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FrensaGeran posted:Did the Japanese have any knowledge before Hiroshima that the U.S. or any WW2 power was developing a nuclear weapon, or did it come completely out of the blue with pun marginally intended? It was known that nuclear weapons were possible so it wasn't like they pulled out a death ray or orbital ion cannon. I don't think anyone really had a good idea where anyone else's program was though.
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Aug 18, 2015 14:17
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C.M. Kruger posted:Off the top of my head the Canadians burnt down a entire town and then used bulldozers to use the rubble to make roads for their tanks after a rumor spread that their commanding officer had been killed by a German civilian. (he had actually been killed by a German soldier hiding in a farmhouse) That's the only really notable example I can think of. I'm trying to track down the resource but I'm locked out of the public resource I used until next semester, had to write a short paper on it. The only instance I can immediately recall offhand was in occupied German territory before the surrender where some town was destroyed via artillery after being evacuated as punishment for spying. And yeah the SHAEF is really unpleasant in hindsight, it didn't help they based it off the SS playbook for counter-insurgency as well. Had either Japan or Germany offered resistance to being occupied it would have gotten real goddamn ugly real fast.
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Aug 18, 2015 15:25
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Bolow posted:It depends what you want to classify as a military benefit. If we're talking about raw materiel and war fighting capability reductions than no, the strategic bombing campaign was a failure by every possible metric. As a weapon of terror, it was extremely effective. It took the US almost an entire month to establish their occupation forces after Japan finally capitulated, in the interim they flew low level B-25 flights to scare the poo poo out of the locals and serve as a warning. Basically "if you try to oppose this occupation we will bomb the poo poo out of you indiscriminately". Also there was no side benefit of the bombing raids drawing out the Japanese Air Force for it to be bled dry as it was in Europe. The thing about the strategic bombing campaigns is that while they failed at their original objectives of completely destroying Germany/Japan's industry and will to fight, I'd seriously disagree with the statement that it was a failure by "Every possible metric". In the case of Germany, their industry took extraordinary damage throughout the campaign, and part shortages greatly contributed to the ever-decreasing reliability of their weapons and AFVs on the frontline. There were even instances where strategic bombing could have utterly crippled German industry had allied planners managed to follow up on particularly successful strikes (Such as the bombing of the Ruhr dams). Japan was obviously a very different target from Germany with a much less developed industry that was harder to target effectively without wiping out the entire city (Which is what the USAAF obviously started doing), but it's undeniable that their ability to prosecute the war was severely diminished by the damage caused by strategic bombing. Was it worth it in the sheer human and material cost? That's a much harder question to answer, and not one that can be answered definitively.
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Aug 18, 2015 17:06
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In both cases the need to defend every major city and industry/transport hub also shifted a massive amount of resources and troops away from the front lines. Germany had to build tens of thousands of large caliber AAA guns and mountains of ammo to keep them firing, for example. They dedicated over a million people to crewing and supplying them.
Warbadger fucked around with this message at 17:51 on Aug 18, 2015 |
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Aug 18, 2015 17:47
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Warbadger posted:In both cases the need to defend every major city and industry/transport hub also shifted a massive amount of resources and troops away from the front lines. Germany had to build tens of thousands of large caliber AAA guns and mountains of ammo to keep them firing, for example. They dedicated over a million people to crewing and supplying them. Did the Japanese actually do this, though? I was under the impression that they simply didn't bother defending their cities very much, because we only started firebombing them very late in the war, at night, after we had stomped the poo poo out of them militarily.
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Aug 18, 2015 17:59
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Sergg posted:Did the Japanese actually do this, though? I was under the impression that they simply didn't bother defending their cities very much, because we only started firebombing them very late in the war, at night, after we had stomped the poo poo out of them militarily. The Japanese air forces, both army and navy were mostly done by this point and they lacked night fighters that would provide any kind of defense against the kind of raids for much of 1945. Even in daylight high altitude raids, the Japanese air defenses weren't very effective. Unlike in Germany where strategic bombing provided attritional pressure against the Luftwaffe(even unescorted B17s took their toll), Japan had already had attritional pressure applied in the Solomons and their results in conventional air operations in 1944 and 1945 were very poor.
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Aug 18, 2015 18:05
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The Japanese wanted to and tried to defend their cities against air attack, they were just very ineffective at it compared to the Germans because of how much worse off their armed forces were by the time the bombing campaign over the Home Islands really got into gear. But don't mistake ineffectiveness for unwillingness.
