Comments by "Bruce Tucker" (@brucetucker4847) on "Military History Visualized" channel.

  1. The tiger was very hungry.
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  2. Flyboymb First, you're comparing the 16th century with the 20th. Second, you're comparing occupation by a different Japanese lord with occupation by barbarians. Third, saying the Japanese would have respected the Chinese more had they committed mass suicide does not mean they wanted or expected that to happen. Fourth, the OP is specifically talking about the military's attitudes and expectations, which were not necessarily shared by the rest of society - the vast majority of the population of Okinawa, for example, did not commit suicide rather than be occupied.
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  3.  @browncoat697  It wasn't Hawaii that the war was fought over, it was the Pacific Fleet. The UK might not have cared much about Norfolk Island or Tahiti, but if the Japanese had sunk half the Royal Navy at anchor in Ceylon or Singapore the British would have reacted the same way the US did after Pearl Harbor. The reason the Pacific Fleet was in Pearl Harbor to begin with was, of course, China. China was much too important economically for any of the great powers to just sit back and watch another try to conquer the whole country. And mass atrocities like Nanjing weren't making Japan any more popular. Majestic Oak, the US didn't go all-out in those wars because they were not major threats. If the Japanese had looked a little further back to see how the Union states responded to Fort Sumter, they might have thought twice about attacking the "soft" US. What Sherman did to Georgia might have been a useful indicator of what LeMay was likely to do to Tokyo.
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  4. And more fleet carriers than enemy heavy cruisers.
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  5. Right, the fact that the Emperor specifically mentioned them in his rescript on terminating the war was a very clever act of misdirection.
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  6.  @andrebas1124  Geronimo?
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  7. The Japanese bomb program was in its infancy and they had no idea what specific type of device (uranium gun or plutonium sphere collapsed by explosives) was used at either site.
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  8. While that's true, it's only fair to point out that the battalion was actually a tiny, starving remnant of 42 men from several different units, half of whom had no rifles, who were a good thousand miles behind the main front and had been completely isolated for a year before they surrendered. What's amazing is that they held out as long as they did.
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  9. Interestingly, their leaders often weren't, particularly the admirals - not so much in terms of personal courage, which they certainly showed, but in terms of aggressive warfighting. There were several occasions during the war when Japanese commanders retreated after a minor setback or failed to take advantage of an opportunity to inflict crippling damage on an American force. For example, Nagumo failed to destroy Pearl Harbor's base facilities with a third strike and his waffling at Midway (when Yamaguchi urged him to launch an immediate strike on the American carriers with whatever forces were at hand) cost him three priceless carriers, while Mikawa threw away an opportunity to crush the American landing on Guadalcanal at its inception after his victory at Savo Island. American commanders like Nimitz, Halsey, and MacArthur were much more willing to accept calculated risks when they saw an opportunity to inflict greater losses on the enemy, even in the first year or two of the war when they were outnumbered and outgunned.
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  10.  @azopeopaz3059  "usa fight against 10 maximun div in west front the rest surender the moment they meet" You are absolutely out of your mind. By December 1944 the Germans had 76 of their 211 active divisions deployed on the Western Front, about 35%, and at least 2/3 of those troops were facing the Americans. And even before D-Day something like 3/4 of the Luftwaffe's fighter and AA strength was deployed in the west. The US, which you claim sent 98% of its strength to the Pacific, had 68 divisions in combat in Western Europe by 1945 and around 20 (including Marines) in the Pacific and Burma. The US Navy was much more heavily deployed in the Pacific but the Army Air Force was even more heavily deployed in Europe than the ground forces, so probably something like 2/3 of total US combat forces were deployed against Germany. I had five uncles who served in WW2: two in the Pacific, two in Europe, and one on convoys in the Atlantic. If any of the latter three were still alive to hear you say the US' share of fighting against Germany was insignificant they'd probably punch you in the teeth even at 98 years of age. Over a quarter of a million American soldiers, sailors, and airmen gave their lives to free Europe from Nazi tyranny and you are spitting on the sacrifices made by those men.
