Overnight Open Thread (8-6-2014)–Surprise Early Edition

69 Years Ago Today: The Bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki

And just six days ago the last surviving member of the Enola Gay's crew, Theodore VanKirk, died.

Here is an article on the men of the Enola Gay as well as the last surviving crewmen of the bombings as of last year.

One of them was Harold Agnew, a Manhattan Project physicist who was a scientific observer on the Hiroshima bombing. Here he is pictured in 1945 holding the core to the Nagasaki bomb.

Later he would go on to become director of the Los Alamos National Laboratory as well as a state senator for New Mexico. He died last September at the age of 92. But a few years before that he was interviewed as part of a Japanese documentary and confronted by a Japanese survivor of Hiroshima. Clearly the producers wanted him to apologize to her for his part in the bombing, but Agnew was having none of that - and explained exactly why.

And here is unedited footage of the Nagasaki bomb, "Fat Man", being prepped and exploding.

I've personally stood on the spot right below where this bomb went off and other than the memorials and preserved wreckage there's no sign at all that a nuclear bomb went off there. Nearby is the Nagasaki Atomic Bomb Museum which is both fascinating and horrifying.

There is a room filled with clocks and watches all stopped exactly at 11:02 and a room full of human shadows permanently burned into stones by the actinic light of the blast along with examples of pretty much every horrible thing that can happen to human flesh exposed to an atomic explosion. Grisly but a must visit if you're ever in the area. The museum wasn't preachy except for vague calls for a peace and an implication that death by atomic bomb is somehow uniquely horrible when compared to the 'normal' brutalities of war.

After a stroll through the museum it would be easy to condemn the use of the atomic bombs in the war, but to fully judge their use it would be necessary to consider what the outcome of not dropping the bombs would have been. And here the historical accounts and personal experiences of men like EB Sledge and Robert Leckie are in near universal agreement: An invasion of Japan would have been a horrific, epic bloodbath that would resulted in the deaths of millions of soldiers and civilians.

Paul Fussell said it best in his famous 1981 article, "Thank God For the Atomic Bomb". The entire thing is worth reading but here is a small sample:

Arthur T. Hadley said recently that those for whom the use of the A-bomb was "wrong" seem to be implying "that it would have been better to allow thousands on thousands of American and Japanese infantrymen to die in honest hand-to-hand combat on the beaches than to drop those two bombs." People holding such views, he notes, "do not come from the ranks of society that produce infantrymen or pilots."

...On the other hand, John Kenneth Galbraith is persuaded that the Japanese would have surrendered surely by November without an invasion. He thinks the A-bombs were unnecessary and unjustified because the war was ending anyway. The A-bombs meant, he says, "a difference, at most, of two or three weeks." But at the time, with no indication that surrender was on the way, the kamikazes were sinking American vessels, the Indianapolis was sunk (880 men killed), and Allied casualties were running to over 7,000 per week.  "Two or three weeks," says Galbraith.

Two weeks more means 14,000 more killed and wounded, three weeks more, 21,000. Those weeks mean the world if you're one of those thousands or related to one of them. During the time between the dropping of the Nagasaki bomb on August 9 and the actual surrender on the fifteenth, the war pursued its accustomed course: on the twelfth of August eight captured American fliers were executed (heads chopped off); the fifty-first United States submarine, Bonefish, was sunk (all aboard drowned); the destroyer Callaghan went down, the seventieth to be sunk, and the Destroyer Escort Underhill was lost. That's a bit of what happened in six days of the two or three weeks posited by Galbraith. What did he do in the war? He worked in the Office of Price Administration in Washington. I don't demand that he experience having his ass shot off. I merely note that he didn't.

Matt Yglesias Voxplains: Hey Let's Get Rid of Time Zones

They were a good idea at the time, but in the modern world they cause more trouble than they are worth. Now that several generations of humanity are accustomed to abstracting time away from the happenstance of where the sun is located, it's time to do away with this barbarous relic of the past. Everyone on the planet should operate according to a single time - Greenwich Mean Time would be suggested by tradition - and then local schedules could differ from place to place according to personal taste and local practicality.

Jonah Goldberg: How WWI Ruined Everything

But the truth is that almost no modern event can hold a candle to it. George Kennan observed that when studying the maladies of the 20th century, "all the lines of inquiry lead back to World War I." A century from now, people might say the same thing of the past two centuries.

..."I believe it is no exaggeration," wrote sociologist Robert Nisbet, "to say that the West's first real experience with totalitarianism - political absolutism extended into every possible area of culture and society, education, religion, industry, the arts, local community and family included, with a kind of terror always waiting in the wings - came with the American war state under Woodrow Wilson."

The White House's Summary of the Second Amendment

"The Second Amendment gives citizens the right to bear arms."

Democratic Operative Declares Kentucky an Asian-free Zone

You know just like the ONT. :-)

The 1937 Game

British Soldiers' Kits From 1066 to 2014

Hipster or Civil War Soldier?

Sadly There Were No Hobbits

Crowd Lifts Train To Rescue Stuck Man

An Australian man failed to mind the gap.

The Group knows what you did.

Tonight's post brought to you by store owners defending their businesses during the 1992 LA riots:

Notice: Posted while everyone is distracted. Send tips and insider information to Ace.

posted by Maetenloch at 08:21 PM

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