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Enviro Eco Nature    H3'ed 10/18/21

The Axis A-bombs

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John Henry Egan
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The Axis A-Bombs

Unterseeboot-234

On March 25th, 1945, the German boat U-234 set course for Japan. It was a big transport submarine that had interesting cargo and passengers. There was a disassembled Me-262 jet fighter aboard as well as an Hs-293 glide-bomb. On board too, was 1,200 pounds of uranium oxide and 50 gold-lined cylinders filled with bomb-grade uranium-235. There were fuses for nuclear bomb detonation. This was the thing holding up the American bomb; they didn't know how to make their device go boom. But somehow Germany did. Luftwaffe officers were aboard, as well as two Imperial Japanese Navy officers. Before the boat got to Japan, Germany capitulated. The Japanese officers then chose suicide when the boat's captain struck his flag to the American Navy. All the captured uranium was immediately sent to Oak Ridge Tennessee and used to arm the Hiroshima bomb. We are repeatedly told that neither the Japanese nor the Germans had any use for this sort of material. One of the legends presented in film is that Kirk Douglas and The Heroes of Telemark (1965) blew up the German heavy-water plant in Norway. That stopped the German atomic bomb project cold, no need for further discussion. This is a factual but inconsequential event. In truth, the Norwegian/German heavy-water program was a ruse. Germany had little intention to build the huge and terribly expensive nuclear reactor that needs heavy-water to produce plutonium for a bomb. Germany didn't need it. They had plenty of uranium (from the Sudetenland); Japan less so: hence the voyage of U-234.

The whole point of the doomsday machine is lost if you keep it a secret!

All atomic bomb building was theoretical at this time. No one knew for sure if any of it would actually work. The Americans, wealthy and safe from attack, built the reactor that needs heavy-water for plutonium and also the centrifuges for uranium enrichment. They manufactured both bombs thinking that at least one of them might explode. The Germans and Japanese were interested in the easier to construct uranium-235 bomb that had no need for heavy-water and plutonium. The first American bomb was tested at New Mexico in the famous Trinity experiment. It was a plutonium bomb and dropped on Nagasaki. Their untested uranium bomb, quickly armed with uranium-235 and triggers from Germany, was used first and it destroyed Hiroshima. You can watch the dozens of documentaries about these events and none of them will ever explain or even mention that the bomb type tested at Trinity was not the one used first; that the Hiroshima bomb was experimental and different from the New Mexico bomb. Obviously there is something very wrong about this deception but nobody seems to care.

In Xanadu did Kublai Khan A stately pleasure-dome decree

When we read Coleridge's poem it is easy to imagine the Kublai Kahn as some fat old boy surrounded by drug-fueled concubines. In reality, he was grandson of Genghis Kahn and the Mongol Emperor of China by conquest. Wise beyond his years and buried in the unspoilt secret Kahn tomb deep in the Mongolian wilderness; he once set his gaze upon the fertile gardens of Japan. Two fleets were assembled in Korea and each was destroyed by the legendary Kamikaze Divine Wind, one in 1274, the other in 1281. Then and now, Korea is a natural invasion route into Japan; which is why the Americans won't get out of there. As a defensive measure Japan invaded (1905) and then annexed Korea in 1910. In 1923 a Japanese firm that produced nitrogen fertilizer and explosives (Japan Nitrogen Fertilizer Company: Nitchitsu) began construction of the largest military-industrial complex in the Japanese Empire. They chose the little Korean village of Konan (now Hungnam) because it had a good harbor. They used Korean slave labor to construct a huge hydro-electrical system fed by three rivers diverted from their natural course north to the Yalu River. This was when America built the Tennessee Valley hydro-electrical dams that fed the centrifuges at Oak Ridge. When the Japanese dams were completed, Nitchitsu produced and used 1/3 of all the electrical power in the entire Japanese Empire! This was akin to the Auschwitz complex that generated an energy output greater than Berlin. The Nitchitsu plant also manufactured many of the same things that I.G. Farben did at Auschwitz: aviation fuel, oil and rubber, primarily from Korea's abundant anthracite coal deposits. But most of the electrical energy was used to drive the huge centrifuges that produced weapons grade uranium-235. Konan, present day Hungnam, is still a central location for North Korea's atomic and hydrogen bomb production.

