Hiroshima, Nagasaki and the 75th Anniversary of the Ending of World War II
Frederick Krantz
Isranet, Aug. 13, 2020In August, 1945 World War II, after six blood-filled years and over 50 million deaths, was drawing to a close in the Pacific. In Europe it had already ended, with Germany’s surrender on May 8, after Hitler’s suicide, Berlin’s conquest by the Red Army, and the inexorable U.S.-British advances in the West. On 24 June Stalin had reviewed his victorious armies from Lenin’s Tomb on Red Square, with 200 captured Wehrmacht and Waffen SS divisional banners strewn on the ground before him (still on view today in Moscow’s Museum of the Great Patriotic War).In the Pacific theater the U.S.’s island-hopping campaign, all the way from Pearl Harbor to Okinawa on mainland Japan’s door-step had, at great cost–over 100,000 Marine, and 200,000 Army, casualties, 24,000 Army Air Force and tens of thousands of Navy and Naval Air Arm losses–successfully rolled back Imperial Japan’s post-December 7, 1941 “Co-Prosperity Sphere”.Since Japan’s 1931 conquest of Manchuria and 1937 invasion of China, its bloody domination had seen the murder of 15 million Chinese, Filipinos, Indonesians, Indochinese, Koreans, and other Asians. Tokyo’s “Asia for Asians” racial propaganda had greased the ways for a colonialist domination far more vicious than anything their European predecessors had imposed.Yet even as the Allied forces inexorably advanced, the Japanese military’s tough fighters, imbued by the country’s military leaders with the bushido ethos, of the samurai warriors, which precluded surrender, were far from a spent force. A million Japanese troops remained in occupied China, two million elsewhere in conquered Manchuria, Korea and South Asia, and four million more in the kokutai homeland, preparing to throw back any invading force.General Douglas MacArthur had made good on his oath and returned to the Philippines, landing in Leyte in October, 1944. There the greatest naval battle in world history erupted in Leyte Gulf as the Japanese, in a last, desperate roll of the dice, sought to interdict the immense amphibious landings.216 U.S.-Allied ships faced 64 Japanese; the last battleship engagement ever to be fought ensued, with the Japanese losing three, as well as six cruisers. One American light aircraft carrier, and 2 destroyers, were sunk, while their carrier-based planes sank four Japanese aircraft carriers and downed 500 aircraft, with the loss of 10,500 Japanese sailors and airmen The decisive U.S. victory saw much lighter loses: 200 aircraft, 2,800 deaths. … [To read the full article, click the following LINK – Ed.]Prof. Frederick Krantz is an historian and the founder and Executive Director of the CIJR.
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One of the Last Living Manhattan Project Scientists Looks Back at the Atomic Bomb Tests
Jamie Katz
Smithsonian Magazine, July 15, 2020For the elite scientists, engineers and military brass of the Army’s remote nuclear weapons facility at Los Alamos, New Mexico, the night of July 15–16, 1945, was one of excruciating tension.
The world’s first atomic bomb, nicknamed the “Gadget,” was scheduled to be tested at a carefully selected site code-named Trinity in a barren valley near Alamogordo, New Mexico, 200 miles south of Los Alamos. It represented the culmination of the Manhattan Project, the massive, top-secret effort mobilizing American scientific ingenuity and industrial might to produce a superweapon unlike any the world had seen. Sparked by a 1939 letter from Albert Einstein and physicist Leo Szilárd to President Franklin D. Roosevelt warning of Nazi Germany’s nuclear weapons potential, the project was fully authorized in 1942 and would eventually employ hundreds of thousands of people across the nation, few of whom had any inkling of the goal of their labors.
Today, those few who are still alive are a rare breed. Among them is Peter Lax, a 94-year-old mathematics genius and retired professor at New York University, who at the time of the Trinity test was just a 19-year-old corporal stationed at Los Alamos. Recruited for his already-evident mathematical prowess, Lax was far from a key player in the development of the bomb, but his memories of the time shed light on the challenge facing the scientists, many of whom had fled Hitler’s Europe and found refuge in the United States.
“There was a feeling of great urgency,” Lax says today of the Manhattan Project. “At the outset, we didn’t know how far along the Germans were with the bomb. As it turned out, not very far at all. But we felt as if the fate of the world was in our hands.” … [To read the full article, click the following LINK – Ed.]
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The Jew Who Bombed Both Hiroshima and Nagasaki
Saul Jay Singer
Jewish Press, Mar. 10, 2020
On the Lufthansa Airlines cover displayed with this column, Jacob Beser has handwritten a complete and definitive statement of his role in America’s nuclear action against Japan that ended World War II: “Jacob Beser, former 1st Lt. USAF, crew of Enola Gay 6 July 45 (Hiroshima), crew of Bock’s Car 9 Aug 45 (Nagasaki).”
Beser (1921-1992) was the only crewman to have flown on both atomic bombing missions over Japan that effectively ended the war and brought the world into the nuclear age. (There was a third bomb and that Beser was scheduled to fly a planned third mission over Nihama, but the operation became unnecessary when Japan surrendered.)
He served as the radar specialist aboard both the Enola Gay, when it dropped the “Little Boy” atomic bomb on Hiroshima on August 6, 1945, and aboard Bock’s Car, when “Fat Man” was dropped on Nagasaki three days later. The 24-year-old radar specialist, who had designed the “proximity fuse” (a critical trigger component for the bombs), was tasked with ensuring that the A-bombs exploded at an altitude that would create the greatest destruction (which, at Hiroshima, was 1,850 feet). He was also charged with broad responsibility for electronic counter-measures that would protect the bombs against the possibility that a radio broadcast could accidentally trigger the electronic fuses.
