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Whirlwind - Barrett Tillman [146]

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figures for Hiroshima: Hiroshima’s 1944 census listed 344,000, whereas various sources list 66,000 and 200,000 dead. In 1946 the Hiroshima police accounted for 78,000 deaths and 14,000 missing, obviously not all the latter being fatalities. The Actual Status Inventory of Atomic Bomb Survivors (Chogoku Shimbun, August 5, 1999) tallied almost 89,000 names of people who died before 1946. “How Many Died at Hiroshima?,” http://www.warbirdforum.com/hirodead.htm.

267 total radiation deaths: “Is Atomic Radiation as Dangerous As We Thought?,” Spiegel Online, November 2007, http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/0,1518,519043,00.html; “Radiation in Perspective: Improving comprehension of risks,” International Atomic Energy Agency Bulletin 2/1995, http://www.iaea.org/Publications/Magazines/Bulletin/Bull372/37205140711.pdf.

268 Former President Herbert Hoover and General Dwight D. Eisenhower: As supreme Allied commander in Europe, Eisenhower’s oft-cited statement that Japan sought to surrender “with a minimum loss of face” was made without knowledge of Pacific Theater intelligence. In his 1948 memoir Crusade in Europe (Garden City, NY: Doubleday & Co., 1948), p. 443, he admitted that his views “were not based on any analysis of the subject.” That situation had not changed in 1963 when he wrote The White House Years: Mandate for Change, 1953–1956 (Garden City, NY: Doubleday & Co, 1963). The frequently accessed Web site http://www.doug-long.com/quotes.htm quotes a full paragraph citing Eisenhower’s opposition to A-bombs, concluding, “The Secretary [Henry Stimson] was deeply perturbed by my attitude,” but deletes the concluding phrase, “most angrily refuting the reasons I gave for my quick conclusions” (emphasis added). The site mentions p. 380 but the quote is on pp. 312–13.

Hoover’s May 1945 urging of Truman to make “a short-wave broadcast to the people of Japan” reveals astonishing naïveté. It assumed that Imperial Japan was a democracy and that a majority of Japanese favored surrender. It also ignored the fact that keeping unauthorized radios was a serious offense.

268 “Neither the Army”: John Toland, The Rising Sun: The Decline and Fall of the Japanese Empire, 1936–1945 (New York: Random House, 1970), 561.

268 “ ‘Blind’ bombing”: Mission Accomplished, 25.

269 Defenders of the atomic bombings: Richard Frank, Downfall: The End of the Imperial Japanese Empire (New York: Random House, 1999), 351. For a wider discussion of the consequences of an Allied blockade, see his “Alternatives and Conclusions.”

269 “Fundamentally the thing”: Craven and Cate, The Army Air Forces in World War II, Vol. 5: The Pacific, 756.

269 “On top of the B-29 raids”: Mission Accomplished, 39–40.

271 “revisionist and offensive”: “Enola Gay Archive,” http://www.afa.org/media/enolagay/chrono.asp. For some revisionist views of the atomic bombings and the 1994–95 controversy over the Smithsonian Institution’s Enola Gay exhibit, see Gar Alperovitz, The Decision to Use the Atomic Bomb (New York: Vintage, 1996); Robert J. Lifton and Greg Mitchell, Hiroshima in America: Fifty Years of Denial (New York: Putnam, 1995); Philip Noble, ed., Judgment at the Smithsonian (New York: Marlowe, 1995).

APPENDIX A: THE UNKNOWN WAR

Page

274 “the most disastrous day”: AAF Combat Chronology, 11 September 1943.

274 Northeast Area Fleet: U.S. Strategic Bombing Survey, Campaigns of the Pacific War. Chapter Six: The Aleutians Campaign, 83, http://www.ibiblio.org/hyperwar/AAF/USSBS/PTO-Campaigns/USSBS-PTO-6.html.

Index


A-26 Invader bombers, 239

Abe, Genke, 146

Adams, Lyle, 138

Afrika Corps, 33

Air Corps Act (1926), 16

Air Corps Tactical School (ACTS), 16–18, 19, 21, 78

aircraft carriers, 1–3, 67, 106–33

classes of, 110–11, 112, 122, 288n

development of, 107–11

Air Force, U.S., 270

see also Army Air Forces, U.S.

air raid shelters, 145–46

Airshow, Operation, 250

air-to-air refueling, 32

Air War Plans Division One (AWPD-1), 19–21, 45, 78, 80, 91, 97

Air War Plans Division Forty-Two (AWPD-42), 20, 21, 45

Akamatsu, Sadaaki “Temei,” 177–79, 185

Akashi, Japan,

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