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This is my new Alfred Hitchcock dvd boxset that Carl got me yesterday for my Birthday it has six Alfred Hitchcock scary film dvd inside it. I watched Stage Fright from 1950 last night and I thought that was really good I have the rest of the dvds to catch up on and I am really looking forward to seeing all the rest of them all because I have never seen them before.
I am looking forward to catching up with my new wrestling dvd’s tonight this week that I got for my Birthday I will be watching them this week. These are the three Wwe dvd’s I got for my Birthday.
I had a nice time yesterday afternoon at Earsdon Grange Care Home in West Monkseaton having some Birthday cake with my Mum and Gran on my Birthday in my Grans room. This is the Birthday cake we had it was very nice.
In the lead-up to World War One Britain and Germany were engaged in a naval arms race. Archivist Louise Bruton examines how the war heralded a new form of naval warfare that featured dreadnoughts, submarines and trade blockades.
In the years leading up to the First World War Britain and Germany engaged in a naval arms race. Britain had peaceably enjoyed its status as the world’s dominant naval force since the Napoleonic Wars but Germany now sought to contest that dominance. A new generation of ships became central to the naval race: the dreadnoughts. Named after the Royal Navy’s HMS Dreadnought, these ‘castles of steel’ came to symbolise naval power in the early 20th century.
The dreadnoughts represented a revolution in warship design and yet their construction was based on the centuries-old definition of the purpose of naval campaigning as being the head-on confrontation of two opposing battle fleets. During the First World War, not only did senior naval officers trained in the days of sail learn to command brand new ships and weaponry untested in wartime; they also witnessed a transformation in warfare that turned the war at sea from a traditional surface encounter into a complex balancing act of defensive strategies and covert tactics involving two new and unforeseen dimensions: under water and in the air.
Original designs for battleship HMS Dreadnought, produced by the British Royal Navy in 1905.
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Britain was quick to capitalise on its enduring naval supremacy and geographical position by establishing a trade blockade of Germany and its allies as soon as war began. The Royal Navy’s Grand Fleet patrolled the North Sea, laid mines and cut off access to the Channel, curtailing the movements of the German High Seas Fleet and preventing merchant ships from supplying Germany with raw materials and food. The North Sea became ‘a marine no man’s land, with the British Fleet bottling up the exits’, as Richard Hough describes it in The Great War at Sea 1914-1918.
The effect of the blockade on Germany’s civilians after four years of war was noted by British Army MajorGeneral Sir Aylmer Gould Hunter-Weston in December 1918 during a visit to Germany: ‘the food situation is very serious indeed…The Germans are living entirely on their food capital now – they have eaten all their laying hens and are eating all their milch [sic] cows… [there is a] real scarcity.’
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Private war diary of Major General Sir Aylmer Gould Hunter-Weston recounting his journey through Germany in December 1918.
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Held by© The copyright status of HUNTER-WESTON PAPERS. Private War Diary. Vol. XIV. 8th Army Corps [VIII Corps]. After Armistice. 11 Nov.1918-April 1919 is unknown. Please contact copyright@bl.uk if you have any information about this item.
The simultaneous torpedoing of HMS Aboukir, Hogue and Cressy by a single German submarine in September 1914 shocked the Royal Navy and forced the Admiralty to recognise the threat that the U-Boats, as they became known, posed to the surface fleet.
Although the Allies had their own submarines, which were active in the Adriatic, the Baltic and the Dardanelles over the course of the war, defences against submarines were slow to be developed. The British Navy appealed both to its own personnel and to the wider public for ideas. Minefields, net barrages, depth charges and patrols were introduced but more often than not these defences could be evaded. U-Boats could roam virtually undetected, since the sighting of a periscope was the most reliable method of location at a time when sonar technology was still in its infancy.
In January 1916, in reply to an enquiry from former Prime Minister and then First Lord of the Admiralty Arthur Balfour, Commander-in-Chief of The Grand Fleet John Rushworth Jellicoe stressed the importance of playing to the Navy’s main strength – its size – to retain control of the North Sea: ‘…as to a possible naval offensive… I have long arrived at the conclusion that it would be suicidal to divide our main fleet…’ For the first two years of the war the Allies accordingly concentrated their naval efforts on a defensive strategy of protecting trade routes, developing anti-submarine devices and maintaining the blockade rather than actively seeking direct confrontation.
The war at sea was not characterised by monumental battles, glorious victories and haunting landscapes as was the war on land. The Battle of Jutland was the only full-scale direct action to occur between opposing navies and even this was indecisive. Yet the blockade of supplies to Germany weakened the country, directly contributing to the end of the war, as indeed the U-Boat campaign would have done in reverse had the convoy system not eventually succeeded in saving Britain from starvation. Control of the North Sea meant no less than the difference between independence and invasion.
The war at sea was a test of nerves and ingenuity. Both sides had to master technologies and ways of fighting unimaginable just a few years earlier. It was a marathon of endurance and persistence, often thankless but always critically important.