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Aug 18, 2015 18:11
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Was the Japanese land-based air force much to write home about for the U.S.? Their good pilots that we encountered were pretty much all attached to the IJN and they got annihilated over the course of the war, i.e. the Great Marianas Turkey Shoot.C.M. Kruger posted:I think somebody said earlier in the thread that their scientists had confirmed it was a nuclear bomb within a couple days of Hiroshima, but believed it would take the US at least a year to make another one. I can't find the source at the moment, but I want to say the assumption of Japanese command after Hiroshima was that if it had taken 4 years of war for the U.S. to drop a nuke, it'd take another 4 years for nuke #2. So Nagasaki three days later came as a serious wake-up call.
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Aug 18, 2015 19:14
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This poster loves police brutality, but only when its against minorities!
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Sergg posted:Did the Japanese actually do this, though? I was under the impression that they simply didn't bother defending their cities very much, because we only started firebombing them very late in the war, at night, after we had stomped the poo poo out of them militarily. I think he was talking just about Germany there.
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Aug 18, 2015 19:16
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FrensaGeran posted:That sounds like tertiary source mumbo jumbo. Nope. The concept of nuclear weapons existed prior to World War 2, but the mechanism and the way to do it was unknown. Ni-Go and F-Go were both serious project investigating nuclear weapons in Japan, but were back burner projects, and got even less attention than the German program.
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Aug 18, 2015 19:20
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FrensaGeran posted:Did the Japanese have any knowledge before Hiroshima that the U.S. or any WW2 power was developing a nuclear weapon, or did it come completely out of the blue with pun marginally intended? Yes. They didn't know the entire details of the Manhattan project, but they knew there was development project. They also likely knew of Germany's program and had their own going.
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Aug 18, 2015 19:57
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DeusExMachinima posted:I can't find the source at the moment, but I want to say the assumption of Japanese command after Hiroshima was that if it had taken 4 years of war for the U.S. to drop a nuke, it'd take another 4 years for nuke #2. So Nagasaki three days later came as a serious wake-up call.
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Aug 18, 2015 19:59
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A Buttery Pastry posted:Must have been a serious case of wishful thinking. Like, even if you assume the Americans had already perfected the design when the war in the Pacific started, and had spent those 4 years just acquiring enough materials to create one more bomb, logic would dictate that America's nuke producing capability would be constantly growing over that period, which would mean the next bomb would be ready sooner than 4 years after the first. Not that the Japanese needed it to take 4 more years, but still. Yeah, the people saying that Japan thought the US wouldn't have another bomb for at least a year or four I've never seen that referenced, and the only time I've seen referenced (and I wish I could remember exactly where to point to) with regards to how soon they thought the next US bomb would be ready was something like 3-4 months after Hiroshima, which they thought would be more than enough time to negotiate conditions other than unconditional surrender. IIRC it was someone in the JIN but I don't remember if it was the chief of staff or the minister of the navy, but they absolutely thought 3-4 months and definitely not 3 days. The funny thing was they were actually sort of right with the 3-4 months part since the US didn't have another functional bomb until close to the end of 45 after fat man was dropped, it's just that the US had an initial 3 bombs as opposed to the 2 Japan thought we would have.
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Aug 18, 2015 20:20
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A Winner is Jew posted:Yeah, the people saying that Japan thought the US wouldn't have another bomb for at least a year or four I've never seen that referenced, and the only time I've seen referenced (and I wish I could remember exactly where to point to) with regards to how soon they thought the next US bomb would be ready was something like 3-4 months after Hiroshima, which they thought would be more than enough time to negotiate conditions other than unconditional surrender. IIRC it was someone in the JIN but I don't remember if it was the chief of staff or the minister of the navy, but they absolutely thought 3-4 months and definitely not 3 days.
