1 1

2 also Hump Day!

3 G-d bless all those great guys and gals who saved the world. And may G-d bless and keep the souls of those who gave their lives for us, including my uncle Harry. Miss you every day.

4 Barack Obama is a stuttering clusterf*ck of a miserable failure

5 what is a VJ

6 Whhaaaa?  We waz hopin' for some Biden replacements!

7 If Barry Soetoro has his way, the next Nagasaki will be undefended on American soil

8

Who gives a shit about beating the Chinks?  Ching chong ching chong.......

 

I don't mean anything by that, Mr. President, just throwing my 2 cents in.

9 They saved Japan from itself

10 Man, after the last couple of days, I could really use a vajayjay day.

11 at the WW2 museum, they are working on restoring some relics. http://www.nww2m.com/2012/08/volunteer-update-catching-up-with-pt-305/

12 But, but anything nuclear is eeeeevil!! Those people helped murder those innocent Japanese women and children!!! /sarc

13 Victory over Japan, on this day the curtain fell on World War II.

American and allied forces would not have to invade the Japanese home islands.  There would be a Japan and millions of Baby Boomers would get born because of two bombs being dropped.

Lets remember all those who died and were wounded in the horror that was World War II.  And let us honor those few veterans of that cataclysmic war who are still with us.

14 Thanks, Dave. My initial reaction was to wonder what any of these people, including the kid standing in front, could have possibly done to bring the war to an end. Now I know.

15 Yeah, what 10. said. But still this is the anniversary of an awesome day and I salute everyone who made it possible and am thankful for every American and allied life that was spared through these actions.

16 At the time, they likely did not fully comprehend the magnitude of their contribution to the war effort. All they knew then was that it was over, and they celebrated with the rest of the nation.

Odd, they don't look like they are wracked with guilt for their part in this mass murder.  In fact, they look happy. 

Oh wait, isn't Tennessee in flyover country?  You know, full of rubes and boobs.  They're just ignorant southerners.  That explains that.

17 I still think we should have dropped the bomb off the coast of Japan before dropping one on a city, as a threat to force them to surrender.  No matter that we dropped one on Hiroshima and they refused to surrender, or that at the time we didn't have material to waste.  I know what I'm talking about, I'm supposedly a comedian.

18 To flesh out Jeff's link.

PT-305 is a Higgins built 78ft PT boat.  Built in New Orleans.  Saw combat in the Med.  Participated in the invasion of Elba.  Worked with British MTBs and MTGs in destroying Axis shipping.  Most unusual combat mission was when PT-302 and PT-305 fired the last three obsolete Mk VIII torpedoes into an Italian harbor, one explosion was heard.  When operations in the Med ended the MTB squadron with boats was shipped from Oran to New York.  In New York the squadron was being refitted for Pacific operations when the war ended.

Information pulled from Robert J. Buckley Jr's book At Close Quarters.

19

"You can't hug your children with nuclear arms" -- some bumper sticker

"Japan didn't stop fighting because we gave them a big hug" -- some Moron

20 Damn.

I thought it said 'B-J Day.'

21 Obama is a stuttering clusterf*ck of a miserable failure.

22 Barry: Remember when Hirohito came on the deck of the ship and signed the surrender?


Biden: Sure do. I watched it on Pay Per View

23 The Imperial Japanese Navy expressed disagreement about our use of Pearl Harbor. We, in turn, showed them the faults in their position.

24 Have not seen any news for a long time on the antimatter bomb project. 

25 23 The Imperial Japanese Navy expressed disagreement about our use of Pearl Harbor.

We, in turn, showed them the faults in their position.

They got the last laugh by unleashing Hello Kitty and tentacle.

26 Hello Kitty, "I have no mouth but I must sell you all this pink and white cuteness"

27 Hello Kitty, "I have no mouth but I must sell you all this pink and white cuteness" Posted by: Anna Puma (+SmuD) at August 15, 2012 09:36 PM (V2inB) Ahem, I happen to like my Hello Kitty eyepatch.

28 A whole lot of us baby boomer 'rons and 'ronettes see Mom and Dad in these WWII photos -- and ha ve even more reasons to be thankful to them. God bess them. R.I.P.

29 $&?#! phone keyboards! :-(

30 Should someone tell Obama?

31 "Little Boy" was a U-235 only bomb...

32 "Little Boy" was a U-235 only bomb...

Yep, simplicity itself, made out of a cannon barrel, and worked like a pip.

Any ruddy Iranian schoolboy could gin one up. And we have known, since the time we started financing the nuclear-engineering educations of "exchange students" over 50 years ago, that this day was coming. And what did we do about that? Hell, we never even checked their security clearances.

I met a few of them, in the 60's. Sullen, quietly arrogant, and getting their tuition paid from some vast, secret fund. The universities only knew one thing about them, for sure: their checks always cleared.

33 Their mission was to separate uranium and plutonium used in "Little Boy" and "Fat Man."

Should mention Hanford's B Reactor in Washington state (on the conservative half of the state) produced the plutonium for Fat Man. Little Boy's U-235 was simpler but the fuel took longer to procure. With plutonium, it would be easier to persuade Japan to surrender- they wouldn't get the bloody invasion that their military leadership was hoping for.

