Atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki
During the final stage of World War II, the United States detonated two nuclear weapons over the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki on August 6 and 9, 1945, respectively. The United States dropped the bombs after obtaining the consent of the United Kingdom, as required by the Quebec Agreement; the two bombings killed 129,000 -- 226,000 people. They remain the only use of nuclear weapons in the history of armed conflict. In the final year of the war, the Allies prepared for what was anticipated to be a costly invasion of the Japanese mainland; this undertaking was preceded by a conventional and firebombing campaign that devastated 67 Japanese cities. The war in Europe had concluded when Germany signed its instrument of surrender on May 8, 1945; as the Allies turned their full attention to the Pacific War, the Japanese faced the same fate. The Allies called for the unconditional surrender of the Imperial Japanese armed forces in the Potsdam Declaration on July 26, 1945—the alternative being "prompt and utter destruction".
The Japanese ignored the war continued. By August 1945, the Allies' Manhattan Project had produced two types of atomic bombs, the 509th Composite Group of the United States Army Air Forces was equipped with the specialized Silverplate version of the Boeing B-29 Superfortress that could deliver them from Tinian in the Mariana Islands. Orders for atomic bombs to be used on four Japanese cities were issued on July 25. On August 6, one of the modified B-29s dropped a uranium gun-type bomb on Hiroshima. Three days on August 9, a plutonium implosion bomb was dropped by another B-29 on Nagasaki; the bombs devastated their targets. Over the next two to four months, the acute effects of the atomic bombings killed 90,000–146,000 people in Hiroshima and 39,000–80,000 people in Nagasaki. Large numbers of people continued to die from the effects of burns, radiation sickness, other injuries, compounded by illness and malnutrition, for many months afterward. In both cities, most of the dead were civilians. Japan announced its surrender to the Allies on August 15, six days after the bombing of Nagasaki and the Soviet Union's declaration of war.
On September 2, the Japanese government signed the instrument of surrender ending World War II. The effects of the bombings on the social and political character of subsequent world history and popular culture has been studied extensively, the ethical and legal justification for the bombings is still debated to this day. In 1945, the Pacific War between the Empire of Japan and the Allies entered its fourth year. Most Japanese military units fought fiercely, ensuring that the Allied victory would come at an enormous cost; the 1.25 million battle casualties incurred in total by the United States in World War II included both military personnel killed in action and wounded in action. Nearly one million of the casualties occurred during the last year of the war, from June 1944 to June 1945. In December 1944, American battle casualties hit an all-time monthly high of 88,000 as a result of the German Ardennes Offensive. America's reserves of manpower were running out. Deferments for groups such as agricultural workers were tightened, there was consideration of drafting women.
At the same time, the public was becoming war-weary, demanding that long-serving servicemen be sent home. In the Pacific, the Allies returned to the Philippines, recaptured Burma, invaded Borneo. Offensives were undertaken to reduce the Japanese forces remaining in Bougainville, New Guinea and the Philippines. In April 1945, American forces landed on Okinawa. Along the way, the ratio of Japanese to American casualties dropped from 5:1 in the Philippines to 2:1 on Okinawa. Although some Japanese soldiers were taken prisoner, most fought until they were killed or committed suicide. Nearly 99% of the 21,000 defenders of Iwo Jima were killed. Of the 117,000 Okinawan and Japanese troops defending Okinawa in April–June 1945, 94% were killed; as the Allies advanced towards Japan, conditions became worse for the Japanese people. Japan's merchant fleet declined from 5,250,000 gross tons in 1941 to 1,560,000 tons in March 1945, 557,000 tons in August 1945. Lack of raw materials forced the Japanese war economy into a steep decline after the middle of 1944.