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Aug 18, 2015 20:26
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DeusExMachinima posted:Was the Japanese land-based air force much to write home about for the U.S.? Their good pilots that we encountered were pretty much all attached to the IJN and they got annihilated over the course of the war, i.e. the Great Marianas Turkey Shoot. They barely had any aircraft capable of intercepting B-29's and lacked the higher octane fuel to make them perform even remotely close to spec at that altitude. The poo poo tier fuel really hampered aircraft performance on both the German and Japanese side. It's why some of the aviation testing we did during the war was heavily skewed towards the enemy, because we were putting in 130-150 octane fuel while the other side only had 87-90. The gap narrowed on the German side as they were capable of producing the same quality fuel as the US by wars end but they weren't able to produce it in any quantity. Japan had lovely gas from day 1
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Aug 18, 2015 20:28
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Bolow posted:They barely had any aircraft capable of intercepting B-29's and lacked the higher octane fuel to make them perform even remotely close to spec at that altitude. The poo poo tier fuel really hampered aircraft performance on both the German and Japanese side. It's why some of the aviation testing we did during the war was heavily skewed towards the enemy, because we were putting in 130-150 octane fuel while the other side only had 87-90. The gap narrowed on the German side as they were capable of producing the same quality fuel as the US by wars end but they weren't able to produce it in any quantity. Japan had lovely gas from day 1 Even worse: They didn't have the pilots either.
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Aug 18, 2015 20:34
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Hair Is Spiders posted:Yes. The Japanese didn't have any world-class physicists working on their project. Germany had one in Heisenberg. The US had a veritable murderer's row of the best physicists in the world working on theirs with a full-time support staff of 130,000.
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Aug 18, 2015 21:45
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Zeroisanumber posted:The Japanese didn't have any world-class physicists working on their project. Germany had one in Heisenberg. The US had a veritable murderer's row of the best physicists in the world working on theirs with a full-time support staff of 130,000. Also safely tucked in the heart of North America away from any conceivable front-line.
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Aug 18, 2015 21:45
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Zeroisanumber posted:The Japanese didn't have any world-class physicists working on their project. Germany had one in Heisenberg. The US had a veritable murderer's row of the best physicists in the world working on theirs with a full-time support staff of 130,000. The Nazis also nearly declared nuclear science a jewish, non-german science (seriously, the effort came close to succeeding) so the failure of their nuclear program was not exactly shocking.
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Aug 18, 2015 21:48
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And also the only known suitable places to extract uranium at the time (Congo, Colorado, Northern Canada, Czechoslovakia(?)) were all far out of Japanese hands.
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Aug 18, 2015 21:57
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Zeroisanumber posted:The Japanese didn't have any world-class physicists working on their project. Germany had one in Heisenberg. The US had a veritable murderer's row of the best physicists in the world working on theirs with a full-time support staff of 130,000. Uhhhhhhh.... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yoshio_Nishina
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Aug 18, 2015 22:00
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I'm embarrassed by my ignorance, but I'm gonna go ahead and admit that I've never heard of Dr. Nishina.
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Aug 18, 2015 22:04
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No offense but if our bar is Heisenberg then, based on that Wikipedia article, Nishima does not qualify. He has more in common with the secondary physicists involved in the German and allied bomb projects.
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Aug 18, 2015 22:13
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Does anybody remember an essay about Hiroshima from a few years ago that had a cool part about Truman being 'obsessed with death' or something like that? It was probably posted on LF.
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Aug 18, 2015 22:22
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Panzeh posted:The Japanese air forces, both army and navy were mostly done by this point and they lacked night fighters that would provide any kind of defense against the kind of raids for much of 1945. Even in daylight high altitude raids, the Japanese air defenses weren't very effective. Unlike in Germany where strategic bombing provided attritional pressure against the Luftwaffe(even unescorted B17s took their toll), Japan had already had attritional pressure applied in the Solomons and their results in conventional air operations in 1944 and 1945 were very poor. Wait so the firebombing did nothing but kill lots of civilians in order to pressure the Japanese leadership to end the war?
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Aug 18, 2015 22:47
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Sergg posted:Wait so the firebombing did nothing but kill lots of civilians in order to pressure the Japanese leadership to end the war? The firebombing disrupted industry, logistics, and forced the government to deal with millions of displaced people in addition to killing lots of civilians.
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Aug 18, 2015 22:49
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I had never heard of this guy, either. I also wasn't aware of Heisenberg working on the bomb for Germany, for some reason I thought he defected.
