Slightly off topic but when I read the headline, I assumed "large crater" would be much more large than you see in the picture. The article reports "7 meters (23 feet) in diameter and 1 meter (3 feet) deep." For a bomb that doesn't seem that "large."
Luckily no one was hurt or nearby when it went off.
The US 500lb bombs had about 270lbs of explosives in them. If this location were a WW-II airfield, it is the sort of bomb that would have been dropped on airplanes on the ground to destroy them.
Most of the damage to Japan's cities was actually done by napalm-filled bomblets combined into cluster-bombs[1], partly because weather made precision bombing difficult.
Also Japanese construction was conveniently, for the US, extremely flammable so you could do way more damage starting a firestorm than you could with the same number of bombers filled with traditional bombs.
There was also the incredible plan to fill a bomb with bats strapped with tiny incendiary charges on timers so they would be dropped, go roost somewhere, and hopefully start even wider spread fires. They spent about 2 million dollars on it before it was cancelled because the atomic bomb was showing much better progress. They also accidentally proved it's effectiveness and burned down part of the testing facility.
Similarly, the Japanese launched over 9000 incendiary balloon bombs against the US & Canada, but they were generally ineffective. Six civilians were killed in Oregon in 1945.
Yeah one of the few instances of damage on the US side of the world from WW2 and it barely did anything. The US was incredibly fortunate to not have to fight basically any of the war on the home front. We rode that wave for a couple decades as Europe and Japan etc rebuilt.
It was the great success of the Allied firebombing campaign that inflicted suburbia on the United States. US construction is just as flammable but fire is less likely to spread when the houses are farther apart.
(Let's rephrase the success part. The campaign was destructive and deadly for the civilian population but did nothing to end the war earlier. Bomber Harris and the Lord Lindemann got a career boost, though.)
There are many contemporary sources on the Japanese side that suggest the firebombings did hasten the (inevitable at this point) surrender. The US certainly had a strategic desire for Japan to surrender to the US rather than the USSR.
Yeah it turns out the whole idea of morale bombing is pretty flawed, it largely just galvanizes the population it turns out; Japan, England and Germany all reacted similarly, maybe for different cultural reasons but it was ineffective everywhere.
Really? To assert this, you need to show not that Axis production didn't decline, but that the damage done didn't prevent production from increasing even more. How does one show that?
Which, of course, proves nothing. What matters is how much it would have increased without the bombing.
Actually, it's even worse than that, since one must also subtract from this production the resources Germany was putting into air defense. This effort was massive.
I did. He was critiquing theories that airpower could win wars. This doesn't mean airpower can't help win a war. There's a large space between "useless" and "all important".
The Germans ended up devoting 1/4 of their war production and a million men to antiaircraft defense.
You are completely ignoring Japanese mindset during that time. Absolute devotion to emperor, casualties could be in millions and that wouldn't change anything. Their suicidal charges and not giving up alive are pretty famous and this comes from certain place, same as kamikadze. Some rational counting of outputs may be for bureaucrats but those were not holding any real power in Japan empire.
There is a lot of speculation why emperor and generals surrendered, even atomic bombs may not have been the triggering point as much as soviet declaration of war to Japan at 8 August 1945. Most probably it all compounded.
It's not impossible we have internal documents from the time, the US was actively reading all of the diplomatic traffic and basically anything broadcast via radio anywhere in the Japanese government. One big sticking point that appears in a lot of discussions is the demand for unconditional surrender, a lot of effort diplomatically was spent around getting past the allied agreement to only accept unconditional surrender. One big factor in that from the primary sources was the possibility of the emperor being executed or completely dethroned.
The war in Europe is highly arguable in both directions.
To assert that the bombing campaign did nothing for the war in the Pacific flies in the face of recorded history. We literally have the imperial Japanese equivalent of meeting minutes where they talk about this stuff and toward the end the sheer destruction of the bombing campaign did affect the credibility of the militarists "yeah we can still pull this off" claims in the eyes of many of the others.
Did historical bombs typically make big explosions? Reading some numbers from the war, it seemed like the strategy was more to dump enormous volume of ordinance and hope to get lucky hitting something vital.
