJ | Subject: RE: Aug 6, 1945 At the risk of attracting a few harpoons sent my way, I find that I have to defend Dex & his attitude re: the Japanese. That attitude was & probably still is prevalent among folks who grew up during that era and those who served in WWII. I don't say that it's right or wrong, it just is. My father was a WWII Marine. He served in the Pacific with the First Marine Division. They are renowned for their "Island Hopping" during the war. He also served at Guadalcanal. As I understand it, at one (or possibly many) point, the men didn't have enough food supplies. They ate captured Japanese foodstocks. As my father told it, they ate "fish heads and rice" for waaaay too long. To his dying day he refused to ever again eat rice in any form. He wouldn't allow it into our house when my sisters and I were growing up. My father-in-law was in the Army in Europe during WWII. Again, to his dying day he refused to eat German food. I assume for the same reasons. He never went into specifics. As I understand from my reading of history, there was a *huge* propaganda "machine" cranked up - on *both* sides. I've seen some of the pictures of the "Bucktoothed Jap" bayoneting women and children. I've heard some of the songs from that era ("The Fuherer's Face" by Spike Jones). To that generation the Japanese were, and always will be "Japs;" the Germans were, and always will be "Krauts." Of course, there was a huge *German* propaganda machine as well. It's a part of war. "Axis Sally" and Lord Haw-Haw come to mind. I would assume that there are a fair number of older Germans who wouldn't touch "American" food or anything related to America. Bottom line is that it was a different era and for many - including Dex - the war was all too personal. To many of us here (including me), WWII is only pages in a history book. To Dex and the WWII veterans (of all the services) it was real and, I'm sure the memory still hurts. So, while from my perspective (reading about the time in history books) I may not agree with the attitudes, I can at least understand it. | ||
| dex armstrong |
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COMSUBBBS Posts: 3202 Location: Alexandria, Virginia | Subject: (Part 2) Following Pearl Harbor and the declaration of war in late 1941, we rapidly put six million men in uniform and millions more in the production and logistics chain. The entire country became mobilized in the "war effort". To maintain national uninamity of the national attitude the government continually racheted up the retoric demonizing the Japanese people....Emphasis on Shinto fanaticism, Japanese atrosities (and we later found that we had underestimated the brutal treatment of our PW's and occupied civilian populations.) Japanese people were racially identifiable (They weren't like us...Their ideals, strange religion, weird alphabetical characters, manner of dress, subjection of women to total domination and subjection to a vast range of, to us, terrible indignities by males, their militaristic fanatical culture....all of this was manipulated by our national propaganda machine to demonize the entire Japanese nation. For years I never realized that the Japanese people had a cultural history of great art, literary tradition, sophisticated theater, and musical composition. I grew up influenced by the propaganda that germinated in my mind by the highly effective demonizing propaganda fed to us by the constant force feeding of a drumbeat of "Jap Hatred" images and rhetoric. (Caption of Submarine Force recruiting poster read SMACK THE JAP and showed a smiling officer at the periscope giving the "V" for victory sign.) Deep in my soul I still harbor wartime generated images of the Japanese people. I have never been comfortable around Japanese people....When introduced to a follow-on generational Japanese person, I always ask myself..."Where in the hell was this person's father from 1941 to until the nasty sonuvabitches got dragged up to quarterdeck of the Big Mo and MacArthur handed the bastards a pen and said SIGN HERE." I grew up in a military family...that gave me an up close and personal view of the history and effects of combat service. First, at any social function held in our home officers collected in the kitchen with my Mother continually refreshing drinks....they told stories of the horrors of war, atroscities, liberation of horribly maltreated prisoners, torture...fanatical troops...and a whole catalog of war crimes. The terms "The Jap bastards","Nazi rats" were the only terms I remember. I realized that these animals were sub-human creatures that deserved Orkin style eradication in the largest numbers possible. Bomb A and Bomb B, to us, were really great package deals....Here's the problem...First nobody had the advantage of hindsight...there was a massive shortage of crystal balls, compassion and intellectual