USS Indianapolis: Men of Courage. I started watching it, this thinking it was a documentary. No, it's a powerful drama about the ship that delivered atomic bombs to Tinian in preparation for ending the War in the Pacific, saving millions of American lives and perhaps tens of millions of Japanese lives. (Fierce fighting and mass suicide on Okinawa suggest a far greater reaction on the home islands.) Like all dramas, there's some romance, and some intrasailor conflict. One of the production companies is Patriot Films, and it shows. If you are familiar with Indianapolis's story, you know it was torpedoed on the way back from Tinian, with enormous loss of life, much to sharks. A moving story of sacrifice and courage.
Life Below Zero is a BBC/National Geographic reality series designed to make me whine less about this last winter. These are [crazy] people who live in places that make central Nevada along US 50 seem overpopulated, metropolitan, and easily accessible. One gal lives by herself running a summer hunting camp two flying hours east of Point Barrow. She has survived one grizzly gnawing on her head. Another subject broke his leg in three places and drove himself several hundred miles to the nearest paved road. These are tough, [crazy] people. Many never buy meat; they live entirely off the land, usually close to the Arctic Circle, but north of it. There are more guns per hour in this show than two episodes of Cops (maybe a whole season), or one episode of The A-Team. I would love to know what Brits and Kiwis (both places this has shown) think of Americans from watching this show. I should mention many of these people would only know about TEOTWAWKI because their Internet would go down. (Yes many have laptops and the Internet.)
Clayton, the book "Hell to Pay", by DM Giangreco was research on the intended invasion of Japan. Lots of info that wasn't public knowledge. The Japanese high command was willing to accept 20M+ civilian deaths in the attempt to repel the Allied forces.
ReplyDeleteIncredible stockpiles of weapons by Japanese.
HUGE stock of airplanes, and fuel, for kamakazi attacks (our intelligence people thought they had exhausted both, but they were hording for the expected fleets- 15k aircraft, many of them wooden construction that they had discovered were invisible to radar).
Gen Marshall wanted to use our expected stock of A-bombs in '46 for clearing the invasion beachheads, and didn't want them wasted on cities. Imagine the losses to radiation of our soldiers!
Our expected casualties were 1 million, PRIOR to what was learned about the Japanese defenses after their surrender. What was discovered scared everyone who learned of it. The invasions would have failed, due to the body count, even without radiating our soldiers.
Haven't read that book, but I have read much of this. The Left prefers not knowing; reality is so inconvenient.
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