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  11. The Soviet invasion of Manchuria was certainly a shock to the Japanese, who had been hoping the Soviets would mediate a peace, but the Soviets had no ability to invade Japan itself or to compel a Japanese surrender. The US, with some help from the UK, was the only nation that had the means to defeat the Japanese in their home islands, whether by invasion, naval blockade, or massive aerial bombardment (including the atomic bombs). In the event, Japan surrendered to the USSR along with all the other Allied nations, and the fact that the Soviets were not allowed to occupy any of the main Japanese islands was decided by the Allies (particularly the US), not the Japanese - nothing was said on that subject in the instrument of surrender. sahil sing, watch the video. Some civilians wanted to surrender but the army, who had been running the government for over a decade, was adamantly opposed. The Japanese peace feelers were not for a surrender with retention of the emperor, they were for a negotiated settlement with no occupation of Japan and with Japan retaining its pre-1937 conquests including Korea and Manchuria, which was totally unacceptable to the Allies. When the Japanese government, after the bombs, the Soviet attack, and the intervention of the emperor, finally did offer surrender with the sole condition of the retention of the emperor, the Allies immediately accepted, with the proviso that the ultimate form of Japan's postwar government would be decided by its people through a democratic process.
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  12. Japan wanted the Soviets to mediate a peace deal with the other Allies. They had no intention of surrendering to the Soviets or letting them occupy any part of Japan itself. Also, the only "deal" Moscow made with eastern Europe was "We're putting our puppet in charge, now do everything we say exactly how we say it or we'll roll tanks in and start shooting people". Which they ended up doing, at various different times, in Poland, East Germany, Hungary, and Czechoslovakia.
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  13.  @user-pn3im5sm7k  Nobody was fighting for "global bankers," whatever that's supposed to mean. Let me guess, you mean the "you know hews".
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  14. Jerrod Volkov that is incorrect. First, the invasion of Manchuria began on August 9, the day the 2nd bomb was dropped, as stated by the OP. Second, the Soviets had no fleet in the Pacific capable of mounting any invasion of Japan proper. They could pick up isolated islands but the only way they were going to occupy any of the Japanese mainland was after a surrender.
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  15. The coup was not led by the top-level army leadership, it was by lower-ranking officers. The top army leaders all pledged to carry out the emperor's directive. Some high-ranking officers who did not actually join the coup tacitly supported it. The division between the army and the navy was real enough, but the navy, while represented in the war cabinet, had not generally exercised as much control over government and the political culture as the army. The navy had always been more traditionalist and less fascist, for lack of a better term, than the army.
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  16. The Soviets had no navy capable of supporting an invasion of Japan. The Soviet attack was important for three reasons: one, it ruined the Japanese hopes of having the Soviets broker a compromise peace, two, it ruined their hopes of negotiating to keep some of their conquests on the Asian mainland (since the Soviets were plainly going to gobble all of them up if given time), and three, it raised the prospect of Soviet inclusion in a postwar occupation of Japan, which the Japanese very much wanted to avoid for reasons that should be obvious.
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  17.  @SuperCatacata  Combat pilot is a young man's game, especially back then. Pappy Boyington was all of 30 years old when he took over VMF-214 and they thought he was a crazy old man. Young men dying in old men's wars has been lamented since the days of Herodotus at least.
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  18. MacArthur and Marshall absolutely intended to invade. LeMay and the Army Air Force were, of course, confident that the conventional bombing campaign would compel Japan to make peace, and most of the Navy's top brass also thought the continuation of the naval blockade plus bombing made invasion unnecessary. Each service thought its actions would be the key to victory.
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  19.  @joelgrosschmidt5507  China was the main front for the IJA but the war there made almost no difference to the outcome of the larger war in Asia and the Pacific. Had China just surrendered in 1942 Japan would still have lost at about the same time. They had no way to deploy all those troops to the South or Central Pacific and no way to supply them there if they could transport them. It probably would have made an Allied invasion of Japan impossible and the Soviet invasion of Manchuria much more difficult, but the Allied blockade and strategic bombing would have forced a Japanese surrender in 1945 or early 1946, and that's not even considering the A-bombs. In short, for the US and its allies the war against Japan was primarily a naval and air war with the ground forces mostly engaging Japanese units that had been cut off from reinforcement and resupply, and in the naval and air war the front line for Japan was in the Pacific and China was a costly but largely indecisive sideshow. The Japanese Empire effectively died in the seas around and the skies above the Solomon, Marianas, and Philippine Islands.
