I certainly hope they added some nudity to spice up the movie.
WWII and nuclear holocaust just won't sell tickets
Nolan's Oppenheimer
- Thread starter dahliaclone
- Start date
I certainly hope they added some nudity to spice up the movie.
WWII and nuclear holocaust just won't sell tickets
My Dad weighed around 100 pounds in the evac hospital. Not sure how he carried his gun and pack.
I read that the casualty rate among bomber crews was high enough that you were pretty unlikely to survive your tour of duty.
Roughly 45% were killed.
Another 5% wounded (notice this was a low rate... not many limped away from a crash).
Another 5% captured.
So roughly flip a coin if you'd make it through your 25 missions.
Nothing else was even close in terms of casualty rate.
Memphis Belle is a solid war movie about a bomber crew in Europe if you haven't seen it.
You should probably read Unbroken about the life of Louis Zamperini and what he endured lost at sea for over a month after his bomber went down and then his stay in a Japanese POW camp. It wasn't all safe missions and sandy beaches in the Pacific either.
I’ve not read that particular one but have read plenty of other accounts of being a POW of the Japanese. It wasn’t fun, obviously. But playing the odds… you’d want to fly in the Pacific. Japanese air power and AAA against high-altitude bombers was minimal compared to what the Germans were throwing at them.
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Building on my previous point here, @VeloClone --
U.S. casualties from the air campaign against Germany
Total U.S. casualties in the war was about 1.1 million. About 7.4% of U.S. casualties were from the air war over Europe and, as I mentioned previously, a very high number of those were KIA.
Compared that to...
U.S. casualties from the strategic bombings of Japan
I'm taking those odds. Still wouldn't want to die or be captured. Still flying military aircraft packed with what was cutting edge and experimental aviation technology for the 1940s with a cargo of high explosives. Still navigating over thousands of miles of open ocean with no GPS and rudimentary radio technology for our modern standards. Things still could go terribly, regrettably wrong for you in such a situation.
But the Japanese weren't filling the sky with shrapnel like the Germans were.
U.S. casualties from the air campaign against Germany
Total U.S. casualties in the war was about 1.1 million. About 7.4% of U.S. casualties were from the air war over Europe and, as I mentioned previously, a very high number of those were KIA.
Compared that to...
U.S. casualties from the strategic bombings of Japan
I'm taking those odds. Still wouldn't want to die or be captured. Still flying military aircraft packed with what was cutting edge and experimental aviation technology for the 1940s with a cargo of high explosives. Still navigating over thousands of miles of open ocean with no GPS and rudimentary radio technology for our modern standards. Things still could go terribly, regrettably wrong for you in such a situation.
But the Japanese weren't filling the sky with shrapnel like the Germans were.
In 2011 I met a new client. Bea was 93 and totally independent. Over the ensuing years(!!!!), I heard her story. It was remarkable.
She married an engineer involved with ballistics at the Rock Island Arsenal facility in 1939. The Arsenal was then, and still is a major DoD operations center, home of the First Army and multiple other Army commands.
In January, 1942, they received an order to transfer. They first had to get to Albuquerque, NM. There, they were met by US officials and were quietly transferred to Los Alamos. Welcome to the atomic bomb world.
Bea said that when they heard "the boys are going to light one off today", they would grab their "special" sunglasses and go watch the detonation of a trigger bomb.
I found an archive of photo's on a DoE web site and showed it to Bea. At 97 she was naming people in the images I showed her. She told the front office how much she enjoyed the movie I showed her. B^)
She married an engineer involved with ballistics at the Rock Island Arsenal facility in 1939. The Arsenal was then, and still is a major DoD operations center, home of the First Army and multiple other Army commands.
In January, 1942, they received an order to transfer. They first had to get to Albuquerque, NM. There, they were met by US officials and were quietly transferred to Los Alamos. Welcome to the atomic bomb world.
Bea said that when they heard "the boys are going to light one off today", they would grab their "special" sunglasses and go watch the detonation of a trigger bomb.
I found an archive of photo's on a DoE web site and showed it to Bea. At 97 she was naming people in the images I showed her. She told the front office how much she enjoyed the movie I showed her. B^)
It's really great because it's almost broken down into 4 parts: 1. His childhood, becoming an elite runner, and running at the Berlin Olympics 2. Joining the military, crashing, and surviving weeks at sea 3. Being a POW and surviving the brutal Japanese camps 4. His comeback to running and his postwar life. It's really a great book. The movie doesn't do it justice at all.
Ludwig Goransson basically apes Zimmer, which is fine because he's outstanding.
There are actually a lot of really other film composers right now - Mark Mothersbaugh, Henry Jackman to name a few.
Let's be honest we were already firebombing Japan with napalm and with the way their buildings were constructed we were burning people alive in terrible circumstances. Curtis LeMay said we would be war criminals for what we were already doing. So if it's an either/or thing, ending the war with one big bomb or two is probably better than melting people with napalm.
German submarine crews might ask you to hold their beer, as might a few others. Although I agree making it through 25 missions was a challenge.
Another good read laying in some context for the decision to use the nuclear bombs is The Fleet at Flood Tide by James Hornfischer. A lot of the decision seemed to hinge on what was witnessed in the invasion of Saipan, where it became clear to US Commanders that Japan would not surrender and would rather die resisting, to the inclusion of mass suicide/execution of civilian women and children to avoid capture or surrender. Well worth the read--as are many of Hornfischer's books--in considering the situation as understood by US Commanders in that period as well as the hold that the military leaders actually held on power in Japan.
My wife's late stepgrandfather was a submariner in the Pacific.
He was perfectly willing to talk about his experience in the war but he said there wasn't much to tell for him. Just months at a time in a tin can never seeing the sun working on the power plant.
He told me he never really knew what was going on with the weapons room at the front or on the bridge. His engineering officer strongly discouraged any thoughts about anything but their immediate duties. All he was concerned with was the smell of diesel and being covered in grease all the time.
He'd only know they were in combat when he heard the compressed air "THWUMP" of a torpedo launch.
This makes me claustrophobic just reading it.
I'm not sure on the casualty rate of US subs overall, but German U-boat had a 75% casualty rate. https://historyincharts.com/german-u-boat-losses-in-world-war-ii/. I believe that--beyond small units which were sometimes wiped out--this was the highest casualty rate of any broad classification of service in WW II.