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Aug 18, 2015 23:06
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Sergg posted:Wait so the firebombing did nothing but kill lots of civilians in order to pressure the Japanese leadership to end the war? How do you get from "we murderized anything flying with a rising sun on the tail for 3 years" to "there were literally no targets of military-industrial value on the ground"? Cliff Racer posted:No offense but if our bar is Heisenberg then, based on that Wikipedia article, Nishima does not qualify. He has more in common with the secondary physicists involved in the German and allied bomb projects. Tezzor and/or Effectronica will be along soon to let you know how anti-Asian and racist you are for thinking that. You probably think their minds were inferior or something  IIRC the Japanese concentrated resources that would've gone into nuclear research into naval radar instead which was a valuable technology as well but they didn't really put that into practice to the degree of effectiveness the U.S. did either... DeusExMachinima fucked around with this message at 23:12 on Aug 18, 2015 |
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Aug 18, 2015 23:08
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Zeroisanumber posted:The firebombing disrupted industry, logistics, and forced the government to deal with millions of displaced people in addition to killing lots of civilians. In terms of strategic bombing, the British night raids on Germany were far less effective than US daytime raids, though they did incur fewer losses. Night time strategic bombing in ww2 was probably a disproportionately civilian-targeting approach to bombing. The reason the Allies didn't pursue daylight bombing on Japan so much is because at the b-29's super high altitude bombs were horrifically inaccurate to the point of having difficulty hitting a city-sized area. This was demonstrated in 1944 and early 1945. I do think that firebombing cities was probably an act akin to slaughtering all the men of a town to root out partisans- that there are definitely partisans does not justify indiscriminate killing in that way.
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Aug 19, 2015 00:39
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FrensaGeran posted:Did the Japanese have any knowledge before Hiroshima that the U.S. or any WW2 power was developing a nuclear weapon, or did it come completely out of the blue with pun marginally intended? Richard Rhodes, in the books The Making of the Atomic Bomb and Dark Sun: The Making of the Hydrogen Bomb cover the history of atom bomb and h-bomb projects. Because Dark Sun includes previously secret information from the Soviet Union (after it collapsed), it includes some updates on early atom bomb projects and should be read right after the first book. From those books, you will learn that Japan had their own atomic bomb project. The facility in Tokyo was working on chemical separation of uranium (which is usually mocked as "futile" because you can't separate the isotopes chemically). The project located in what is now called North Korea included hydroelectric plants and the Japanese version of Hanford Nuclear Reservation. This facility was located near Chosin Reservoir and was where some of the fiercest fighting happened during the Korean War. From these books, you will also learn that spies at Los Alamos were leaking information about the atom bomb project to the Japanese. I vaguely remember Rhodes fingering some Spanish folks as agents/dupes of the Japanese. I seem to remember that his conclusion was that every nations' atom bomb project came from Los Alamos, but every nations' hydrogen bomb was developed on their own (mostly because folks started taking security seriously). C.M. Kruger posted:As I recall they hadn't made fundamental mistakes in their math like the Germans (who, IIRC, believed the bomb would need to be the size of a house), but had only begun extracting small amounts of uranium in 1945. They had also requested a shipment of uranium yellowcake from Germany via submarine. Heisenburg miscalculated the "mean free path" of a neutron in uranium and concluded that an atom bomb would need approximately all of the at-that-time-known uranium 235 on Earth (something like 2000 tons for a critical mass instead of the real-life number of 33 pounds/15 kg needed) . No one corrected him. All the scientists who would have done so had already fled to America. Also, they were Jewish and would not have been believed (more likely sent to the gas chambers several years prior). In a perverted coincidence of fate, that shipment of uranium was sent on a U-Boat numbered U-234. U-235 is the isotope used to fuel nuclear reactors and make primitive nuclear weapons. U-238 is the non-fissile version that is more commonly known as "depleted uranium" (once the fissile stuff has been separated out) and used in A-10 attack aircraft. While U-234 is itself fissile, it is too rare to be good for anything and it exists as part of the natural decay of U-238 into lead. Any of it that exists in fuel rods will be converted via neutron capture into U-235 where it will decay into the more commonly known daughter products. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_submarine_U-234 As for the firebombings, much of Japanese industry depended on piece-work. So a lot of manufacturing of subcomponents would be done in small shops or in residences. It wasn't like SimCity where you have industrial districts separated from residential districts. The particular cultural style of construction was wooden frame buildings. These were very hardy in earthquakes. Pro: flexible enough to survive weak quakes, light enough that if they do fall, can be excavated by manual labor. Cons: Firewood. A particular quirk of Japanese firefighter macho-bullshit was to have one of the firefighters stand with a banner that basically proclaimed "we aren't letting the fire past this point". The fires were so bad that these firefighters would end up wounded or killed by the fires that spread past the line they drew. Their macho was so bullshit that they'd stand in place until they were injured or killed by the advancing fire, reducing the numbers of trained (or semi-trained) firefighters. Someone used the word "honor golem". I think that fits.
