Hiroshima and the Atomic Bomb…Plus 75 Years.

13 thoughts on “Hiroshima and the Atomic Bomb…Plus 75 Years.”

1. Interesting and thanks.

   WEB Griffin’s Marine Corps series has a lot about “Magic” and McArthur in Brisbane.

   We were very lucky the atomic bomb worked as the invasion might well have failed. The point system the Army used would probably have resulted in a green invasion army. The senior noncoms and junior officers with high point totals would have been sent home.

2. Mike K: “We were very lucky the atomic bomb worked as the invasion might well have failed.”

   Indeed! The logistic chain across the Pacific Ocean would have presented ongoing difficulties for an opposed landing. And the US had learned during the island hopping approaches to Japan how tenaciously the Japanese would have defended their home islands.

   This would not have changed the eventual outcome of Japan’s defeat. Following a repulsed invasion (or an invasion which established a beachhead at the cost too many US lives), the fall-back would have been effectively a siege of Japan along with continued fire-bombing. The cost in Japanese lives would have been tremendous, as Japan was driven back to the Stone Age. It is also likely that the USSR’s invasion of northern Japan would have continued south into the main Japanese islands — probably with massive indiscriminate slaughter of Japanese civilians.

   The Emperor did his nation a great service by using the atomic bombing as a rationale for surrendering.

3. It was because of one of the previous installments that I read “Last to Die”
   https://www.amazon.com/Last-Die-Defeated-Forgotten-American/dp/0306823381

   I hadn’t even heard of the B-32 before. It has a pretty good account of the period between the A-Bombing and the actual surrender that I also wasn’t aware of. The surrender was not nearly the foregone concussion that is presented now.

   My father was in training to participate in the invasion. Neither he nor I have ever had much doubt that the bombing was the right thing to do.

4. Interesting. I would have thought polar regions would have
   been worse for radio comm. because of solar flares.

   Was non H/F similarly disrupted? Is there any place to
   get a more detailed explanation of interference patterns?

   The map shows Nov. – Mar. Was the rest
   of the year similar?

   Thanks in advance for any replies.

5. Leather,
   Here are some current links just from a quick search. Hams are probably the people that keep best track of HF since its not used commercially that much. Before satellites, it was the only way for planes to communicate on long hauls over the oceans for example or to make connections to remote locations.
   https://www.hfpropagation.com/
   https://www.qrzcq.com/page/propagation
   http://prop.hfradio.org/
   http://hamwaves.com/propagation/en/index.html
   https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4EadY6eDKhs
   https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TBO0IYXF79g
   https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YgmvPWRYw3I

   Here’s what looks like a discussion covering WWII:
   http://play.fallows.ca/wp/radio/shortwave-radio/ww2-solar-cycle-17-hf-propagation/

6. On the topic of the invasion of Japan, I have a book on alternate history about the war. It is titled “Rising Sun Victorious.” One chapter is about the 1946 typhoon which would have hit the invasion fleet.

7. Realistically, a lot of things would have affected the invasion like that typhoon that would have increased casualties on our side. None would have changed the outcome. Japan would have been left even more devastated than it was, with many many more civilian casualties.

   We could have simply stood aside and let the Soviets take the whole thing. We could have continued the blockade and let them finish starving for an almost negligible cost in Allied casualties. The invasion was the most costly, least effective course of action open to us. A completely typical government program.

8. A completely typical government program.

   The typical government program was the B 29, which cost more than the atomic bomb.

   And it didn’t work. The Jet Stream was unknown and high altitude bombing was inaccurate. Curtis LeMay saved everybody’s bacon by throwing out the plan for high altitude bombing and going to low altitude fire bombing. From his Wiki entry:

   In August 1944, LeMay transferred to the China-Burma-India theater and directed first the XX Bomber Command in China and then the XXI Bomber Command in the Pacific. LeMay was later placed in charge of all strategic air operations against the Japanese home islands.[7][8] LeMay soon concluded that the techniques and tactics developed for use in Europe against the Luftwaffe were unsuitable against Japan. His Boeing B-29 Superfortress bombers flying from China were dropping their bombs near their targets only 5% of the time. Operational losses of aircraft and crews were unacceptably high owing to Japanese daylight air defenses and continuing mechanical problems with the B-29. In January 1945, LeMay was transferred from China to relieve Brigadier General Haywood S. Hansell as commander of the XXI Bomber Command in the Marianas.[7][8]

