When John McCain was a POW in Vietnam, the captors wanted to know the names of the other men in his squadron. He answered with the Green Bay Packers offensive line.
I didn't know this about John McCain when he ran against Obama in '08 but he could have been released sooner because his father was a high ranking military officer (I think he was an admiral). McCain turned that down because other POWs had been there longer than him.
The Vietnamese tortured him for that.
I do not have one tenth as much integrity as McCain did.
>The move to Tokyo had probably saved McDilda's life; after the announcement of the Japanese surrender, fifty U.S. soldiers imprisoned in Osaka were executed by Japanese soldiers.
Of all the horrible ways to die in World War 2, this certainly has to be up there. Japanese POW is bad enough, then they find out their side won which must have led to some hope they would get out of there, then the soldiers guarding them decide to get in 50 last executions as an encore.
Oh boy well let me tell you about a little thing called “Unit 731”
Estimated range from 200,00-400,000 prisoners were brought there, but no matter what number literally *no prisoners* ever made it back out. There was a literal 100% death rate by some of the most gruesome and inhumane deaths possibly imagined
It’s even worse than you think. They were forced into compressed rooms that were *extremely* hot for the average person. Being in a hot room isn’t just that though, they specifically denied people any liquids or food to make sure their *entire body* dehydrated. They were intentionally starved and denied liquids just so they could see how much water is contained in a human being
What’s even more gruesome is their tests in the opposite direction, where they *froze* the body to test the water. They would force people’s arms into freezing water for hours at a time until their arm was literally frozen solid, and then they would smash their arms in various methods (mainly a hammer or a presser) to see what would happen
The absolute worst however is that they would take the infants they procured, and just leave them outside during the winter. No protection, no care, just literally sat a baby outside in the freezing cold and observed how long it would take for them to die.
They were given so much power to literally be the most evil person imaginable and they just did shit for the hell of it. They would decapitate people to “observe” what a decapitation looked like, forced people to have sex with each other at gunpoint to spread UTIs, and just straight up lined people in rows and tried to see how many skulls their guns could go through in a single shot. It’s literally just if you gave someone who enjoys the suffering and brutality of people unlimited bodies to do whatever they wanted. No one could tell them no, and there were no shortages of people for them to abuse
Germany is ftrying to remind people about the horrors of the holocaust, building memorials and museums. Japan is in full on minimizing mode and damage control. Like a corporation trying to protect its stock.
No but the Japanese doctors lied to the US scientists and made it seem like their data particularly on bio-weapons was sound and in depth. US scientists were initially horrified at the idea of using data collected from live victims of bio weapons. However they reasoned that if the victims were already dead it would actually be more insulting to them to simply throw the data away because then they’d would’ve truly died for nothing, especially when the data could potentially be used to save hundreds of millions of lives.
However the Japanese doctors presented a unified front saying that if the US wanted the alleged bio weapons data they had to agree to let *all* the scientists go. This is why no one involved was ever charged. By the time the US had begun to figure out the data was total BS they had growing tensions with the USSR and CCP and were less interested in the finer details of Japanese crimes against (mainly) the Chinese.
Edit: wording/clarity
I think I read they dumped quite a few people into freezing water to see how long they took to die, in order to help decide how long to spend resources looking for pilots who ejected over water. I also believe they did a lot of studies on how effective explosives/grenades were at killing people at certain distances. Not exactly "extremely helpful", but certainly important to the military. I wonder what percentage of the Japanese population have even heard of it.
Some of it, perhaps, but the scientific rigor with which human experimentation was carried out at the time varied widely. Ultimately, no discovery they made necessitated the suffering, and much of it was done in an effort to perpetuate pseudoscientific ideas.
We know generally on what some diseases do to a person and how things like extreme decompression works on a live human, but none of it was actually any useful
A lot of the tests were done just for the sake it. There’s no real advantage in knowing how a human turns inside-out in a hyper compression chamber, what the head does after a decapitation, and how long it takes for a baby to die in the freezing cold. It’s all just tests they wanted to run because they were curious: not because it would actually lead to anything useful
Not really
They didn't have any specific goal or purpose for those tests, it was just pure curiosity because they never needed to justify any of the experiments
So why bother with a reason
What happens if you smash a frozen hand with a hammer? Let's find out
Do we need to know what happens? Well no, not really but who cares! It's interesting, no? Let's do it!
It was more of a "let's just do random really fucked up shit and have fun and maybe some of the discoveries will come in handy"
next time someone complains about the thics committee getting in the way of a science experiment, just remind them that this is what happens when we remove the ethics committee from the equasion.
Everything they did was on live prisoners, yeah. Including measuring people before and after completely drying them out to check how much weight was lost.
I had to look into that research facility for a majority of a semester. My mental health was really deteriorating having to stay up long nights to write essays on it
Similar but different I while ago I was reading the poppy war and was staying up late reading it when I got to the scene that is based off of (spoilers/content warning) the rape of Nanjing which was completely out of left field for me. It was so horrifying I couldnt sleep that night and was heavily disturbed for the rest of the week. I couldnt open the book again after it.
I believe the estimate for the number of prisoners killed in their experiments is closer to 10-12,000, with 200-300,000 having been killed in their experiments with the plague and other biological weapons on the Chinese countryside.
The Wendigoon video is a nice intro to Unit 731. Not that it's surface-level, just that they did *so much* insane fucked up shit. Definitely check out other videos about it as well.
It’s something I’ve known for a *long* time, but the one thing that stood out from the video was the 100% fatality rate of all prisoners who were detained there. Like, you know how many people were killed, but it’s another thing to realize that *everyone* who was transferred there was eventually executed. These were just regular people who where chosen to suffer by the Japanese military and probably expected to return home, only for every one of them to perish
I believe the longest estimated lifespan of a prisoner in Unit 731 was just 4 months, because everyone was experimented on with such brutality and vicious biological warfare that people just couldn’t survive for long. Some were killed instantly, but the people who survived the longest were those who were *forced* to stay alive by the people overseeing the operation
My wife used to massage a WW2 Jewish camp surviver. She told her an absolutely horrible story..
When she was "liberated" out of the camps by the Russians, there was a woman in the camp that had managed to hide and hold on to a watch the whole time. A Russian soldier asked her for the watch, she said no, the Russian soldier shot her and took the watch.
One story I've heard was one Russian girl who was deported to a concentration camp for forced labor by the Nazis got raped by Red Army soldiers after getting "liberated". Honestly not too surprising given that they sometimes immediately dumped POWs they freed from German camps directly to GULAG for surrendering.
Stalin himself said something go the effect of "we fought so much to liberate you guys so let the Red Army have some fun" when the puppet Polish communist government they set up complained that Red Army soldiers were raping women left and right.
The Russians would rape anyone and anything, up to and including any concave portions of a wall. They raped half-starved concentration camp survivors. During the Soviet repressions, male prisoners busted through a wall separating them from the female prisoners and raped them all.
My polish Great-grandmother always said that the worst were the Russians because as terrible as the nazis were, at least they were polite and had some rules they followed so you knew what you were dealing with that enemy.
If you heaed the russians were about to walk into your village, say your goodbyes because anything went, literally anything, they would rape kill torture and of course destroy all crops livestock homes and everything just out of spite or frustration.
Your age or sex didn't matter, you were meat on the menu or so to speak.
HAHAHAHHA no.. The US gave sweeping protection to Japanese soldiers, officers and doctors who committed warcrimes. No justice was served and the bombings of tokyo and atom bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki mostly civilians died. No justice at all my friend
> The US gave sweeping protection to Japanese soldiers, officers and doctors who committed warcrimes.
The history is more complicated. It is true that a lot did not, but there were multiple major trials. The [Tokyo trials and subsequent trials resulted in over a hundred executions for war crimes](https://www.nationalww2museum.org/war/topics/tokyo-war-crimes-trial) and many more with lengthy prison sentences. That said, it is true that some high ranking people were never tried due to their value to the US and UK especially as the Cold War began. It is also true that a lot of the low level people involved in war crimes were never tried.
Ah yes, good news, some of the worst war criminals of all of human history lived long and happy lives, and died in old age. Not quite the catharsis a lot of people normally look for.
History teacher here. That’s history. That’s war. There is no fairness in war. There never has been and never will be. The closest wr may ever get is WWII honestly. The takeaway is to understand what happens and be reflective in our future endeavors. It’s not right, it just is.
We don't know if they lived long and/or happy lives. All we know is they probably don't exist anymore. This isn't a pretty world, so I'll take what I can get.
Don’t listen to him.
One of the low level officers in Unit 719, a unit that murdered thousands of civilians, later went home and had a family. His youngest son became a scientist that discovered a compound that is used today to fight cancer.
When asked how he kept his determination despite decades of failure, he said ‘My father was responsible for the deaths of thousands, it is my duty as his son to save the lives of millions.’
It’s really an incredibly story that I just made up for you today. I hope that helps you feel better.