Though his grandparents had emigrated from Germany almost a century earlier – his grandfather fought with the Union army during the Civil War and his father fought against his own Jewish cousins while serving with the American Expeditionary force against the Germans in World War I – Beser still had close relatives in Germany and France who were victimized by the Nazis. … [To read the full article, click the following LINK – Ed.]
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Unlikely Assistance: How the Chinese and the Japanese Saved 20,000 Jews in Shanghai During World War II
Ian Deeks
History, edu.
A Jewish Community in Shanghai? The history of European Jewry has been precarious to say the least. The Jewish communities of Europe have lived under centuries of anti-Semitism; however, the rise of the Nazi Party in Germany during the 1930s marked a major turning point as anti-Semitism seemed to be reaching a climax. After the Nuremburg Laws were passed in 1933, Kristallnacht in 1938, and the creation of the concentration camps, many Jews viewed escape from Europe as their only chance for survival. Tragically, just as the situation of European Jewry became dire, many Western countries closed their borders to Jewish refugees by enforcing strict immigration restrictions. While much of the Western world turned its back on the Jews in World War II, European Jewry found an unlikely haven halfway around the world: Shanghai, China.
As an internationally controlled city, Shanghai occupied a unique position, requiring neither a visa, passport, affidavit, or certificate of guarantee for entry. In fact, Shanghai was the only city in the world between 1937 and 1939 that required neither an entry visa nor a financial guarantee to enter. ii Consequently, approximately 20,000 Jewish refugees fled Europe for Shangha i during the late 1930s and early 1940s.
While Shanghai’s unique political situation allowed the European Jews to settle in Shanghai, what was unique about Shanghai, a city with seemingly no connection to or involvement in the crisis in Europe, that allowed the Jews to find refuge? Furthermore, as much of the world turned its back on the Jewish plight and anti-Semitism seemed to be spreading globally, why did anti-Jewish violence never emerge among the Chinese and Japanese in Shanghai. … [To read the full article, click the following LINK – Ed.]
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The Japanese Man Who Saved 6,000 Jews With His Handwriting
David Wolpe
NYTimes, Oct. 15, 2018
“Even a hunter cannot kill a bird that flies to him for refuge.” This Samurai maxim inspired one gifted and courageous man to save thousands of people in defiance of his government and at the cost of his career. On Friday I came to Nagoya at the invitation of the Japanese government to speak in honor of his memory.
The astonishing Chiune Sugihara raises again the questions: What shapes a moral hero? And how does someone choose to save people that others turn away?
Research on those who rescued Jews during the Holocaust shows that many exhibited a streak of independence from an early age. Sugihara was unconventional in a society known for prizing conformity. His father insisted that his son, a top student, become a doctor. But Sugihara wanted to study languages and travel and immerse himself in literature. Forced to sit for the medical exam, he left the entire answer sheet blank. The same willfulness was on display when he entered the diplomatic corps and, as vice minister of the Foreign Affairs Department for Japan in Manchuria in 1934, resigned in protest of the Japanese treatment of the Chinese.
A second characteristic of such heroes and heroines, as the psychologist Philip Zimbardo writes, is “that the very same situations that inflame the hostile imagination in some people, making them villains, can also instill the heroic imagination in other people, prompting them to perform heroic deeds.” While the world around him disregarded the plight of the Jews, Sugihara was unable to ignore their desperation. … [To read the full article, click the following LINK – Ed.]
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FOR FURTHER REFERENCE:
Photos: Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Before and After the Bombs: Madison Horne, History, July 28, 2020 — In early August 1945, warfare changed forever when the United States dropped two atomic bombs on Japan, devastating the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and killing more than 100,000 people.
Book Review: “Brighter Than A Thousand Suns” – By Robert Jungk: Noel Wauchope, Jan. 10, 2013 — Book-Jungk “Brighter than a Thousand Suns”, A Personal History of the Atomic Scientists, by Robert Jungk, was first published in 1956. [Controversial book]
The ‘Oskar Schindler’ of Japan Remembered in Philly: Peter Crimmins, WHYY PBS, May 18, 2019 — Theirs was a carefully orchestrated meeting. The two men who met at Shofuso, the Japanese House in Philadelphia’s Fairmount Park, knew of each other, but had never met nor spoken.
Japan’s Bizarre Jewish Thing A Fresh Look At Japanese Exceptionalism, Plus Secrets Of Great Manufacturers, and Thought Bites From A Digital Guru: Louis Kraar, CNN Money, Mar. 20, 1995 — The tight-knit Japanese share an almost tribal bond that often hobbles their dealings with the rest of the world.
Israeli Defense Minister Invokes Hiroshima And Nagasaki In Response To Iran Question: Ali Gharib, Lobe Log, May 15, 2015 — Speaking at a conference in Jerusalem nearly two weeks ago, the Israeli Defense Minister Moshe Yaalon invoked the American decision to drop nuclear bombs on Japan in World War II in response to a question about “dealing with a threat like Iran.”
75 Years After Hiroshima And Nagasaki, A Nuclear Threat Returns: International Committee Of The Red Cross, July 31, 2020 — Seventy-five years ago, on the morning of 6 August 1945, a B-29 warplane released a terrifying new weapon on Hiroshima.
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This week’s French-language briefing is titled:
Communiqué: Un séisme d’une magnitude biblique: les Émirats arabes unis vont signer un accord de paix et normaliseront leurs relations avec l’État d’Israël! (August14,2020)
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