RE: First atomic bomb - 58 years ago today

["Strickert, Rick" <rstrickert@signaturescience.com>]

Regarding Winston Churchill's quoted WWII comment about Japan: 



> "What kind of a people do they think we are? Is it possible 

> that they do not realize that we shall never cease to persevere 

> against them until they have been taught a lesson which they 

> and the world will never forget?"



At least one Japanese person did realize. Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto, Commander in Chief of the Japanese Combined Fleet, the person who conceived and planned the attack on Pearl Harbor, spent several years in the United States, including two years at Harvard University and later as naval attaché at the Japanese embassy in Washington, D.C., in the mid-20s.  In a 1940 interview with a Japanese newspaper Yamamoto was quoted saying, "In the first six to twelve months of a war with the United States and Great Britain I will run wild and win victory upon victory. But then, if the war continues after that, I have no expectation of success."



In April, 1943, the U.S., having earlier cracked Japanese communication codes, identified the plane in which Yamamoto was flying and shot it down in the Solomon Islands.



And in his _The Making of the Atomic Bomb_ Richard Rhodes mentions another connection to the ongoing A-bomb thread  - Yamamoto's attack plan succeeded in part because the torpedoes delivered to the carrier fleet sent to attack Pearl Harbor were redesigned not to plunge into the mud of the shallow harbor at Pearl when dropped from attacking Japanese planes.  The unprecedented redesign, manufacture, and delivery of 180 torpedoes within a short timeframe and in under strict secrecy was accomplished by Yukiro Fukuda, manager of the Mitsubishi Munitions factory... in Nagasaki.



Rick Strickert

Austin, TX



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