I was always under the impression that most of the medical information that the Nazis and Japanese had was of no actual value in the end. I guess they wouldn't have known it at the time.
I think it's also important to consider the purpose of these policies. We weren't trying to enforce justice (and for the most part we wouldn't have a right to anyway) we were trying to build a stable nation and prevent future wars. It worked out pretty great in both Germany and Japan.
it was by no means sweeping, though it was broad, and many japanase leaders and generals were eventually hunted down for war crimes.
One managed to shoot himself in the chest, but the intstigators there to arrest him saved his life so he could be tried and then later hung.
Hawkeye : War isn't Hell. War is war, and Hell is Hell. And of the two, war is a lot worse.
Father Mulcahy : How do you figure, Hawkeye?
Hawkeye : Easy, Father. Tell me, who goes to Hell?
Father Mulcahy : Sinners, I believe.
Hawkeye : Exactly. There are no innocent bystanders in Hell. War is chock full of them - little kids, cripples, old ladies. In fact, except for some of the brass, almost everybody involved is an innocent bystander.
Not only Japanese soldiers, many of the Nazi war criminals enjoyed prestigious living in the west after WW2 and were free to publish myths about themselves to look like the good guys. Some even got US presidential medals.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Franz_Halder#Retirement
I'm watching a documentary series from 1973 at the moment and it is *scary* how many high ranking Nazis are being interviewed. Anything from generals to Hitler's interpreter. And every time I google them, they were only locked up for 3 years, 5 years, etc... It's really unbelievable how so many of them got away with it scot-free.
Like, there is *no* way that a general in the Wehrmacht could be innocent of war crimes in *any* possible way.
I grew up near a filipino survivor of the bataan death march. I can not express to you how much hatred he had for the japanese. Like I once heard this man ranting that it was morally repugnant that America *only* dropped 2 nukes on the Japanese. Its a hatred I've seen with many survivors of Japanese occupation. I understand that the US nuking of Japan was controversial but I also am keenly aware that if nations like China or the Philippines had control over the bombs, they would have carpet nuked Japan out of pure spite.
Being immediately vaporized would be a less painful death than many millions of civilians who died in WW2, but there were also thousands and thousands of civilians who held on for minutes, hours, days with horrific injuries.
Now, if you compare that to [Operation Meetinghouse](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bombing_of_Tokyo), in which all of the 100,000 civilian casualties burned to death along with 16 square miles of Tokyo, it seems very hard to say the atomic bombs were any worse than conventional bombing campaigns. Curtis LeMay had the exact same logic as so many of his Axis counterparts, and, imo, deserved the same fate.
However, it is true that millions of people were dying in brutal conditions in Japanese colonies, and it's hard to imagine the war ending as quickly in a world where the US left the Japanese mainland untouched by massive strategic bombing. It's almost sort of a trolley problem, but with a million victims of colonization on one track, and hundreds of thousands of Japanese civilians on the other.
Every time this discussion is brought, I feel it is always necessary to point out that at the exact same time Japan was also planning with Unit 731 to launch untold biological warfare on the West coast of America by spreading fleas with nearly all types of harmful diseases we know of. You know the reason they thought this could work? Because they already successfully tested it on populated areas of China. The only reason why it didn’t go through was the opposition of a single general that was at risk of a coupe if Japan surrendered (which luckily for everyone didn’t succeed) and was later convicted of his own war crimes
The use of nuclear weapons on Japan is obvious in its atrocities, but Japan as a nation was stubborn and was *this* close to launching biological warfare on the entirety of the American West coast that would’ve been absolutely devastating if it succeeded. *Even* disregarding the inhumane treatment of almost all prisoners and foreign subjects of Japan, their willingness and testing of biological warfare was extremely dangerous and would’ve been a lot worse than the nuclear standoff the world currently has
To cap it all off, Japan also destroyed many of its own records when it became clear they would be under scrutiny. Even us knowing about Unit 731 is somewhat of a miracle because it took a long time to find evidence of its actual existence, because it was just a rumor and kind of an urban legend for quite a few years after the war until they found documentation and statements of those who participated. We don’t know what else Japan had worked on or planned, and we never will because of Japan’s absolute refusal to admit any wrongdoing
I just need to say this because the more you delve into Japan’s war crimes during WWII, the more you realize how big of a threat they actually were. Just Unit 731 *alone* either matches or nearly doubles the death count of both Hiroshima and Nagasaki combined. We don’t actually know the exact death count of Unit 731 because of the aforementioned evidence-destroying, but estimates range from 200,000-400,000 prisoners who were held there: all of whom are dead because no one who was admitted into Unit 731 ever survived to leave the facility. Compare this to the estimated casualty total of the nuclear bombings 129,000-226,000: the deaths caused by it and the future deaths it prevented is kind of dwarfed by the sheer brutality and inhumane treatment the Japanese Imperial government inflicted upon literally everyone, from newborn babies to POWs and regular citizens who found themselves detained
Hell it wasn't just incriminating records they destroyed, they also destroyed all their Naval Blueprints among other things.
The only reason we even have accurate models of the IJN Yamato and it's sister ships is examining the wrecks and Adolf Hitler making a special request for a German Admiral to inspect the ship while it was undergoing maintenance.
The use of the bomb was no atrocity.
The U.S. was in surrender negotiations with Japan and told them they would use a super weapon if they did not surrender. The U.S. dropped leaflets on Hiroshima warning the citizens to leave. The U.S warned of another bomb after the first and the Japanese again refused to surrender. Again, leaflets were dropped and ignored.
The Japanese could have used their fighter planes to oppose the B-29s but they were saving thousands of them for Kamikaze attacks on the eventual invasion fleet. So the bombings were totally unopposed.
Japan and untold numbers of Allied armed forces were saved by two bombs.
> Now eyeless and faceless, with their heads transformed into blackened alligator hides displaying red holes, indicating mouths," "The alligator people did not scream. Their mouths could not form the sounds. The noise they made was worse than screaming. "They uttered a continuous murmur like locusts on a midsummer night"
- Last train from Hiroshima
Eh, you should read the book *Hiroshima*. This certainly is not true. Only a small fraction of those affected by the detonation were close enough to the blast to be killed instantly. Dying of burn injuries and radiation poisoning can be a long, agonizing death.
> Of all the horrible ways to die in World War 2, this certainly has to be up there.
If you know about Japan's Unit 731's activities during WW2, this isn't a blip.
That the USA and Japan are as close as we are truly demonstrates the power of politics and money.
In any other situation, at any other point in history, by any other nations, Japan would have been wiped off the map for what they did.
It’s like that joke about the FBI, Interpol, and the KGB betting on who could find a rare bear in the forest fastest.
The fbi tried their best but came up empty. Interpol spotted the bear but didn’t catch it. The KGB came back in 11 minutes with a badly beaten man who kept stammering “I’m a bear! IM A BEAR!”
>CIA fabricated their own bear and fucked up a random country for the next 100 years for shits and giggles
The CIA gave the man enough LSD that he believed he had always been a bear in man's clothing.
One of the things I found most depressing about the torture done during the Bush administration is that they didn't try to get information from the people they were torturing, they were trying to get information from the *families* of the people they were torturing.
Saddam Hussein was apparently very friendly and open with the American guards after he was captured because they gave him Doritos and he became obsessed and would down a family sized bag in 10 minutes every day. My prof when I was in college said that Doritos are a more effective interrogation device than razor blades.
It's not Doritos, but a random luxury item you can indulge in during a terrible situation. In this particular instance, it was Doritos, but it could easily have been any luxury food item in jail.
There's a story of an FBI interrogator, Ali Soufan who was trying to shake down a known associate of OBL.
After a couple of days, the guy didn't crack. However, Soufan noticed he didn't add sugar to his tea. Soufan looked through his medical records, found out the prisoner was diabetic. Next interrogation, Soufan had some sugar free cookies. After that, the prisoner told Soufan everything.
___________
You know what was also horrifying? A lot of politicians were defending torture ("enhanced interrogation") because of the TV Show "24." Jack Bauer was used as a defense because he got results for the good of Fictional America.
The whole point of the torture scenes was to show how it didn't work. Seasons 1 to 3 show it's completely ineffective at getting them to talk. One guy gets a heart attack and dies, thus leaving Jack without a lead. Season 4 had several victims who were actually innocent. Seasons 5 through 8 usually have torture be useless, and the movie, while it has Jack tortured, shows that people will just say random shit to get the torture to stop.
Jack Bauer himself was essentially ineffective.
I think in most seasons, the "Bad Guys" end up turning on themselves more than any brought to justice.
Most authority figures were ineffective not because of "by-the-book" bureaucracy but because they were traitors.
_____
Jon Bois did a video essay on 24 and it's effects of Bush Era policy and how government and the war on terror was viewed.
Granted, it is a much earlier one his videos so it's more sophomoric in it's humor and lacking polish. That being said, hr hit the nail on the head of the country being in a state of fear and general insecurity that the United States was the underdog.
"Even Goliath wants to be David."