The civilian economy, which had deteriorated throughout the war, reached disastrous levels by the middle of 1945. The loss of shipping affected the fishing fleet, the 1945 catch was only 22% of that in 1941; the 1945 rice harvest was the worst since 1909, hunger and malnutrition became widespread. U. S. industrial production was overwhelmingly superior to Japan's. By 1943, the U. S. produced 100,000 aircraft a year, compared to Japan's production of 70,000 for the entire war. By the middle of 1944, the U. S. had a hundred aircraft carriers in the Pacific, far more than Japan's twenty-five for the entire war. In February 1945, Prince Fumimaro Konoe advised Emperor Hirohito that defeat was inevitable, urged him to abdicate. Before the surrender of Nazi Germany on May 8, 1945, plans were underway for the largest operation of the Pacific War, Operation Downfall, the Allied invasion of Japan; the operation had two parts: Operation Coronet. Set to begin in October 1945, Olympic involved a series of landings by the U.
S. Sixth Army intended to capture the southern third of the southernmost main Japanese island, Kyūshū. Operation Olympic was to be followed in March 1946 by Operation Coronet, the capture of t
Hiroshima
Hiroshima is the capital of Hiroshima Prefecture and the largest city in the Chūgoku region of western Honshu, the largest island of Japan. Hiroshima gained city status on April 1, 1889. On April 1, 1980, Hiroshima became a designated city; as of August 2016, the city had an estimated population of 1,196,274. The gross domestic product in Greater Hiroshima, Hiroshima Urban Employment Area, was US$61.3 billion as of 2010. Kazumi Matsui has been the city's mayor since April 2011. Hiroshima was the first city targeted by a nuclear weapon, when the United States Army Air Forces dropped an atomic bomb on the city at 8:15 a.m. on August 6, 1945, near the end of World War II. Hiroshima was established on the delta coastline of the Seto Inland Sea in 1589 by powerful warlord Mōri Terumoto. Hiroshima Castle was built, in 1593 Mōri moved in. Terumoto was on the losing side at the Battle of Sekigahara; the winner of the battle, Tokugawa Ieyasu, deprived Mōri Terumoto of most of his fiefs, including Hiroshima and gave Aki Province to Masanori Fukushima, a daimyō who had supported Tokugawa.
From 1619 until 1871, Hiroshima was ruled by the Asano clan. After the Han was abolished in 1871, the city became the capital of Hiroshima Prefecture. Hiroshima became a major urban center during the imperial period, as the Japanese economy shifted from rural to urban industries. During the 1870s, one of the seven government-sponsored English language schools was established in Hiroshima. Ujina Harbor was constructed through the efforts of Hiroshima Governor Sadaaki Senda in the 1880s, allowing Hiroshima to become an important port city; the San'yō Railway was extended to Hiroshima in 1894, a rail line from the main station to the harbor was constructed for military transportation during the First Sino-Japanese War. During that war, the Japanese government moved temporarily to Hiroshima, Emperor Meiji maintained his headquarters at Hiroshima Castle from September 15, 1894, to April 27, 1895; the significance of Hiroshima for the Japanese government can be discerned from the fact that the first round of talks between Chinese and Japanese representatives to end the Sino-Japanese War was held in Hiroshima, from February 1 to February 4, 1895.
New industrial plants, including cotton mills, were established in Hiroshima in the late 19th century. Further industrialization in Hiroshima was stimulated during the Russo-Japanese War in 1904, which required development and production of military supplies; the Hiroshima Prefectural Commercial Exhibition Hall was constructed in 1915 as a center for trade and exhibition of new products. Its name was changed to Hiroshima Prefectural Product Exhibition Hall, again to Hiroshima Prefectural Industrial Promotion Hall. During World War I, Hiroshima became a focal point of military activity, as the Japanese government entered the war on the Allied side. About 500 German prisoners of war were held in Ninoshima Island in Hiroshima Bay; the growth of Hiroshima as a city continued after the First World War, as the city now attracted the attention of the Catholic Church, on May 4, 1923, an Apostolic Vicar was appointed for that city. During World War II, the Second General Army and Chūgoku Regional Army were headquartered in Hiroshima, the Army Marine Headquarters was located at Ujina port.
