It's fascinating to think how many early civilizations or cities may have met a similar fate with the remains just too obliterated to identify / study.
If I'm not misremembering history, then their delay in action - due to the difficulty of getting news of the situation out of the area of destruction - led to the bombing of Nagasaki as well.
It was a bit more complicated than that [0]. There was intense resistance to the Allies' demands for unconditional surrender. Japanese scientists confirmed on the 7th August (the day after the bombing) that Hiroshima had been atom bombed and Nagasaki was bombed on the 9th. The Japanese didn't actually surrender until the 15th August, following a failed coup d'état in which elements of the Army rebelled against the emerging surrender plans [1].
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atomic_bombings_of_Hiroshima_a...
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Surrender_of_Japan#Attempted_c...
According to an ethnic japanese teacher of mine, the Japanese remembered very well how badly it went for them when they tried to invade Mongolia and lost to URSS, and they were more afraid of post-war occupation by URSS than by USA, thus why the surrender became more accepted.
The Emperor singled-out the atomic bombs in his surrender message. Japan was depending on the USSR to mediate a conditional surrender, until they entered the war, which closed that avenue. And the reason the USSR hastily entered the war was because of the atomic bomb, they knew it was about to end. Japan was no doubt very concerned about a second front in the war, but I don't know of any particular fear of the USSR... Japan had soundly defeated a pre-USSR Russia in the Russo-Japanese War.
It's quite possible that they would have endured the USSR joining the war effort, if not for the additional "shock" of the atomic bombs, and Truman's bluff that the US would be dropping one every week...
https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/films/pacific/#t...
Phones / telegrams and cameras existed.
Nagasaki happened 3 days later, I find it hard to believe information couldn't travel that fast.
It didn't take days, but it did take many hours for Tokyo to realize that indeed Hiroshima was devastated in an attack. Some officers even thought it was a traditional bombing raid and that there was a technical issue or even sabotage with their communication lines between Hiroshima and Tokyo. Tho Officer Corps at first had little knowledge to understand that it might have been an atomic attack, and that therefore the war had changed in a very serious manner.
There were confused reports of a large explosion. As others have noted, there was no large observed flight of US/Alied aircraft, was would have been typical of a bombing raid.
It wasn't until the early afternoon that a Japanese Imperial Army aircraft was flown over the city and made the first direct assessment of the damage incurred to those outside the city. It wasn't until the United States Government informed the Japanese via diplomatic cable the next day that it was clear that what had delivered the damage was a new type of weapon.
That initial symptom of loss of communications is actually highly typical of major disasters. For smaller incidents, a more usual problem is that those directly involved simply fail to accept or change their viewpoint to understand what it is that's transpiring. In almost any large disaster, though, a highly consistent consequence is loss of regular or effective means of communications, such that this itself is a fair indication of the scope and scale of a disaster.
Compare for example the HMS Sheffield attack during the Falklands War.
http://www.cddc.vt.edu/host/atomic/hiroshim/hiro_med.html#AT...
https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/1wf9yc/on_disa...
https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/2ab25z/on_disa...
At this point in the war the Americans had been hitting Japanese cities with 300-500 super heavy bomber firebombing raids for four months. After bombing all the major cities the Americans were now well into their list of twenty five smaller 75,000 to 300,000 population cities.
So Hiroshima was just another day in Japan, just another bombed city. The only thing new to the Japanese was that the destruction was from a new kind of bomb, and the following morning an investigation group had been formed.
The Japanese leadership met the following morning, discussed that the city was wiped out via a new bomb, and decided to continue fighting while seeing what kind of better terms they could get before surrendering. Which is what they had been doing for quite some time, and continued to do even as the Soviets declared war on them a few days later.
News of the attack traveled to the Tokyo quickly.
For example, a major Go championship was being played on the outskirts of Hiroshima at the time of the bomb explosion. Although the windows of the building the game were played in were blown out, and one of the players knocked over, gameplay resumed a few hours later and the match was finished. (https://senseis.xmp.net/?AtomicBombGame) It was assumed in Tokyo that day that the players were probably killed, indicating that news of the city being hit had traveled there.
When you see a SINGLE B-29 bomber, you ignore it. Its just a scout, and one bomber can't do much damage... Until Hiroshima happened. Its unbelievable: the "rules" of the war changed overnight, in a dramatic way that no one in the Japanese army could have possibly imagined. Every __SINGLE__ bomber "scout" could in fact be, the next nuclear bomb.
Japan didn't have the resources to fight against singular bombers anymore. They focused only on the groups of bombers. At this point, it was clear that their air-force was soundly defeated.
> Japan didn't have the resources to fight against singular bombers anymore. They focused only on the groups of bombers. At this point, it was clear that their air-force was soundly defeated.
It doesn't really make sense that it is easier to take down 10 bombers than 1, does it?
It sounds like you mean the hypothetical where as many bombers were each sent individual to nuke as many cities that would be harder to defend against, because any bombers that got through would do so much more damage.
So it's important to differential between potential destruction and actual destruction. The firebombings did incontrovertibly more damage, and after the war both governments had reason to not emphasize this.
https://www.toptenz.net/brutal-facts-about-general-curtis-le...
This is not to say anything nice about the Axis powers, but more to dispel the illusion that the American military were some kind of heroic force.
If you fire an imprecise weapon at a group of 10 bombers, your odds of hitting one of them can be up to 10x what it is if the same weapon fired at a single bomber.
If you have limited ammunition, it is therefore sensible to wait for the group of 10 before firing.