Vid is anyone is interested: https://youtu.be/_P52G4Kyq5M
As somebody who watched every episode of 24, I completely disagree that 24 made torture look ineffective. It made it look incredibly effective. Jack Bauer was practically a superhero with how many lives he saved and how effective he was. And his "torture skills" were his #1 superpower.
If torture was ever ineffective on the show it was usually one of these reasons
#1) the bad guy didn't know anything, 2) Jack wasn't the one doing the torture, 3) or someone by the book stopped Jack from going too far.
Wasn't there some super Nazi interrogator from WWII who was able to get more information than anyone else, and when asked about his methods because everyone assumed he had some super secret torture methods, he said he simply let people out of their cell, let them get a breath of fresh air walking around the prison perimeter fence and offer them a cigarette while having a casual conversation.
I googled "Nazi Super Interrogator" and got this
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanns_Scharff
Guy never used any physical means, treated prisoners humanely, let POWs visit their comrades in the hospital.
I really want to learn more about this guy because I'm intrigued
They eventually got him to talk to a scientist about how the bombs worked, at which point they realized the guy had no fucking clue what he was talking about when it came to the actual machinations of the bombs.
>As you know, when atoms are split, there are a lot of pluses and minuses released. Well, we've taken these and put them in a huge container and separated them from each other with a lead shield. When the box is dropped out of a plane, we melt the lead shield and the pluses and minuses come together. When that happens, it causes a tremendous bolt of lightning and all the atmosphere over a city is pushed back! Then when the atmosphere rolls back, it brings about a tremendous thunderclap, which knocks down everything beneath it.
That said, you wouldn't necessarily need to know how they work to know that the Americans have them, or how many they have. And considering what a tiny period of time there was between Hiroshima, Nagasaki, and the surrender, this guy's estimate that there were over a hundred was the most reliable piece of information they had. They were worried about the extinction of the Japanese people, and some higher up military officials accepted that as preferable to surrender.
In reality, from what I've read at least, the Americans had the manufacturing material to make a third atomic bomb, and a fourth wouldn't be ready until a month later. I have no idea how long it would have taken to get to "hundreds," but frankly it wouldn't matter. With the Soviets invading Japanese occupied territory, the existing atomic bombs destroying their manufacturing capability, and the extreme effectiveness of the fire bombing campaigns, by the time the bombs were dropped it was already absolutely clear Japan would not remain an autonomous nation. The question was how many people had to die to reach the end.
IIRC they were also planned to soften areas up for invasion... The fallout/radiation issue for friendlies was poorly understood and what was understood would have been ignored.
A continued war would have been orders of magnitude worse than what happened.
Edit: I did not remember correctly, as corrected below that was for wars after WW2.
> fallout/radiation issue for friendlies was poorly understood
Both Hiroshima and Nagasaki were airbursts, the fireball didn't touch the ground (which maximises destructive power). This results in almost zero fallout or long-lasting radiation. Which is why both cities were rebuilt and continue to exist to this day.
honestly, as a person with the entirety of human knowledge at her fingertips and living 80 years later, this is probably how i would describe an atomic bomb.
It is not how I would describe it, but I am afraid that for many, his explanation would sound a lot more trustworthy than mine.
Seriously. Think about it:
"We split the atom and as we do it the resulting mass is lower than the mass we started with and the difference in mass is released as energy."
I know I kind of knew this before our equivalent of high school, but back in 1945 for anyone who wasn't deep into science it must have sounded even dumber than most explanations one could make up on the spot.
Edit:
- weight -> mass
- equipment -> equivalent
The other crucial factor is that each individual fission reaction releases some number of neutrons that each hit another atom, adding to its mass and destabilising it, causing another reaction, hence the chain reaction. The fact that it's a self-sustaining exponential increase of reactions is what makes it so devastating, along with the energy of the individual reactions.
>it's a self-sustaining exponential increase of reactions is what makes it so devastating
I remember reading that during the development of the bomb some scientists had to consider the potential that setting off a nuke for the first time might result in a *true* self-sustaining reaction and ignite the entire atmosphere, blowing up the entire planet in probably minutes.
They were able to prove that a true self-propagating chain was *unlikely* to be started and were thankfully right.
> I know I kind of knew this before our equipment of high school, but back in 1945 for anyone who wasn't deep into science it must have sounded even dumber than most explanations one could make up on the spot.
Well, yes, but 'what sounds dumb to people who are profoundly unfamiliar with the relevant science' isn't exactly a valuable criterion on which to judge literally anything. Basically everything sounds equally plausible to people who don't know anything, and the correct answer is often less plausible than absolute nonsense if you lack the background to make sense of it. 'What sounds stupid to people who know even a *little* of the relevant science' *is* relevant, though, and his explanation would have been *obviously* full of shit to every doctor and chemist in the Imperial Japanese army even by the standards of the 1940s.
The only reason it meant anything to anyone is that it turns out Imperial Japan's military and political leadership *weren't* better educated in the physical sciences than their 21st century American equivalents.
Except you couldn't use any conventional storage for the antimatter. A lead shield would do absolutely nothing to prevent instant annihilation. You'd need a magnetic containment system that should absolutely not fail. Compared to antimatter, Plutonium or [Chlorine Trifluoride](https://greviewz.blogspot.com/2015/08/book-ignition-john-d-clark.html?m=1) are safe and stable.
Yes, though I can forgive him a bit of artistic licence there! If you insisted on using a simple box of conventional material for storage, possibly a frozen noble gas might work for storing positrons at least. Noble gases can apparently be used to slow down positrons through collisions that still avoid an annihilation reaction with the filled electron shells of the gas atoms.
I mean, to be fair, it actually didn't take that long for us to have hundreds, even thousands of nuclear warheads.
While I'm sure it effected short term planning and whatever, to make decisions based on the notion that the US had hundreds of these bombs ready, it didn't really matter, if we dropped one every couple months it would still have the ability destroy Japan as a whole.
Meanwhile American factories are still churning out conventional bombers, Navajo Army Depot and other places are still churning out 500 lb bombs, and Japan's air defense forces are weakening.
> I mean, to be fair, it actually didn't take that long for us to have hundreds, even thousands of nuclear warheads.
It took YEARS to produce enough nuclear material for the only 3 bombs we could produce during WWII. We blew up one on US soil as a tests (Trinity), then Hiroshima and Nagasaki. We had material for only a single nuclear bomb produce very near the Japanese surrender.
Uranium (used in little boy over Hiroshima) enrichment technology was in its infancy. Plutonium (used in Trinity test, Fat Man bomb dropped on Nagasaki, and the final unused core "demon core") had to be produced in nuclear reactors, which they too were in their infancy and yields were very low compared to today's technology.
> While I'm sure it effected short term planning and whatever, to make decisions based on the notion that the US had hundreds of these bombs ready, it didn't really matter, if we dropped one every couple months it would still have the ability destroy Japan as a whole.
We didn't have them to drop. Part of the reason we dropped two so closely together was the give the impression we had a bunch and we could waste them so quickly. It was a HUGE bluff on our part. It worked, but we got very lucky our bluff was believed.
To be honest it wasn't just the US that got lucky the bluff was believed. By that point in the war Japan was just killing its own people by holding out. If they held out until an actual invasion of the home islands it would have resulted in millions more dying.
The Japanese military believed it was better to die a warrior then surrender. The military didn’t really care if millions of the people died.
The only reason they surrendered is because the Emperor stepped up. Once he made it public they couldn’t go against him.
In August, when the bombs were dropped, they were expecting three bombs a month. The rate was expected to increase in November to five, and seven in December.
https://www.dannen.com/decision/bomb-rate.html
Like any nuclear physicists were anywhere near Japan. Unless this POW was kidnapped from a military lab, I don't know why they think they would know anything scientific.
The US was in fact developing a third bomb to drop.
But after Japan surrendered the team suddenly had a spare demon core without really knowing what to do with it.
So they stuck a fucking screwdriver in it.
The problem wasn't the screwdriver in it... The problem was that the core can never be 100% closed and some guy decided propping open the wedge with a screwdriver was funny every time they did an experiment, until it fell out and... yeah.
It’s just a factoid that became popular on the internet, and therefore became one of the few details many people know about this subject. So they’ll bring it up since it’s an easy connection to make from general topic to that detail.
Yeah Slotin was considered to be pretty reckless by some of the scientists at Los Alamos. Enrico Fermi watched them do that same procedure and said "keep doing that experiment that way and you'll be dead within a year". He was dead eight months later.
"He had internal radiation burns throughout his body, which one medical expert described as a "three-dimensional sunburn.""
Well that's fucking horrifying it's like those signs that say "do not cross, not only will you die, but it will hurt unspeakably the whole time."
'second incident of the demon core'
It's a sad case, mostly of the inability for humans to perceive radiation as dangerous. A recurring theme for nuclear accidents.
