Okay, Let’s Be Friends

During World War II, the United States totally mobilized for war.  Most Americans don’t know what mobilization means any more, since we haven’t done anything like that in any of the smaller wars we have fought since 1945.

This war was different:  almost all industries stopped producing consumer goods and produced material for the war, instead.  The auto makers stopped producing cars, making military trucks, tanks, and airplanes.  Singer stopped making sewing machines and produced pistols.  Clothing companies produced uniforms and, instead of making shoes, shoe factories turned out combat boots.  

By the end of the war, American factories had produced 86,000 tanks, 296,000 airplanes, 15 million rifles and machine guns, 64,000 landing craft, and 6,500 ships.  Over two-thirds of American industrial output was geared towards producing military hardware.  American industrial production was what enabled the Allies to win, as the real strategic victory was fought not on the battlefield but on the assembly line.

None of the above is to slight the 15 million Americans in uniform at the end of the war, but to simply point out that the incredible output of American manufacturing was what those men—along with our Allies—used to fight the war.

Part of that amazing mobilization was the incredible production of the Consolidated B-24 bomber.  If you watch movies about WWII, you usually see the more photogenic B-17, but the most widely produced heavy bomber in history was the B-24.  Over 18,500 B-24 bombers in assorted variants were made during the war at plants scattered across the United States.  At the height of production, one Ford Motor plant was rolling a new bomber off the assembly line every 59 minutes.  The photo above shows the planes being produced at the Fort Worth, Texas plant.

Though the B-24 could not fly as high as the B-17, it could carry a larger load of bombs farther, making the plane a highly successful bomber that was used by all branches of the American military, as well as by all of our Allies, so it saw service all around the world.  One example of this bomber’s effectiveness would be the 1945 raids on the Japanese city of Nagaoka, a town of 65,000 people.  The most likely reason the city was picked as a target was because it was a center for chemical research and production.  The Japanese survivors, however, maintained that the city was bombed because it was the hometown of Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto, the man who had planned the Pearl Harbor attack.

Nagaoka was firebombed, with estimates of the destruction ranging from 65% to 80% of the urban area.  1,496 lives were lost in Nagaoka, while the air crews that bombed the town suffered no losses.

The United States military stopped flying the B-24 almost as soon as the war was over.  A few were used for transport or submarine patrol immediately after the war, but few were still operating by the start of the Korean War.  Most were scrapped or simply parked and abandoned.  There are about a dozen of the planes still on display, with only two still flying (one of which was manufactured in Fort Worth), so it may be in that photo above.

Long after the war, the people of Fort Worth and Nagaoka became friends, as part of the sister city program.  In the 1990’s, Fort Worth (with the help of its sister city) expanded the its Botanical Gardens by adding a typical Japanese Garden.  As part of that garden, a pagoda was built to house a gift from the people of Nagaoka:  an authentic Mikoshi (left).

A Mikoshi is a Shinto shrine that is believed to promote peace, community unity, purification, and spiritual connection with the deities. Mikoshi festivals can be observed throughout the year across various regions of Japan, with some of the most famous ones including the Sanja Matsuri in Tokyo, Gion Matsuri in Kyoto, and Kishiwada Danjiri Matsuri in Osaka.

I’m not sure that the gift is simply a sign of friendship, but perhaps is additionally motivated by a desire to establish some form of peaceful link with a city whose past includes a link to its sister city’s destruction—call it “insurance”.  I came to this conclusion when I discovered that Nagaoka had made a similar gift to its other sister city, Honolulu.  That Mikoshi is located just outside of Pearl Harbor.