On Wednesday, June 9, 2021 at 4:11:20 PM UTC-7, John B. wrote:
On Wed, 09 Jun 2021 07:36:57 -0500, AMuzi wrote:

On 6/9/2021 1:00 AM, John B. wrote:
On Tue, 8 Jun 2021 19:41:32 -0700 (PDT), Sir Ridesalot
wrote:

On Tuesday, June 8, 2021 at 10:18:36 p.m. UTC-4, John B. wrote:
On Tue, 8 Jun 2021 17:27:04 -0700 (PDT), Sir Ridesalot
wrote:

On Tuesday, June 8, 2021 at 7:27:46 p.m. UTC-4, John B. wrote:
On Tue, 8 Jun 2021 08:24:40 -0700 (PDT), Tom Kunich
wrote:

On Monday, June 7, 2021 at 2:59:25 PM UTC-7, John B. wrote:
On Mon, 7 Jun 2021 09:08:56 -0700 (PDT), Tom Kunich
wrote:

On Sunday, June 6, 2021 at 3:55:02 PM UTC-7, John B. wrote:
On Sun, 6 Jun 2021 07:54:24 -0700 (PDT), Tom Kunich
wrote:

On Saturday, June 5, 2021 at 6:25:42 PM UTC-7, John B. wrote:
On Sat, 5 Jun 2021 16:51:49 -0700 (PDT), Tom Kunich
wrote:

On Saturday, June 5, 2021 at 3:54:43 PM UTC-7, John B. wrote:
On Sat, 5 Jun 2021 13:09:24 -0700 (PDT), "
wrote:

On Thursday, May 27, 2021 at 6:53:14 PM UTC-5, wrote:
On Thursday, May 27, 2021 at 4:13:38 PM UTC-7, John B. wrote:
On Thu, 27 May 2021 09:05:37 -0700 (PDT), Tom Kunich
wrote:

On Thursday, May 27, 2021 at 7:05:12 AM UTC-7, AMuzi wrote:
On 5/27/2021 8:57 AM, Tom Kunich wrote:
On Wednesday, May 26, 2021 at 9:21:00 PM UTC-7, wrote:
On Tuesday, May 25, 2021 at 4:56:06 PM UTC-5, wrote:
While Titanium is a good material, there are so many possibilities for an error in construction that it is probably a bad idea to buy an el cheap producto in that material.
Like buying an Airborne titanium frame? Like you did?
Question Russell, who founded Airborne?

Gen Ridgeway, 82d Division, 1942.

HA HA, I watched a podcast of Victor David Hansen who was discussing General Patten. He had a very bad reputation as did General Curtis LeMay. But it turns out that if Eisenhower and Ridgeway had listened to Patten he would have shortened the war and probably saved 400,000 lives.. Seem like most of the other Generals didn't like Patten because he was a rich man that came from a filthy rich family and was a college football and polo champion.
Did General Curtis LeMay have a bad reputation? Certainly he didn't
within SAC.
If you don't know anything about the world around you why
are you commenting all of the time? Curtis LeMay loaded the entire
American bomber fleet full of napalm and dropped it on Japanese
industrial centers which burning alive all of the men, women and
children in those areas and destroying 80% of the industrial base of
Japan. He could have burned Japan back into the stone age if Truman
didn't give orders to drop the nuclear bombs. There would have been
absolutely no way for the Japanese to provide even the simplest things
for daily life and none of the simplest farming implements could have
been made.

For someone that claims to have been in the ****ing Air Force since the Air Force began, perhaps you ought to at least know something about it you nitwit.

Are you suggesting LeMay got his bad reputation as you are suggesting from dropping napalm on Japanese cities. Just like we had been doing for several years in Germany. Did his staff and equal generals object to this style of warfare? Even though Eisenhower and Roosevelt and Churchill had been doing it for years in Germany? USA and Britain fire bombed Dresden Germany in February 1945. That fire bombing is very famous. The USA fire bombed Tokyo in March 1945. A month later. So LeMay just copied European strategy it appears. And you say this gave him a bad reputation?