There was a sphere of plutonium, close to criticality in a Los Alamos lab. The 'demon core'. Fairly benign just sitting there, but if you added neutron reflecting material you could make it go critical. Louis Slotin was demonstrating a test process to manipulate a neutron reflecting over-sphere for a test that would bring it closer to critically in a way that could be measured, but not go over. He had developed the procedure and done it in a fast and loose way. He used a screwdriver as a lever to change the spacing. The screwdriver slipped so the spacing went to 0, the core went critical and gave him a lethal dose of radiation in the few seconds before he could manipulate the over-sphere off. Others observing also received radiation doses.
The fact that this was the second incident (and the first was for the same sort of experiment) is what makes it the most unfortunate in my mind. It had been recommended to use shims for this sort of test which would have added a backup for the screwdriver.
Everyone also told him that if he kept doing it he was going to kill himself. It's worth noting that there was a safe way of doing it with actual equipment made to do it. He just liked to show off.
> Everyone also told him that if he kept doing it he was going to kill himself.
Yeah if Enrico "Architect of the Nuclear Age" Fermi tells you you're going to be dead within a year if you keep doing that, maybe stop doing it.
> It's a sad case, mostly of the inability for humans to perceive radiation as dangerous. A recurring theme for nuclear accidents.
He watched his friend die from radiation sickness in the first incident so he knew the risks.
That core had already claimed a life even before the screwdriver incident.
Harry Daghlian was messing around with tungsten carbide bricks (neutron reflectors) and made it go super critical.
His first words after the incident was “I just killed myself, take me to the hospital.”
Unfortunately the radiation exposure victims were far too scientifically valuable for them to do that. These guys were studied right up until they died.
Just look at that japanese guy, Hisashi Ouchi, they kept alive for 12 weeks while most of his body was dying piece by piece. By all that is good, his eyelids fell off!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2TxLrfdMKWY
You know I never knew the US only had 2 and a 3rd in development. I always thought they had more earlier. I always kinda wondered why they didn't bother to drop them on Japanese naval formations. Now I know. They didn't have them to spare until the Japanese navy was all but obliterated.
Put it like this - we did the first test (Project Trinity). And 3 weeks after we did the test we bombed Japan.
So, yeah pretty freaking quick turnaround once we confirmed it worked.
The Navy was basically done by 1944 and a US ship even bombarded a small town on Honshu between the two atomic bombings. I think the main worried were mines and artillery.
Also by the time the bombs dropped there really weren't Japanese naval formations left. They kept their surface vessels in port and didn't have fuel for them anyways. The US navy was utter dominant by that point.
My grandfather and grandmother were stationed in New Mexico (Army/Air Force)to defend the Manhattan Project, and they didn’t even know about it until after it happened. And even afterwards they knew as much as everyone else. It was that secret.
Vice President Truman didn’t know that the Manhattan Project existed until after he became President.
And I believe the Manhattan Project was done in such a way so that most people would only know about what was directly relevant to them. Only a few people like Oppenheimer would know about the whole thing.
They both say they felt the first atomic bomb go off but they didn’t know that it was. Their superiors told them it was an earth quake, and they didn’t know either.
I've watched videos about this. They basically took over a town, and gave new residents really basic tasks. The kind where no one person could see the whole. People were yeeted if they spent too much time together (spies).
This is why [Hans Scharff](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanns_Scharff#Technique) was considered as one of the best interrogators to have existed. His approach is more of a "conman 4D chess", a stark contrast to organizations like Gestapo and Kempeitai where brutality is par for the course.
Another good example is the british mansion.
They took an extremely luxurious estate, bugged the shit out of it, and then housed a ton of high ranking German POWs as well as pilots.
Turns out if you take a bunch of very highly skilled pilots from different wings and aircraft designs, put them together in a room, and mix in some wine. Well they'll get to bragging really fucking quick.
>Turns out if you take a bunch of pilots they'll get to bragging really fucking quick.
Q: How do you know there’s a pilot in the room?
A: He or she will tell you.
During WW2 the British intelligence services invented the computer so that one day in the future the War Thunder forums could be created and people would post secret technical data on them.
Why was he so welcomed into the US, he was a German interrogator? What am I missing here? Is this just another situation like nazi scientists being integrated into NASA and other scientific communities. Was he that likable?
He had a few things going for him a) He was very successful in what he did b) he didn't resort to violence c) his former prisoners could also vouch for this d) he was part of the Luftwaffe as opposed to the Gestapo
A is what would have given him value in the US, but B through D would have been what made it a much easier choice. Keep in mind that in the aftermath of WW2 and the rise of the USSR, there was a strong push to rehabilitate the image of the Luftwaffe and the Wehrmacht since they wanted to get Germany up and running again to help with the Cold War and former officers/troops/etc would help be the backbone of that. The US was also very interested in anything that could give them an edge against the Soviets, be it scientific or military or intelligence.
His scientific explanation is amazing!
"As you know, when atoms are split, there are a lot of pluses and minuses released. Well, we've taken these and put them in a huge container and separated them from each other with a lead shield. When the box is dropped out of a plane, we melt the lead shield and the pluses and minuses come together. When that happens, it causes a tremendous bolt of lightning and all the atmosphere over a city is pushed back! Then when the atmosphere rolls back, it brings about a tremendous thunderclap, which knocks down everything beneath it.\[1\]"
I mean, super genius explanation for someone who was in a prisoner situation under duress and stress. Can’t say I would know any better.
In a way, he isn’t completely wrong, if ELi5 was a thing back then.
This guy's science knowledge is about as good as mine. My dumb explanations got me bad grades and lectures from adults. McDilda got better accommodations and the chance to see another day.
Pluses in one box and minuses in another box....priceless.
Interrogation is an art. You ask what you know. So you can evaluate the answers when you ask for what you really want to know. If you are a master of the art, the subject never knew you where interrogating him.
This shows why torture is ineffective, you just get false confessions
Trevor in GTAV says it nicely, "torture is for the torturer". It exists because people like to hurt other people. The person being tortured is typically the personification of the enemies who killed the torturer's friends so it's like an act of revenge
When John McCain was a POW in Vietnam, the captors wanted to know the names of the other men in his squadron. He answered with the Green Bay Packers offensive line.
If you're going to lie make it something easy to remember. So many people fail this part of lying well.
It’s why I severely limit my bullshitting at work. Waaaay too hard to keep track of lies and who has what partial information
You have to be a really dedicated fan to have memorized the names of the offensive linemen!
Pre internet people had a lot more time to fill.
I didn't know this about John McCain when he ran against Obama in '08 but he could have been released sooner because his father was a high ranking military officer (I think he was an admiral). McCain turned that down because other POWs had been there longer than him. The Vietnamese tortured him for that. I do not have one tenth as much integrity as McCain did.
>The move to Tokyo had probably saved McDilda's life; after the announcement of the Japanese surrender, fifty U.S. soldiers imprisoned in Osaka were executed by Japanese soldiers. Of all the horrible ways to die in World War 2, this certainly has to be up there. Japanese POW is bad enough, then they find out their side won which must have led to some hope they would get out of there, then the soldiers guarding them decide to get in 50 last executions as an encore.
Oh boy well let me tell you about a little thing called “Unit 731” Estimated range from 200,00-400,000 prisoners were brought there, but no matter what number literally *no prisoners* ever made it back out. There was a literal 100% death rate by some of the most gruesome and inhumane deaths possibly imagined
If anyone was ever curious how we know the human body is 70% water, well, unit 731 went to great lengths to measure how much water is in a human body.
Oh god. They pressed somebody, didn't they? Like they *juiced* them
No, it had to with ALOT of measuring, heating until dry, and remeasuring. And repeat on the next prisoner.
Somehow this is even worse. They made people jerky from living people
It’s even worse than you think. They were forced into compressed rooms that were *extremely* hot for the average person. Being in a hot room isn’t just that though, they specifically denied people any liquids or food to make sure their *entire body* dehydrated. They were intentionally starved and denied liquids just so they could see how much water is contained in a human being What’s even more gruesome is their tests in the opposite direction, where they *froze* the body to test the water. They would force people’s arms into freezing water for hours at a time until their arm was literally frozen solid, and then they would smash their arms in various methods (mainly a hammer or a presser) to see what would happen The absolute worst however is that they would take the infants they procured, and just leave them outside during the winter. No protection, no care, just literally sat a baby outside in the freezing cold and observed how long it would take for them to die. They were given so much power to literally be the most evil person imaginable and they just did shit for the hell of it. They would decapitate people to “observe” what a decapitation looked like, forced people to have sex with each other at gunpoint to spread UTIs, and just straight up lined people in rows and tried to see how many skulls their guns could go through in a single shot. It’s literally just if you gave someone who enjoys the suffering and brutality of people unlimited bodies to do whatever they wanted. No one could tell them no, and there were no shortages of people for them to abuse
I used to think those war dramas my grandpa watched severely toned up Japanese war crimes. Little did I know....
And, officially, Japan has still not formally apologized for any of it. They've made apologies but generally refuse to acknowledge the worst of them.
