63, 63 plus 3
minnow
Any place that interests me.
I've finished reading the paper- not 1 word mentioned the event that occured 63 years ago Aug. 9, 1945. The Aug. 6 papers might have mentioned it 6-8 pages back.
I'm referring to the dropping of 2nd atomic bomb on Nagasaki, preceded by the 1st on Hiroshima on August 6, 1945. Those 2 missions changed the world forever. Yet one can reflect on how some things really haven't changed.
A couple of tidbits not always mentioned in the accounts:
1) "Bocks Car" (the B-29 bomber on the mission) was delivered to the then Army Air Force at the cost of $639,000 (~ $7.7M in 2008 $$).
2) After dropping the bomb, "Bocks Car" had inadequate fuel (due to several mission delays) to reach alternate landing field of Iwo Jima, landing instead at Okinawa with very little fuel remaining. This island had only been secured weeks earlier.
This shows that the successful outcome of any endeavor involves having many "pieces of the puzzle" in place. Doing so involves painstaking sacrifice- had Okinawa not been secured, crew would have been forced to ditch or bail out, close(r) to enemy territory. Also, with todays outsourcing of our manufacturing,one can only question whether US could today develop & manufacture IN HOUSE anywhere near the magnitude(large quantity, and many new developments in limited timeframe) of what we did back then.
I'm referring to the dropping of 2nd atomic bomb on Nagasaki, preceded by the 1st on Hiroshima on August 6, 1945. Those 2 missions changed the world forever. Yet one can reflect on how some things really haven't changed.
A couple of tidbits not always mentioned in the accounts:
1) "Bocks Car" (the B-29 bomber on the mission) was delivered to the then Army Air Force at the cost of $639,000 (~ $7.7M in 2008 $$).
2) After dropping the bomb, "Bocks Car" had inadequate fuel (due to several mission delays) to reach alternate landing field of Iwo Jima, landing instead at Okinawa with very little fuel remaining. This island had only been secured weeks earlier.
This shows that the successful outcome of any endeavor involves having many "pieces of the puzzle" in place. Doing so involves painstaking sacrifice- had Okinawa not been secured, crew would have been forced to ditch or bail out, close(r) to enemy territory. Also, with todays outsourcing of our manufacturing,one can only question whether US could today develop & manufacture IN HOUSE anywhere near the magnitude(large quantity, and many new developments in limited timeframe) of what we did back then.
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32 comments
Yep, heaven forbid had "Okinawa not been secured, crew would have been forced to ditch or bail out, close(r) to enemy territory." I for one would have preferred MANY fewer "pieces of the puzzle in place" and that holds true for other conflicts modern and ancient. Saves lives and limbs!
Yes, I realize what a tremendous hardship it would be for the crew to get closer, but heck if they could save the lives of 12,000 American soldiers, then I'd hope you could find a few good brave heroic men willing to accept a riskier mission. Also, another 36,000 were wounded. :( Government always seem to have such contempt for human life and limb, but the people just love it. :(
God, it gets worse. :( Yes, they're supposed to be so good to the invaders of their homeland. I'm sure if the Japanese soliders liberated the U.S., then American women would be fantastic in bed with Japanese soldiers. Yep, the Japanese soldiers would be writing back to their homeland that American men can't fight worth a lick and have small dicks, but American women sure know how to suck dicks and pump dicks for every drop. The American women would surely make you proud shadowcat---you might even stop hating 'em for a few seconds.
I know that education (books) is the key to keep from making the terrible mistakes that your generation did.
How come oldsters like shadowcat think that their Archie Bunker style of dealing with things is always absolutely right?
Why the hell would you want to do that??
I'm pretty sure that RI is the last state to celebrate V-J Day, or, as I used to call it (and still do) "we hate the Japanese Day". Why someone would want to celebrate the victory over Japan still and not the victory over Germany I suspect has a lot more to do with racism that we might like to think. I for one appreciate what my grandfather & all his war buddies did for us so long ago, but the V-J Day thing still bugs me for some reason...
I'm skeptical, but I'll bite. What information would you provide them?
For Germany the best I can see you doing is providing them information about the exact date and location of D-Day. I agree that would would have kept the US, Britain, and Canada from pulling it off. However, the war was already lost at that point. The Russians could have done it all by themselves. (And, even if there was no D-Day, the US+Britain would be able to do mighty destruction to German air power, and could have destroyed many German cities through fire-bombing.)
As for Russia, that one was closer. You might have helped them capture Moscow in Oct or Nov 1941 but I don't think that would have been enough to win the war. (Maybe Moscow + Leningrad, but it's not clear they had the manpower to do that one).
In reality, once Hitler learned how massive the Russian forces really were he was on record as saying he would have never done the invasion in the first place. With no Barbarossa, he could have eliminated Britain but that doesn't win him the war.
As for Japan? How the hell could Japan have pulled off any occupation of America? Way too small a nation. Wasn't even their goal. They hoped to cripple the American fleet and thought the Americans would sue for an immediate and generous peace treaty with them. Oooops!
As to the Pacific, there are a number of pieces of intel that could have made a difference. Location of the US carriers at the time of the attack. Location and relative weakness of the fleet at Midway and Coral Sea. Relative weakness of the forces in Hawaii would have made capture and occupation possible again denying us reasonable access as a jumping off point for that theatre.
Unfortunately war, any war, is filled with "if only I had knowns" that could change the outcome or at least the course of the conflict. Unfortunately of late even good intel would not have affected our actions since some assholes only accept that which fits the decisions they already made. You can figure out who I'm speaking of, I'm sure.