The city had large depots of military supplies, was a key center for shipping. The bombing of Tokyo and other cities in Japan during World War II caused widespread destruction and hundreds of thousands of civilian deaths. There were no such air raids on Hiroshima. However, a real threat was recognized. In order to protect against potential firebombings in Hiroshima, school children aged 11–14 years were mobilized to demolish houses and create firebreaks. On Monday, August 6, 1945, at 8:15 a.m. the nuclear weapon "Little Boy" was dropped on Hiroshima from an American Boeing B-29 Superfortress, the Enola Gay, flown by Colonel Paul Tibbets, directly killing an estimated 70,000 people, including 20,000 Japanese combatants and 2,000 Korean slave laborers. By the end of the year and radiation brought the total number of deaths to 90,000–166,000; the population before the bombing was around 340,000 to 350,000. About 70% of the city's buildings were destroyed, another 7% damaged; the public release of film footage of the city following the attack, some of the Atomic Bomb Casualty Commission research about the human effects of the attack, were restricted during the occupation of Japan, much of this information was censored until the signing of the Treaty of San Francisco in 1951, restoring control to the Japanese.
As Ian Buruma observed, "News of the terrible consequences of the atom bomb attacks on Japan was deliberately withheld from the Japanese public by US military censors during the Allied occupation—even as they sought to teach the natives the virtues of a free press. Casualty statistics were suppressed. Film shot by Japanese cameramen in Nagasaki after the bombings was confiscated. "Hiroshima", the account written by John Hersey for The New Yorker, had a huge impact in the US, but was banned in Japan. As Dower says:'In the localities themselves, suffering was compounded not by the unprecedented nature of the catastrophe... but by the fact that public struggle with this traumatic experience was not permitted." The US occupation authorities maintained a monopoly on scientific and medical information about the effects of the atomic bomb through the work of the Atomic Bomb Casualty Commission, which treated the data gathered in studies of hibakusha as privileged information rather than making the results available for the treatment of victims or providing financial or medical support to aid victims.
The book Hiroshima by
Braunschweig
Braunschweig called Brunswick in English, is a city in Lower Saxony, north of the Harz mountains at the farthest navigable point of the Oker River which connects it to the North Sea via the Aller and Weser Rivers. In 2016, it had a population of 250,704. A powerful and influential centre of commerce in medieval Germany, Braunschweig was a member of the Hanseatic League from the 13th until the 17th century, it was the capital city of three successive states: the Principality of Brunswick-Wolfenbüttel, the Duchy of Brunswick, the Free State of Brunswick. Today, Braunschweig is the second-largest city in Lower Saxony and a major centre of scientific research and development; the date and circumstances of the town's foundation are unknown. Tradition maintains that Braunschweig was created through the merger of two settlements, one founded by Brun, a Saxon count who died in 880, on one side of the River Oker – the legend gives the year 861 for the foundation – and the other the settlement of a legendary Count Dankward, after whom Dankwarderode Castle, reconstructed in the 19th century, is named.
The town's original name of Brunswik is a combination of the name Bruno and Low German wik, a place where merchants rested and stored their goods. The town's name therefore indicates an ideal resting-place, as it lay by a ford across the Oker River. Another explanation of the city's name is that it comes from Brand, or burning, indicating a place which developed after the landscape was cleared through burning; the city was first mentioned in documents from the St. Magni Church from 1031, which give the city's name as Brunesguik. Up to the 12th century, Braunschweig was ruled by the Saxon noble family of the Brunonids through marriage, it fell to the House of Welf. In 1142, Henry the Lion of the House of Welf became duke of Saxony and made Braunschweig the capital of his state, he turned Dankwarderode Castle, the residence of the counts of Brunswick, into his own Pfalz and developed the city further to represent his authority. Under Henry's rule, the Cathedral of St. Blasius was built and he had the statue of a lion, his heraldic animal, erected in front of the castle.
The lion subsequently became the city's landmark. Henry the Lion became so powerful that he dared to refuse military aid to the emperor Frederick I Barbarossa, which led to his banishment in 1182. Henry went into exile in England, he had established ties to the English crown in 1168, through his marriage to King Henry II of England's daughter Matilda, sister of Richard the Lionheart. However, his son Otto, who could regain influence and was crowned Holy Roman Emperor, continued to foster the city's development. During the Middle Ages, Braunschweig was an important center of trade, one of the economic and political centers in Northern Europe and a member of the Hanseatic League from the 13th century to the middle of the 17th century. By the year 1600, Braunschweig was the seventh largest city in Germany. Although formally one of the residences of the rulers of the Duchy of Brunswick-Lüneburg, a constituent state of the Holy Roman Empire, Braunschweig was de facto ruled independently by a powerful class of patricians and the guilds throughout much of the Late Middle Ages and the Early modern period.