I enjoyed meeting my Uncle Kevin and Auntie Lesley’s new dog Buddy yesterday on my Birthday. It was the first time I met him since Kevin and Lesley got him he is just a little puppy and it was nice to meet him.
Associate Professor Richard Fogarty stated how World War One was influenced by different races fighting together in a global war.
Race and racism were important aspects of World War One for two reasons. First, ideas about race had developed over the course of the 19th century to make the concept one of the most prominent preoccupations of modern Europeans. Second, several of the major belligerents at war between 1914 and 1918 possessed large colonial empires, where white Europeans ruled over Africans, Asians, and Pacific Islanders. These two factors came together because a large part of the justification for the possession of colonial territories was the supposed right of superior whites to rule over allegedly inferior non-whites. This in turn led several European combatant nations to make use of their colonial resources, both materials and men, to wage war. Thus, while purely military and political considerations often shaped strategy during the war, ideologies of race and racism also played a role, helping in particular to make the war a genuinely global one.
By the early 20th century, thinking about race was moving toward a more biological understanding of human difference and its significance, with an emphasis on physical features such as colour. But earlier conceptions of racial difference had not disappeared completely, and it was common during World War One for Europeans to speak of national or ethnic differences in terms of race. For instance, many believed that the war pitted the English and French ‘races’ against the Germanic, or Teutonic, ‘race’. Another area where this kind of national or ethnic understanding of race played a role was in the Balkans, where the war began. Despite numerous similarities and centuries of mixing that created many commonalities among the peoples of the region, ethnic differences loomed large in the self-understandings of many. Ethnic tension and nationalist aspirations helped ignite the war in 1914, when Serbian nationalists assassinated the heir to the throne of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and these same factors were paramount in American President Woodrow Wilson’s calls for national self-determination during the war and at the Paris Peace Conference in 1919.
European colonial possessions, particularly in Africa and Asia, played the most important role in injecting race and racism into World War One strategy. The race factor was most visible in the use of millions of colonial subjects as workers and soldiers. Many Africans and Asians laboured and fought in their home territories, as they had done before the war. But hundreds of thousands travelled to new lands to contribute to the war efforts of their colonial masters. Some even travelled to Europe itself.
France was the colonial power most enthusiastic about deploying its colonial populations, especially in Europe. Some 200,000 came to France to work in war industries, but even more, some 500,000, wore the uniform of the French army and manned the trenches of the Western Front. Even before the war, military officers like Charles Mangin (an important general during the war) advocated recruiting from the vast ‘reservoirs of men’ in Africa to strengthen the French army in the face of a larger and more populous Germany. When the war began in 1914, soldiers from North and West Africa began arriving in France and played an active role in the fighting. Eventually, soldiers from Indochina and Madagascar also served in France. These men were often very popular among the French people, although many in France regarded non-Europeans through a haze of racial stereotypes. For instance, black West Africans were popular and celebrated for their courage and loyalty, but also denigrated for their primitive savagery and mental inferiority.
The British army also deployed colonial soldiers. A force of nearly 140,000 Indians served on the Western Front in 1914, but they departed from the Front, and from Europe altogether, in 1915. British authorities were concerned about the effect of pitting non-whites against white Europeans in battle. Indians with such experience might be more difficult to rule after the war. So, in the end, the bulk of Indian soldiers who fought in World War One, some one million in all, fought in the Middle East against the Germans’ ally, the Ottoman Empire. West Indians also fought in the British army, in France and other theatres. Racial politics precluded arming South African blacks for combat in Europe, though more than 20,000 came to France as labourers. As was the case with France’s use of troops from its colonies, the participation of these men in the British war effort was visible to the public, reinforcing racial stereotypes in some cases, but also enhancing the awareness of the conflict as a world war.
Other combatant nations with extensive colonial possessions, such as Belgium and Portugal, did not make use of their colonial subjects in Europe, but they joined Great Britain and France in deploying indigenous people as both soldiers and workers within the colonies. Hundreds of thousands participated as porters carrying supplies and soldiers fighting to gain control over German colonies in Africa. The Germans did the same with their African subjects, though the Kaiser’s government complained loudly and publicly about the Allies’ introduction of ‘uncivilized’ warfare and racially inferior warriors into the conflict at home in Europe.
The most obvious case of colonial considerations helping to shape strategy in the war was the attempt of Germany to exploit the Muslim religious faith of some of its enemies’ colonial populations. This attempt took many forms, but one particularly active site of German activity was in prisoner of war camps. The German army made much of the ‘exotic’ soldiers it captured from among enemy troops, often subjecting Africans and Asians to anthropological study in the camps and using images of the prisoners in propaganda. The Germans also gathered together in one special camp, near Berlin, all the Muslim prisoners of war captured from the Russian, French, and British armies. This ‘Halfmoon Camp’, named for the Muslim symbol of the crescent moon, was the site of an aggressive propaganda campaign to convince these men to switch sides and fight against their colonial masters. After all, Germany was allied with the Muslim Ottoman Empire, and the Sultan in Constantinople had declared jihad, calling all the faithful to fight the Ottomans’ enemies. These efforts mostly failed, as did other German attempts to encourage the Muslim populations of the Russian Caucasus, British India, and French North Africa to rise up en masse in the name of Islam. But the effort was a serious one, and demonstrated the important role non-European peoples and lands played in geostrategy during the conflict.
