81st Anniversary: Attack on Pearl Harbor…

[Pimpadeaux 2,245]

11 minutes ago, zsasz said:

Nope. The Gravy Seals and Meal Team Six clowns who obsess over guns and drive around in their trucks with Molon Labe, Don't Tread on Me and Punisher stickers all would be too fat and out of shape to enlist. 

 

I think the skinny-jeans, bearded, craft-beer-loving young men would sign up. 

[zsasz 195]

7 minutes ago, Pimpadeaux said:

I think the skinny-jeans, bearded, craft-beer-loving young men would sign up. 

I don't know.  They'd have to shave their beards.  

[WhiteWonder 2,171]

Biden

[RLLD 3,455]

The Japanese see themselves as victims 

[craftsman 1,045]

A lot of Japanese taking selfies. It was horrifying. Oh wait....they actually dropped bombs.

[wiffleball 4,631]

2 hours ago, RLLD said:

The Japanese see themselves as victims 

Well, the coverage of all of this is  clearly slanted.

[JustinCharge 2,397]

10 hours ago, paulinstl said:

My dad told me that half of the guys that worked at the same factory as he did enlisted within a week of the attack, including him. Never happen today.

there were half a million draft dodgers in WW2 and at least 50k deserters.  The president was a democrat and the media was leftist so they all agreed to not report it.  Bias always exists.  it is not new to our times.

[jerryskids 5,169]

21 hours ago, Pimpadeaux said:

Outside of the atomic bomb, which the Germans were working on, they just had better stuff than we did. Better machine guns. Better tanks. Not so much better aircraft. If they'd focused on beating England, left Russia alone, fortified Europe, continued to develop their military and its equipment, it would have been tough to beat them. They were too ambitious.

I always thought this until about a month ago; I took a class on the People and Physics of the Atomic Bomb this past semester.  Surprisingly, Germany was woefully behind in nuclear weapon development -- the report from ALSOS (our espionage effort to determine military capabilities) stated that they thought we spent more money on ALSOS than they had on the atomic bomb.  They instead focused on nuclear reactors.  Part of it was perhaps brain drain -- a lot of the top scientists were Jews who either fled or were dismissed (or worse).  But speculation was that Werner Heisenberg (not the Meth dealer) had an ethical issue with such a weapon.  This is explored in the play Copenhagen, a fictional account of a meeting between Heisenberg and Niels Bohr.

Japan didn't even really try.  They had some experimental activities (and some labs that were blown up) but in general had concluded that neither they nor the US could develop a weapon in time to be useful.

So basically, it was not really a "race to the atomic bomb."

Unless you count Russia; they got the memo, and developed one years ahead of our estimate.

[Pimpadeaux 2,245]

12 hours ago, jerryskids said:

I always thought this until about a month ago; I took a class on the People and Physics of the Atomic Bomb this past semester.  Surprisingly, Germany was woefully behind in nuclear weapon development -- the report from ALSOS (our espionage effort to determine military capabilities) stated that they thought we spent more money on ALSOS than they had on the atomic bomb.  They instead focused on nuclear reactors.  Part of it was perhaps brain drain -- a lot of the top scientists were Jews who either fled or were dismissed (or worse).  But speculation was that Werner Heisenberg (not the Meth dealer) had an ethical issue with such a weapon.  This is explored in the play Copenhagen, a fictional account of a meeting between Heisenberg and Niels Bohr.

Japan didn't even really try.  They had some experimental activities (and some labs that were blown up) but in general had concluded that neither they nor the US could develop a weapon in time to be useful.

So basically, it was not really a "race to the atomic bomb."

Unless you count Russia; they got the memo, and developed one years ahead of our estimate.

Damn, bro, this is some interesting stuff here. Seriously. I'm super fascinated with World War 2 and haven't seen this before. Please hook up a brother with some links. I didn't realize they were all that far behind.

[wiffleball 4,631]

A lot of people don't realize this. But we were actually following the Japanese bombers all the way to hawaii. But we didn't think they'd end up there. Because their left turn signals were on the entire time

[jerryskids 5,169]

45 minutes ago, Pimpadeaux said:

Damn, bro, this is some interesting stuff here. Seriously. I'm super fascinated with World War 2 and haven't seen this before. Please hook up a brother with some links. I didn't realize they were all that far behind.

It was super fascinating.  I'll see what I can do; he gave us Power Point "slide shows," not slides themselves, and either way they aren't mine to share.

The prof was a PhD physicist who worked at Los Alamos, albeit after the bomb work.  He personally knew some of the people who worked on the Manhattan project, tho.  As a tech person, I learned a ton about the physics behind the bomb, even though technically there were no prereqs.  For instance, the two bombs were different shapes because they used different elements which required different triggers.  Little Boy was uranium; long and skinny because the trigger was simple -- a gun-like tube to propel half of the uranium into the other half.  Fat Man was plutonium, which required a much more complex mechanism which basically compressed it in a complete sphere.  Thus, the entire shape of both was driven by the trigger.  Most of the work at Los Alamos was in developing the Fat Man trigger, and the Trinity test in bufu NM was to test that mechanism.  If I understood correctly, they never tested the uranium bomb, but that seems hard to believe.

[Hardcore troubadour 12,589]

Super