Because of the growing power of Braunschweig's burghers, the Princes of Brunswick-Wolfenbüttel, who ruled over one of the subdivisions of Brunswick-Lüneburg moved their Residenz out of the city and to the nearby town of Wolfenbüttel in 1432. The Princes of Brunswick-Wolfenbüttel didn't regain control over the city until the late 17th century, when Rudolph Augustus, Duke of Brunswick-Lüneburg, took the city by siege. In the 18th century Braunschweig was not only a political, but a cultural centre. Influenced by the philosophy of the Enlightenment, dukes like Anthony Ulrich and Charles I became patrons of the arts and sciences. In 1745 Charles I founded the Collegium Carolinum, predecessor of the Braunschweig University of Technology, in 1753 he moved the ducal residence back to Braunschweig. With this he attracted poets and thinkers such as Lessing and Jakob Mauvillon to his court and the city. Emilia Galotti by Lessing and Goethe's Faust were performed for the first time in Braunschweig. In 1806, the city was captured by the French during the Napoleonic Wars and became part of the short-lived Napoleonic Kingdom of Westphalia in 1807.
The exiled duke Frederick William raised a volunteer corps, the Black Brunswickers, who fought the French in several battles. After the Congress of Vienna in 1815, Braunschweig was made capital of the reestablished independent Duchy of Brunswick a constituent state of the German Empire from 1871. In the aftermath of the July Revolution in 1830, in Brunswick duke Charles II was forced to abdicate, his absolutist governing style had alienated the nobility and bourgeoisie, while the lower classes were disaffected by the bad economic situation. During the night of 7–8 September 1830, the ducal palace in Braunschweig was stormed by an angry mob, set on fire, destroyed completely. Charles was succeeded by his brother William VIII. During William's reign, liberal reforms were made and Brunswick's parliament was strengthened. During the 19th century, industrialisation caused a rapid growth of population in the city causing Braunschweig to be for the first time enlarged beyond its medieval fortifications and the River Oker.
On 1 December 1838, the first section of the Brunswick–Bad Harzburg railway line connecting Braunschweig and
Viet Cong
The Việt Cộng known as the National Liberation Front, was a mass political organization in South Vietnam and Cambodia with its own army – the People's Liberation Armed Forces of South Vietnam – that fought against the United States and South Vietnamese governments during the Vietnam War emerging on the winning side. It had both guerrilla and regular army units, as well as a network of cadres who organized peasants in the territory it controlled. Many soldiers were recruited in South Vietnam, but others were attached to the People's Army of Vietnam, the regular North Vietnamese army. During the war and anti-war activists insisted the Việt Cộng was an insurgency indigenous to the South, while the U. S. and South Vietnamese governments portrayed the group as a tool of Hanoi. Although the terminology distinguishes northerners from the southerners, communist forces were under a single command structure set up in 1958; the headquarters of the Viet Cong based at Memot came to be known as Central Office for South Vietnam or COSVN by its Military Assistance Command and South Vietnamese counterparts, a near-mythical "bamboo Pentagon" from which the Việt Cộng's entire war effort was being directed.
For nearly a decade the fabled COSVN headquarters, which directed the entire war effort of the Viet Cong was the target of the RVN/US war effort, which would have collapsed the insurgency war effort. US and South Vietnamese Special Forces sent to capture them were killed quickly or returned with heavy casualties to the point that teams refused to go. Daily B-52 bombings had failed to kill any of the leadership during Operation Menu despite flattening the entire area, as Soviet trawlers were able to forewarn COSVN, whom used the data on speed and direction to move perpendicular and to move underground. North Vietnam established the National Liberation Front on December 20, 1960, to foment insurgency in the South. Many of the Việt Cộng's core members were volunteer "regroupees", southern Việt Minh who had resettled in the North after the Geneva Accord. Hanoi gave the regroupees military training and sent them back to the South along the Hồ Chí Minh trail in the early 1960s; the NLF called for southern Vietnamese to "overthrow the camouflaged colonial regime of the American imperialists" and to make "efforts toward the peaceful unification".