Race and racism helped shape both the approaches of combatant nations to waging World War One, and the experience of the war for millions of people among the European public and in European colonies in Africa and Asia. From the colour of their skins, to the content of their religious beliefs, colonized peoples’ attributes were of major concern to those making decisions about how and where to wage war. In fact, the very racial and cultural differences of non-European peoples gave European colonial powers a sense of entitlement to their colonial possessions in the first place. Then, during the war, these differences justified making use of Africans and Asians as workers, soldiers, and objects .
NTDF will be working to expand into neighbouring territory, North Shields with a new pop up charity shop. No dates yet, but is immanent.
Two days after Germany invaded Poland in September 1939, Britain and France declared war on Germany, and World War II erupted. Dozens of countries, still recovering from the horrors of World War I, tried to remain neutral to avoid invasion and more bloodshed.
But a declaration of neutrality did little to insulate countries from the conflict if they were geographically desirable. “The fact that the coast of Norway straddled the North Sea made it an area of critical importance to both Great Britain and Germany,” says Dr. David Woolner, Marist college professor and author of The Last 100 Days: FDR at War and Peace. “It was this fact that led to the German invasion of Denmark and Norway in April 1940, and to the British decision to intervene in the neutral Danish territory of Iceland shortly thereafter.”
It was true for other countries as well—including Belgium and the Netherlands, both of which had declared their neutrality prior to the war. Their neutral status made little impression on Adolf Hitler, who ordered his forces to invade both states as part of his attack on France in May 1940. Meanwhile, the Soviet Union invaded Lithuania, Estonia and Latvia in June. This enabled Soviet leader Joseph Stalin to expand power, Woolner explains, and create a buffer between the USSR and Germany.
“In short, staying neutral in an ever-expanding war proved virtually impossible for these nations,” he says.
The United States, protected by two vast oceans, however, stayed neutral for more than two years despite finding ways to help the Allies. It officially entered the war after the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941.
Only 14 countries remained officially neutral throughout the entire war. They included Sweden, Switzerland, Spain, Portugal, Ireland, Turkey, Yemen, Saudi Arabia and Afghanistan as well as the microstates of Andorra, Monaco, Liechtenstein, San Marino and Vatican City.
But even those states that managed to stay out of the war, such as Sweden and Switzerland, found their ability to maintain strict neutrality hampered by the intensity of the conflict, Woolner says. The result, he adds, is “they played a somewhat ambiguous—and still controversial—role in the war.”
A seminal 1998 U.S. State Department report helped dispel the myth that there was any standard form of neutrality, citing that the neutral countries continued trading with the Allied and Axis forces, sent troops to offer military assistance, and allowed one side or the other access to its territory.
Perhaps the largest finding from the report was that the Nazis purchased critical war material from neutral countries using Swiss francs gained in exchange for gold looted by the Nazis from occupied countries and from individual victims of concentration camps. These materials included tungsten from Portugal and Spain; ball-bearings and iron ore from Sweden; and chromite ore from Turkey— all critical to the German war effort.
Although the neutral countries often cited fear of German reprisals as their motivation for maintaining trade with Germany, the report found that many continued well into 1944, while Switzerland continued to trade until the end of the war in 1945.
The report also noted the military assistance offered by neutral countries. Spain, whose civil war had just ended at the beginning of World War II, sent troops to the Russian front to help German armed forces. Portugal granted access to the British to its bases in the Azores. Sweden allowed German troops across its territory to reach Finland in order to fight against Soviet occupation forces, as well as to facilitate the occupation of Norway. It also protected German shipping in the Baltic.
Decisions and actions even of a single country were often inconsistent. Argentina traded more with the Allies than the Axis powers, yet its wartime leaders leaned toward fascism; it was a center for Axis espionage, smuggling and propaganda; and it was long suspected for being the destination for Nazi looted assets.
Despite these conflicting actions, the neutral countries offered refuge to 250,000 Jews fleeing the Holocaust, though each country’s response was unique. The authors wrote, “Acts of humanity and even heroism rose above the harshness or insensitivity of wartime refugee policies and reflected well on their governments and peoples.”
The report concluded that the neutral countries were able to maintain their status because of their distinctive history, geography, previous relationships with wartime belligerents and, with Sweden and Switzerland, historical traditions of neutrality. They all faced similar pressures from both the Allied and Axis power, but their responses varied considerably. As the report concludes, “There was, in short, no such thing as uniform or absolute neutrality during World War II.”