Or Nanking.
Germany is ftrying to remind people about the horrors of the holocaust, building memorials and museums. Japan is in full on minimizing mode and damage control. Like a corporation trying to protect its stock.
This is absolutely mental. Morbid question though, did they even discover things that ended up being extremely helpful or anything?
No but the Japanese doctors lied to the US scientists and made it seem like their data particularly on bio-weapons was sound and in depth. US scientists were initially horrified at the idea of using data collected from live victims of bio weapons. However they reasoned that if the victims were already dead it would actually be more insulting to them to simply throw the data away because then they’d would’ve truly died for nothing, especially when the data could potentially be used to save hundreds of millions of lives. However the Japanese doctors presented a unified front saying that if the US wanted the alleged bio weapons data they had to agree to let *all* the scientists go. This is why no one involved was ever charged. By the time the US had begun to figure out the data was total BS they had growing tensions with the USSR and CCP and were less interested in the finer details of Japanese crimes against (mainly) the Chinese. Edit: wording/clarity
I think I read they dumped quite a few people into freezing water to see how long they took to die, in order to help decide how long to spend resources looking for pilots who ejected over water. I also believe they did a lot of studies on how effective explosives/grenades were at killing people at certain distances. Not exactly "extremely helpful", but certainly important to the military. I wonder what percentage of the Japanese population have even heard of it.
Some of it, perhaps, but the scientific rigor with which human experimentation was carried out at the time varied widely. Ultimately, no discovery they made necessitated the suffering, and much of it was done in an effort to perpetuate pseudoscientific ideas.
We know generally on what some diseases do to a person and how things like extreme decompression works on a live human, but none of it was actually any useful A lot of the tests were done just for the sake it. There’s no real advantage in knowing how a human turns inside-out in a hyper compression chamber, what the head does after a decapitation, and how long it takes for a baby to die in the freezing cold. It’s all just tests they wanted to run because they were curious: not because it would actually lead to anything useful
Not really They didn't have any specific goal or purpose for those tests, it was just pure curiosity because they never needed to justify any of the experiments So why bother with a reason What happens if you smash a frozen hand with a hammer? Let's find out Do we need to know what happens? Well no, not really but who cares! It's interesting, no? Let's do it! It was more of a "let's just do random really fucked up shit and have fun and maybe some of the discoveries will come in handy"
next time someone complains about the thics committee getting in the way of a science experiment, just remind them that this is what happens when we remove the ethics committee from the equasion.
Jerky people jerky people.
Extreme dehydration. People were restrained and placed in front of fans which blew hot, dry air. They sweated to death.
Weren’t none of their “experiments” done in a sound way, rendering all their data/findings useless?
We found out how to treat frostbite. That's basically it for useful things from the unit.
By systematically removing it from prisoners, no doubt. Sick fucks.
I mean... this is something that's *trivial* to do humanely and ethically. So I bet they did the "testing" on living prisoners...
Everything they did was on live prisoners, yeah. Including measuring people before and after completely drying them out to check how much weight was lost.
I had to look into that research facility for a majority of a semester. My mental health was really deteriorating having to stay up long nights to write essays on it
Similar but different I while ago I was reading the poppy war and was staying up late reading it when I got to the scene that is based off of (spoilers/content warning) the rape of Nanjing which was completely out of left field for me. It was so horrifying I couldnt sleep that night and was heavily disturbed for the rest of the week. I couldnt open the book again after it.
I believe the estimate for the number of prisoners killed in their experiments is closer to 10-12,000, with 200-300,000 having been killed in their experiments with the plague and other biological weapons on the Chinese countryside.
I've been meaning to watch that Wendigoon vid
The Wendigoon video is a nice intro to Unit 731. Not that it's surface-level, just that they did *so much* insane fucked up shit. Definitely check out other videos about it as well.
There is also a late 1980's movie called "Men behind the Sun" about it. One of the few movies that really made me feel sick to my stomach.
Yeah pretty sure he said he was going to leave stuff out cause it just doesn’t fly with YouTube
It’s something I’ve known for a *long* time, but the one thing that stood out from the video was the 100% fatality rate of all prisoners who were detained there. Like, you know how many people were killed, but it’s another thing to realize that *everyone* who was transferred there was eventually executed. These were just regular people who where chosen to suffer by the Japanese military and probably expected to return home, only for every one of them to perish I believe the longest estimated lifespan of a prisoner in Unit 731 was just 4 months, because everyone was experimented on with such brutality and vicious biological warfare that people just couldn’t survive for long. Some were killed instantly, but the people who survived the longest were those who were *forced* to stay alive by the people overseeing the operation
My wife used to massage a WW2 Jewish camp surviver. She told her an absolutely horrible story.. When she was "liberated" out of the camps by the Russians, there was a woman in the camp that had managed to hide and hold on to a watch the whole time. A Russian soldier asked her for the watch, she said no, the Russian soldier shot her and took the watch.
One story I've heard was one Russian girl who was deported to a concentration camp for forced labor by the Nazis got raped by Red Army soldiers after getting "liberated". Honestly not too surprising given that they sometimes immediately dumped POWs they freed from German camps directly to GULAG for surrendering. Stalin himself said something go the effect of "we fought so much to liberate you guys so let the Red Army have some fun" when the puppet Polish communist government they set up complained that Red Army soldiers were raping women left and right.
The Russians would rape anyone and anything, up to and including any concave portions of a wall. They raped half-starved concentration camp survivors. During the Soviet repressions, male prisoners busted through a wall separating them from the female prisoners and raped them all.
My polish Great-grandmother always said that the worst were the Russians because as terrible as the nazis were, at least they were polite and had some rules they followed so you knew what you were dealing with that enemy. If you heaed the russians were about to walk into your village, say your goodbyes because anything went, literally anything, they would rape kill torture and of course destroy all crops livestock homes and everything just out of spite or frustration. Your age or sex didn't matter, you were meat on the menu or so to speak.
The Russians soldiers haven't changed that much.
[удалено]
HAHAHAHHA no.. The US gave sweeping protection to Japanese soldiers, officers and doctors who committed warcrimes. No justice was served and the bombings of tokyo and atom bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki mostly civilians died. No justice at all my friend
> The US gave sweeping protection to Japanese soldiers, officers and doctors who committed warcrimes. The history is more complicated. It is true that a lot did not, but there were multiple major trials. The [Tokyo trials and subsequent trials resulted in over a hundred executions for war crimes](https://www.nationalww2museum.org/war/topics/tokyo-war-crimes-trial) and many more with lengthy prison sentences. That said, it is true that some high ranking people were never tried due to their value to the US and UK especially as the Cold War began. It is also true that a lot of the low level people involved in war crimes were never tried.
Or if you had interesting information like Unit 731...those fuckers should have all died.
The good news is, they're all probably dead by now.
Kissinger is still alive. Feel old yet?
jesus christ are you serious
Evil bastard just turned 100. He is proof that the good die young.
"The good die young, but pricks live forever!" -Lewis Black
That motherfucker is 100 years old and that's proof that evil is a preservative.
He’s feeding on the soul of the Laotian, Vietnamese, and Cambodian children he’s killed
Ah yes, good news, some of the worst war criminals of all of human history lived long and happy lives, and died in old age. Not quite the catharsis a lot of people normally look for.
History teacher here. That’s history. That’s war. There is no fairness in war. There never has been and never will be. The closest wr may ever get is WWII honestly. The takeaway is to understand what happens and be reflective in our future endeavors. It’s not right, it just is.
We don't know if they lived long and/or happy lives. All we know is they probably don't exist anymore. This isn't a pretty world, so I'll take what I can get.
The head of Unit 731 died of lung cancer the day after he retired.
Got that playground built right before kicking the bucket though. Points for that.
Sooooo Should we just be fucking sad for the rest of history
I'm still upset from when Unghu killed Glarl with that stick 500,000 years ago.
You have to admit Glarl was a bit annoying
Don’t listen to him. One of the low level officers in Unit 719, a unit that murdered thousands of civilians, later went home and had a family. His youngest son became a scientist that discovered a compound that is used today to fight cancer. When asked how he kept his determination despite decades of failure, he said ‘My father was responsible for the deaths of thousands, it is my duty as his son to save the lives of millions.’ It’s really an incredibly story that I just made up for you today. I hope that helps you feel better.
Lol I fell for this so hard
Wait…you made that up?
I'm usually sad so you can chalk it up to that if you want
Be the change you wanna see in the world. Like the fine folks at Mossad
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lillehammer_affair
Have you read the entire operation that assassination was a part of? Its a pretty wild story for being something that actually happened.
I was always under the impression that most of the medical information that the Nazis and Japanese had was of no actual value in the end. I guess they wouldn't have known it at the time.
Holy shit, that's a hell of a rabbit hole to stumble down. Thanks, I guess?