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  20. That's not true at all. Both targets were chosen partly for their military significance (but mostly because they hadn't been heavily bombed already).
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  21. Yes, but the emperor did not intervene until after the bombings. It's not so much that no one in Japan wanted to make peace, as that there was no one in Japan other then the emperor capable of preventing the military leaders who wanted to continue the war from doing so.
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  22. Being shot at tends to throw pilots' aim off quite a bit. It's the same reason so many combatant nations put single .30 MGs in the back of bombers.
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  23. I thought Kyoto had been taken off the target list. The Nagasaki bomb had been intended for Kokura, but Kokura had bad weather on the 9th so they diverted to Nagasaki. based on that I would think Kokura would have been the next target. Marshall wanted to save them for tactical use preceding an invasion.
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  24. Maybe if you slow the video down so it takes a month or two... and even then, you're not going to remember much of the month or two.
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  25. Those accounts are referring to the flights of only one to three bombers like the ones that dropped the atomic bombs. They had learned that they represented little threat and did not necessarily indicate a larger raid to follow - they were recon flights, weather reporting, or dry practice runs for the atomic bombings (although the Japanese had no way of knowing the latter). When hundreds of bombers appeared overhead at night you'd better believe they sought shelter.
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  26. Given that the Soviets had agents in Los Alamos who were actually present at the Trinity test, I think they knew exactly how powerful the bomb was and that they needed to develop their own as quickly as possible.
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  27. I've never seen any evidence that the Japanese made any such detailed analysis that soon, and even if they had, their atomic bomb research was still in its infancy and they almost certainly had little idea of the practical difficulty of obtaining plutonium vs. weapons grade uranium. Remember, there was only one reactor in the entire world at that time capable of producing plutonium in enough quantity to make weapons, and AFAIK no one outside the US, UK, and Soviet (because of their spies) governments had any idea it existed.
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  28. Those conditions were completely unacceptable to the Allies so they were non-starters.
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  29. It worked for the North Vietnamese, but it was a very, very costly victory.
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  30. But the Allies were not willing to accept a peace treaty with the military-dominated government of Japan, any more than they had been willing to accept a peace treaty with Hitler, and for the same reasons.
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  31. You were taught nonsense. The Japanese government hadn't gone anywhere, and the military command WERE most of the government.
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  32. The coup failed because the senior army leadership had resolved to carry out the Emperor's directive to end the war. Before he made that decision they had been opposed to surrendering, but obedience to the Emperor was more important to them than continuing the war was. I think it's fair to blame the US Army leadership in part for Vietnam, but there was a also a failure of political will. LBJ and Robert McNamara (his Secretary of Defense) had both concluded the war was unwinnable but kept going because they were unwilling to face the political cost of pulling out. Korea, after MacArthur was gone, was really a political failure more than a military one. The war was plainly stalemated after 1951 and negotiating an end to it was a purely political problem.
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  33. They may have been rational as a tactical response to the situation, but continuing the war at all after the disaster of the Philippine Sea and the conquest of the Marianas was complete insanity. Japan at that point was like the boxer who can't even throw a punch in response and can barely even hold his hands up but refuses to go down no matter how horrendous a pummeling he's getting from an opponent who's just landing punches at will. Alas, there was no sane manager to throw in the towel and no referee to stop the fight.
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  34. Only in the vaguest sense, I think. American political commitment to winning WW2 was orders of magnitude greater than the will to see Vietnam through to victory. Also, the context of the Cold War and the precedent from Korea meant that the US did not dare invade and occupy North Vietnam and risk open war with China or the Soviets, while Japan had no such protector in its corner.