On 6 and 9 August 1945, the United States detonated two atomic bombs over the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The bombings killed between 129,000 and 226,000 people, most of whom were civilians, and remain the only use of nuclear weapons in an armed conflict. Japan surrendered to the Allies on 15 August, six days after the bombing of Nagasaki and the Soviet Union’s declaration of war against Japan and invasion of Japanese-occupied Manchuria. The Japanese government signed the instrument of surrender on 2 September, effectively ending the war.
In the final year of World War II, the Allies prepared for a costly invasion of the Japanese mainland. This undertaking was preceded by a conventional bombing and firebombing campaign that devastated 64 Japanese cities. The war in the European theatre concluded when Germany surrendered on 8 May 1945, and the Allies turned their full attention to the Pacific War. By July 1945, the Allies’ Manhattan Project had produced two types of atomic bombs: “Little Boy“, an enriched uranium gun-type fission weapon, and “Fat Man“, a plutonium implosion-type nuclear weapon. The 509th Composite Group of the United States Army Air Forces was trained and equipped with the specialized Silverplate version of the Boeing B-29 Superfortress, and deployed to Tinian in the Mariana Islands. The Allies called for the unconditional surrender of the Imperial Japanese armed forces in the Potsdam Declaration on 26 July 1945, the alternative being “prompt and utter destruction”. The Japanese government ignored the ultimatum.
The consent of the United Kingdom was obtained for the bombing, as was required by the Quebec Agreement, and orders were issued on 25 July by General Thomas Handy, the acting chief of staff of the United States Army, for atomic bombs to be used against Hiroshima, Kokura, Niigata, and Nagasaki. These targets were chosen because they were large urban areas that also held militarily significant facilities. On 6 August, a Little Boy was dropped on Hiroshima. Three days later, a Fat Man was dropped on Nagasaki. Over the next two to four months, the effects of the atomic bombings killed between 90,000 and 146,000 people in Hiroshima and 60,000 and 80,000 people in Nagasaki; roughly half occurred on the first day. For months afterward, many people continued to die from the effects of burns, radiation sickness, and injuries, compounded by illness and malnutrition. Though Hiroshima had a sizable military garrison, most of the dead were civilians.
Scholars have extensively studied the effects of the bombings on the social and political character of subsequent world history and popular culture, and there is still much debate concerning the ethical and legal justification for the bombings. Supporters claim that the atomic bombings were necessary to bring an end to the war with minimal casualties; critics believe that the bombings were unnecessary for the war’s end and a war crime, and highlight the moral and ethical implications of the intentional nuclear attack on civilians.
In 1945, the Pacific War between the Empire of Japan and the Allies entered its fourth year. Most Japanese military units fought fiercely, ensuring that the Allied victory would come at an enormous cost. The 1.25 million battle casualties incurred in total by the United States in World War II included both military personnel killed in action and wounded in action. Nearly one million of the casualties occurred during the last year of the war, from June 1944 to June 1945. In December 1944, American battle casualties hit an all-time monthly high of 88,000 as a result of the German Ardennes Offensive. Worried by the losses sustained, President Roosevelt suggested the use of atomic bombs on Germany as soon as possible, but was informed the first usable atomic weapons were still months away.America’s reserves of manpower were running out. Deferments for groups such as agricultural workers were tightened, and there was consideration of drafting women. At the same time, the public was becoming war-weary, and demanding that long-serving servicemen be sent home.
In the Pacific, the Allies returned to the Philippines, recaptured Burma, and invaded Borneo. Offensives were undertaken to reduce the Japanese forces remaining in Bougainville, New Guinea and the Philippines. In April 1945, American forces landed on Okinawa, where heavy fighting continued until June. Along the way, the ratio of Japanese to American casualties dropped from five to one in the Philippines to two to one on Okinawa. Although some Japanese soldiers were taken prisoner, most fought until they were killed or committed suicide. Nearly 99 percent of the 21,000 defenders of Iwo Jima were killed. Of the 117,000 Okinawan and Japanese troops defending Okinawa in April to June 1945, 94 percent were killed; 7,401 Japanese soldiers surrendered, an unprecedentedly large number.
As the Allies advanced towards Japan, conditions became steadily worse for the Japanese people. Japan’s merchant fleet declined from 5,250,000 gross tons in 1941 to 1,560,000 tons in March 1945, and 557,000 tons in August 1945. Lack of raw materials forced the Japanese war economy into a steep decline after the middle of 1944. The civilian economy, which had slowly deteriorated throughout the war, reached disastrous levels by the middle of 1945. The loss of shipping also affected the fishing fleet, and the 1945 catch was only 22 percent of that in 1941. The 1945 rice harvest was the worst since 1909, and hunger and malnutrition became widespread. U.S. industrial production was overwhelmingly superior to Japan’s. By 1943, the U.S. produced almost 100,000 aircraft a year, compared to Japan’s production of 70,000 for the entire war. In February 1945, Prince Fumimaro Konoe advised Emperor Hirohito that defeat was inevitable, and urged him to abdicate.