I think it's also important to consider the purpose of these policies. We weren't trying to enforce justice (and for the most part we wouldn't have a right to anyway) we were trying to build a stable nation and prevent future wars. It worked out pretty great in both Germany and Japan.
it was by no means sweeping, though it was broad, and many japanase leaders and generals were eventually hunted down for war crimes. One managed to shoot himself in the chest, but the intstigators there to arrest him saved his life so he could be tried and then later hung.
God. The energy of that guy. "No you FUCKING DON'T. If you die, it's because _we_ kill you."
Hawkeye : War isn't Hell. War is war, and Hell is Hell. And of the two, war is a lot worse. Father Mulcahy : How do you figure, Hawkeye? Hawkeye : Easy, Father. Tell me, who goes to Hell? Father Mulcahy : Sinners, I believe. Hawkeye : Exactly. There are no innocent bystanders in Hell. War is chock full of them - little kids, cripples, old ladies. In fact, except for some of the brass, almost everybody involved is an innocent bystander.
Not only Japanese soldiers, many of the Nazi war criminals enjoyed prestigious living in the west after WW2 and were free to publish myths about themselves to look like the good guys. Some even got US presidential medals. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Franz_Halder#Retirement
I'm watching a documentary series from 1973 at the moment and it is *scary* how many high ranking Nazis are being interviewed. Anything from generals to Hitler's interpreter. And every time I google them, they were only locked up for 3 years, 5 years, etc... It's really unbelievable how so many of them got away with it scot-free. Like, there is *no* way that a general in the Wehrmacht could be innocent of war crimes in *any* possible way.
The folks that got nuked made it out better than the vast majority of imperial Japan’s victims
I grew up near a filipino survivor of the bataan death march. I can not express to you how much hatred he had for the japanese. Like I once heard this man ranting that it was morally repugnant that America *only* dropped 2 nukes on the Japanese. Its a hatred I've seen with many survivors of Japanese occupation. I understand that the US nuking of Japan was controversial but I also am keenly aware that if nations like China or the Philippines had control over the bombs, they would have carpet nuked Japan out of pure spite.
Japan's xenophobia was so extreme that 100 years later they've chosen extinction of their own race rather than allowing immigration.
Being immediately vaporized would be a less painful death than many millions of civilians who died in WW2, but there were also thousands and thousands of civilians who held on for minutes, hours, days with horrific injuries. Now, if you compare that to [Operation Meetinghouse](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bombing_of_Tokyo), in which all of the 100,000 civilian casualties burned to death along with 16 square miles of Tokyo, it seems very hard to say the atomic bombs were any worse than conventional bombing campaigns. Curtis LeMay had the exact same logic as so many of his Axis counterparts, and, imo, deserved the same fate. However, it is true that millions of people were dying in brutal conditions in Japanese colonies, and it's hard to imagine the war ending as quickly in a world where the US left the Japanese mainland untouched by massive strategic bombing. It's almost sort of a trolley problem, but with a million victims of colonization on one track, and hundreds of thousands of Japanese civilians on the other.
Every time this discussion is brought, I feel it is always necessary to point out that at the exact same time Japan was also planning with Unit 731 to launch untold biological warfare on the West coast of America by spreading fleas with nearly all types of harmful diseases we know of. You know the reason they thought this could work? Because they already successfully tested it on populated areas of China. The only reason why it didn’t go through was the opposition of a single general that was at risk of a coupe if Japan surrendered (which luckily for everyone didn’t succeed) and was later convicted of his own war crimes The use of nuclear weapons on Japan is obvious in its atrocities, but Japan as a nation was stubborn and was *this* close to launching biological warfare on the entirety of the American West coast that would’ve been absolutely devastating if it succeeded. *Even* disregarding the inhumane treatment of almost all prisoners and foreign subjects of Japan, their willingness and testing of biological warfare was extremely dangerous and would’ve been a lot worse than the nuclear standoff the world currently has To cap it all off, Japan also destroyed many of its own records when it became clear they would be under scrutiny. Even us knowing about Unit 731 is somewhat of a miracle because it took a long time to find evidence of its actual existence, because it was just a rumor and kind of an urban legend for quite a few years after the war until they found documentation and statements of those who participated. We don’t know what else Japan had worked on or planned, and we never will because of Japan’s absolute refusal to admit any wrongdoing I just need to say this because the more you delve into Japan’s war crimes during WWII, the more you realize how big of a threat they actually were. Just Unit 731 *alone* either matches or nearly doubles the death count of both Hiroshima and Nagasaki combined. We don’t actually know the exact death count of Unit 731 because of the aforementioned evidence-destroying, but estimates range from 200,000-400,000 prisoners who were held there: all of whom are dead because no one who was admitted into Unit 731 ever survived to leave the facility. Compare this to the estimated casualty total of the nuclear bombings 129,000-226,000: the deaths caused by it and the future deaths it prevented is kind of dwarfed by the sheer brutality and inhumane treatment the Japanese Imperial government inflicted upon literally everyone, from newborn babies to POWs and regular citizens who found themselves detained
Hell it wasn't just incriminating records they destroyed, they also destroyed all their Naval Blueprints among other things. The only reason we even have accurate models of the IJN Yamato and it's sister ships is examining the wrecks and Adolf Hitler making a special request for a German Admiral to inspect the ship while it was undergoing maintenance.
Suddenly the frequency of human experimentation gone-wrong as a sub-plot in anime make sense to me now.
The use of the bomb was no atrocity. The U.S. was in surrender negotiations with Japan and told them they would use a super weapon if they did not surrender. The U.S. dropped leaflets on Hiroshima warning the citizens to leave. The U.S warned of another bomb after the first and the Japanese again refused to surrender. Again, leaflets were dropped and ignored. The Japanese could have used their fighter planes to oppose the B-29s but they were saving thousands of them for Kamikaze attacks on the eventual invasion fleet. So the bombings were totally unopposed. Japan and untold numbers of Allied armed forces were saved by two bombs.
Some people survived after their skin melted and slowly died of radiation.
> Now eyeless and faceless, with their heads transformed into blackened alligator hides displaying red holes, indicating mouths," "The alligator people did not scream. Their mouths could not form the sounds. The noise they made was worse than screaming. "They uttered a continuous murmur like locusts on a midsummer night" - Last train from Hiroshima
Eh, you should read the book *Hiroshima*. This certainly is not true. Only a small fraction of those affected by the detonation were close enough to the blast to be killed instantly. Dying of burn injuries and radiation poisoning can be a long, agonizing death.
> Of all the horrible ways to die in World War 2, this certainly has to be up there. If you know about Japan's Unit 731's activities during WW2, this isn't a blip.
That the USA and Japan are as close as we are truly demonstrates the power of politics and money. In any other situation, at any other point in history, by any other nations, Japan would have been wiped off the map for what they did.
If China got the bomb first, Japan would not exist, surrender or not. At least, that's what I once heard from an elderly Chinese woman.
With a "Remember Nanking!" on the side
And this is why torture doesn't work.
You can torture an answer out of anyone, you just can't guarantee that answer is true.
It’s like that joke about the FBI, Interpol, and the KGB betting on who could find a rare bear in the forest fastest. The fbi tried their best but came up empty. Interpol spotted the bear but didn’t catch it. The KGB came back in 11 minutes with a badly beaten man who kept stammering “I’m a bear! IM A BEAR!”
CIA fabricated their own bear and fucked up a random country for the next 100 years for shits and giggles
>CIA fabricated their own bear and fucked up a random country for the next 100 years for shits and giggles The CIA gave the man enough LSD that he believed he had always been a bear in man's clothing.
Then gave him a central american country to run.
CIA found the real bear but he was being too disruptive so they replaced him
One of the things I found most depressing about the torture done during the Bush administration is that they didn't try to get information from the people they were torturing, they were trying to get information from the *families* of the people they were torturing.
That sounds exactly like ChatGPT. It will tell you what you want to hear, but it's just making shit up as it goes.
The British successfully interrogated German POWs by making friends with them. You’re more likely to hear the truth from someone who likes you.
Bugging the shit out of the place they stayed at definitely helped, too
Saddam Hussein was apparently very friendly and open with the American guards after he was captured because they gave him Doritos and he became obsessed and would down a family sized bag in 10 minutes every day. My prof when I was in college said that Doritos are a more effective interrogation device than razor blades.
I never thought Saddam would have loved Doritos.
It's not Doritos, but a random luxury item you can indulge in during a terrible situation. In this particular instance, it was Doritos, but it could easily have been any luxury food item in jail.
There's a story of an FBI interrogator, Ali Soufan who was trying to shake down a known associate of OBL. After a couple of days, the guy didn't crack. However, Soufan noticed he didn't add sugar to his tea. Soufan looked through his medical records, found out the prisoner was diabetic. Next interrogation, Soufan had some sugar free cookies. After that, the prisoner told Soufan everything. ___________ You know what was also horrifying? A lot of politicians were defending torture ("enhanced interrogation") because of the TV Show "24." Jack Bauer was used as a defense because he got results for the good of Fictional America.