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  35. It wasn't the fuel lines that doomed the Japanese carriers at Midway, it was all the armed and fueled planes in the hangars (and a few on the flight decks), plus all the extra ordnance lying around because they hadn't had the time to return it to the magazines with all the re-arming and re-re-arming going on.
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  36. Amusingly, the earliest American attempts to build a self-guided antiship mission involved using a pigeon trained to recognize a ship's silhouette (pigeons are very smart and very easily trained) in the missile's nose to guide it to the target. They never managed to make the concept work before more conventional "smart" weapons were developed. The problem with the Fritz-X, even had the Japanese had them, was that it required the operator to be in a plane flying more or less straight and level within visual range of the target. That would have worked for picket destroyers but for carriers the ability of the operator's plane to survive in airspace so thoroughly dominated by US fighters would have been very doubtful. That's the main reason the weapon had so little impact on the Normandy invasion - Allied air supremacy was much stronger over the Normandy beaches than it had been over Italian beaches in 1943. Allied jamming of the radio control signal was also a serious obstacle.
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  37. Ethan C, given the postwar histories of those nations and the horrific scale of death and destruction launched on the world by the fascist regimes of the Axis powers I'd say that eliminating those regimes and replacing them with peaceful democracies was a pretty wise policy. Doing otherwise was an invitation for another round in another 15-20 years. And as other have noted, Japan was NOT trying to negotiate a surrender, they were trying to negotiate a compromise peace leaving them in charge of much of their conquests, and the Allies would have to have been insane to consider that.
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  38. I think the people who really mattered knew what he was saying.
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  39. They were the only ones ready but more were being produced. A third core had been cast and would have been ready to use by late August. Eight bomb assemblies complete except for than the fissile cores had already been delivered to Tinian by the Indianapolis.
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  40. Back, and to the left. Back, and to the left. lol
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  41.  @danielhughes5932  I mean, not all that many torpeckers survived long enough to drop them. You do have a few extras from submarines, though.
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  42. Sun Tzu, that may be the ideal, but it sure wasn't how Stalin felt or acted. However, Stalin was a pragmatic leader and his willingness to sacrifice large numbers of people depended on the context. To save the USSR from being conquered and its people enslaved and/or mass murdered by Nazis he was willing to make any sacrifice that was necessary; to expand Soviet influence at the far end of its empire in East Asia he was only willing to make limited sacrifices. He knew that the Japanese forces in Manchuria would be relatively easy for his hardened and experienced veterans to overrun.
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  43. The problem was, Pearl Harbor made it impossible by enraging the US public so much that they would never accept that sort of peace (and to a lesser extent the debacle at Singapore did the same for the British and Australian public). The Japanese had no possible ability to occupy Hawaii or significant parts of India or Australia, and without doing that no way to compel the Allies to make peace.
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  44. I agree. The logic was inevitable. Without the oil they couldn't sustain the war effort, but the only way to get the oil was to attack the Dutch and British colonies and to attack the Philippines to secure the supply route to the oil, which meant starting a much wider war they couldn't possibly win.
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  45. If Truman had invaded without using the bombs, and the public later found out he had possessed a weapon that might have made the hundreds of thousands of resulting American deaths unnecessary but had decided not to use it, he would have been strung up on a lamppost on Pennsylvania Avenue by a rabid lynch mob - and he knew it.
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  46. It would be by today's standards, it was not by WW2 standards. War crimes at that point were as much a matter of custom as formal law, and as a practical matter bombing cities was something every one of the major combatants did as a matter of policy on as large a scale as they could manage. The Japanese had been bombing civilians themselves for nearly a decade. (Also, there were numerous warnings.)
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  47. Another factor was that Japan, unlike the US and UK, was heavily dependent on foreign shipping before the war, and most of that foreign shipping was owned and operated by the countries they attacked. Something like 40% of the shipping that had supplied Japanese industry in peacetime effectively evaporated the moment they started the war. And of course the war economy vastly increased the demand for cargo ships. Japan would never have been able to make up that loss with its own shipbuilding, let alone even begin to replace the ships lost to enemy action. So the Allied war against Japanese commerce shipping effectively started on 2nd base. That's not to minimize what Allied, primarily American, submarines accomplished, they turned what would already have been an economic disaster into an utter catastrophe that completely crippled Japanese industry by the end of the war.
