Paul Allen finds lost WWII ship USS Indianapolis

Mr. Liberty:

Azzhole, make sure you watch the vid by Peaceable Citizen.

As I’ve stated before, I was against the Atomic Bombs – I preferred the Incendiary Bombs that lit up the cities composed of wooden structures and created firestorms, which lit up the Japs into flaming torches. Those demented scum deserved more of the same.

Fuck you. Those poor bastards suffered a terrible fate most of us can hardly imagine. There’s nothing “fair” or “just” or “karmic” about surviving a ship sinking, then facing death from exposure, starvation, drowining, dehydration, and shark attack at sea while wondering if anyone even knows where you are or if they’ll come save you. I don’t think karma is real, but want to talk about it? How about the Japs who started the war? If anything, getting nuked was THEIR karma.
I was just in Pearl Harbor and it was remarkable how small that place was. Some of the buildings at Hickham still have bullet holes in them. It’s something to see.

I once met Leon Smith, weaponeer to the bomb during the Manhattan Project. He is honored at the Nuke School at Kirtland AFB for famously designing an airborne test unit for the bomb in 30 hours. He gave a lecture I was privileged to sit in on about his experiences helping build the bomb. I was fascinated to learn he almost got to drop one of the bombs, but he lost a coin toss, and ended up dropping the Bikini Atol test bomb, instead. He told us he was in Saipan assembling the launch infrastructure for the bomb (it took a special loading pit) and he sat in on the Japanese invasion briefings. The ships and troops were being assembled for the projected November 1945 invasion. He said they estimated we would lose 1,000 troops an hour in the invasion. That would have been an incredible amount of people. So dropping the bombs was a lifesaver. He told us he was relieved when it was finally used, because he knew everyone could finally go home. When I had my chance to meet him and shake his hand, I told him thank you. I also told him the story my father told me. He was 15 at the end of the war and thought he would grow up to go fight it, too. Mr. Smith looked me in the eye and told me, “He wouldda been dead!”

I think it’s great we used the bomb and were I in a position to use it, I would have dropped it, too. I’ve read about the last-ditch caves the Japs had set up complete with enough weapons for every man, woman, and child, and reserve suicide planes and the national resistance training for everyone in the islands. It was not an easy decision, but it did save lives. And you must note it took 2 fucking bombs before they finally admitted defeat. 1 bomb wasn’t enough.
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While I was in Pearl, I was also privileged to get a chance to board and tour a nuclear attack submarine. My impressions of that are:
1. Submariners do an incredible job under really difficult conditions.
2. It’s tough enough to be a sailor, but it takes a special kind of person to willingly seal yourself into a tiny pressurized tube to spend months underneath the sea. I figure if every additional level of complexity means the more likely a system is to crash, then a submarine is like a deathtrap.

If you get to visit Pearl and walk around, it’s impressive to see the various plaques and signs and memorials. I saw one next to a dock regarding a Torpedoman 2nd Class, Henry Breault, who served on submarine 0-5 in October 1923 when it sank due to a collision with a steamer. Breault, instead of abandoning ship, ran back to the forward torpedo room where a shipmate was trapped, and willingly sealed himself in the compartment with the guy and waited 31 hours for rescue. They survived and he was awarded the Medal of Honor. That was amazing.