The PLAF's best-known action was the Tết Offensive, a gigantic assault on more than 100 South Vietnamese urban centers in 1968, including an attack on the U. S. embassy in Saigon. The offensive riveted the attention of the world's media for weeks, but overextended the Việt Cộng. Two further offensives were conducted in the mini-Tet and August Offensive. In 1969 the Việt Cộng would establish the Provisional Revolutionary Government of the Republic of South Vietnam, a shadow-country in South Vietnam intended to represent the organisation on the world stage and was recognised by the communist bloc and maintained diplomatic links with many nations in the Non-Aligned Movement. Communist offensives were conducted predominantly by newly mechanised PAVN forces, as the ability of the Việt Cộng to recruit among the South Vietnamese became much more limited; the Việt Cộng remained an active political front. The organisation was dissolved in 1976 when North and South Vietnam were unified under a communist government.
Political and military organization of the Việt Cộng was complex, with a series of well-constructed, overlapping networks and organisations, see strategy and structure. Material aid was provided through the well-established, ingenious Hồ Chí Minh trail which withstood the most sustained bombing campaign in history while expanding the war effort, see logistics and equipment, they had further developed a complex insurgency warfare method capable of countering overwhelmingly superior numbers and technology, retaining the strategic initiative during much of the war. According to the Pentagon Papers, 90% of large firefights were initiated by the PAVN/VC and 80% were well-planned VC operations throughout most of the war and as early as 1966 US Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara expressed doubt about the US ability to win the war; the term Việt Cộng appeared in Saigon newspapers beginning in 1956. It is a contraction of Việt Nam Cộng-sản, or alternatively Việt gian cộng sản; the earliest citation for Việt Cộng in English is from 1957.
Media worldwide referred to them as "Vietcong". American soldiers referred to them as Victor Charlie or V-C. "Victor" and "Charlie" are both letters in the NATO phonetic alphabet. "Charlie" referred to communist forces in both Việt Cộng and North Vietnamese. The official Vietnamese history gives the group's name as the Liberation Army of South Vietnam or the National Liberation Front for South Vietnam. Many writers shorten this to National Liberation Front. In 1969, the Việt Cộng created the "Provisional Revolutionary Government of the Republic of South Vietnam", abbreviated PRG. Although the NLF was not abolished until 1977, the Việt Cộng no longer used the name after PRG was created. Members referred to the Việt Cộng as "the Front". Today's Vietnamese media most refers to the group as the "People's Liberation Armed Forces of South Vietnam". By the terms of the Geneva Accord, which ended the Indochina War and the Việt Minh agreed to a truce and to a separation of forces; the Việt Minh had become the government o
The Blitz
The Blitz was a German bombing campaign against Britain in 1940 and 1941, during the Second World War. The term was first used by the British press and is the German word for'lightning'; the Germans conducted mass air attacks against industrial targets and cities, beginning with raids on London towards the end of the Battle of Britain in 1940, a battle for daylight air superiority between the Luftwaffe and the Royal Air Force over the United Kingdom. By September 1940, the Luftwaffe had failed and the German air fleets were ordered to attack London, to draw RAF Fighter Command into a battle of annihilation. Adolf Hitler and Reichsmarschall Hermann Göring, commander-in-chief of the Luftwaffe, ordered the new policy on 6 September 1940. From 7 September 1940, London was systematically bombed by the Luftwaffe for 56 out of the following 57 days and nights. Most notable was a large daylight attack against London on 15 September; the Luftwaffe decreased daylight operations in favour of night attacks to evade attack by the RAF, the Blitz became a night bombing campaign after October 1940.