You have to understand that Tommy was born in 1944 so on 9 March 1945
when the U.S. Air Force first firebombed Japan he might have been 1
year old, depending on what month he was born in, and while it is
possibly that Tommy was a precocious child it is apparent that he
could have knew nothing about what the U.S. Military was doing half
the world away.
As for your very false and fictitious claims that "absolutely no way for the Japanese to provide even the simplest things for daily life and none of the simplest farming implements could have been made." Wow!!!! You are foolish. Every single solitary army, navy, marine, air force person knew that it would be extremely costly in lives and machinery to invade Japan. NO MATTER how many bombs and fires we dropped on them. No one thought we could fire bomb or explosive bomb Japan back to the stone age and beat them or get them to surrender without a huge invasion. All of the island battles where the Japanese fought to the death and did not surrender at all taught the USA that Japan was not going to stop. Unless something like the atomic bomb was developed and used as a demonstration. The Japanese were going to fight to the death no matter what. Either by American bullets or starvation. Made no difference to them how they died. Death is death.
Well, Tommy quite apparently knows nothing about farming in Japan in
the 1940 - 1950's. I was assigned to an Air Base in Japan, in 1954
which was surrounded on 3 sides by rice fields and I can assure you
that at that time rice growing, rice being the main constituent of the
Japanese diet, was done solely by hand. The only "farming tools" were
hand tools.

Here our expert on war goes again. 9 years after the war and after
huge reconstruction efforts by America, John tells us that Japanese
rice farmers could successfully grow rice in an area minimally
effected by the war. Doesn't this just warm your heart with the
knowledge he brings to the group? By the way John, what part of
"Industrialized" didn't you understand?
Well, apparently more then you do.
https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/industry
Definition of industry - manufacturing activity as a whole
https://www.dictionary.com/browse/industrialized
industrialize - to introduce industry into (an area) on a large scale.

As for Minimally effected by the war?

Some 7 miles from Tachakawa Air Base which dated back to the 1920's
and was one of several bases tasked with the air defense of Tokyo? The
home of the Ishikawajima Aircraft Manufacturing Company later
renamed the Tachikawa Aircraft Company Ltd. which produced more than
6,000 aircraft. It produced fighters, troop carriers, and bombers.
Prototypes were designed and developed at the manufacturing plant.

Tachikawa was subjected to intense bombing by United States Army Air
Forces XXI Bomber Command 29th Bombardment Group B-29 Superfortresses
during April and June 1945. The Shintentai, an anti-aircraft kamikaze
group, defended the airfield and its manufacturing facilities, however
most of the airfield was rendered unserviceable by the bombing raids,
along with most of the structures and support facilities of the
airfield.

Tommy, you are flailing all around a subject which you so obviously
know nothing at all.

You can't get out of your ignorance by making stupid claims. Of course Tachakawa was bombed, what did that have to do with the surrounding countryside? And what did that have to do with the fact that you were there 9 years after the war? You are spinning your web of lies with the idea that they aren't completely transparent.
I'm not sure what you are talking about but I suspect that you believe
that when Tachikawa A.B. was bombed that somehow the bombs fell only
within the limits of the air base itself, but that just wasn't true.
Most of Tachikawa City was obliterated as well as the surrounding
country side.

As for being there 9 years after the war.... well it probably gives me
more insight to what happened then someone who was one year old when
the bombing occurred and has never visited the country.

I suppose one might say the difference between someone who had been
there, seen what happened, and talked with the inhabitants as opposed
to someone who was never there at all.

Tell us all how farmland and especially rice paddies couldn't have been totally repaired and put back into complete operation in 9 years. I'm sure that you can google something about the fire bombing of London that is pertinent.
Goodness Tommy but you've lost all track of the discussion.

YOU talked about the Japanese Industry and said (read it above) " none
of the simplest farming implements could have been made".
I simply pointed out that rice farming as practiced in Japan in the
period after WW II was performed by hand with minimum tools.

Now you are going on about rice paddies "couldn't have been repaired".

Tommy, are you really so stupid that you can't keep track of the
discussion or is this just your method of trying to disguise the fact
that (as usual) you don't know what you are talking about.

John, you have become a running joke. We were talking about the actions of Curtis LeMay and how he was prevented from bombing Japan into the stone age. And you tell us that rice farmers could farm rice 9 years after the war ended.
Nice try Tommy but I was replying to your assertion that "There would
have been absolutely no way for the Japanese to provide even the
simplest things for daily life and none of the simplest farming
implements could have been made" - see above.

But your apparent claim that General LeMay was, somehow, solely
responsible for fire bombing Japan, simply shows how little you know
about the subject.

You see Tommy the United States Joint Chiefs of Staff approved a
proposal, in 1943, to begin the strategic air campaign against the
Japanese home islands and East Asia by basing B-29 Superfortress heavy
bombers in India and establishing forward airfields in China. This
strategy was designated Operation Matterhorn.