That strategy was not because the bombs weren't very destructive, but because they just could not be placed accurately. So they had to drop a lot of bombs and hope a few of them hit the strategically important targets.
Yep. The US did drop around 160,800 tons of conventional bombs on Japan during WWII, thought that's still relatively tame compared to the 623,000 tons they drop on Germany. Though the two nukes more than made up for it, I guess.
Bomb findings during construction is nothing especially rare in these countries.
The conventional bombing of Japan was scheduled for massive increase. To quote Ian Toll's "Twilight of the Gods":
> If the war had lasted any longer than it did, the scale and ferocity of the conventional bombing campaign would have risen to inconceivable new heights. [...] At the height of the bombing campaign, between May and August 1945, a monthly average of 34,402 tons of high explosive and incendiary bombs were dropped on Japan. According to USAAF chief Hap Arnold, the monthly total would have reached 100,000 tons in September 1945, and then risen steadily month by month. By early 1946, if the Japanese were still fighting, eighty USAAF combat groups would be operating against Japan, a total of about 4,000 bombers. In January 1946, they would drop 170,000 tons of bombs on Japan, surpassing in one month the cumulative tonnage actually dropped on the country during the entire Pacific War. By March 1946, the anticipated date of the CORONET landings on the Tokyo plain, the monthly bombing figure would surpass 200,000 tons.
> The conventional bombing of Japan was scheduled for massive increase.
Allegedly.
It's possible it's true, but claims like this have the incentive of selling the "atom bombing Hiroshima and Nagasaki was necessary and justified" narrative behind them, so that should be taken into account as a factor.
It doesn't even have to be consciously disingenous - the more one can convince oneself (and thus eventually others) of how destructive and costly conventional warfare would have been, the more digestible the nuclear option becomes, so there's a lot of motivation to fuel some motivated reasoning.
Professionals talk logistics indeed. To imagine what kind is pipeline would be required to enable such a venture. Producing, assembling, and shipping millions of tons of explosives as a continual operation.
'Between 1965 and 1975, the United States and its allies dropped more than 7.5 million tons of bombs on Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia—double the amount dropped on Europe and Asia during World War II.' - https://storymaps.arcgis.com/stories/2eae918ca40a4bd7a55390b...
>Though the two nukes more than made up for it, I guess.
Not if you go by the kiloton rating of those two bombs: they were each in the kiloton range (around 10-15 kT IIRC), so if you add a generous 30,000 tons to the 160,800 you mentioned before, that's 190,800 tons, still far short of the 623,000 tons dropped on Germany.
In some parts of France, you can’t dig without getting a specialized surveyor inspection and certificate it’s safe to dig this deep in that place first.
Absolutely. In my country it is mandatory to submit an UXO report as part of getting the building permit for nontrivial stuff. Most of the time this is boring office work (Was there a strategic target nearby during WWII? Are there any records of bombing happening here? Have there been earthworks in the last 70 years significant enough to rule out anything still remaining?) and you get a report noting that there's no risk expected, but sometimes you have to call in the cavalry and go searching with ground-penetrating radar.
It's just part of doing business, really. Same story with archaeological remains, chemical contamination, or threatened animal species.
It would have done considerably more damage if it had gone off when and where it was intended. The runway is designed to have enormous, heavy planes takeoff and land on it routinely, it undoubtedly absorbed a lot of the bomb’s energy. Not to mention the earth underneath it.
Real WWII historians could probably determine the date on which the bomb was dropped, its intended target, etc., etc.
But with the condition that most of Japan was in, later in WWII - I'm thinking that "gone off where & when intended" would probably have had little effect. Most of the country was burned-out rubble.
That's likely a stock image completely unrelated to the actual explosion. Blame reporters(or the sites they work for) for normalizing this behavior.
If it's not, I can't tell because it's hard to get a sense of scale from the video and image. The crater only appears maybe 2 or 3 meters wide judging by the grass, the painted stripes, and the overall taxiway width.
If the crater is only 1 meter deep then the bomb was likely more shallow than that (although some of the ejected dirt will fall back into the crater). So much of the bomb's energy went into the atmosphere.
Luckily no one was hurt or nearby when it went off.