The Luftwaffe attacked the main Atlantic sea port of Liverpool in the Liverpool Blitz and the North Sea port of Hull, a convenient and found target or secondary target for bombers unable to locate their primary targets, suffered the Hull Blitz. Bristol, Portsmouth, Plymouth and Swansea were bombed, as were the industrial cities of Birmingham, Coventry, Glasgow and Sheffield. More than 40,000 civilians were killed by Luftwaffe bombing during the war half of them in the capital, where more than a million houses were destroyed or damaged. In early July 1941, the German High Command began planning Operation Barbarossa, the invasion of the Soviet Union. Bombing failed to do much damage to the war economy; the greatest effect was to force the British to disperse the production of aircraft and spare parts. British wartime studies concluded that cities took 10 to 15 days to recover when hit but exceptions like Birmingham took three months; the German air offensive failed because the Luftwaffe High Command did not develop a methodical strategy for destroying British war industry.
Poor intelligence about British industry and economic efficiency led to OKL concentrating on tactics rather than strategy. The bombing effort was diluted by attacks against several sets of industries instead of constant pressure on the most vital. In the 1920s and 1930s, airpower theorists such as Giulio Douhet and Billy Mitchell claimed that air forces could win wars, obviating the need for land and sea fighting, it was thought that bombers would always get through and could not be resisted at night. Industry, seats of government and communications could be destroyed, depriving an opponent of the means to make war. Bombing civilians would cause a collapse of morale and a loss of production in the remaining factories. Democracies, where public opinion was allowed, were thought vulnerable; the RAF and the United States Army Air Corps adopted much of this apocalyptic thinking. The policy of RAF Bomber Command became an attempt to achieve victory through the destruction of civilian will and industry.
The Luftwaffe took a cautious view of strategic bombing and OKL did not oppose the strategic bombardment of industries or cities. It believed it could affect the balance of power on the battlefield by disrupting production and damaging civilian morale. OKL did not believe air power alone could be decisive and the Luftwaffe did not have a policy of systematic "terror bombing"; the vital industries and transport centres that would be targeted for shutdown were valid military targets. It could be claimed civilians were not to be targeted directly, but the breakdown of production would affect their morale and will to fight. German legal scholars of the 1930s worked out guidelines for what type of bombing was permissible under international law. While direct attacks against civilians were ruled out as "terror bombing", the concept of attacking vital war industries—and probable heavy civilian casualties and breakdown of civilian morale—was ruled as acceptable. From the beginning of the National Socialist regime until 1939, there was a debate in German military journals over the role of strategic bombardment, with some contributors arguing along the lines of the British and Americans.
General Walter Wever championed strategic bombing and the building of suitable aircraft, although he emphasised the importance of aviation in operational and tactical terms. Wever outlined five points of air strategy: To destroy the enemy air force by bombing its bases and aircraft factories and defeat enemy air forces attacking German targets. To prevent the movement of large enemy ground forces to the decisive areas, by destroying railways and roads bridges and tunnels, which are indispensable for the movement and supply of forces To support the operations of the army formations, independent of railways, i.e. armoured forces and motorised forces, by impeding the enemy advance and participating directly in ground operations. To support naval operations by attacking naval bases, protecting German naval bases and participating directly in naval battles To paralyse the enemy armed forces by stopping production in armaments factories. Wever argued that OKL should not be educated in tactical and operational matters but in gra
Coventry Blitz
The Coventry Blitz was a series of bombing raids that took place on the English city of Coventry. The city was bombed many times during the Second World War by the German Air Force; the most devastating of these attacks occurred on the evening of 14 November 1940 and continued into the morning of 15 November. At the start of the Second World War, Coventry was an industrial city of around 238,000 people which, like much of the industrial West Midlands, contained metal and wood-working industries. In Coventry's case, these included cars, aeroplane engines and, since 1900, munitions factories. In the words of the historian Frederick Taylor, "Coventry was therefore, in terms of what little law existed on the subject, a legitimate target for aerial bombing". During the First World War, the advanced state of the mechanical tooling industry in the city meant that pre-war production could be turned to war production purposes, with industries such as the Coventry Ordnance Works assuming the role of one of the leading munition centres in the UK, manufacturing 25% of all British aircraft produced during the war.
