Japanese experimental weapons against america: patato bombs?

Japan's WW2 Secret Weapon – Balloon Bomb

Jan 3, 2011 Marco Lobo

Watching a Japanese TV quiz show, I was intrigued by the question: which of these things can konnyaku not be used for? The screen showed three pictures – a pillow, a futon and a bomb. ‘No Brainer’, or so I thought...naturally it had to be the bomb. For those who don’t know what konnyaku is, it is a rubbery food made from a kind of potato. Rather tasteless I think, but it is supposed to have marvelous health benefits.
As it turns out, I was wrong about the bomb. The show did not go on to explain why, and so I started to look into it for myself. Around the same time, there was a TV re-run of a 1980 movie, The Final Countdown; about an American nuclear aircraft carrier that encounters a supernatural storm and is sent back into the past to just before the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbour.
In the story, the captain realizes that with the use of the modern weapons on board, the course of the war and history could be changed drastically. It was a case of America’s F-14 Tomcats against Japan’s A6M Zeros. The battle never materializes; just as it is about to start, the mysterious storm comes back and the aircraft carrier is sent forward four decades to the time that it came from.

F-14’s against Zeros isn’t as strange as it sounds.
As WW2 continued, Japan’s resources were so depleted that the Japanese came up with unusual ways to fight. Certainly the kamikaze was one of them and there are other examples. One only needs to visit the Yushukan, the Japanese military and war museum at Tokyo’s Yasukuni Shrine to actually see models of some of these suicide weapons.
My research led me to a different museum – the Noborito Institute for Peace Education, where I finally found the answer I was looking for. The small museum is located on the grounds of Meiji University, the location where the development of many of the experimental weapons took place. In it, various secret devices are displayed: water-proof, wind resistant matches; explosive materials; disappearing inks and other things, all worthy of a showing in an episode of the old Mission Impossible.

Atom Bomb Vs Potato Bomb

Here’s where the konnyaku comes in. While the US was busy developing the atomic bomb with the Manhattan Project, the Japanese had developed a secret weapon of their own; the balloon bomb. The project was given high priority by Japan’s military – the idea was to send gas-filled paper balloons flying on air currents over the Pacific and drop incendiary devices over America.
The konyakku was used to make a paste to be painted over the paper. The idea being that the resulting fires from the bombs would cause such fear and confusion amongst Americans that they would no longer want to fight. In the six months until spring of 1945, over nine thousand of these balloons were launched. Only six people were known to have been killed by these devices, when one of them came down in Oregon. You can learn more about this by reading a paper published by the Smithsonian Institution Press, entitled Japan’s WW2 Balloon Bomb Attacks on North America.

Copyright Marco Lobo. Contact the author to obtain permission for republication.

Read more at Suite101: Japan's WW2 Secret Weapon – Balloon Bomb http://www.suite101.com/content/a-japanese-ww2-secret-weapon--potato-a327634#ixzz1AfTYeTHT

Mr. Taylors Hero Howard Zinn was one of the first Napalm using pilots?

Professor Howard Zinn, 1922 - 2010

Author: A Mohit
Published: January 28, 2010 at 1:23 pm

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Yesterday, when I heard the news of Howard Zinn’s death at age 87, an overwhelming sadness swept over me. I'd never met or corresponded with Dr. Zinn, yet his writing and wisdom affected me deeply.
When I first immigrated to this country, I read voraciously about American history and Dr. Zinn’s writing was one of my favorite sources. What attracted me most to his writing was his utterly honest approach. I have only read a few of his nearly two dozen books, including A People's History of the United States, nevertheless, it was his articles that I used to look forward to with earnest.
Zinn was born in Brooklyn in 1922 to Jewish immigrant parents who came to the U.S. from Europe just prior to World War I. As a young man, Zinn joined the U.S. Air Force during WWII and participated in several bombing targets throughout Europe, including one of the first missions to use napalm, during a bombing in France. Later, Zinn would return to France to investigate the bombings, it was during this pilgrimage he discovered many innocent civilians had been killed. This experience touched him profoundly, and raised many ethical questions in his mind, thus changing his perspective on war, especially the targeting of civilians.
In 1963, Dr. Zinn was a tenured professor of History at Spelman College in Atlanta. He was fired from his job for supporting his students when they challenged their institution’s stand on female students. Zinn was also a instrumental voice during the Civil Rights Movement, a time which he describes as being his most "interesting." In 1964, Dr. Zinn joined the political science department at Boston University.
Dr. Zinn wrote profusely, with history being his favorite subject. His writing always had a human element, searching for truth and seeking justice. Zinn gave voice to millions of people who had no voice and anyone who is familiar with his writings will miss him dearly.
For me, it comes as a personal loss.
Howard Zinn is dead, long live Howard Zinn.


Read more: http://technorati.com/politics/article/professor-howard-zinn-1922-20102/#ixzz1AfSqek5p

Did you Know?

Did you know that the idea and creation of the Godzilla movies and comics were thought of as an after effect of the dropping of the Atomic bombs on Japan, and that the radiation from the bombs mutated a lizard turning it into Godzilla!

