The Battles of Iwo Jima and Okinawa in the winter and spring of were among the bloodiest of the war, and the American military projected that as many as 1 million casualties would accompany any invasion of the Japanese mainland.
Weeks after the first successful test of the atomic bomb occurred in Alamogordo, New Mexico, on July 16, , President Harry Truman , who had ascended to the presidency less than four months earlier after the death of Franklin D.
Roosevelt , authorized its use against Japan in the hopes of bringing a swift end to the war. On August 6, , the American B bomber Enola Gay dropped an atomic bomb on the manufacturing city of Hiroshima, immediately killing an estimated 80, people. Tens of thousands later died of radiation exposure. When Japan failed to immediately surrender after the bombing of Hiroshima , the United States detonated an even more powerful atomic bomb on Nagasaki three days later that killed 35, instantly and another 50, in its aftermath.
In addition to the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Japan came under increasing pressure when the Soviet Union formally declared war on August 8 and invaded Japanese-occupied Manchuria in northeastern China. A great tragedy has ended. A great victory has been won. But if you see something that doesn't look right, click here to contact us! Twice a week we compile our most fascinating features and deliver them straight to you. Live TV. When the last disk weakened and snapped, the spring was released, the firing pin struck the priming charge and—finally, unexpectedly—the bomb exploded.
Quickly reaching terminal velocity, it fell toward the southwest, missing the yards and the chemical plants. It fell instead toward the canal and the two bridges connecting Oranienburg and the suburb of Lehnitz, closing on a wedge of low-lying land framed by the embankments of Lehnitzstrasse and the railroad line. Before the war this had been a quiet spot beside the water, leading to four villas among the trees, parallel to a canal on Baumschulenweg. But now it was occupied by anti-aircraft guns and a pair of narrow, wooden, single-story barracks built by the Wehrmacht.
This was where the bomb finally found the earth—just missing the more westerly of the two barracks and plunging into the sandy soil at more than miles per hour. It bored down at an oblique angle before the violence of its passage tore the stabilizing fins away from the tail, when it abruptly angled upward until, its kinetic energy finally spent, the bomb and its M fuse came to rest: nose-up but still deep underground.
The city center was ablaze, the first of the delayed explosions had started: The Auergesellschaft plant would soon be destroyed and the rail yards tangled with wreckage. But the bomb beside the canal lay undisturbed. Taken by gravity, it trickled harmlessly downward, away from the celluloid disks it was supposed to weaken. Less than two months later, Nazi leaders capitulated. As much as ten square miles of Berlin had been reduced to rubble. In the months following V-E Day that May, a woman who had been bombed out of her home there found her way, with her young son, out to Oranienburg, where she had a boyfriend.
The town was a constellation of yawning craters and gutted factories, but beside Lehnitzstrasse and not far from the canal, she found a small wooden barracks empty and intact. She moved in with her boyfriend and her son. Abandoned ammunition and unexploded bombs claimed their first postwar victims almost as soon as the last guns fell silent. In June , a cache of German anti-tank weapons exploded in Bremen, killing 35 and injuring 50; three months later in Hamburg, a buried American pound bomb with a time-delay fuse took the lives of the four technicians working to disarm it.
It was dangerous work done at close quarters, removing fuses with wrenches and hammers. He said he never felt fear during the defusing process.
In the same way that a baker bakes bread, we defuse bombs. In the decades after the war, bombs, mines, grenades and artillery shells killed dozens of KMBD technicians and hundreds of civilians.
Thousands of unexploded Allied bombs were excavated and defused. But many had been buried in rubble or simply entombed in concrete during wartime remediation and forgotten. In the postwar rush for reconstruction, nobody kept consistent information about where unexploded bombs had been made safe and removed.
A systematic approach to finding them was officially regarded as impossible. When Reinhardt started work with the East German KMBD in , both he and his counterparts in the West usually found bombs the same way: one at a time, often during construction work.