Say the US lost their entire Pacific fleet. No biggie, they just build another.
Pacific - you can't win a war with just a fleet. You need to be able to put boots on the ground and from here supplying an invasion would have been virtually impossible.
But I do agree, partially, if the definition of winning is weakened to just mean defeating Britain, it could have been done by the Germans with time. Doesn't help with the US or Russia though.
(ignore)
Dougster, I would not such harsh language as Clubman2 did, but for whatever it is worth, I do agree with the general tenor of his remarks. Consider just one huge blunder you made: stating that Japan would not have been able to successfully occcupy America. (False premise) Read some some history, Dougster. Japan had NEVER had any interest in occupying America, or even in "DEFEATING" America. The objective of Pearl Harbor attack was to take out the American Pacific Fleet, and then consolidating their gains in the eastern Pacific region without pesky interference from America. The militarists took a huge gamble and ultimately lost. Hard to predict WHAT would have happened in the Pacific if the Japanese Battle Plan for Midway had succeeded. There is a book "Miracle at Midway" which convinced me that America was VERY LUCKY to achieve our tremendous victory at Midway. If the Japanese had sunk the American carriers instead of vice versa, it is possible that America would not have been able to prevent Japan from consolidating its Pacific conquests. There are so many imponderables and unknowns....
"As for Japan? How the hell could Japan have pulled off any occupation of America? Way too small a nation.
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Wasn't even their goal. They hoped to cripple the American fleet and thought the Americans would sue for an immediate and generous peace treaty with them.
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Oooops!"
Now, I say that even if the Japanese had completely sunk the entire US pacific fleet, America would never have given them a peace treaty. They would have had to occupy the US itself to keep the US from rebuilding a navy and eventually flattening them. That's what it would have taken. And was just plain impossible.
Roosevelt was just dying to get into WWII. Heck, some even argue that he provoked the war with Japan, or knew about Pearl Harbor but did not do all he could to prevent it. (I don't completely buy this argument but it is odd which Japanese codes were broken, and, how there was a little gap around Pearl Harbor time when this was not the case. But I'll just go with the official story of coincidence.)
The Japanese had a real bad read on America. No way they could have ever have won that war.
So unless CG is suggesting something super fanciful, like he goes back and tells them their codes have been cracked, which ones would be secure, how to build an atomic bomb, etc.
But I'm sure that's not what he meant though. So let's have him comment.
Biological weapons of mass destruction? A sweet deal for Mexico after softening America up? Dirty bombs? Heck, there is even some propaganda that Britain has a chemical weapon where a teaspoon can wipe out a major city.
Of course, I remember the phoney blaoney stories about Dioxin where a couple tablespoons could wipe out a city. That silliness wore down to zilch after a few patriots were caught with 17 pounds of Dioxin. Of course, the Feds were laughing their asses off for the most part. It wouldn't have surprised me if the Dioxin was so relatively harmless that one could get dusted with it without dying.
I don't think a lot people realize exactly how tenuous the Allied position in 1942 was...they got a LOT of good breaks for their side...Midway, Guadalcanal, Taranto, Oran Algeria, El Alamein, Stalingrad (which was a big, huge waste of German resources that one could have warned them off of)...all of which could have gone either way for either side.
It's all moot now though...
Keep grapsing at straws there "how"...it's tough when your side's going down the crapper real fast eh??
It is hilarious to say "if I could go back...." for anything. I'd then say to that poster "if I could go back to before you were born, I'd make it so your parents wouldn't meet...then you couldn't go back and change the war...but then someone else can go back and fix me before I do that..." and so on. War has existed since the beginning of time and will continue to exist. Most of the time it progresses the species one way or the other. Treaties are signed, alliances are made and (albiet years down the road) most involved parties end up progressing. We are in the first few generations who want to re-write history so that we lose or so that we never enter the conflict at all. If WWII never invloved the US or if we did indeed settle up with Japan and lay low, Europe would be a shambles (Hitler's vision would have imploded on itself within a few years)and the US would have been a much weaker country so many of the advances we have made might never have come to be (don't forget, for better or worse we are the most technologicly advanced country in the world and one of the few that have a true operational democracy). Who knows what kind of shambles the earth would be in now. Do you think Japan or Germany or Russia would have treated us well after winning a war (or if we surrendered before one got started)?
Let's say you do away with war throughout the centuries....No Egypt, no Roman Empire, no expansion into Europe and over the Atlantic, no discovery of America, no Revolutionary War, no USA. I'm not saying War is good, only that it has to be. And since there will always be some amount of war, you have to do the best thing you can do to end the war, which is to win it as soon as possible and that means losing men and women on both sides. Until there is something to either totally unite the planet (doomsday, alien invasion, asteroid...whatever) there will be war...period. Wanting to go back and change what happened is just stupid. If you could go back and change anything, go back with a gun and take out a few key religious leaders throughout the centuries, since religion is at the heart of most conflicts (including the current one in Iraq).
That's my 2 cents....and that's all it's worth, keep the change if you don't agree.
SMEGMA!!
Probably he was just proposing it as an hypothetical example in strategic thinking and/or thinks he has a take on this "what if" question that hasn't been considered before.
It already is in deep shit.
Only in your imagination is anyone of this thread suggesting they wanted the Axis to win, let alone Bin Laden/Hussein.
Take a valium and chill!