Atoms over Japan
The 2nd World War supposedly ended in 1945. Most people alive today weren't then. Our knowledge about it comes from pixel bits and second-hand accounts written well after the fact. The World War is, for all intents and purposes, mythical. Nobody really knows what happened. Oppenheimer is in the cinema now. People are now interested, more than usually, about the use of the first atomic bomb. The movie didn't say that the atomic bomb tested at Los Alamos was not the weapon first used against Hiroshima. The Trinity experiment tested a plutonium bomb. The USA had plenty of plutonium. That plutonium bomb, "Fat Man" was used on Nagasaki. The weapon dropped on Hiroshima was an untested uranium bomb. The two bombs are different mechanically. American Uranium resources were practically non-existent. They didn't have enough uranium to build the bomb and they didn't know how to make it go bang. Luckily for them, a captured German submarine's uranium cargo was used to build "Little Boy" that was dropped on Hiroshima. The same submarine offered up the uranium bomb triggers they needed.
U-234
Unterseeboot 234 was a jumbo transport submarine that surrendered to the American Navy on May 14, 1945. She was on the way to Germany's Japanese ally. Germany had unlimited uranium resources in the once famous Sudetenland (now Czech Republic). On board was 1,200 pounds of uranium oxide and 50 gold-lined cylinders filled with bomb-grade uranium-235. There were fuses for nuclear bomb detonation. The Americans needed those. A few weeks before, Robert Oppenheim informed President Truman that the American bomb wouldn't be ready until November 1945. They didn't know how to make their "gadget" go boom. Now they had triggers from Germany. Eight weeks later, in July and not November, the gadget exploded. The captured German uranium - 235 and triggers that made it work were declared Top Secret and remain so today.
Obviously there is something very immoral about this deception but nobody seems to care. That's why it remains a secret. Nobody talks about it. The official story is the untested uranium bomb was used first because "everybody knew it would work." This is a deception. It worked once with plutonium. Would it work with uranium? Nobody knew. What if it was a dud? What if it landed with a thud in the Hiroshima mud? Then Japan would have America's most advanced technology. In truth "everybody knew it would work" because Nazi Germany had already successfully tested a uranium bomb. This is of course the biggest secret of all. Compliant historians just go along for the ride. * see notes
Benevolent Victors
Another central myth about the bomb was that the United States was forced to use it. Historians all say: the Japanese simply refused to surrender. That's true. Japan refused to surrender because the United States refused to negotiate. They offered no terms. They gave the Japanese one option; unconditional surrender. By this time the Imperial Navy was sunk and its air force shot out of the skies. But the Imperial Army was still intact and a mighty force of seven million men. The Japanese Imperial Army was resilient in a way that is incomprehensible to modern Americans. No Japanese unit of any size ever surrendered in this war. Field Marshall William Slim:
If 500 Japanese were ordered to hold a position, we had to kill 495 till it was ours. And then the last 5 killed themselves.
At this point in the war, 400,000 Asians were killed every month. After Okinawa fell in May 1945, Japan sought to negotiate surrender. They only asked for preservation of the Emperor whose position was regarded as a Devine spiritual incarnation. The Americans wouldn't discuss the issue, or any issue. The Imperial Army resolved to fight it out to the last man, woman and child in Japan. They reckoned to lose 20 million of their own people and force the enemy into a negotiated settlement. Redoubts in the mountains and hills were already prepared. The Soviet invasion of Manchukuo (Manchuria) wasn't a problem. Their plan was to fall back to the mountains in Korea and fight to the last man. They had 8,000 Kamikaze suicide planes and pilots ready. Women and children trained with bamboo spears. The US Army estimated one million American casualties. Marine Major General Graves B. Erskine:
Victory was never in doubt. What was in doubt, in all our minds, was whether there would be any of us left to dedicate our cemetery at the end, or whether the last Marine would die knocking out the last Japanese gun and gunner.
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