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Aug 19, 2015 00:53
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mrs. nicholas sarkozy posted:Does anybody remember an essay about Hiroshima from a few years ago that had a cool part about Truman being 'obsessed with death' or something like that? It was probably posted on LF. It's probably this.
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Aug 19, 2015 01:50
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Zeroisanumber posted:The firebombing disrupted industry, logistics, and forced the government to deal with millions of displaced people in addition to killing lots of civilians. Yeah but you can do that a lot more efficiently than hurling 500 bombers at a city and hoping at least 1% of the bombs drop hit their target. There's a reason LeMay pushed for more accurate bombing post-war because the large scale strategic bombing is barely worth it for the amount of materiel it takes vs the amount of damage you can do.
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Aug 19, 2015 02:16
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Thank you, that's it.
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Aug 19, 2015 02:21
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Rand alPaul posted:I had never heard of this guy, either. I also wasn't aware of Heisenberg working on the bomb for Germany, for some reason I thought he defected. Well, Heisenberg was dragging his feet on purpose. Despite staying behind, he was strongly opposed to the Nazi Deutsche Physiks movement.
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Aug 19, 2015 03:18
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You could say he was uncertain about it?
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Aug 19, 2015 03:36
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Sergg posted:Wait so the firebombing did nothing but kill lots of civilians in order to pressure the Japanese leadership to end the war? "Killing lots of civilians" has a military value insofar as forcing the government to deal with the fallout of that much damage being inflicted on infrastructure. The RAF term for it was "dehousing". And yes, there's a bit of chicken-and-egg at play here: the Allies invested a lot into their heavy bomber programs, only to find that they're not nearly as accurate as they hoped they would be, so they rewrote doctrine and rationalized bombing entire cities because that was the one thing that they could reliably hit.
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Aug 19, 2015 05:04
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gradenko_2000 posted:"Killing lots of civilians" has a military value insofar as forcing the government to deal with the fallout of that much damage being inflicted on infrastructure. The RAF term for it was "dehousing". 'dehousing' was more "well, we can't hit the factories, but we can hit where the workers live, so if we 'dehouse' them they can't work in the factories anymore cause they have nowhere to sleep. also, since we can't do daylight raids, we'll dehouse the workers at night while they are sleeping...in that house. hey look, they can't work in the factories anymore!"
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Aug 19, 2015 13:38
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gradenko_2000 posted:"Killing lots of civilians" has a military value insofar as forcing the government to deal with the fallout of that much damage being inflicted on infrastructure. The RAF term for it was "dehousing". Well, the other problem was that they did try low level bombing which was significantly more accurate. And got slaughtered. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Tidal_Wave
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Aug 19, 2015 13:39
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CommieGIR posted:Well, Heisenberg was dragging his feet on purpose. That was his story. There's a lot of reasons to doubt it though. http://www.nytimes.com/2002/01/07/us/letter-may-solve-nazi-a-bomb-mystery.html
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Aug 19, 2015 20:26
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Panzeh posted:In terms of strategic bombing, the British night raids on Germany were far less effective than US daytime raids, though they did incur fewer losses. Night time strategic bombing in ww2 was probably a disproportionately civilian-targeting approach to bombing. The reason the Allies didn't pursue daylight bombing on Japan so much is because at the b-29's super high altitude bombs were horrifically inaccurate to the point of having difficulty hitting a city-sized area. This was demonstrated in 1944 and early 1945. People get super mad about flying high and bombing inaccurately. There's the Op Tidal Wave counter-example to that, but I think it was Robert McNamara's "Fog of War" that basically said in Europe the 8th Air Force let bomber crews go home after 25 missions. There was a reason for this. Basically the AAF calculated (this was McNamara's job in WW2) that you had a 4% loss rate per mission, so their logic was that if you send a given bomber crew out there 25 times... Not many crews made it that far. I know that Hell's Angels, Hot Stuff, and Memphis Belle did, but not many. Basically once you were assigned to a bomber crew you hoped the war ended before your luck did. And that was with high flying tactics. So when B-29s let them fly even higher than before, they loving jumped at the chance to do just that. DeusExMachinima fucked around with this message at 04:49 on Aug 20, 2015 |
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Aug 20, 2015 04:44
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