So it's important to differential between potential destruction and actual destruction. The firebombings did incontrovertibly more damage, and after the war both governments had reason to not emphasize this.
Yeah. The USA invented a weapon (napalm) specifically intended to target the poorest neighborhoods in Japan. And those neighborhoods were so vulnerable exactly because the Japanese government didn't care about the people living there.
It was much safer to talk about how big and threatening nuclear bombs were.
In 1944, these were largely "strategic" bombers: who had more range than our fighters. I believe they were unescorted (our fighters / carriers simply didn't have enough range yet to provide assistance).
These large "superfortress" bombers may have had machine gun defenses, but they couldn't dodge or dogfight. They were sitting ducks (albeit at higher altitudes than Japanese aircraft could follow, but these superfortresses weren't made for air-superiority... not at all).
This means that if a Japanese fighter / interceptor was most efficient vs these strategic bombing runs. Once you shot down one bomber, you're already to shoot down a 2nd or 3rd. Your most efficient use of fighters was therefore against groups of bombers.
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Its not about the "difficulty" of the task, and more about the "efficiency" of the task. One Ace pilot could kill 2 or 3 bombers during the defense of a city.
But if only 1-bomber "scout" were going somewhere, its just not worth your ace pilot's time or energy. The best they could do is shoot down just one enemy bomber.
Given their heavy defensive armaments, I would not describe that as a 'sitting duck'. As Japan lost the ability to actually put planes in the air, B-29 guns started getting stripped out, because they were no longer necessary.
Yes, they were big targets, but they were also flying quickly, at high altitudes. A fighter only carries so much ammunition, can quickly expend it, and has poor accuracy when shooting at a distant, fast-moving target. Due to the fuel shortages, available fighter loiter time was very low, so it doesn't get more than one, maybe two chances in a sortie to even take a shot at a B-29. And even if some of its shots hit, it's still quite likely that the bomber will make it back home.
If you got shot at early, you simply drop your bombs (maybe over rural farmland) and hit the engines as hard as you can. You wanted to fall into the part of the sea where the US-Navy still controlled the area.
The bombers were flighting high enough that even if they were shot down... there was a chance of being rescued after a crash landing. But the crash landing absolutely had to be outside of the control of the Japanese. As such, more engine power, less guns, more bombs.
Drop the bombs if attacked unexpectedly, and drift towards the Navy.
If all goes well... with a bit of luck, you outrun the enemy on the way back as well. Your plane is much lighter after the payload has been dropped
"...We had decided to take out the guns and gunners to make up for the shortage of airplanes, because it would be another factor in helping increase the bombload. However, if the change to low altitude had been quite a step to take, then going in at low altitude with half a crew was something else!"
The firebombing of Japan was done at low altitude, not high altitude.
Do you have a source on heavy bombers over Japan dropping bombs on farmland and fleeing if attacked? That seems against almost every principal of bomber warfare. Lone bombers are much easier to kill than a formation, and an entire formation jettisoning bombs and abandoning their attack just because a few fighters showed up, or AA fire began is hard for me to comprehend.
I don't think carriers (or carrier air wings) were involved in the bombing of the Japanese mainland. The famous bombing of Tokyo that you reference was all B-29 superfortresses, launched from a land-base in mariana islands.
Superfortresses were so high in altitude, that they couldn't be escorted by typical fighters. Indeed, that was its #1 defense mechanism: just fly higher than other planes (which it could do because of the marvels of pressurized cabins: oxygen masks just weren't good enough to reach that height.)
I'm sure the Japanese fighter pilots would fly as high as reasonably possible before shooting their guns at the bombers.
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There were a few attempts at strategic bombing in 1942 from Chinese bases (ally of the USA at the time). But a single mission used up the entire fuel supply from those bases: it was possible but just not practical. The USA would have to island hop to somewhere closer before attacking the mainland... which began in full capacity in 1944.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doolittle_Raid
[2] Because the USSR was not at war with Japan, by the rules of neutrality, the crew got to drink vodka and play cards for the next year, until they 'escaped' Soviet custody into UK/US occupied territories. Their bomber, however, remained.
But with 15 of the 16 bombers being destroyed and the remaining 1 captured in the mission, it does show that the Doolittle Raid was very impractical outside of the propaganda purpose. (Proving to the American people that it was possible, though impractical, to strike Japan probably was a huge win for morale, and possibly well worth the destruction of all those bombers).
1. By mid-1945, Japan no longer had any fuel for those fighters.
2. B-29s cruised at 40,000', way out of reach of Japanese fighters.
At that point in the war, whether or not you see a single, or 50 B-29s, Japanese air defense would ignore them, because Japan no longer had a working air defense. The only difference is that in the latter, the firefighting crews would start getting ready.
> It is worth speculating that a remarkable catastrophe, such as the destruction of Tall el-Hammam by a cosmic object, may have generated an oral tradition that, after being passed down through many generations, became the source of the written story of biblical Sodom in Genesis. The description in Genesis of the destruction of an urban center in the Dead Sea area is consistent with having been an eyewitness account of a cosmic airburst, e.g., (i) stones fell from the sky; (ii) fire came down from the sky; (iii) thick smoke rose from the fires; (iv) a major city was devastated; (v) city inhabitants were killed; and (vi) area crops were destroyed. If so, the destruction of Tall el-Hammam is possibly the second oldest known incident of impact-related destruction of a human settlement, after Abu Hureyra in Syria ~ 12,800 years ago.
https://pursuit.unimelb.edu.au/articles/victoria-s-volcanic-...