Even before the surrender of Nazi Germany on 8 May 1945, plans were underway for the largest operation of the Pacific War, Operation Downfall, the Allied invasion of Japan. The operation had two parts: set to begin in October 1945, Operation Olympic involved a series of landings by the U.S. Sixth Army intended to capture the southern third of the southernmost main Japanese island, Kyūshū. This was to be followed in March 1946 by Operation Coronet, the capture of the Kantō Plain, near Tokyo on the main Japanese island of Honshū by the U.S. First, Eighth and Tenth Armies, as well as a Commonwealth Corps made up of Australian, British and Canadian divisions. The target date was chosen to allow for Olympic to complete its objectives, for troops to be redeployed from Europe, and the Japanese winter to pass.
Japan’s geography made this invasion plan obvious to the Japanese; they were able to predict the Allied invasion plans accurately and thus adjust their defensive plan, Operation Ketsugō, accordingly. The Japanese planned an all-out defense of Kyūshū, with little left in reserve. In all, there were 2.3 million Japanese Army troops prepared to defend the home islands, backed by a civilian militia of 28 million. Casualty predictions varied widely, but were extremely high. The Vice Chief of the Imperial Japanese Navy General Staff, Vice Admiral Takijirō Ōnishi, predicted up to 20 million Japanese deaths.
The Americans were alarmed by the Japanese buildup, which was accurately tracked through Ultra intelligence.On 15 June 1945, a study by the Joint War Plans Committee, who provided planning information to the Joint Chiefs of Staff, estimated that Olympic would result in 130,000 to 220,000 U.S. casualties, with U.S. dead in the range from 25,000 to 46,000. Secretary of War Henry L. Stimson commissioned his own study by Quincy Wright and William Shockley, who estimated the invading Allies would suffer between 1.7 and 4 million casualties, of whom between 400,000 and 800,000 would be dead, while Japanese fatalities would have been around 5 to 10 million.
Marshall began contemplating the use of a weapon that was “readily available and which assuredly can decrease the cost in American lives”: poison gas. Quantities of phosgene, mustard gas, tear gas and cyanogen chloride were moved to Luzon from stockpiles in Australia and New Guinea in preparation for Operation Olympic, and MacArthur ensured that Chemical Warfare Service units were trained in their use. Consideration was also given to using biological weapons.
Main article: Air raids on Japan
While the United States had developed plans for an air campaign against Japan prior to the Pacific War, the capture of Allied bases in the western Pacific in the first weeks of the conflict meant that this offensive did not begin until mid-1944 when the long-ranged Boeing B-29 Superfortress became ready for use in combat. Operation Matterhorn involved India-based B-29s staging through bases around Chengdu in China to make a series of raids on strategic targets in Japan. This effort failed to achieve the strategic objectives that its planners had intended, largely because of logistical problems, the bomber’s mechanical difficulties, the vulnerability of Chinese staging bases, and the extreme range required to reach key Japanese cities.[24]
Brigadier General Haywood S. Hansell determined that Guam, Tinian, and Saipan in the Mariana Islands would better serve as B-29 bases, but they were in Japanese hands. Strategies were shifted to accommodate the air war, and the islands were captured between June and August 1944. Air bases were developed, and B-29 operations commenced from the Marianas in October 1944. The XXI Bomber Command began missions against Japan on 18 November 1944. The early attempts to bomb Japan from the Marianas proved just as ineffective as the China-based B-29s had been. Hansell continued the practice of conducting so-called high-altitude precision bombing, aimed at key industries and transportation networks, even after these tactics had not produced acceptable results. These efforts proved unsuccessful due to logistical difficulties with the remote location, technical problems with the new and advanced aircraft, unfavorable weather conditions, and enemy action.
Hansell’s successor, Major General Curtis LeMay, assumed command in January 1945 and initially continued to use the same precision bombing tactics, with equally unsatisfactory results. The attacks initially targeted key industrial facilities but much of the Japanese manufacturing process was carried out in small workshops and private homes. Under pressure from United States Army Air Forces (USAAF) headquarters in Washington, LeMay changed tactics and decided that low-level incendiary raids against Japanese cities were the only way to destroy their production capabilities, shifting from precision bombing to area bombardment with incendiaries. Like most strategic bombing during World War II, the aim of the air offensive against Japan was to destroy the enemy’s war industries, kill or disable civilian employees of these industries, and undermine civilian morale.
Over the next six months, the XXI Bomber Command under LeMay firebombed 64 Japanese cities. The firebombing of Tokyo, codenamed Operation Meetinghouse, on 9–10 March killed an estimated 100,000 people and destroyed 41 km2 (16 sq mi) of the city and 267,000 buildings in a single night. It was the deadliest bombing raid of the war, at a cost of 20 B-29s shot down by flak and fighters. By May, 75 percent of bombs dropped were incendiaries designed to burn down Japan’s “paper cities”. By mid-June, Japan’s six largest cities had been devastated. The end of the fighting on Okinawa that month provided airfields even closer to the Japanese mainland, allowing the bombing campaign to be further escalated. Aircraft flying from Allied aircraft carriers and the Ryukyu Islands also regularly struck targets in Japan during 1945 in preparation for Operation Downfall. Firebombing switched to smaller cities, with populations ranging from 60,000 to 350,000. According to Yuki Tanaka, the U.S. fire-bombed over a hundred Japanese towns and cities.