But the government of Hamburg had recently brokered an agreement to allow the states of West Germany access to the 5. Between and , ACIU pilots flew thousands of reconnaissance missions before and after every raid by Allied bombers, taking millions of stereoscopic photographs that revealed both where the attacks could be directed and then how successful they had proved.
Those images held clues to where bombs had landed but never detonated—a small, circular hole, for example, in an otherwise consistent line of ragged craters. Defense Intelligence Agency by an enterprising American intelligence officer based in Germany, who had hoped to sell them privately to the German government for his own profit. When he failed, he sold 60, of them to the teacher for a few pfennigs each.
Carls, sensing a business opportunity, snapped them up for a deutsche mark apiece. Convinced there must be more, held somewhere in the United States, Carls established a company, Luftbilddatenbank. With the help of archivists in Britain and the States, he brought to light hundreds of cans of aerial reconnaissance film that had gone unexamined for decades.
Supplementing the photographs and the sortie plots with local histories and police records, contemporary eyewitness testimony and the detailed records of bombing missions held at the Air Force Historical Research Agency at Maxwell Air Force Base in Alabama, Carls was able to build a chronology of everything that had happened to a given patch of land between and Examining the photographs using a stereoscope, which makes the images appear in 3-D, Carls could see where bombs had fallen, where they had exploded and where they may not have.
He closed in on an L-shaped cul-de-sac in Oranienburg, in the area between Lehnitzstrasse and the canal. On the other monitor, he used the geolocation data of the address to summon a list of more than aerial photographs of the area shot by Allied reconnaissance pilots and scrolled through them until he found the ones he needed.
A week after the March 15 raid, photographs and were taken from 27, feet over Oranienburg, a fraction of a second apart. They showed the scene near the canal in sharp monochromatic detail, the curve of the Lehnitzstrasse bridge and the bare branches of the trees on Baumschulenweg tracing fine shadows on the water and the pale ground beyond.
Then Kroeckel used Photoshop to tint one picture in cyan and the other in magenta, and combined them into a single image. I put on a pair of cardboard 3-D glasses, and the landscape rose toward me: upended matchbox shapes of roofless houses; a chunk of earth bitten out of the Lehnitzstrasse embankment; a giant, perfectly circular crater in the middle of Baumschulenweg.
Yet we could see no sign of a dormant 1,bomb concealed in the ruins of the neighborhood, where, soon after the photograph was taken, a woman would find a home for herself and her family.
Kroeckel explained that even an image as stark as this one could not reveal everything about the landscape below. Paule Dietrich bought the house on the cul-de-sac in Oranienburg in He and the German Democratic Republic had been born on the same day, October 7, , and for a while the coincidence seemed auspicious.
At 20, he and the others were guests at the opening of the Berlin TV tower, the tallest building in all of Germany. Over the next 20 years, the Republic was good to Dietrich. He drove buses and subway trains for the Berlin transit authority. Hitler wanted a submissive, neutralized Britain so that he could concentrate on his plans for the East, namely the land invasion of the Soviet Union , without interference. Since June, English vessels in the Channel had been attacked and aerial battles had been fought over Britain, as Germany attempted to wear down the Royal Air Force in anticipation of a land invasion.
A land invasion was now ruled out as unrealistic; instead Hitler chose sheer terror as his weapon of choice. British intelligence had had an inkling of the coming bombardment. Evidence of the large-scale movement of German barges in the Channel and the interrogation of German spies had led them to the correct conclusion-unfortunately, it was just as the London docks were suffering the onslaught of Day One of the Blitz. By the end of the day, German planes had dropped tons of bombs on London.
Even though civilian populations were not the primary target that day, the poorest of London slum areas-the East End—felt the fallout literally, from direct hits of errant bombs as well as the fires that broke out and spread throughout the vicinity. Four hundred and forty-eight civilians were killed that afternoon and evening. A little past 8 p.
A state of emergency broke out in England; even home defense units were put to the ready. They would not run or be cowed into submission. They would fight.
0コメント