XX Bomber Command was assigned responsibility for Operation
Matterhorn, and its ground crew began to leave the United States for
India during December 1943. The Twentieth Air Force was formed in
April 1944 to oversee all B-29 operations. In an unprecedented move,
the commander of the USAAF, General Henry H. Arnold, took personal
command of this unit and ran it from the Pentagon.

XX Bomber Command began flying missions against Japan in mid-June
1944. The first raid took place on the night of 15/16 June when 75
B-29s were dispatched to attack the Imperial Iron and Steel Works at
Yawata in northern Kyushu. This attack caused little damage and cost
seven B-29s, but received enthusiastic media coverage in the United
States.

Arnold relieved XX Bomber Command's commander, Brigadier General
Kenneth Wolfe, shortly after the raid on Yawata when he was unable to
make follow-up attacks on Japan due to insufficient fuel stockpiles at
the bases in China. Wolfe's replacement was Major General Curtis
LeMay, a veteran of Eighth Air Force bombing attacks against Germany.

Arnold relieved XX Bomber Command's commander, Brigadier General
Kenneth Wolfe, shortly after the raid on Yawata when he was unable to
make follow-up attacks on Japan due to insufficient fuel stockpiles at
the bases in China. Wolfe's replacement was Major General Curtis
LeMay, a veteran of Eighth Air Force bombing attacks against Germany.

So, essentially the bombing of Japanese cities was planned long before
LeMay was assigned as commander and the bombing was, to a large
extent, designed to prove to the U.S. public that "we were winning"
and this news was received enthusiastically in the U.S.

As an aside I was 13 years old in 1945 and well aware of the war and
of the atrocities attributed to the Japanese forces which were well
publicized in the U.S. and the general attitude in the U.S. was that
the Japanese were back stabbing fiends from Hell who deserved anything
that might be done to them.

You might want to read up on:

The Nanking Massacre.
Unit 731. Manchukuo 1935-1945
Comfort Women. 1932-1945
Sook Ching Massacre. February-March 1942
Bataan Death March
Manilla Massacre

--
Cheers,

John B.

There was one raid where a lot of damage was done to a Japanese city because of
fires. LeMay decided to take out most of the guns from the B-29s and
also to greatly lower the altitude from which they were bombing. That
lowering of the bombing altitude greatly improved accuracy. LeMay also
decided to use mostly incendiary bombs rather than high explosive
ones. The result was an extremely successful campaign where many
cities suffered great devastation. One city was 98.8% destroyed in a
SINGLE raid.

Cheers
I'm not sure about taking the guns out as there would be relatively
little advantage for that but yes, LeMay's big contribution was to
order the bombing to be done from lower altitudes and in the day time,
which of course increased the bombs on the target accuracy very
noticeably.
--
Cheers,

John B.

Taking the guns out meant the B-29s could carry a bit more of a bomb load or more fuel.

Cheers

I looked up what a M-2 50 caliber air cooled machine gun weighs and it
seems to be ~82 lbs. If I remember correctly the B-29 carried 10 guns
so 820 lbs. Note that I am ignoring the weight of the ammunition for
the guns which was a significant weight, more then the guns
themselves. So for argument double the weight of the guns and ammo or
1,640 lbs.

Another source said that on the Tokyo raid either each B-29 dropped
9,970 lbs of bombs. Would subtracting 1,640 be worth it.

But the other side of the equation if that the original raids over
Japan had been flown at night and at high altitude... and aircraft had
been lost.

And now you are telling me I gotta fly at low altitudes? In the
daytime? Without any guns?


.50cal belts weigh 35 pounds per hundred rounds. Aircraft
typically used 300 round belts.

(for the nitpickers, yes there are a lot of variants to ".50
cal" ammo)
Somewhere I read that a B-17 carried 1.3 tons of ammunition on a
typical mission over Germany and had 12 .50 cal machine guns. Which
would amount to about 600 rounds/gun. A B-29 carried 10 guns, I think
some versions may have had 12, so likely carried about a ton of
ammunition.

At the time of the Korean war the B-29's stationed at Yokota Air Base,
Japan, used one API round for each 4 standard rounds.

When they removed the guns on the B29's they also removed all of the mechanisms that were the motor drives for the turrets and the turrets as well. The effect was to to give these B29's an extra 500 miles of range with a full load of bombs. This was about 1/5th more range than with all of the guns, ammunition, turrets, turrets drives and gunners. That gave them a far greater safety margin if they were damaged or lost fuel from one of the tanks.

These were bombers remember? Do you remember what that even ment?