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Good look at declassified pictures of the A-bombs Fat Man and Little Boy:

http://www.alternatewars.com/Bomb_Loadi ... _Guide.htm" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

Cool stuff. Thanks Howdy.

Very interesting!

Thanks for the post. I guess OSHA didn't require much PPE back then.

howdy wrote:Good look at declassified pictures of the A-bombs Fat Man and Little Boy:

http://www.alternatewars.com/Bomb_Loadi ... _Guide.htm" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

Thank you for the blast from the past.

That is interesting, thanks for posting the link. The National Museum of the US Air Force at Wright-Patterson AFB in Dayton Ohio has a (demilled ) Fat Man and Little Boy on display, if you ever want to see one up close.

My Dad was an USAAF mechanic in the Pacific during WWII. All the guys in the photos from Tinian look just like the photos of Dad - baseball cap, cut off khaki shorts, no shirt, ankle high boots, and covered in sweat. He said they rigged up a tray that could be sealed with the proper ingredients inside and secured to the bomb racks on a fighter planes wing. The fighter would go fly around at higher altitude for awhile, then come back, they'd open the tray, and voila! Ice cream!

I wonder how much ice cream you could make in a bomb bay big enough to hold Fat Man and Little Boy?

gringo pistolero wrote:

howdy wrote:Good look at declassified pictures of the A-bombs Fat Man and Little Boy:

http://www.alternatewars.com/Bomb_Loadi ... _Guide.htm" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

Thank you for the blast from the past.

Very punny.

ELB wrote:That is interesting, thanks for posting the link. The National Museum of the US Air Force at Wright-Patterson AFB in Dayton Ohio has a (demilled ) Fat Man and Little Boy on display, if you ever want to see one up close.

My Dad was an USAAF mechanic in the Pacific during WWII. All the guys in the photos from Tinian look just like the photos of Dad - baseball cap, cut off khaki shorts, no shirt, ankle high boots, and covered in sweat. He said they rigged up a tray that could be sealed with the proper ingredients inside and secured to the bomb racks on a fighter planes wing. The fighter would go fly around at higher altitude for awhile, then come back, they'd open the tray, and voila! Ice cream!

I wonder how much ice cream you could make in a bomb bay big enough to hold Fat Man and Little Boy?

I can't remember the gentleman's name off the top of my head, but he was for years a speaker at the Planes of Fame Museum......may still be for all I know....anyway he was a P47 pilot during WW2. He flew bomber escort missions out of England over France and Germany, and then later he was part of the D-Day air battle. His squadron shot up the Germans pretty badly in the Fallaise Gap. He told me that lots of times they would take a clean, unused belly tank and fill it will 75 gallons (or whatever the capacity was) of ice cream ingredients and then take it up for some aerobatics. Same deal....by the time they landed, they had a belly tank full of ice cream for the ground crews. Those boys took very good care of their airplanes. No fly, no ice cream.

Very cool. Thanks.

Thanks - I had never seen these before.

As a somewhat related item, the USS Indianapolis was the ship that transported the bombs
from the States to the island where they were loaded onto the bombers.

After it delivered the bombs it was transitting to a new duty site when it was sunk by a Japanese
submariine. The sailors were in the water for days since nobody was looking for them.
Many were eaten by sharks.

SIA

Thanks for posting link. Awesome pics.

surprise_i'm_armed wrote:Thanks - I had never seen these before.

As a somewhat related item, the USS Indianapolis was the ship that transported the bombs
from the States to the island where they were loaded onto the bombers.

After it delivered the bombs it was transitting to a new duty site when it was sunk by a Japanese
submariine. The sailors were in the water for days since nobody was looking for them.
Many were eaten by sharks.

SIA

There is a WWII museum in Indianapolis that devotes much of its space to the loss of this ship. The sacrifice these men gave is mind bogeling.

surprise_i'm_armed wrote:Thanks - I had never seen these before.

As a somewhat related item, the USS Indianapolis was the ship that transported the bombs
from the States to the island where they were loaded onto the bombers.

After it delivered the bombs it was transitting to a new duty site when it was sunk by a Japanese
submariine. The sailors were in the water for days since nobody was looking for them.
Many were eaten by sharks.

SIA

Yeah, I saw "Jaws", too.

sjfcontrol wrote:

surprise_i'm_armed wrote:Thanks - I had never seen these before.

As a somewhat related item, the USS Indianapolis was the ship that transported the bombs
from the States to the island where they were loaded onto the bombers.

After it delivered the bombs it was transitting to a new duty site when it was sunk by a Japanese
submariine. The sailors were in the water for days since nobody was looking for them.
Many were eaten by sharks.

SIA

Yeah, I saw "Jaws", too.

This was actually no joke, but the legend has distorted the facts somewhat. The Indianapolis was traveling under the strictest radio silence going to Tinian because of the nature of her mission. She wasn't carrying the bombs, but parts of the Little Boy bomb plus all of its uranium core. After leaving Tinian, she sailed for Guam, where some of her crew was rotated out and she picked up new sailors. She left Guam for a training run, after which she was supposed to join the fleet at Okinawa. Two days out of Guam, she was hit by two Japanese torpedoes, and rolled over and went down by the bow in only 12 minutes. Approximately 300 of the 1,196 crewmen went to the bottom with the ship. Approximately 880 survived the sinking. Only 321 men were rescued still alive, of whom 4 more died after being rescued. Legend says that the remaining 551 men were killed by sharks, but that isn't entirely true. Although certainly some significant number were killed by sharks, many died from the effects of exposure and prolonged salt-water immersion, burns and traumatic injuries. The truth is that sharks did drag off many of the bodies of many of the men who had died from other causes, lending the impression that the sharks had actually killed them.

But in a sense, it's academic. The bottom line is that only 317 men out of a crew of 1,196 lived, and 879 died. And those that died suffered horrible deaths. "Jaws" aside, it's not really a joking matter.

The Annoyed Man wrote:

sjfcontrol wrote:

surprise_i'm_armed wrote:Thanks - I had never seen these before.

As a somewhat related item, the USS Indianapolis was the ship that transported the bombs
from the States to the island where they were loaded onto the bombers.

After it delivered the bombs it was transitting to a new duty site when it was sunk by a Japanese
submariine. The sailors were in the water for days since nobody was looking for them.
Many were eaten by sharks.

SIA

Yeah, I saw "Jaws", too.

This was actually no joke, but the legend has distorted the facts somewhat. The Indianapolis was traveling under the strictest radio silence going to Tinian because of the nature of her mission. She wasn't carrying the bombs, but parts of the Little Boy bomb plus all of its uranium core. After leaving Tinian, she sailed for Guam, where some of her crew was rotated out and she picked up new sailors. She left Guam for a training run, after which she was supposed to join the fleet at Okinawa. Two days out of Guam, she was hit by two Japanese torpedoes, and rolled over and went down by the bow in only 12 minutes. Approximately 300 of the 1,196 crewmen went to the bottom with the ship. Approximately 880 survived the sinking. Only 321 men were rescued still alive, of whom 4 more died after being rescued. Legend says that the remaining 551 men were killed by sharks, but that isn't entirely true. Although certainly some significant number were killed by sharks, many died from the effects of exposure and prolonged salt-water immersion, burns and traumatic injuries. The truth is that sharks did drag off many of the bodies of many of the men who had died from other causes, lending the impression that the sharks had actually killed them.

But in a sense, it's academic. The bottom line is that only 317 men out of a crew of 1,196 lived, and 879 died. And those that died suffered horrible deaths. "Jaws" aside, it's not really a joking matter.

TAM dropping bombs . . . of knowledge.