Harry Kellogg III - The Red Sky - The Second Battle of Britain

Many things could go wrong with the Mark I and many things could make it prematurely explode either conventionally or in an atomic explosion. The Mark I was the bomb that everyone knew would work because of its simplicity. The Mark III was somewhat of a question mark until Nagasaki. Because of its significant improvement in safety the Mark III using polonium 210 was the bomb destined to fill America’s nuclear arsenal and not the much more dangerous Mark I. That was until George Koval used the world’s supply of polonium to sabotage the US atomic weapons program.

The students of the original designers and engineers who brought the world the Mark III atomic bomb had to improvise and the Mark I was their answer… or so they thought. The reason the Mark I is so dangerous is because any number of things can go catastrophically wrong. A simple electrical short, getting hit by lightning, getting wet or a fire could set it off. No one knows what happened aboard the bomber. The former student of Robert Oppenheimer during one of his rare semesters teaching at Caltech, had designed the trigger mechanism. He had never assembled it before in earnest. This would be his first attempt under simulated combat conditions and he apparently failed his test.

30 miles out from the target the B29 Silverplate exploded in a nuclear fireball over the Pacific Ocean. If the Bikini test had not been scheduled no one would have seen what happened. But they were 289 reporters from the NATO countries that did see it happen. Although far enough away to not suffer any immediate harm some were not yet prepared and did not have their special glasses on and did suffer temporary effects to their eyes. Luckily, and by design, no one or anything was in the ingress path of the B29 Silverplate bomber named Bockscar. No one but the crew and the assembly person were immediately harmed. The nuclear program of the United States of America would not survive, however.

The lethal list of US nuclear accidents that became public knowledge and included…

2 September 1944

Peter Bragg and Douglas Paul Meigs, two Manhattan Project chemists, were killed when their attempt to unclog a tube in a uranium enrichment device led to an explosion of radioactive uranium hexafluoride gas exploded at the Naval Research Laboratory in Philadelphia, PA. The explosion ruptured nearby steam pipes, leading to a gas and steam combination that bathed the men in a scalding, radioactive, acidic cloud of gas which killed them a short while later.

21 August 1945

Harry K. Daghlian Jr. was killed during the final stages of the Manhattan Project (undertaken at Los Alamos, New Mexico to develop the first atomic bomb) from a radiation burst released when a critical assembly of fissile material was accidentally brought together by hand. The accident occurred during a procedure known as “tickling the dragon’s tail”).

21 May 1946

A critical nuclear accident occurred at the Los Alamos Scientific Laboratory in New Mexico. Eight people were exposed to radiation, and one, Louis Slotin, died nine days later of acute radiation sickness.

13 July 1946

The Soviet spy known as Delmar (George Koval) releases polonium 210 by timed explosions during two separate gatherings of nuclear scientists and engineers in Dayton, OH and Oak Ridge, TN. The world’s only supply of polonium kills hundreds of America’s top scientists as well as killing and sickening tens of thousands of others who come in contact with the scientists.

Add to this our latest nuclear fiasco and combine that with the images of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and the American public has had enough and more importantly Harry Truman has had enough. All nuclear weapons production ceases.

Diary of Burt Post Sept. 24 th, 1946

Just read that prices increased by 12% this year. My salary sure didn’t. The way prices are going up, I don’t know if we’ll ever be able to save enough to buy that new radio. I looked at them again on my lunch hour. The salesman showed me the inside. It was full of glowing tubes. It was just wonderful. He told me that if one of the tubes burned out you just went to the hardware store and buy another. They even have testing machines to see if your tube is bad.

I don’t think the war bond drives are going very well. No one has the money to buy them. The cost of food is going up and the taxes have to stay high to pay for the war it’s kind of a no win situation. Plus there’s the fact that many just can’t see the sense in bailing out the French again much less the German’s. I’m sure we won’t let Britain fall. If the British navy and the US navy can’t keep the Reds on their side of the channel then nothing can. I just wrote “their” side. Already it’s starting to seep into our consciousness. “Their” side, not occupied France or Denmark or even Germany. How fast change becomes the normal. I’m going to work on that. It’s not “theirs”. It belongs to the people of Western Europe and we have to give them the chance to choose once again.

Can you imagine being in occupied France? Once again occupied by a foreign power. It must be almost unbearable. I guess that’s why that guy DeGaul did what he did. He just couldn’t take it anymore. Just couldn’t see his country raped one more time.

He couldn’t believe the Soviets kept coming. It was a slaughter with Red fighters and bombers falling from the skies as far as the eye could see. The AA guns and the proximity fuse were destroying the enemy as a prodigious rate. He started out the day worried that he would not get a chance to tear into the waves of bombers that made it over the channel. They obviously had no idea of where they were going. Flocks of bombers and their escorting fighters wandered off from the main bomber stream and that was his squadron’s chance. Free from the AA zones set up around the airfields, the bombers and their Yak escorts were fair game.

The total superiority of the Spitfire Mark XIV was evident immediately. They could out turn, out accelerate and just plain out-maneuver any of the Yak and Lag models. They could boom and zoom or burn and turn with impunity. It was like the Marianas Turkey shoot the US experienced in the Pacific in the last war. The Tu2 bombers were sitting ducks a full 100 kph slower than the Spits and lumbering along at medium altitude in formations that stretched from horizon to horizon. It was like shooting ducks in the proverbial barrel. The .23mm cannons firing from the dorsal and tail guns seemed to have no effect. The Soviet gunners were so bad you could come right up behind the Tu2s and blow them to hell.