Like many of the industrial towns of the English West Midlands region, industrialised during the Industrial Revolution, many of the small and medium-sized factories in the city were woven into the same streets as the workers' houses and the shops of the city centre. However, it developed many large interwar suburbs of both private and council housing, which were isolated from industrial buildings; the city was at the centre of Britain's car industry, with many carmakers being based at different locations in Coventry, although many of these factories had switched to help supply the war effort. The RAF began bombing Germany in March 1940. There were 17 small raids on Coventry by the Luftwaffe during the Battle of Britain between August and October 1940 during which around 198 tons of bombs fell. Together, the raids killed 176 people and injured around 680; the most notable damage was to the new Rex Cinema, opened in February 1937 and had been closed by an earlier bombing raid in September. On 17 October 1940, Second Lieutenant Sandy Campbell of the Royal Engineers Bomb Disposal Company was called upon to deal with an unexploded bomb that had fallen at the Triumph Engineering Company's works in Canley.
War production in two factories had ceased on a temporary basis because of it, a large number of nearby residents having to be evacuated. Campbell found that the bomb was fitted with a delayed action fuse, impossible to remove, so he transported it to a safe place; that was done by lorry, he lay alongside the bomb so that he could hear if it started ticking and could warn the driver to stop and run for cover. Having taken it a safe distance, he disposed of the bomb but was killed whilst dealing with another bomb the next day. Campbell was posthumously awarded a George Cross for his actions on 17 October 1940. One notable casualty of the October raids was Ernest Hugh Snell FRSE, a retired former local Medical Officer of Health; the raid that began on the evening of 14 November 1940 was the most severe to hit Coventry during the war. It was carried out by 515 German bombers, from Luftflotte 3 and from the pathfinders of Kampfgruppe 100; the attack, code-named Operation Mondscheinsonate, was intended to destroy Coventry's factories and industrial infrastructure, although it was clear that damage to the rest of the city, including monuments and residential areas, would be considerable.
The initial wave of 13 specially modified Heinkel He 111 aircraft of Kampfgruppe 100, which were equipped with X-Gerät navigational devices dropped marker flares at 19:20. The British and the Germans were fighting the Battle of the Beams and on this night the British failed to disrupt the X-Gerät signals; the first wave of follow-up bombers dropped high explosive bombs, knocking out the utilities and cratering the roads, making it difficult for the fire engines to reach fires started by the waves of bombers. These waves dropped a combination of high explosive and incendiary bombs. There were two types of incendiary bomb: those made of petroleum; the high explosive bombs and the larger air-mines were not only designed to hamper the Coventry fire brigade, they were intended to damage roofs, making it easier for the incendiary bombs to fall into buildings and ignite them. Coventry's air defences consisted of twelve 40 mm Bofors; the AA Defence Commander of 95th Heavy Anti–Aircraft Regiment, Royal Artillery, had prepared a series of concentrations to be fired using sound-locators and GL Mk.
I gun-laying radar, 128 concentrations were fired before the bombing severed all lines of communication and the noise drowned out sound-location. The anti-aircraft batteries fought on in isolation; some gun positions were able to fire at searchlight beam intersections, glimpsed through the smoke and guessing the range. Although the Coventry guns fired 10 rounds a minute for the whole 10 hour raid, only one German bomber was shot down. At around 20:00, Coventry Cathedral, was set on fire by incendiaries for the first time; the volunteer fire-fighters managed to put out the first fire but other direct hits followed and soon new fires broke out in the cathedral. During the same period, more than 200 other fires were started across the city, most of which were concentrated in the city-centre area, setting the area ablaze and overwhelming the fi
Nagasaki
Nagasaki is the capital and the largest city of Nagasaki Prefecture on the island of Kyushu in Japan. The city's name, 長崎, means "long cape" in Japanese. Nagasaki became a centre of colonial Portuguese and Dutch influence in the 16th through 19th centuries, the Hidden Christian Sites in the Nagasaki Region have been recognized and included in the UNESCO World Heritage List. Part of Nagasaki was home to a major Imperial Japanese Navy base during the First Sino-Japanese War and Russo-Japanese War. During World War II, the American atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki made Nagasaki the second and, to date, last city in the world to experience a nuclear attack; as of 1 March 2017, the city has an estimated population of 425,723 and a population density of 1,000 people per km2. The total area is 406.35 km2. Nagasaki is a Japanese port city, occupied by the Portuguese in the late 16th century. A small fishing village set in a secluded harbor, Nagasaki had little historical significance until contact with Portuguese explorers in 1543.
