[ARC5] The Norden Bombsight and history. (my rant)

[Kenneth G. Gordon]

On 9 Dec 2015 at 9:23, Leslie Smith wrote:

>   Today (for the past 70 years)  there is discussion about "the bomb"
>   and the need to drop the bomb - particularly the second bomb.
>   I once had the opportunity to ask a fellow who was a POW in Japan in
>   1945 what he thought about "the bomb".
>   This fellow was intelligent and (more to the point) he was in Japan at
>   that time - a POW.
> 
>   He told me how the POWs in his camp had dug a long tunnel into the
>   side of a mountain that led no-where.
>   It was to be (my father-in-law believed) a mass grave.  His grave.

Sometime long after WWII, 1976, I think, it was discovered, definitively, that 
the Japanese military command had a very detailed and strict plan in place 
to kill (murder, rather) every single POW they held at that time should Japan 
appear to be losing the war. In fact, the commanders of all the POW camps 
had been given that order, in writing. In my opinion, it was no small miracle 
that so many of the POWs escaped that fate. Some did not. 5000 Koreans, 
for instance, along with a certain number of Allied POWs. Eniweitok was one 
of the Japanese held places from which, as far as we know, only TWO 
American POWs were moved while still alive. All others there were 
murdered. 

Some American POWs were even eaten. A number were burned alive in 
fairly large groups.

My only, but very serious, complaint about using "the bomb" was that the 
only two cities targeted in Japan were centers of Catholic converts, 
Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Those two cities, were the ONLY "Catholic" cities 
in all of Japan. The Japanese had martyered many, many Catholics in 
Nagasaki over the previous many years.

FYI, there was a Catholic Jesuit center of operations directly beneath the 
center of the explosion of the A-bomb at Nagasaki. Not one person in that 
building was even so much as scratched, and there was never any reported 
cases of radiation poisoning amongst them either.

You can find the details of this on the web.

Ken W7EKB