   Major General Curtis LeMay talking with General Joseph W. Stilwell.
   He became convinced that high-altitude precision bombing would be ineffective, given the usually cloudy weather over Japan. Furthermore, bombs dropped from the B-29s at high altitude (above 20,000 feet (6,100 m)) were often blown off of their trajectories by a consistently powerful jet stream over the Japanese home islands, which dramatically reduced the effectiveness of the high-altitude raids. Because Japanese air defenses made daytime bombing below jet stream-affected altitudes too perilous, LeMay finally switched to low-altitude nighttime incendiary attacks on Japanese targets, a tactic senior commanders had been advocating for some time.[7][8] Japanese cities were largely constructed of combustible materials such as wood and paper. Precision high-altitude daylight bombing was ordered to proceed only when weather permitted or when specific critical targets were not vulnerable to area bombing.

9. Consider this scenario, truman launches the invasion of the homeland it doesnt go well, he has to step down there was no vice president till 1948, so james byrnes becomes president maybe the weapon is tried again at that point. One assumes the war would still be continuing for the allied powers in the east, with all the consequences that entails.

10. The whole “precision” bombing narrative hasn’t fared very well in the 21st Century. War is the most wasteful government program conceivable. Just about nothing works as well as its inventors/promoters expect it to. It certainly seems plausible that the reason wars seem to happen every 20 years is because that’s how long it takes for a new group of credulous suckers to come to power. Conducting a war for the entire interval is something that hasn’t happened in quite a while, since Napoleon at least.

    Near the end of WWII there was work on bombing using SHORAN. I believe it was used in Europe to bomb the bridges over the Po river and in Japan. With good preparation, it allowed the position of the aircraft to be determined quite accurately. The problem, as you point out, remained the last 5 miles between the plane and the ground. That wasn’t really solved until the advent of first, laser and then GPS guided bombs.

    The SHORAN technology came into its own after the war, enabling the first really accurate, long base line surveys of the U.S. The accuracy was on the order of 1/4 inch over more than 100 miles. It was, of course, also an important advance in navigation once stations were established and receivers became available.

11. On the 45th anniversary of the Hiroshima, SF author Harlan Ellison expressed the opinion that The Bomb, rather than an immoral weapon for its lack of discrimination between civilian and soldier, was, in fact, the first moral weapon developed since Kings stopped riding into battle at the head of their armies.

    His argument was, I think, seriously meritorious: For the first time in about 500 years, those whose choice it was to START a war, would bear the cost of much of the war.

    And that, he asserted, was why The Bomb has a particularly unique distinction among weaponry invented by humans — once invented, it has not again been used, for (then 45, now) 75 years.

    This is unprecedented in human history.

    As a personal corollary to that, I will argue that, sad though Hiroshima and Nagasaki were, their usage probably saved mankind from a much much worse war.

    Those very graphic images of what the very FIRST and weakest of these managed to do clearly leave an indelible picture on the minds of those “whose choice it was to start a war”. One that cannot be hand-waved off, as might be possible for pictures of tests against Potemkin villages constructed for atom-bomb tests. It put, into the mind’s eyes of the power elite all around, exactly what would happen to THEIR power and privilege, if they chose to go to war with this weapon.

    Would they have held their hands, during the Korean War, when we had a very close brush with a hot war? Would they have held their hands, during the Cuban Missile Crisis, without these images?

    One might hope so, but those images, multiplied by a hundred, a thousand, times… surely made them more reluctant to make that last stupid, fatal step.

12. >>Interesting. I would have thought polar regions would have
    >>been worse for radio comm. because of solar flares

    This is an “it depends” situation.

    H/F radio has three forms of transmission. Ground wave, Near Vertical incident Skywave and Skywave.

    Skywave is the main advantage of H/F in that it can reach world wide.

    The issue in the polar regions is that when the maximum usable frequency falls below the lowest usable frequency, you get black outs. That is, you cannot get a critical angle reflection past the first atmospheric bounce.

    NVIS is simply shooting signal straight up and having it re-radiate straight down. It gives between 200km and 400 km range. Which is still quite useful in polar regions, but not the thousands of kilometres of a good skywave connection.

    German armored units, and their armored cars in particular, made very extensive use if NVIS H/F in the 1939-1942 blitzkriegs in Poland, Western Europe, the Balkans, Russia and Africa. This is why German Panzer divisions could be more than 100 miles ahead of German infantry formations and both elements stayed well coordinated.

13. OBloodyHell,
    There still seemed to be some that thought it wouldn’t be so bad if we had enough fallout shelters. Luckily, they didn’t get much influence. Probably because of the images.

    The German reliance on HF also meant that they were broadcasting all their plans to Bletchley Park.

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