An early visitor was Fernão Mendes Pinto, who came from Sagres on a Portuguese ship which landed nearby in Tanegashima. Soon after, Portuguese ships started sailing to Japan as regular trade freighters, thus increasing the contact and trade relations between Japan and the rest of the world, with mainland China, with whom Japan had severed its commercial and political ties due to a number of incidents involving Wokou piracy in the South China Sea, with the Portuguese now serving as intermediaries between the two Asian countries. Despite the mutual advantages derived from these trading contacts, which would soon be acknowledged by all parties involved, the lack of a proper seaport in Kyūshū for the purpose of harboring foreign ships posed a major problem for both merchants and the Kyushu daimyōs who expected to collect great advantages from the trade with the Portuguese. In the meantime, Spanish Jesuit missionary St. Francis Xavier arrived in Kagoshima, South Kyūshū, in 1549, soon initiated a thorough campaign of evangelization throughout Japan, left for China in 1552 and died soon afterwards.
His followers who remained behind converted a number of daimyōs. The most notable among them was Ōmura Sumitada. In 1569, Ōmura granted a permit for the establishment of a port with the purpose of harboring Portuguese ships in Nagasaki, set up in 1571, under the supervision of the Jesuit missionary Gaspar Vilela and Portuguese Captain-Major Tristão Vaz de Veiga, with Ōmura's personal assistance; the little harbor village grew into a diverse port city, Portuguese products imported through Nagasaki were assimilated into popular Japanese culture. Tempura derived from a popular Portuguese recipe known as peixinho-da-horta, takes its name from the Portuguese word,'tempero,' seasoning, refers to the tempora quadragesima, forty days of Lent during which eating meat was for bidden, another example of the enduring effects of this cultural exchange; the Portuguese brought with them many goods from China. Due to the instability during the Sengoku period and Jesuit leader Alexandro Valignano conceived a plan to pass administrative control over to the Society of Jesus rather than see the Catholic city taken over by a non-Catholic daimyō.
Thus, for a brief period after 1580, the city of Nagasaki was a Jesuit colony, under their administrative and military control. It became a refuge for Christians escaping maltreatment in other regions of Japan. In 1587, Toyotomi Hideyoshi's campaign to unify the country arrived in Kyūshū. Concerned with the large Christian influence in southern Japan, as well as the active and what was perceived as the arrogant role the Jesuits were playing in the Japanese political arena, Hideyoshi ordered the expulsion of all missionaries, placed the city under his direct control. However, the expulsion order went unenforced, the fact remained that most of Nagasaki's population remained practicing Catholic. In 1596, the Spanish ship San Felipe was wrecked off the coast of Shikoku, Hideyoshi learned from its pilot that the Spanish Franciscans were the vanguard of an Iberian invasion of Japan. In response, Hideyoshi ordered the crucifixions of twenty-six Catholics in Nagasaki on February 5 of the next year. Portuguese traders were not ostracized, so the city continued to thrive.
In 1602, Augustinian missionaries arrived in Japan, when Tokugawa Ieyasu took power in 1603, Catholicism was still tolerated. Many Catholic daimyōs had been critical allies at the Battle of Sekigahara, the Tokugawa position was not strong enough to move against them. Once Osaka Castle had been taken and Toyotomi Hideyoshi's offspring killed, the Tokugawa dominance was assured. In addition, the Dutch and English presence allowed trade without religious strings attached. Thus, in 1614, Catholicism was banned and all missionaries ordered to leave. Most Catholic daimyo apostatized, forced their subjects to do so, although a few would not renounce the religion and left the country for Macau and Japantowns in Southeast Asia. A brutal campaign of persecution followed, with thousands of converts across Kyūshū and other parts of Japan killed, tortured, or forced to renounce their religion. Catholicism's last gasp as an open religion and the last major military action in Japan until the Meiji Restoration was the Shimabara Rebellion of 1637.
While there is no evidence that Europeans directly incited the rebellion