objective attitude in the years following the war. For those of you who remember VICTORY AT SEA...When it was aired on TV it was considered very objective. Today it is considered by generations who never lived through those days as racist, exploitive (Is that a word?) and an extensive daisy chain of anti-Shinto propaganda (Doesn't matter to this jaybird...I'll bet I've watched it end-to-end, 200 times....love it!). Times change...terrible times become gentler when views, through the rear view mirror fashioned by the longrange view of people whose only information comes from historical revisionist writers, producers and intellects....I think ones prospective depends on whether or not you lived through the period or picked up your predigested views second hand.....and if you listen to the stories as an impressionable kid of recently returning veterans, waiting for your turn in the chair at the St. Elmo Barber Shop......I remember Tommy Zilky bringing a paper bag to school in second grade containg his "show and tell" object. When it was his turn, Miss Finny said..."Well Tommy, what have you brought to show the children today." A smile came over Tommy's face that turned into a twenty tooth grin....He reached into the bag and pulled out an extremely bloodstained Japanses battle flag..."My Dad took this off-a dead Jap." We all came from a neighborhood where everyone looked on the dropping of the two war ending atomic loads as a good thing. It was all summed up in this statement..."Ya know if the sumbitches had em, the bastards woodena thought twice about parking one on Chikkaggo and the other one on Nooyork." DEX.....I would like to express my thanks to Tom Conlon for his wonderfully well thought out and expressed piece. | ||
| Ric |
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Plankowner Posts: 9165 Location: Upper lefthand corner of the map. | Subject: RE: (Part 2) I'm a little younger than Dex but not by much. I, too, am a "war baby" though born just two months past the surrender. I, too, grew up on the stories and attitudes generated by those times. My first encounter with anything doing with a war was Korea. My mother was a nurse and she worked sort of free lance from time to time. We lived on Vashon Island in the middle of Puget Sound at that time and a young man from there had been wounded, machine gunned in fact, and mom was nursing him after he returned home to convalesce. She took me with her one time and I got to meet the fellow. He was a nice young man and he joked with me as mom changed his dressings on his back. I saw the wounds and they were quite large. All I can remember was mom saying she'd take me back to visit the next day since the guy seemed to enjoy my being there. Like any 6 year old I was excited to go and was ready early and wanting to return. I saw that mom was still in bed and woke her to ask when we were going. She told me we weren't as the fellow had died in the night. That has always stuck with me. Flashing forward to the early '60's and high school. I attended what was probably the most racially integrated high school in Seattle at that time. ½ the kids were white and the other ½ was everyone else. Seattle never was or has been a very racist city like many places were. I remember my aunt "Sugar" who grew up in North Carolina telling me how after the war she and my uncle came to Seattle to live, (he was from here), and how having grown up in the south had a very hard time when she rode the buses because anyone could sit anywhere they liked. No front of the bus back of the bus rules. She couldn't cope, in her words, with a nego sitting on the seat next to her. They ended up, at her insistence, moving back to NC. But I digress. In high school I had many friends who were American Japanese. One day while riding the bus downtown a class mate and his older brother who were of Japanese decent were on the bus with me. The older boy was very angry since the US history teacher he had had assigned him a term paper for him to write. The theme of the paper was the internment of Japanese Americans in WW II. Both of the these kids had been born in the camps! I was dumbfounded. I had never heard that there was such a thing. None of the adults I had been around all my life had ever talked about this. This was the first time I had heard of this and was shocked that my country could do this to my friends. It, still to this day, pisses me off. I had, like almost all here, had grown up with the idea of the treacherous Japanese but those were not the same people as I knew around me who were Americans by birth. As to the bombs, like Dex says, hindsight is 20/20 sometimes but I still feel that the sacrifice of some lives to the bombs saved a million US lives and about 7 million Japanese lives, mostly civilians and little children. End brain dump. | ||
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