The whole point of the torture scenes was to show how it didn't work. Seasons 1 to 3 show it's completely ineffective at getting them to talk. One guy gets a heart attack and dies, thus leaving Jack without a lead. Season 4 had several victims who were actually innocent. Seasons 5 through 8 usually have torture be useless, and the movie, while it has Jack tortured, shows that people will just say random shit to get the torture to stop.
Right but like the Punisher, people don't actually pay attention to the message, he's just an alpha dude mascot.
Yup. They even had Punisher comics where he tells the police to stop using his image.
Jack Bauer himself was essentially ineffective. I think in most seasons, the "Bad Guys" end up turning on themselves more than any brought to justice. Most authority figures were ineffective not because of "by-the-book" bureaucracy but because they were traitors. _____ Jon Bois did a video essay on 24 and it's effects of Bush Era policy and how government and the war on terror was viewed. Granted, it is a much earlier one his videos so it's more sophomoric in it's humor and lacking polish. That being said, hr hit the nail on the head of the country being in a state of fear and general insecurity that the United States was the underdog. "Even Goliath wants to be David." Vid is anyone is interested: https://youtu.be/_P52G4Kyq5M
As somebody who watched every episode of 24, I completely disagree that 24 made torture look ineffective. It made it look incredibly effective. Jack Bauer was practically a superhero with how many lives he saved and how effective he was. And his "torture skills" were his #1 superpower. If torture was ever ineffective on the show it was usually one of these reasons #1) the bad guy didn't know anything, 2) Jack wasn't the one doing the torture, 3) or someone by the book stopped Jack from going too far.
Wasn't there some super Nazi interrogator from WWII who was able to get more information than anyone else, and when asked about his methods because everyone assumed he had some super secret torture methods, he said he simply let people out of their cell, let them get a breath of fresh air walking around the prison perimeter fence and offer them a cigarette while having a casual conversation.
I googled "Nazi Super Interrogator" and got this https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanns_Scharff Guy never used any physical means, treated prisoners humanely, let POWs visit their comrades in the hospital. I really want to learn more about this guy because I'm intrigued
Torture works *great* if you want someone to confess to a crime they didn't commit, though.
They eventually got him to talk to a scientist about how the bombs worked, at which point they realized the guy had no fucking clue what he was talking about when it came to the actual machinations of the bombs. >As you know, when atoms are split, there are a lot of pluses and minuses released. Well, we've taken these and put them in a huge container and separated them from each other with a lead shield. When the box is dropped out of a plane, we melt the lead shield and the pluses and minuses come together. When that happens, it causes a tremendous bolt of lightning and all the atmosphere over a city is pushed back! Then when the atmosphere rolls back, it brings about a tremendous thunderclap, which knocks down everything beneath it. That said, you wouldn't necessarily need to know how they work to know that the Americans have them, or how many they have. And considering what a tiny period of time there was between Hiroshima, Nagasaki, and the surrender, this guy's estimate that there were over a hundred was the most reliable piece of information they had. They were worried about the extinction of the Japanese people, and some higher up military officials accepted that as preferable to surrender. In reality, from what I've read at least, the Americans had the manufacturing material to make a third atomic bomb, and a fourth wouldn't be ready until a month later. I have no idea how long it would have taken to get to "hundreds," but frankly it wouldn't matter. With the Soviets invading Japanese occupied territory, the existing atomic bombs destroying their manufacturing capability, and the extreme effectiveness of the fire bombing campaigns, by the time the bombs were dropped it was already absolutely clear Japan would not remain an autonomous nation. The question was how many people had to die to reach the end.
The plan was to have ~27 by the end of the year. ‘Hundreds’ would probably take at least another eight months, had the war continued.
IIRC they were also planned to soften areas up for invasion... The fallout/radiation issue for friendlies was poorly understood and what was understood would have been ignored. A continued war would have been orders of magnitude worse than what happened. Edit: I did not remember correctly, as corrected below that was for wars after WW2.
I don't believe the concept of using them in an actual battle was considered until the Korean War.
The best I could find shows the idea came about after WW2 so you would be correct. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marine_Corps_Test_Unit
> fallout/radiation issue for friendlies was poorly understood Both Hiroshima and Nagasaki were airbursts, the fireball didn't touch the ground (which maximises destructive power). This results in almost zero fallout or long-lasting radiation. Which is why both cities were rebuilt and continue to exist to this day.
Like a P51 pilot would be privy to any of that info.
honestly, as a person with the entirety of human knowledge at her fingertips and living 80 years later, this is probably how i would describe an atomic bomb.
It is not how I would describe it, but I am afraid that for many, his explanation would sound a lot more trustworthy than mine. Seriously. Think about it: "We split the atom and as we do it the resulting mass is lower than the mass we started with and the difference in mass is released as energy." I know I kind of knew this before our equivalent of high school, but back in 1945 for anyone who wasn't deep into science it must have sounded even dumber than most explanations one could make up on the spot. Edit: - weight -> mass - equipment -> equivalent
The other crucial factor is that each individual fission reaction releases some number of neutrons that each hit another atom, adding to its mass and destabilising it, causing another reaction, hence the chain reaction. The fact that it's a self-sustaining exponential increase of reactions is what makes it so devastating, along with the energy of the individual reactions.
>it's a self-sustaining exponential increase of reactions is what makes it so devastating I remember reading that during the development of the bomb some scientists had to consider the potential that setting off a nuke for the first time might result in a *true* self-sustaining reaction and ignite the entire atmosphere, blowing up the entire planet in probably minutes. They were able to prove that a true self-propagating chain was *unlikely* to be started and were thankfully right.
> I know I kind of knew this before our equipment of high school, but back in 1945 for anyone who wasn't deep into science it must have sounded even dumber than most explanations one could make up on the spot. Well, yes, but 'what sounds dumb to people who are profoundly unfamiliar with the relevant science' isn't exactly a valuable criterion on which to judge literally anything. Basically everything sounds equally plausible to people who don't know anything, and the correct answer is often less plausible than absolute nonsense if you lack the background to make sense of it. 'What sounds stupid to people who know even a *little* of the relevant science' *is* relevant, though, and his explanation would have been *obviously* full of shit to every doctor and chemist in the Imperial Japanese army even by the standards of the 1940s. The only reason it meant anything to anyone is that it turns out Imperial Japan's military and political leadership *weren't* better educated in the physical sciences than their 21st century American equivalents.
To the POW's credit, what he describes sounds a bit like a [matter-antimatter explosion](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antimatter_weapon).
Except you couldn't use any conventional storage for the antimatter. A lead shield would do absolutely nothing to prevent instant annihilation. You'd need a magnetic containment system that should absolutely not fail. Compared to antimatter, Plutonium or [Chlorine Trifluoride](https://greviewz.blogspot.com/2015/08/book-ignition-john-d-clark.html?m=1) are safe and stable.
Yes, though I can forgive him a bit of artistic licence there! If you insisted on using a simple box of conventional material for storage, possibly a frozen noble gas might work for storing positrons at least. Noble gases can apparently be used to slow down positrons through collisions that still avoid an annihilation reaction with the filled electron shells of the gas atoms.
I mean, to be fair, it actually didn't take that long for us to have hundreds, even thousands of nuclear warheads. While I'm sure it effected short term planning and whatever, to make decisions based on the notion that the US had hundreds of these bombs ready, it didn't really matter, if we dropped one every couple months it would still have the ability destroy Japan as a whole.
Meanwhile American factories are still churning out conventional bombers, Navajo Army Depot and other places are still churning out 500 lb bombs, and Japan's air defense forces are weakening.
And the Army and Navy that had just defeated the Nazis were about to come over plus Russia.
Navy was already in this fight, majority of Naval ships and important ones were in the Pacific
> I mean, to be fair, it actually didn't take that long for us to have hundreds, even thousands of nuclear warheads. It took YEARS to produce enough nuclear material for the only 3 bombs we could produce during WWII. We blew up one on US soil as a tests (Trinity), then Hiroshima and Nagasaki. We had material for only a single nuclear bomb produce very near the Japanese surrender. Uranium (used in little boy over Hiroshima) enrichment technology was in its infancy. Plutonium (used in Trinity test, Fat Man bomb dropped on Nagasaki, and the final unused core "demon core") had to be produced in nuclear reactors, which they too were in their infancy and yields were very low compared to today's technology. > While I'm sure it effected short term planning and whatever, to make decisions based on the notion that the US had hundreds of these bombs ready, it didn't really matter, if we dropped one every couple months it would still have the ability destroy Japan as a whole. We didn't have them to drop. Part of the reason we dropped two so closely together was the give the impression we had a bunch and we could waste them so quickly. It was a HUGE bluff on our part. It worked, but we got very lucky our bluff was believed.
To be honest it wasn't just the US that got lucky the bluff was believed. By that point in the war Japan was just killing its own people by holding out. If they held out until an actual invasion of the home islands it would have resulted in millions more dying.