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  48.  @edfrawley4356  Yeah, it was more like 1944 -- rot, crumble.
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  49. He had not exercised that much sway until that event. His stepping in to break the deadlock was a violation of precedent.
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  50. It's 2019, Hannibal Chew should be working on that right now in his shop in Los Angeles.
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  51.  @Tavenhotep  There was no "von" in Balck's name. It would be like saying Winston d'Churchill.
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  52. From looking at that paper it appears that the surveys in question were just trying to determine if the explosion was from an atomic weapon at all, not what sort of weapon it was. They didn't even make the final determination that the bomb was atomic until August 10. The other objective was determining the effects on human health of the particular kinds of radiation/fallout found at Hiroshima. And there was zero knowledge about the manufacture of plutonium in Japan in 1945. They certainly wouldn't have had the slightest idea about the capacity of the Hanford reactor or the uranium purification plant at Oak Ridge. Theoretical knowledge would be useless there, it was a question of the size of the facilities. Incidentally, plutonium wasn't first synthesized and discovered in a reactor, it was synthesized in a cyclotron (a type of early particle accelerator), but the amounts produced by cyclotron were far too small to produce a critical mass that could be used in a weapon. The whole reason the gun design was discarded for use with plutonium was that the reactor-produced plutonium contained unexpected impurities that were not present in the cyclotron-produced samples and those impurities would cause pre-detonation (a "fizzle") if used in the gun design. Again, since this was the only plutonium producing reactor on the planet it's extremely unlikely that anyone without access to the Manhattan Project (i.e., the US, UK, and Stalin's spies) had any idea about this as it had not been predicted by theory, it was only discovered once the reactor was up and running and the plutonium it produced could be analyzed. It's not even clear that during the war the Japanese knew of the existence of the reactor at Hanford that was producing plutonium as their own atomic program was focused on uranium. There's also zero indication in that paper that the survey team was aware of any difference between the bombs used at Hiroshima and Nagasaki until after the war.
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  53. Excluding noncombat losses misses an important point, though. If a Tiger had to be abandoned and destroyed because there wasn't another vehicle around that could tow it while a medium tank in the same place could have been recovered, that speaks to the combat effectiveness of the Tiger. You can't have an effective combat tank if its flaws (including being too heavy for transport or towing) prevent it from being used in combat.
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  54. Stalin was a pragmatist, and while he was willing to sacrifice millions of lives to keep his regime from being overrun by the Nazis, his willingness to add to an already horrific death toll just to expand his influence on the far periphery of his empire was doubtless much more limited. Also, the Soviets had no ability to conduct an amphibious invasion of Japan. However, I think you're correct about the Japanese government's well-grounded fear of the political consequences of wider Soviet involvement in the war and in the postwar occupation.
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  55. Stalin had no ability to invade, the Soviet fleet was tiny. They did hope that if they went ahead and surrendered the US would not allow the Soviets to take part in the postwar occupation, and that hope turned out to be correct.
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  56. Without the blockade restricting Germany's access to resources and the Allied air attacks keeping up to 2/3 of Germany's fighters and AAA in the west it would have been a completely different war and the Soviets wouldn't have had a chance.
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  57. As has been noted many times, Soviet naval strength in the Pacific was effectively zero, and without naval support an invasion of Japan was completely out of the question. They did overrun much of Japan's conquests on the Asian mainland, which destroyed any Japanese hope of retaining those conquests in a compromise peace, and they raised the scary prospect of the Soviets being allowed to take part in a postwar division of Japan as had happened with Germany.
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  58. The dispute isn't over whether it happened, it's about the extent to which it influenced the Japanese government's decision to surrender. I think the most accurate thing to say about it was that it didn't actually alter the military situation that much - it didn't make defending the Japanese home islands against invasion, bombing, and blockade any easier or harder - but it forced the Japanese leaders to give up unrealistic hopes they'd been clinging to about the USSR mediating a compromise peace with Japan holding on to some of its conquests.
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