34 A few well placed bunker buster bombs and some JDAMS with a bundle of cruise missiles thrown in will be needed to keep DinnerJacket and his Iranian nut jobs out of the nuclear club soon. I am constantly amazed at the stupidity of folks who question the use of Fat Man and Little Boy. Whenever I get into such a discussion I demand that they produce testimony from a WWII veteran saying these devices should never have been used. This shuts them up. Without the use of nuclear bombs the Boomer generation would never have existed and Japanese would be spoken less than ancient Sumerian is today. God Bless our Armed Forces!

35 Barack Obama is a stuttering clusterf*ck of a miserable failure Posted by: Bill from Chappaqua at August 15, 2012 09:15 PM (8BaAK) What he said.

36

Nagasaki was an implosion device (plutonium), not uranium. =) Pretty cool device, too!

37

I should add that uranium is separated (gaseous diffusion, etc), and plutonium creation requires a breeder reactor.

38

comatus, I've always found one of the interesting things about the Little Boy/Fat Man combo was how "ah, routine" Little Boy was and how daunting and complex Fat Man was.  I am referring to the bomb designs and concepts, not the astonishing feat of BOTH of them in terms of materials and technology of the time. 

 

Little Boy wasn't even tested - well, it's first test was Hiroshima.  Of course the Trinity shot, the firstest evuh nukyler detonation done by Man, was the Fat Man implosion/plutonium design.

 

Got me a beautiful M1 Garand - sometimes when I handle it I recall the thought I've had many times: when the atomic weapons were developed (from nothing - every inch was exploration of scientific terra incognita), "technology" mostly included wooden gun stocks, mechanical computers, crude riveted sheet metal for aircraft, and typewriters with carbons for "communications". A relative actually worked on the Manhattan Project, young metallurgist in Fermi's group. I recall (second-hand) stories of microwave ovens and digital clocks at Los Alamos - little side-inventions by the 97% PhD population that today are stand-bys for today's population.

 

As noted above and in the similar thread the other day, Hiroshima helped save Japan as much as it saved huge numbers of lives among US soldiers and victims in then-Japanese controlled Asia/Pacific (lots of China, all of Vietnam, Malaysia, Indonesia).   The "revisionist" nonsense is not just outrageous but illustrative of the pervasive silliness and unseriousness of our society in many ways.  Reflects a complete ignorance of the facts plus inability to reason.  A war that lasted beyond August 1945 would have been, ipso facto, a vastly more disastrous one for all parties.  Obvious and irrefutable.

 

Among the more obscure negatives of the counter-historical (Japan fights on) speculation:  a Soviet-occupied Hokkaido.  Seems pretty certain.  While Truman gave a wonderfully brutal and clear rebuff to Stalin's overtures about grabbing a piece of the occupation in the actual history, if Japan fought beyond August, and Olympic and Coronet had to be organized and launched, one wonders whether Stalin would have held off.   I believe the Soviets would have been in a solid position to invade Hokkaido long before Coronet (March 1946), and Japan could hardly have spared the resources to make such an invasion very costly when Kyushu and southern/western Honshu were the correctly guessed targets of US intentions.

 

39

Er, I guess "central" Honshu, as the Kanto plain near Tokyo was the intended locus of Coronet's gigantic amphibious invasion plan.  Can't recall if operations across the strait from Kyushu were anticipated once that island was subdued.

 

40

Hmmm, there's a certain lack of diversity in that photo.

1945 America was a different place, indeed.

41 So, when is vajayjay day? *ducks*

42 I remember it.  I was six years old.  The adults were the ones who were excited.  All I remember was that one summer afternoon I was sitting on our front porch and I started hearing church bells peal and car horns honking.  Even the steam whistle in the nearby railroad shops started hooting.  Since I had heard all of that on V-E Day, I ran inside and yelled, "Mom.  The war's over."  I didn't even know that there still was a war.  Mom gathered up my younger brother and we all took a bus thetwo  dozen blocks or so to the middle of town.  The streets were crowded with people.  Car horns were blaring.  The bell in the court house tower kept ringing.  I remember seeing some guy on the back of an ice truck throwing blocks of ice into Main Street. (Who knows now what an ice truck was?)

43 This is an August 14th color 16mm video of some of the celebrating in and around Honolulu by many servicemen and women many of whom probably would have been part of an invasion force had the war not ended.

http://vimeo.com/5645171

44 38 If Stalin (пбух invaded Japan, the added stress would have killed him 6 years sooner and the grief would have given such pause to the Japanese that they'd reconsider surrender. This is easy stuff, really.

45 My Grandpa was captain of the USS Nicholson DDS 442 one of two destroyers that were invited into Tokyo harbor for the signing of the surrender. An invitation as a show of gratitude for the sacrifice of destroyers in the Pacific campaign. He died before I was born but I have heard some good stories about him and the Nicholson site has some good pix so its all good. Wish I could have talked to him in person though.He saw some shit that is for sure, served in Atlantic and Pacific class of 32 at the academy.

46 I look at this and I wonder if one of those faces is my grandmother's!
Yes, she worked at the Oak Ridge facility to earn money to pay  for her education-she transposed this into a teaching degree. From her degree, she was able to work and scrimp and save enough to pay off her family's debt at the 'company store' in the coal mining camp where she grew up, and move her family to another town where the family was able to have other opportunities. All this culminated in my generation being able to pursue their own interests: I was able to go to medical school and become a practicing physician. I hope you see, THIS is how America is supposed to work. God blessed those people in the photograph with the ethic to work hard and pull together. May God continue to bless us in the same manner, and let us remember those that paved the road of opportunity for us.