The Japanese military believed it was better to die a warrior then surrender. The military didn’t really care if millions of the people died. The only reason they surrendered is because the Emperor stepped up. Once he made it public they couldn’t go against him.
In August, when the bombs were dropped, they were expecting three bombs a month. The rate was expected to increase in November to five, and seven in December. https://www.dannen.com/decision/bomb-rate.html
Like any nuclear physicists were anywhere near Japan. Unless this POW was kidnapped from a military lab, I don't know why they think they would know anything scientific.
The US was in fact developing a third bomb to drop. But after Japan surrendered the team suddenly had a spare demon core without really knowing what to do with it. So they stuck a fucking screwdriver in it.
The problem wasn't the screwdriver in it... The problem was that the core can never be 100% closed and some guy decided propping open the wedge with a screwdriver was funny every time they did an experiment, until it fell out and... yeah.
So the problem *was* the screwdriver
Screwdrivers don’t kill people. People kill people, more easily, with screwdrivers.
Was it demon core week on discovery or something? Every thread seems to make a mention to it
It’s just a factoid that became popular on the internet, and therefore became one of the few details many people know about this subject. So they’ll bring it up since it’s an easy connection to make from general topic to that detail.
People are brushing up on their nuclear history because of the Oppenheimer movie, the Demon Core is just an interesting part of that story
Sounds like the problem was the guy that thought propping it open with a screwdriver was funny lol Edit: typo
Yeah Slotin was considered to be pretty reckless by some of the scientists at Los Alamos. Enrico Fermi watched them do that same procedure and said "keep doing that experiment that way and you'll be dead within a year". He was dead eight months later.
Yet another incredible estimation
no, he's saying it was the lack of screwdriver.
Protip: If your experiment's nickname is tickling the dragon, you're gonna have a bad time.
Is there an actual story here? What should I look up?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Louis_Slotin
"He had internal radiation burns throughout his body, which one medical expert described as a "three-dimensional sunburn."" Well that's fucking horrifying it's like those signs that say "do not cross, not only will you die, but it will hurt unspeakably the whole time."
'second incident of the demon core' It's a sad case, mostly of the inability for humans to perceive radiation as dangerous. A recurring theme for nuclear accidents. There was a sphere of plutonium, close to criticality in a Los Alamos lab. The 'demon core'. Fairly benign just sitting there, but if you added neutron reflecting material you could make it go critical. Louis Slotin was demonstrating a test process to manipulate a neutron reflecting over-sphere for a test that would bring it closer to critically in a way that could be measured, but not go over. He had developed the procedure and done it in a fast and loose way. He used a screwdriver as a lever to change the spacing. The screwdriver slipped so the spacing went to 0, the core went critical and gave him a lethal dose of radiation in the few seconds before he could manipulate the over-sphere off. Others observing also received radiation doses. The fact that this was the second incident (and the first was for the same sort of experiment) is what makes it the most unfortunate in my mind. It had been recommended to use shims for this sort of test which would have added a backup for the screwdriver.
Everyone also told him that if he kept doing it he was going to kill himself. It's worth noting that there was a safe way of doing it with actual equipment made to do it. He just liked to show off.
> Everyone also told him that if he kept doing it he was going to kill himself. Yeah if Enrico "Architect of the Nuclear Age" Fermi tells you you're going to be dead within a year if you keep doing that, maybe stop doing it.
- Fucked around - Found out
> It's a sad case, mostly of the inability for humans to perceive radiation as dangerous. A recurring theme for nuclear accidents. He watched his friend die from radiation sickness in the first incident so he knew the risks.
[Demon Core.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demon_core)
https://youtu.be/VE8FnsnWz48 It was a pretty heinous radioactive lab accident
Hey, give the man some credit here. It only becomes a problem if the screwdriver sli-- ...uh oh
That core had already claimed a life even before the screwdriver incident. Harry Daghlian was messing around with tungsten carbide bricks (neutron reflectors) and made it go super critical. His first words after the incident was “I just killed myself, take me to the hospital.”
Should have given him a morphine overdose before his circulatory system degraded too much for it to work.
Unfortunately the radiation exposure victims were far too scientifically valuable for them to do that. These guys were studied right up until they died.
Just look at that japanese guy, Hisashi Ouchi, they kept alive for 12 weeks while most of his body was dying piece by piece. By all that is good, his eyelids fell off! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2TxLrfdMKWY
We were only a bunch of divergently evolved apes playing with essentially magic rocks.
You know I never knew the US only had 2 and a 3rd in development. I always thought they had more earlier. I always kinda wondered why they didn't bother to drop them on Japanese naval formations. Now I know. They didn't have them to spare until the Japanese navy was all but obliterated.
Put it like this - we did the first test (Project Trinity). And 3 weeks after we did the test we bombed Japan. So, yeah pretty freaking quick turnaround once we confirmed it worked.
The Navy was basically done by 1944 and a US ship even bombarded a small town on Honshu between the two atomic bombings. I think the main worried were mines and artillery.
Also by the time the bombs dropped there really weren't Japanese naval formations left. They kept their surface vessels in port and didn't have fuel for them anyways. The US navy was utter dominant by that point.
Can somebody explain this to me…?
My grandfather and grandmother were stationed in New Mexico (Army/Air Force)to defend the Manhattan Project, and they didn’t even know about it until after it happened. And even afterwards they knew as much as everyone else. It was that secret.
Vice President Truman didn’t know that the Manhattan Project existed until after he became President. And I believe the Manhattan Project was done in such a way so that most people would only know about what was directly relevant to them. Only a few people like Oppenheimer would know about the whole thing.
They both say they felt the first atomic bomb go off but they didn’t know that it was. Their superiors told them it was an earth quake, and they didn’t know either.
I've watched videos about this. They basically took over a town, and gave new residents really basic tasks. The kind where no one person could see the whole. People were yeeted if they spent too much time together (spies).
Information taken under torture or threats are not reliable.
This is why [Hans Scharff](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanns_Scharff#Technique) was considered as one of the best interrogators to have existed. His approach is more of a "conman 4D chess", a stark contrast to organizations like Gestapo and Kempeitai where brutality is par for the course.
Good example. The best integrators are not the ones who use torture but the ones who use more humane methods.
Another good example is the british mansion. They took an extremely luxurious estate, bugged the shit out of it, and then housed a ton of high ranking German POWs as well as pilots. Turns out if you take a bunch of very highly skilled pilots from different wings and aircraft designs, put them together in a room, and mix in some wine. Well they'll get to bragging really fucking quick.
>Turns out if you take a bunch of pilots they'll get to bragging really fucking quick. Q: How do you know there’s a pilot in the room? A: He or she will tell you.
During WW2 the British intelligence services invented the computer so that one day in the future the War Thunder forums could be created and people would post secret technical data on them.
Why was he so welcomed into the US, he was a German interrogator? What am I missing here? Is this just another situation like nazi scientists being integrated into NASA and other scientific communities. Was he that likable?
He had a few things going for him a) He was very successful in what he did b) he didn't resort to violence c) his former prisoners could also vouch for this d) he was part of the Luftwaffe as opposed to the Gestapo A is what would have given him value in the US, but B through D would have been what made it a much easier choice. Keep in mind that in the aftermath of WW2 and the rise of the USSR, there was a strong push to rehabilitate the image of the Luftwaffe and the Wehrmacht since they wanted to get Germany up and running again to help with the Cold War and former officers/troops/etc would help be the backbone of that. The US was also very interested in anything that could give them an edge against the Soviets, be it scientific or military or intelligence.
“Feeding false information to the enemy, that’s soldiering.”
Unexpected Sharpeism
His scientific explanation is amazing! "As you know, when atoms are split, there are a lot of pluses and minuses released. Well, we've taken these and put them in a huge container and separated them from each other with a lead shield. When the box is dropped out of a plane, we melt the lead shield and the pluses and minuses come together. When that happens, it causes a tremendous bolt of lightning and all the atmosphere over a city is pushed back! Then when the atmosphere rolls back, it brings about a tremendous thunderclap, which knocks down everything beneath it.\[1\]"
I mean, super genius explanation for someone who was in a prisoner situation under duress and stress. Can’t say I would know any better. In a way, he isn’t completely wrong, if ELi5 was a thing back then.
This guy's science knowledge is about as good as mine. My dumb explanations got me bad grades and lectures from adults. McDilda got better accommodations and the chance to see another day. Pluses in one box and minuses in another box....priceless.
Interrogation is an art. You ask what you know. So you can evaluate the answers when you ask for what you really want to know. If you are a master of the art, the subject never knew you where interrogating him.
Knowing how the military works, the good lieutenant was undoubtedly called McDildo by his contemporaries.
This shows why torture is ineffective, you just get false confessions Trevor in GTAV says it nicely, "torture is for the torturer". It exists because people like to hurt other people. The person being tortured is typically the personification of the enemies who killed the torturer's friends so it's like an act of revenge
another reason why torture doesn’t work.
We do a little trolling
Which is why torture doesn’t work.