Japan's atomic bomb

Japan's physicists were 'too primitive' to produce a bomb, wrote the New York Times in 1979. One of them was Yoshio Nishina, who worked with Niels Bohr in Denmark. It was his small centrifuges that the US Navy captured and then mysteriously jettisoned into Tokyo Bay. They were located in the Riken Institute in the Tokyo suburbs. The laboratory was run by the Japanese Army and when it was bombed in April 1945 the story goes that Japanese atomic bomb research ended there. But the main Japanese nuclear effort was in Korea and run by the Navy. The lack of cooperation between the Japanese Army and Navy was famous. For example, each had its own separate fleet of transports. When an army transport was half full, it sailed that way, even if navy supplies were on the same dock going to the same place. The atomic bomb project was administered the same way: separately and secretly. On August 12, 1945 the Navy probably conducted their first successful test. Journalist David Snell interviewed Japanese counter-intelligence officer Captain Tsetusuo Wakabayashi (pseudonym) who was an eyewitness. His story was corroborated by Nitchitsu chemical engineer Otogoro Natsume who escaped capture by the Red Army. Whether this story is true, is as maybe. But the Russian Army took Konan ten days after Japan's test. The Reds wanted the place so badly they couldn't wait for ordinary infantry to get there and took it instead with airborne paratroops. This was ordinarily completely unnecessary. But the Reds knew what was in Konan. They disassembled the entire factory (they were experienced at this) and took everything back to Russia. They let the 700 workers go but kidnapped the scientists as booty. Those fellows (except Otogoro Natsume) were never seen nor heard from again. Four years later, the USSR announced that they exploded their first atomic bomb. They needed a bomb in case the planned American preemptive nuclear attack was actually carried out (Operation Dropshot, Operation Bushwhacker, for example). The Americans had their own reasons for keeping Japan's bomb undisclosed and so did Japan. After all, Japan didn't have a lot of moral high-ground to cling to in 1945. Japan's army killed 20 million people in China, most of them women and children, along with any and all military age men and boys they encountered who were specifically targeted for death. However, with the atomic attacks, Japan was suddenly a victim! This was all too good to pass up. So the germ warfare and atomic bomb projects were excluded from the Japanese memory stick. Japan is still occupied by the Americans and they threw a lot of money into the place. Interestingly, the nations that Japan invaded; China, North Korea and Vietnam, soon became America's new enemies and Japan suddenly an ally.

Germany's bomb

In 1943 the Japanese delegation in Sweden reported to Tokyo that the German Army used an "atom-splitting" device near Kursk. This is Japanese diplomatic signal # 232, intercepted in December 1944: National Archives, RG 457, and declassified October 1, 1978.

This bomb is revolutionary in its results, and will completely upset all ordinary precepts of warfare hitherto established. I am sending you, in one group, all those reports on what is called the atom-splitting bomb. It is a fact that in June of 1943, the German Army tried out an utterly new type of weapon against the Russians at a location 150 kilometers southeast of Kursk. Although it was the entire 19th Infantry Regiment [Vorezneh Rifles] of the Russians which was thus attacked, only a few bombs (each round up to 5 kilograms) sufficed to utterly wipe them out to the last man. The following is according to a statement by Lieutenant Colonel... Kenji, adviser to the attache' in Hungary and formerly... in this country, who by chance saw the actual scene immediately after the above took place: All the men and the horses [within radius of] the explosion of the shells were charred black and even their ammunition had all been detonated. Moreover, it is a fact that the same type of war material was tried out in the Crimea too. At that time the Russians claimed that this was poison gas, and protested that if Germany were ever again to use it, Russia, too, would use poison gas. Recently the British authorities warned their people of the possibility that they might undergo attack by German atom-splitting bombs. The American authorities have likewise warned that the American east coast might be the area chosen for a blind attack by some sort of flying bomb.

The kind of bomb they are talking about is a small light-weight Lithium-Deuterium (hydrogen) bomb that Enrico Fermi proposed to the Americans at Oak Ridge. They weren't interested on account of the technical difficulties and also because it is a tactical nuclear weapon and costly. It weighs c. 10 pounds and will knock out a city block. The Americans wanted a big one. And so did the Germans.

Zinsser's Affidavit

Hans Zinsser was a Luftwaffe pilot who gave the following testimony to the USAAF (military intelligence report of August 19, 1945, roll number A1007, filmed in 1973 at Maxwell Air Force Base in Alabama, declassified 1992). In it Zinsser describes a flight he took in October 1944. He perfectly describes an atomic bomb explosion. At this time, only a very few people had ever seen an atomic blast and lived to tell about it. Especially telling is his description of the initial purple mushroom cloud with small circular explosions within it. He was aware of the test and flew as an observer:

In the beginning of Oct, 1944 I flew from Ludwigslust (south of Lubeck), about 12 to 15 km from an atomic bomb test station, when I noticed a strong, bright illumination of the whole atmosphere, lasting about 2 seconds. The clearly visible pressure wave escaped the approaching and following cloud formed by the explosion. This wave had a diameter of about 1 km when it became visible and the color of the cloud changed frequently. It became dotted after a short period of darkness with all sorts of light spots, which were, in contrast to normal explosions, of a pale blue color. After about 10 seconds the sharp outlines of the explosion cloud disappeared, Then the cloud began to take on a lighter color against the sky covered with a gray overcast. The diameter of the still visible pressure wave was at least 9000 meters while remaining visible for at least 15 seconds. Personal observations of the colors of the explosion cloud found an almost blue-violet shade. During this manifestation reddish colored rims were to be seen, changing to a dirty-like shade in very rapid succession. The combustion was lightly felt from my observation plane in the form of pulling and pushing. About one hour later I started with an He 111 from Ludwigslust and flew in an easterly direction. Shortly after the start I passed through the almost complete overcast (between 3000 and 4000 meter altitude). A cloud shaped like a mushroom with turbulent, billowing sections (at about 7000 meter altitude) stood, without any seeming connections, over the spot where the explosion took place. Strong electrical disturbances and the impossibility to continue radio communication as by lightning turned up.

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John Henry Egan lives in the Mojave Desert and has a degree in History from Hofstra University, He is published nationally and internationally in military history and film theory. His latest book is; War and Migration 1860-2020: The Ruin of (more...)
 

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