http://archive.org/details/TheLastBomb1945

Don't know if it's been posted before (I searched), but worth watching.

SPECTACULAR: B-29/P-51 Actual/Live WWII Footage

This is spectacular live footage of the 3,000 mile round trip air assault upon the Japanese mainland, with three B-29 bomber wings and a host of P-51 fighter escorts. No matter what war footage you ever saw before, this is the real deal and will keep your undivided attention. The P-51 & B-29 footage is remarkable. The strafing runs by the P-51 pilots are incredible.

A great compilation of combat footage from WWII. It is 36 minutes long, The beginning is the planning and preparation for a bombing raid on Tokyo. See the B-29's take-off from Guam, Saipan and Tinian to be joined by the P-51 escort fighter from Iwo Jima. It's about 12 hours of flight boredom and 1 hour of hell over the target area. Some great P-51 combat strafing footage after the B-29 bombing runs. Then the long flight home with some damaged B-29's landing at Iwo Jima and thanking the US Marines for their action in taking the island. The majority of the B-29's make it back to their bases where exhausted flight crews review the mission. This is a War Department produced gem for those who would like to trace the dots from Pearl Harbor in 1941 to Japan in 1945 -- the Last Bomb.

Gump

Great stuff.

Great footage.
Incidentally the longest non-stop mission in WWII was flown by B-29s from China Bay,Ceylon (Sri Lanka) to Palembang (Sumatra) and return - 3900nm. This was after they had positioned fron Chengdu (China) the day before.

Good documentary.

Reminded me of the saying.

Peace time is that short period of time when everybody is reloading.

G'Day

If I'm remembering the history book correctly, being the architect of the Japan B-29 campaign is what made LeMay famous, and infamous... to the extreme on both counts. His campaign shortened the war, won the war,a nd saved a lot of Ameerican and Japanese lives as much as the nukes did. But he killed a WHOLE LOT of non-combatants in the process, many grandmothers and infants who had never picked up a weapon in their lives. Not that warfare doesn't demand a cold blooded warrior to win a war (of course it does), but that LeMay's utter lack of remorse for burning up millions of old ladies and infants is not what we Yankees like to think about ourselves being the world's morally superior and decent poster child.

Back to the history books maybe?

Toward the end of the war (just before the bombs were dropped) the Emperor of Japan was training old men, women and children to defend the empire to the last man standing. It was their creedo to die rather than surrender. A "code of honor" if you will. At the same time he was starving his own country to death. That the horror experienced by those in Hiroshima and Nagasaki saved the lives of the survivors in the rest of the country is a distinct probability. Talk to anyone who spent any time as a Japanes POW and you'll get the real story. History books sometimes can be a little "ahem" Politically correct.

eh009us wrote:Toward the end of the war (just before the bombs were dropped) the Emperor of Japan was training old men, women and children to defend the empire to the last man standing. It was their creedo to die rather than surrender. A "code of honor" if you will. At the same time he was starving his own country to death. That the horror experienced by those in Hiroshima and Nagasaki saved the lives of the survivors in the rest of the country is a distinct probability. Talk to anyone who spent any time as a Japanes POW and you'll get the real story. History books sometimes can be a little "ahem" Politically correct.

Yep, that is definitely true. Also the story of "suicide cliff" on Saipan, where the Emperor told people to commit suicide just because he didn't want them to know that the Americans would treat POW's well. Tragic stuff. My point above was that most of the people who had to make the awful decisions, like Truman dropping nukes and Churchill allowing the Germans to bomb a city even though he had broken the code and could have evacuated the city... they had very sincere remorse and sadness over the human suffering that happened because of it. LeMay apparently did not, nor did Hitler, and perhaps Hirohito, and Stalin, and others. The people like Churchill and probably Truman carried a much greater sense of responsibility with them, and never stopped thinking about the lives that were lost because of their decisions, right or wrong.

It's a two-edged sword Bill... You need men like that who can carry the burden and do what has to be done to "win." But more often than not, that kind of man isn't wired to do anything else, and isn't going to be warm and fuzzy when the dirty work is done.

