When did it end exactly?

[caldrail]

When did the Great War end?

 

Now most of you will say November 1918, but you'd be wrong.

 

Nope, not after that Russian trouble in 1920/21 either.

 

It offically ended on September 25th 1939, when the little country of Andorra (who'd been forgotten by the Versailles Treaty) kissed and made up with Germany. Hmmm... One wonders they suddenly decided to make a big deal of it...

 

When did the Secobnd World War end?

 

If you said August 1945 and muttered about gay slogans on bombers carrying atom bombs, you're completely wrong.

 

Apparently President Truman declared the Second World War officially at an end in December 1946. Just in case anyone hadn't noticed.

[caesar novus]

When did the Secobnd World War end?

 

If you said August 1945 and muttered about gay slogans on bombers carrying atom bombs, you're completely wrong.

Speaking of historic weapons with swishy names, the Nagasaki bomber may have been more decisive than the Hiroshima one (named after pilots mother of Enola Gay). It's reasonable for an adversary to assume such difficult bomb is a one time thing for quite a while until resources can be built up again. Stalin actually felt extremely vulnerable after detonating his first nuke, because he had revealed his menace but it was all he could produce for a very long time. One hawk US general wanted to take the opportunity to nuke Russia then and prevent a dangerous cold war.

 

Back to swishy B-29 names. The Nagasaki bomber was first reported to be named "The Great Artiste" because it held their crew and names hadn't been painted on yet. In fact they had switched to "Bockscar" which was named after it's more usual pilot. This was probably poetic justice, because the pilot that sctually flew to Nagasaki was quite irresponsible, and probably should have been court-martialed and shot. Unlike the Enola Gay pilot who was meticulous and professional, the other one broke countless rules and only by chance didn't waste the war-ending bomb into a forest or ocean. For instance he flew in circles waiting so long for a photo aircraft that he hadn't the fuel to bring the bomb back if Japan was socked in (which it essentially was). He managed a near miss of a secondary target, and glided in to an emergency airstrip on fumes.

 

The B29 story is so unlike it's stereotype of yet another boring weapon with incremental improvement. It's development costs were actually higher than the atom bomb, which was astronomical... like building umpteen pyramids while you are trying to win a war. Most of it's technical improvements didn't pay off. When first used as intended, flights would typically lay one single bomb on target (with stupendous effort, like the B29 would have to do 8 round trips to the rear to build up enough resources to make one bomb run). The Japanese literally found this hilarious - it is in their evaluation records. I personally suspect that a new British bomber designed for the pacific (Avro Lincoln) could have been modified to fill in for the hyper expensive B29.

 

It was only a few rebels, like Curtis LeMay and the pilot/organizer of the Enola Gay that drastically revamped the B29 to a practical tool. LeMay actually reaped the more destruction with innovative mini firebombs, and yet escaped the criticism of Harris or the nukers. I don't recall the Enola Gay elicited any feelers of surrender, but the bumbling efforts of The Great Artiste crew did seem to convince the emperor. However a subsequent conventional raid by LeMay is credited with disrupting an Army coup against the emperor and his surrender plans. LeMay later went on to organize the postwar Berlin airlift that broke the Soviet cutoff.

Edited January 2, 2010 by caesar novus

[caldrail]

The B29 was such a costly aeroplane that they designed another, the B32 Dominator, to be its understudy in case the '29 was a huge costly white elephant like most big bomber projects. Remember the B19? Huge. Simply huge. But only one built for flight testing and later used as a transport.

 

XB19...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Douglas_XB-19

 

B32...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/B-32_Dominator

[caesar novus]

I had never heard of the B-19. I may have mentioned here some odd circumstances where the restorers of the Enola Gay B29 had asked me to stroke it with my hand to do a comparison test of different protective coatings. Dunno why they didn't test on scrap metal instead; maybe wanted an excuse to give tour members a thrill. It's now on display at Dullas airport near Baltimore. And as a child I wandered around a shabby pre-restored Bockscar B29 and a dummy H bomb at a Dayton Ohio museum; hope I didn't absorb too much leftover radiation.

 

I guess Curtis LeMay was a huge innovator not only for B29 but overall ww2 air tactics. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curtis_Lemay is very favorable anyway, showing him overcoming all kinds of opposition such as for the air mining of Japanese harbors which was later estimated to have been a war winner if started earlier. Known for more ruthless bombing, but he dropped amazing leaflets beforehand begging the civilians to clear the area and defy their crazy leaders http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Firebombing_leaflet.jpg . In further odd circumstances in his last year of service, I was under his jurisdiction (even as a civilian child) and only knew of him as a stuffy old guy putting out weird slogans here and there... about keeping clean and doing careful work to keep the commies away, or some such.