I found a boom about Kamikaze; its about kamikaze who couldnt complete their missions

I Was a Kamikaze
by Ryuji Nagatsuka
translated from the French by Nina Rootes
Macmillan Publishing, 1973, 212 pages

Some people wonder who could have written a book titled I Was a Kamikaze, since the common perception is that all Japanese kamikaze pilots died carrying out their suicide missions. Although no kamikaze pilot survived crashing into an American ship, many others in kamikaze attack corps survived. Some turned back due to bad weather or mechanical problems with their outdated planes. A small number of escort plane pilots, who protected the suicide attack planes, managed to escape the superior enemy fighters. Many Navy and Army airmen, trained and ready for suicide attacks, disbanded after hearing the Emperor's radio message to surrender. Ryuji Nagatsuka, a kamikaze pilot in the Japanese Imperial Army, relates his experiences and feelings as he faced death.
While a student of French literature at the University of Tokyo, Nagatsuka entered the Army in 1944 as a cadet pilot. The book's parts cover the three stages of his time in the Army. Part One deals with his basic flight training, where he learned details of Japan's desperate military situation. Part Two describes his training to fly fighters and his squadron's two attempts to use their fighters to engage superior U.S. B-29 bombers. Both times he returned with negative results for which he felt inexpressible shame. Part Three relates his volunteering for a kamikaze special attack corps. He sortied with a group of eighteen fighters, but twelve returned to base because bad weather made it impossible to locate the American fleet. The commanding officer considered their action to be equivalent to desertion and a discredit to the squadron, so the pilots were punched in the face, put under arrest for three days, and forced to copy out the emperor's decree on military conduct.
I Was a Kamikaze was first published in France in 1972, and the English translation came out the following year. Surprisingly, no Japanese version of this book exists. Since Nagatsuka wrote this book more than 25 years after the actual events, a few parts seem like he is looking back on past events rather than describing his feelings and opinions at the time. For example, when he first arrives at flight training school, the squadron leader gives a long lecture of five pages filled with names and details of the war situation. This speech appears to be more the results of the author's subsequent background research for the book rather than what a brand-new cadet pilot would remember. However, Nagatsuka's description of his suicide mission has a real immediacy that will grip the reader. Before copying the emperor's decree when put under arrest after returning to base, he secretly wrote in a diary all of this thoughts during his two-hour flight.
A fascinating feature of this book is the depiction of the author's conflicting emotions as he contemplates his impending death. Nagatsuka's thoughts on death waver. At times he resolves that he will willingly sacrifice his life for his family and countrymen, but at other times he wants to continue to live rather than carry out a senseless suicide mission. When he suffers contempt from the other men at the base after returning from his suicide flight, he ponders the foolishness of the principle that a suicide pilot should not return to base even though the only alternative would be to futilely plunge into the sea without hitting an enemy ship.

New English Library edition

In contrast to the commonly held image of kamikaze pilots volunteering for suicide missions based on fanatical loyalty to the emperor, Nagatsuka never thought of the emperor as the reason for his sacrifice. He fought in whatever way he could, including joining a kamikaze special attack corps, in order to protect his family and friends from the enemy. American B-29s dropped incendiary bombs on Tokyo, his hometown of Nagoya, and other major cities, killing tens of thousands of civilians and destroying hundreds of thousands of homes. He willingly set out on a suicide mission for his family and for his country's people, but certainly not for the emperor.
The author not only relates his history during the war, he also provides his opinions, sometimes emotional ones, on several subjects for which he does not have direct support or experience. For example, Nagatsuka states emphatically that corporal punishment rarely occurred in the Army air force. He rails against the "vile distortion of the truth" contained in a book that described brutal physical violence committed by officers against cadet pilots at Chiran, an air base in southern Japan from which many Army kamikaze pilots sortied. However, he never served at that base, and he also describes his being punched in the face by a superior in a couple of separate instances.
The two Japanese characters (kanji) for "kamikaze" (meaning "divine wind") can be read in two ways: "kamikaze" or "shinpu." Nagatsuka speculates that nisei (second-generation Japanese-Americans) in the U.S. military were the first to use the pronunciation "kamikaze" to describe the special attack suicide squads because "they did not know how to read Japanese correctly and so pronounced the two Japanese characters for Divine Wind in a more vernacular way [kamikaze]" (p. 142). He cites no support for such an assertion. Although Shinpu was the official name given to the first unit formed in the Philippines in October 1944, people in Japan both during and after the war frequently read the two kanji as "kamikaze." The pronunciation "kamikaze" was used frequently to refer to the "divine wind" that destroyed the Kublai Khan's Mongol fleets invading Japan in 1281, so this pronunciation was the most familiar one to Japanese people.
Nagatsuka's in-depth account of his fears and inner struggles as he faces impending death makes I Was a Kamikaze a valuable primary source to understand the psychology of the kamikaze pilots

One of hitlers biggest downfalls?

I think one of the reasons hitler and the Nazi and all of Germany lost the war because hitler would not have any defensive units. He was completely offense and some of his other generals and scientists often told hitler of defensive batteries and other defensive plans but hitler ignored them. I think this is why they lost. You know what they say the best offence is a good defence.