Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Hunter's Campfire Fat Man Bomb - Nagasaki

The Japs were also training millions of civilians to fight. They had plenty of bodies to spare. They had no guns, though, just pitch forks, sticks, and other hand tools. They were going to be used for mass suicide attacks to try to overrun our troops by sheer numbers. Think about being in a unit of 1000 men. You're attacked by 30 to 40,000 in a mass charge. You can't reload and shoot fast enough to stop them before you're overrun and beaten to death.

To strike decisively against the Japanese, without the loss of American life, to bring the war to an end, the choice was obvious.

And they will be torn down and scrapped out in the name of political correctness by a mob of Asian Lives Matter.

Yep. As I understand it, the rest of the bomb vaporizes.

One of my former bosses was a survivor of the Bataan Death March. A kind and spiritual man, but didn't have anything good to say about his captors.

Well, when all was said and done, you could at least stroll along the pier in Oahu on a Sunday morning without being burned to death by evil people.

That museum alone is worth a trip to DC.

I gets dispersed with the rest of the bomb materials. It is not a significant contributor to the radiological hazard from fallout.

It's even better for your side if you can write it. Even re-write it. We are seeing that now in our own internal politics. Winner take all.

Actually the Chinese did this in Korea and it didn't go well for them with mass charges into fixed positions. Semiautomatic rifles, full auto BAR's belt fed air & water cooled machine guns and artillery with proximity fuses caused horrendous casualties for the Chinese troops. The banzai charges by armed Japanese troops were repulsed later on in the Pacific campaign and I don't think that massed charges by civilians armed with spears and pitchforks would have ended differently. Add in armor support and close air support with airplanes using 50 caliber machineguns and napalm and it would have been very gruesome. Americans would have suffered heavy casualties but the outcome would still be the same. Take a look at how the Soviet tanks and troops tore through Japanese forces in Manchuria in August of 1945.

I just finished the book "Twilight of the Gods" great series about the Pacific war.Even after the second bomb the Japan's army almost had a coup to keep fighting.I think an estimate of a million allied lives would have been sacrificed is pretty conservative.

The bombs ended the war and that was a good thing for the U.S. However, since then we rebuild japan for them and apologized 400 times to them for using the big hammer. Those two events opened the door to a nuclear deterrent that many countries have today. But, I do not regret the use of those bombs for a single minute.Right tool, right job. right time. Statement was made and entire world heard it!

Was the second bomb fusion or fission? Is it true that the Physicists were not sure if they were going to
be able to control the reaction, and possibly incinerate the planet?

Both of the atomic bombs that were used against Japan were fission weapons. There was talk among some (likely jokingly) that the explosion would ignite the atmosphere.

Most of what the Japanese did with infantry in WWII was horribly inefficient and ineffective. Take Guadacanal, and leave off the Banzai charges. One of their favorite tactics was to take a few highly motivated soldiers in the dead of night and try to infiltrate our positions. They might have a grenade or just a trench knife. It scared the piss out of everyone but most of these infiltrators were killed by our guys before they caused any harm. It was mostly a senseless waste. Another was jungle ambushes. They were good at setting them up, but they got to be fairly predictable. We also quickly figured out that once contact was made, we'd just fall back a bit and either lob mortar or automatic weapons in. They might get one or two casualties inflicted, but we'd bag the whole lot.

Another thing I picked up from reading a memoir of an infantry sniper at Guadacanal was that the Marines pulled out before the real killing started. The Japs had no clue how to respond to artillery, and wherever and whenever we could, we'd make contact with the Japs and then soak the area with Arty. I'm not trying to throw shade on the Marines, but it was the Army that did the bulk of the actual killing. They had the tools for wholesale slaughter.

Another thing to consider is that the US learned from all its mistakes. We generally improved our way of doing things over the course of the conflict. We responded to our own weaknesses and worked them out before the next landing. Japan did not have that. They'd been fighting us for years, sending horribly ill-supplied, woefully small numbers at us and when it all fell in on them, everyone would commit suicide and the process would repeat. At no time was there any commander limping back to tell his superiors "Hey, guys! We really screwed the pooch on this last one. Here's what we need to do next time."

It wasn't a joke. They were dead serious:

https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/cross-check/bethe-teller-trinity-and-the-end-of-earth/

Well, at least some of them weren't treating it as a joke.

I believe I recall reading that the US was close to being out of money to continue prosecuting
the war, and this played heavy in the decision making as well. Sounds ridiculous given how they
operate these days, but I think cash was beginning to be a bit of a concern in 1945.

A comparison of a mass attack by Jap troops or civilians might be found in the battle Rorke's Drift in So. Africa in 1876. 3 to 4,000 Zulu's armed with spears tried a mass attack on a British fort defended by about 150 soldiers with muzzle loaders. Discipline won the battle for the Brits. Even with flinters, they were able to hold off the attack by maintaining a steady rate of aimed fire directly into the faces of the attackers. You can imagine the fear experienced by the Brits but they held their ground and won.

1) They weren't flintlocks Muzzleloaders. They were Martini Henry rifles with brass cartridges.
2) In an invasion of Japan we would have taken the place of the Zulu. We would be attacking well defended positions. A well-defended position has about a 3 to 1 advantage over the attackers.

A friend showed me photos he took at Iwo Jima (IIRC) with literally hundreds of Japanese bodies from a Banzai attack. Amazing photos.