14 comments

  1. World War 2 had a beginning and an end. When has that happened since? We just left Vietnam, Korea was not really resolved, and now we have been in Afghanistan for how long?

    You would almost think someone wants to keep us fighting someone or something somewhere continually.

    1. WWII was our last actual declared war. The more recent conflicts have been police actions or some such without the resolve required for absolute victory.

  2. v^ That’s the result of “proportionate response” doctrine rather than “Fuck them, they started it, so raze their cities, burn their farms and kill them all.”
    And “proportionate response” is probably because the nuke genie is out of the bottle.

  3. I may have posted this previously; apologies for possible redundancy. I highly recommend The Making Of The Atomic Bomb by Richard Rhodes. Exceptionally well done narrative of the Manhattan Project. He’s able to dumb down the science enough that even a maroon like me can wrap his pea brain around it, without making me feel like an idiot. He’s quite a good writer & it often reads like a novel. His account of the commando raid on the Kraut heavy water facility (in Norway, I think) is something Tom Clancy could’ve penned.

    1. I concur completely with this and would also recommend the sequel, “Dark Sun: The Making of the Hydrogen Bomb” also by Rhodes.

      The fact that Rhodes could make nuclear physics comprehensible to someone who literally took the LEAST amount of math and science needed to graduate college (me) should tell you something about his skills as a writer.

      Both books also heavily detail the extent to which the Manhattan Project was thoroughly penetrated by Soviet espionage agents right from the beginning and at least to some extent with the tacit acceptance (if not the active cooperation) of the scientists themselves.

  4. Kudos to my great uncle Satoru, who lost his leg to the bad guys as a member of the 442nd RCT. I was pretty tight with him as a kid, and he NEVER talked about the war. After he died we mobilized a caravan of pickups to move Aunty Shizu into a condo. A box I was carrying broke open & out spilled Uncle Sat’s war memorabilia, including his Purple Heart & Silver Star. Aunty Shizu walked in on me & said “You found the lucky charms!” She explained Uncle Sat felt displaying them would have been vulgar. He saw them as tokens of his stupendous luck & reminders of his brothers who never made it home. Aunty Shizu labeled them lucky charms, a private endearment between the two of them. I’m the 1st member of the family to have ever seen them after he came home, he never even showed them to their daughter.

  5. Having been stationed in Hawaii, I feel connected to the events of that day, even though the occurred 19 years before I was born.

    Many of the buildings on Hickam AFB still are still pock marked from Japanese machine gun and cannon fire.

    I lived on Wheeler AFB, just a couple of blocks of the flight line. And again scars from the attack were still there.

    Most Sunday mornings I was at the Combat Pistol program of the Scholfield Barracks Rod and Gun club. The range was oriented so that we had a great view of the Kole Kole Pass, where part of Japanese carrier strike came in towards their targets at Scholfield Barracks, Wheeler, Hickam and Pearl Harbor.

    One of the most moving moments of my active duty time was administering the re-enlistment oath to my NCOIC on the Arizona Memorial in front of the wall listing those lost that day.

  6. And remember…

    …the little people got bombed and burned while Churchill, Roosevelt, Stalin, and the Immortal Emperor ‘lived like kings’.

    For a thorough background on the instigators and beneficiaries of World War The Second, read SUPERMOB by Russo.
    Can you imagine — everything you know is wrong?

    Hint:
    * the beneficiaries of that mess came out of smelling like a rose… and with their very own freshly-minted nation to boot.

  7. Nit picking, but it’s personal.

    Nagasaki was August 9, not August 6. That was Hiroshima.
    Same day as the Manson murders.
    And Nixon resigning.
    And my wedding.
    And, by coincidence, my divorce being final.

  9. My dad was in the European Theater when the war wound down there and was about to be transferred to the eventual invasion of Japan. His birthday was on August 9th when the second bomb was dropped which ended the fighting a few days later. He always said it was the best birthday present he ever got.

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