The Japanese military was unable to stop the Allied attacks and the country’s civil defense preparations proved inadequate. Japanese fighters and anti-aircraft guns had difficulty engaging bombers flying at high altitude. From April 1945, the Japanese interceptors also had to face American fighter escorts based on Iwo Jima and Okinawa. That month, the Imperial Japanese Army Air Service and Imperial Japanese Navy Air Service stopped attempting to intercept the air raids to preserve fighter aircraft to counter the expected invasion. By mid-1945 the Japanese only occasionally scrambled aircraft to intercept individual B-29s conducting reconnaissance sorties over the country, to conserve supplies of fuel. In July 1945, the Japanese had 137,800,000 litres (1,156,000 US bbl) of avgas stockpiled for the invasion of Japan. About 72,000,000 litres (604,000 US bbl) had been consumed in the home islands area in April, May and June 1945. While the Japanese military decided to resume attacks on Allied bombers from late June, by this time there were too few operational fighters available for this change of tactics to hinder the Allied air raids.
At the time of its bombing, Hiroshima was a city of industrial and military significance. A number of military units were located nearby, the most important of which was the headquarters of Field Marshal Shunroku Hata‘s Second General Army, which commanded the defense of all of southern Japan, and was located in Hiroshima Castle. Hata’s command consisted of some 400,000 men, most of whom were on Kyushu where an Allied invasion was correctly anticipated. Also present in Hiroshima were the headquarters of the 59th Army, the 5th Division and the 224th Division, a recently formed mobile unit. The city was defended by five batteries of 70 mm and 80 mm (2.8 and 3.1 inch) anti-aircraft guns of the 3rd Anti-Aircraft Division, including units from the 121st and 122nd Anti-Aircraft Regiments and the 22nd and 45th Separate Anti-Aircraft Battalions. In total, an estimated 40,000 Japanese military personnel were stationed in the city.
Hiroshima was a supply and logistics base for the Japanese military.] The city was a communications center, a key port for shipping, and an assembly area for troops. It supported a large war industry, manufacturing parts for planes and boats, for bombs, rifles, and handguns. The center of the city contained several reinforced concrete buildings. Outside the center, the area was congested by a dense collection of small timber workshops set among Japanese houses. A few larger industrial plants lay near the outskirts of the city. The houses were constructed of timber with tile roofs, and many of the industrial buildings were also built around timber frames. The city as a whole was highly susceptible to fire damage. It was the second largest city in Japan after Kyoto that was still undamaged by air raids, primarily because it lacked the aircraft manufacturing industry that was the XXI Bomber Command’s priority target. On 3 July, the Joint Chiefs of Staff placed it off limits to bombers, along with Kokura, Niigata and Kyoto.
The population of Hiroshima had reached a peak of over 381,000 earlier in the war but prior to the atomic bombing, the population had steadily decreased because of a systematic evacuation ordered by the Japanese government. At the time of the attack, the population was approximately 340,000–350,000. Residents wondered why Hiroshima had been spared destruction by firebombing. Some speculated that the city was to be saved for U.S. occupation headquarters, others thought perhaps their relatives in Hawaii and California had petitioned the U.S. government to avoid bombing Hiroshima. More realistic city officials had ordered buildings torn down to create long, straight firebreaks. These continued to be expanded and extended up to the morning of 6 August 1945.
Hiroshima was the primary target of the first atomic bombing mission on 6 August, with Kokura and Nagasaki as alternative targets. The 393d Bombardment Squadron B-29 Enola Gay, named after Tibbets’s mother and piloted by Tibbets, took off from North Field, Tinian, about six hours’ flight time from Japan. Enola Gay was accompanied by two other B-29s: The Great Artiste, commanded by Major Charles Sweeney, which carried instrumentation, and a then-nameless aircraft later called Necessary Evil, commanded by Captain George Marquardt. Necessary Evil was the photography aircraft.