It's all accident of birth. If LeMay had been born German, he'd a been planning firebombings of the London suburbs, and we'd all be speaking funny.

Gump

EZFlap wrote:

But he killed a WHOLE LOT of non-combatants in the process, many grandmothers and infants who had never picked up a weapon in their lives.

Maybe as a military commander he had this pie chart in the back of his mind:



Germany attacked Russia and Japan attacked China. About 60 million people died in WW-II. 43 million of the 60 million were Russians and Chinese. No wonder they became paranoid about borders and defense. Russia lost about 14% of its population. We lost 0.3% From LeMay's point of view, wiping out the home islands wouldn't have balanced the pie chart anyway. The allies defeated the axis, but not before they invaded countries like a scythe in a wheat field.

From my armchair in the 21st. century, I can't pass judgement on any of the decisions those guys made back then. I'm really glad we didn't have to scorch the entire nation though - I have a really nice Sony TV and I drive an Audi.

YB

"I suppose if we had lost the war, I would have been tried as a war criminal."
--Curtis Lemay


They say the victors write the history. The German and Japanese populations paid a terrible price for the hubris/madness of their leaders, but there was enough suffering to go around (e.g., Bataan, rape of Nanking, Auschwitz). In Lemay's defense, he didn't start the fight, he just finished it. Not the kind of guy to bring a knife to a gunfight. With casualties estimated at over 1 million for an invasion of Japan, it was an all-out brawl.

Agreeing with Gump, I've heard it said it's a good thing Patton died when he did, because he wasn't wired for peacetime.

EZFlap wrote:
Not that warfare doesn't demand a cold blooded warrior to win a war (of course it does),

Not disparaging LeMay, he was the right tool for the job and might have saved more than he killed. (Unfortunately he is not with us now to bring his particular skill set to bear on today's enemies of our way of life). I'ze just being a tiny little bit sad that so many human beings had to get burned up in those fire raids, and a thousand other tragedies of war.

IMHO to balance our society, hindsight is very much necessary for us to keep ourselves honest. We need to look back at the actions of ourselves and everyone else with a clear head after the dust settles, without the emotions, lack of education, immaturity, or greed that affected the actions of the past. And it works both ways. Many times a retrospective examination reveals we were correct to take drastic actions, many times it doesn't. The Venona transcripts revealed that there was indeed far more to the Cold War Communist spying and maneuvering than many people thought, and so J. Edgar and the Boys at least had a reason to be so wacked out in the 50's and 60's. Of course they did a lot of stupid things and McCarthy was an embarrassment to our constitution, but there was indeed something sinister under it all. 40 years from now we may have to face up to a realization that there was not a huge Muslim conspiracy to overthrow America. Or 40 years from now we may look back and realize America would have been lost and destroyed if we hadn't bombed those rag-heads "back into the stone age" as LeMay famously said. Or maybe we will find that the oil companies were the puppeteers of the whole game, and we trusting Americans were betrayed by our own white collar types, who abused the shit out of the "free enterprise" system, and that the Occupy protesters were on the right track after all, and that we were right to riot in the streets and hang them before they could Learjet their asses off to South America.

What we take from all this is what we carry forward. So far in history its been less of a lesson in how to avoid the next war and more of a lesson on how to win it. Like a book of matches, it can warm your home on a cold night or that same book can take your home from you. All in how you use it.

This video gave me a greater appreciation for my uncle, Martin Ganschow's service as a P-51 pilot who flew off of Iwo Jima. He flew about 15 missions at the closing days of the war and I never knew he even did this until my father mentioned it. My grandmother didn't want him talking about it after he came back. I interviewed him about it and his attitude was it was what he was trained to do. He wasn't scared, excited, or anything. He did make mention in his memoirs how beat up his plane would get and how the engineers would rebuild it overnight.

I gave his eulogy a couple years ago. My cousin provided these scanned images of some of the planes he flew:



Shot of plane and Iwo in the background



We even has his gun camera footage film originals which we intend to transfer to digital. Most of it is airplanes flying past the plane.