| Aircraft | Pilot | Call sign | Mission role |
|---|---|---|---|
| Straight Flush | Major Claude R. Eatherly | Dimples 85 | Weather reconnaissance (Hiroshima) |
| Jabit III | Major John A. Wilson | Dimples 71 | Weather reconnaissance (Kokura) |
| Full House | Major Ralph R. Taylor | Dimples 83 | Weather reconnaissance (Nagasaki) |
| Enola Gay | Colonel Paul W. Tibbets | Dimples 82 | Weapon delivery |
| The Great Artiste | Major Charles W. Sweeney | Dimples 89 | Blast measurement instrumentation |
| Necessary Evil | Captain George W. Marquardt | Dimples 91 | Strike observation and photography |
| Top Secret | Captain Charles F. McKnight | Dimples 72 | Strike spare – did not complete mission |
After leaving Tinian, the aircraft made their way separately to Iwo Jima to rendezvous with Sweeney and Marquardt at 05:55 at 2,800 meters (9,200 ft), and set course for Japan. The aircraft arrived over the target in clear visibility at 9,470 meters (31,060 ft). Parsons, who was in command of the mission, armed the bomb in flight to minimize the risks during takeoff. He had witnessed four B-29s crash and burn at takeoff, and feared that a nuclear explosion would occur if a B-29 crashed with an armed Little Boy on board. His assistant, Second Lieutenant Morris R. Jeppson, removed the safety devices 30 minutes before reaching the target area.
During the night of 5–6 August, Japanese early warning radar detected the approach of numerous American aircraft headed for the southern part of Japan. Radar detected 65 bombers headed for Saga, 102 bound for Maebashi, 261 en route to Nishinomiya, 111 headed for Ube and 66 bound for Imabari. An alert was given and radio broadcasting stopped in many cities, among them Hiroshima. The all-clear was sounded in Hiroshima at 00:05. About an hour before the bombing, the air raid alert was sounded again, as Straight Flush flew over the city. It broadcast a short message which was picked up by Enola Gay. It read: “Cloud cover less than 3/10th at all altitudes. Advice: bomb primary.” The all-clear was sounded over Hiroshima again at 07:09.
At 08:09, Tibbets started his bomb run and handed control over to his bombardier, Major Thomas Ferebee. The release at 08:15 (Hiroshima time) went as planned, and the Little Boy containing about 64 kg (141 lb) of uranium-235 took 44.4 seconds to fall from the aircraft flying at about 9,400 meters (31,000 ft) to a detonation height of about 580 meters (1,900 ft) above the city. Enola Gay was 18.5 km (11.5 mi) away before it felt the shock waves from the blast.
Due to crosswind, the bomb missed the aiming point, the Aioi Bridge, by approximately 240 m (800 ft) and detonated directly over Shima Surgical Clinic. It released the equivalent energy of 16 ± 2 kilotons of TNT (66.9 ± 8.4 TJ). The weapon was considered very inefficient, with only 1.7 percent of its material fissioning. The radius of total destruction was about 1.6 kilometers (1 mi), with resulting fires across 11 km2 (4.4 sq mi).
Enola Gay stayed over the target area for two minutes and was 16 kilometers (10 mi) away when the bomb detonated. Only Tibbets, Parsons, and Ferebee knew of the nature of the weapon; the others on the bomber were only told to expect a blinding flash and given black goggles. “It was hard to believe what we saw”, Tibbets told reporters, while Parsons said “the whole thing was tremendous and awe-inspiring … the men aboard with me gasped ‘My God’.” He and Tibbets compared the shockwave to “a close burst of ack-ack fire”.
Kristallnacht (German pronunciation) or the Night of Broken Glass, also called the November pogrom(s) (German: Novemberpogrome, was a pogrom against Jews carried out by the Nazi Party‘s Sturmabteilung (SA) paramilitary and Schutzstaffel (SS) paramilitary forces along with some participation from the Hitler Youth and German civilians throughout Nazi Germany on 9–10 November 1938. The German authorities looked on without intervening. The name Kristallnacht (literally ‘Crystal Night’) comes from the shards of broken glass that littered the streets after the windows of Jewish-owned stores, buildings and synagogues were smashed. The pretext for the attacks was the assassination of the German diplomat Ernst vom Rath by Herschel Grynszpan, a 17-year-old German-born Polish Jew living in Paris.
Jewish homes, hospitals and schools were ransacked as attackers demolished buildings with sledgehammers. Rioters destroyed 267 synagogues throughout Germany, Austria and the Sudetenland. Over 7,000 Jewish businesses were damaged or destroyed, and 30,000 Jewish men were arrested and incarcerated in concentration camps.British historian Martin Gilbert wrote that no event in the history of German Jews between 1933 and 1945 was so widely reported as it was happening, and the accounts from foreign journalists working in Germany drew worldwide attention. The Times of London observed on 11 November 1938: “No foreign propagandist bent upon blackening Germany before the world could outdo the tale of burnings and beatings, of blackguardly assaults on defenceless and innocent people, which disgraced that country yesterday.”
Estimates of fatalities caused by the attacks have varied. Early reports estimated that 91 Jews had been murdered. Modern analysis of German scholarly sources puts the figure much higher; when deaths from post-arrest maltreatment and subsequent suicides are included, the death toll reaches the hundreds, with Richard J. Evans estimating 638 deaths by suicide. Historians view Kristallnacht as a prelude to the Final Solution and the murder of six million Jews during the Holocaust.
In the 1920s, most German Jews were fully integrated into the country’s society as citizens. They served in the army and navy and contributed to every field of German business, science and culture. Conditions for German Jews began to worsen after the appointment of Adolf Hitler (the Austrian-born leader of the National Socialist German Workers’ Party) as Chancellor of Germany on 30 January 1933, and the Enabling Act (implemented 23 March 1933) which enabled the assumption of power by Hitler after the Reichstag fire of 27 February 1933. From its inception, Hitler’s regime moved quickly to introduce anti-Jewish policies. Nazi propaganda alienated the 500,000 Jews living in Germany, who accounted for only 0.86% of the overall population, and framed them as an enemy responsible for Germany’s defeat in the First World War and for its subsequent economic disasters, such as the 1920s hyperinflation and the subsequent Great Depression. Beginning in 1933, the German government enacted a series of anti-Jewish laws restricting the rights of German Jews to earn a living, to enjoy full citizenship and to gain education, including the Law for the Restoration of the Professional Civil Service of 7 April 1933, which forbade Jews to work in the civil service. The subsequent 1935 Nuremberg Laws stripped German Jews of their citizenship and prohibited Jews from marrying non-Jewish Germans.
These laws resulted in the exclusion and alienation of Jews from German social and political life.Many sought asylum abroad; hundreds of thousands emigrated, but as Chaim Weizmann wrote in 1936, “The world seemed to be divided into two parts—those places where the Jews could not live and those where they could not enter.” The international Évian Conference on 6 July 1938 addressed the issue of Jewish and Romani immigration to other countries. By the time the conference took place, more than 250,000 Jews had fled Germany and Austria, which had been annexed by Germany in March 1938; more than 300,000 German and Austrian Jews continued to seek refuge and asylum from oppression. As the number of Jews and Romani wanting to leave increased, the restrictions against them grew, with many countries tightening their rules for admission. By 1938, Germany “had entered a new radical phase in anti-Semitic activity”. Some historians believe that the Nazi government had been contemplating a planned outbreak of violence against the Jews and were waiting for an appropriate provocation; there is evidence of this planning dating back to 1937. In a 1997 interview, the German historian Hans Mommsen claimed that a major motive for the pogrom was the desire of the Gauleiters of the NSDAP to seize Jewish property and businesses. Mommsen stated:
The need for money by the party organization stemmed from the fact that Franz Xaver Schwarz, the party treasurer, kept the local and regional organizations of the party short of money. In the fall of 1938, the increased pressure on Jewish property nourished the party’s ambition, especially since Hjalmar Schacht had been ousted as Reich minister for economics. This, however, was only one aspect of the origin of the November 1938 pogrom. The Polish government threatened to extradite all Jews who were Polish citizens but would stay in Germany, thus creating a burden of responsibility on the German side. The immediate reaction by the Gestapo was to push the Polish Jews—16,000 persons—over the borderline, but this measure failed due to the stubbornness of the Polish customs officers. The loss of prestige as a result of this abortive operation called for some sort of compensation. Thus, the overreaction to Herschel Grynszpan’s attempt against the diplomat Ernst vom Rath came into being and led to the November pogrom. The background of the pogrom was signified by a sharp cleavage of interests between the different agencies of party and state. While the Nazi party was interested in improving its financial strength on the regional and local level by taking over Jewish property, Hermann Göring, in charge of the Four-Year Plan, hoped to acquire access to foreign currency in order to pay for the import of urgently-needed raw material. Heydrich and Himmler were interested in fostering Jewish emigration.
The Zionist leadership in the British Mandate of Palestine wrote in February 1938 that according to “a very reliable private source—one which can be traced back to the highest echelons of the SS leadership”, there was “an intention to carry out a genuine and dramatic pogrom in Germany on a large scale in the near future”.
Main article: Polenaktion
In August 1938, German authorities announced that residence permits for foreigners were being canceled and would have to be renewed. This included German-born Jews of foreign citizenship. Poland stated that it would renounce citizenship rights of Polish Jews living abroad for at least five years after the end of October, effectively making them stateless.[24] In the so-called “Polenaktion“, more than 12,000 Polish Jews, among them the philosopher and theologian Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel, and future literary critic Marcel Reich-Ranicki were expelled from Germany on 28 October 1938, on Hitler’s orders. They were ordered to leave their homes in a single night and were allowed only one suitcase per person to carry their belongings. As the Jews were taken away, their remaining possessions were seized as loot both by Nazi authorities and by neighbors.
The deportees were taken from their homes to railway stations and were put on trains to the Polish border, where Polish border guards sent them back into Germany. This stalemate continued for days in the pouring rain, with the Jews marching without food or shelter between the borders.Four thousand were granted entry into Poland, but the remaining 8,000 were forced to stay at the border. They waited there in harsh conditions to be allowed to enter Poland. A British newspaper told its readers that hundreds “are reported to be lying about, penniless and deserted, in little villages along the frontier near where they had been driven out by the Gestapo and left.”Conditions in the refugee camps “were so bad that some actually tried to escape back into Germany and were shot”, recalled a British woman who was sent to help those who had been expelled.
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