Just a few nitpicks :
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[li] the V3 were not rockets, they were fixed long range guns aimed at London. They were overrun in the Pas-de-Calais in '44 ;[/li][li] the rockets you are talking about never made it off the drawing board. They were a two stage rocket called, IIRC, A9/A4. A4 being the official designation of the V2 and it didn’t have the capacity to carry a nuke of this era ;[/li][li] the Nazi nuclear program was in shamble because Opal was not in charge ;). Actually, the German Post Office was in charge of nuclear research. There was so much competition amongst the various Nazi “baronies” that this was the only way found to settle the dispute, appoint a neutral agency in charge of it ;[/li] they did have a weapon that could have been used in terror raids. At this point in time, Germany was the only country that had nerve gases.
If so, your history professor’s way off. Germany was bombing civilian targets by the first day of the war, in Warsaw, to say nothing of Rotterdam, long before the British started bombing civilian targets. In fact, they were doing it before World War II even started, in Guernica during the Spanish Civil War. Mussolini had been ordering civilian bombing in Ethiopia, too. I’m not saying that this necessarily justifies the Allies’ firebombing of Hamburg or Tokyo, but there’s no question that the Axis powers were the first to resort to targeting civilians with their bombs.
It is true that a British air raid on Berlin provoked Hitler and Goering to switch their to massive night bombing of London, during the Battle of Britain. But the Berlin raid was not at all the first time that civilians had been deliberately bombed in World War II.
Re the OP, I agree that bombing NYC or DC would have simply provoked America to greater effort, and reduced what little feeling there was against bombing civilians in Axis countries.
Apparently, Germany was only an eyelash away from launching modified V2s from submarines.
Also, Japan sent submarines with airplanes on them to bomb the Panama Canal, thereby causing all kinds of trouble for the US - we would have had to go around Cape Horn, resources expended to fix the Panama Canal, etc. These submarines were redirected when the US invaded, IIRC, Okinawa, and were too close to the Japanese homeland.
Damn! Got my model numbers confused! Thanks for the correction.
Almost complete, but not quite.
Hitler & Goering had initially pledged to not bomb cities in England deliberately, although military targets close to cities were fair game. So, while terror bombing had happened elsewhere, it wasn’t supposed to happen in England, for whom Hitler had an actual fondness. When a single German bomber lost it’s way and released bombs over a London suburb, there was an immediate and large scale retaliatory raid by the English, which infuriated Hitler and led to him rescinding his pledge to not bomb UK cities. His rational was if the English were going to react in a “murderous” fashion to a “mistake” of war, there was no point in not going all-out. Dumb move.
I thought Unca Cecil once told us that the Japanese did deploy a lot of “balloon bombs” meant to float over to the United States, lose altitude, and kill/destroy random targets. None of them were effective, but a few did make it and were blown up by the police.
Did I dream that? I swear I read that in a Straight Dope book.
You’re not dreaming… They were real. I think part of the reason was to create large forest fires in Canada/US to drain away manpower. The effects of them were negligible.
I had no idea they had “V3” rockets on the drawing board. What I meant to say, if things had gone on long enough, it was conceivable that they would have developed Intercontinental missiles. Coupled with nukes, that would have been a very bad thing for all concerned.
I just meant that in general terms, and should have specified that.
One of the reason I asked this was during my college days between classes I would go to the library and look at old microfishe(sp?) of the Chicago Tribune and read about WWII as it actually was reported and unfolded.
Amercians seemed pretty isolated and unafraid from those newspaper accounts.
After France fell the editorial was Oh well France fell too bad it doesn’t effect us.
On the July 2nd issue of 1940 you had Britian hanging on for dear life. Russia reported to be about to collapse and the question of the day was about whether you like mayo or mustard potato salad.
Would a bombing of NYC or DC have shaken people up and demoralized them? In the vein when Britian was able to bomb Berlin during the Blitz it did little damage but shook people who believed that Britian was all done fore.
I guess I am looking for “in terms of shock value.”
In terms of shock value? Oh, we’d have been shocked alright. For about 10 seconds. Then we’d have been righteously pissed, and Hitler would’ve gotten the same scorched earth that Japan got. If you want a comparison, look at our reaction to the bombing of Pearl Harbor, then imagine the response to the homeland being bombed (Hawaii wasn’t yet a state). The response would’ve been murderous.
Nazi Chemical weapon attack?
That would’ve been the only way to effectively carry out a transatlantic attack with the technology Germany had. They were going the wrong-way 'round with their atomic work. They’d have gotten some nice reactors, but were years and years away from the ‘bomb’, and their “Amerika” bomber had too little capacity to be anything more than a nuiscance of propaganda issue… A large scale chemical attack on a US city would’ve produced a jihad against Germany. Our response would’ve been beyond murderous.
But, how would we carry it out?
We couldn’t attack from Great Britain. No way would Churchill be able to put the British cities in danger of chemical retaliation. Parliment would have booted him with a “No Confidence” vote in the twinkling of an eye.
It could have split the Allies.
I wonder why Hitler didn’t do it? 
Probably becaused he was gassed himself during WWI and because he didn’t want the Allies to retaliate with CW against German cities. However, there are points in the war where CW would have been the best choice. The Battle of Britain being one of them (persistent (sp.?) agents, including nerve gases on the airfields, naval bases even maybe some terror bombing with gases, I think England would have surrendered).
Well, partly, because he couldn’t. Only one German bomber made it that far, and it was an experimental aircraft anyway. To do it properly, he’d have needed a hundred or more of them. Even a half-assed raid would’ve required a couple dozen aircraft.
Also, I’m not at all convinced that it would’ve split the Allies. The Brits went to their shelters with gas masks hanging on their shoulders. They were expecting chemical attack. Further, if Hitler would fly all the way to New York to gas the Americans, you can be d*mn sure the English would be asking themselves when the gas would be coming their way. Germany had already broken one promise to not bomb civilians, the English would never have trusted them on a second promise. A very good friend of mine is daughter of a Blitz survivor, and you should see this little old lady when the subject is brought up. She goes from soft old gentry to steel-hard avenger in a heartbeat. I understand that the attitude is common, so I’m thinking that a large-scale gas attack would’ve just produced operation Sledgehammer sooner, only backed by chemical attack on Germany’s infrastructure. Don’t forget that the Us and the UK both had large stockpiles of war gasses. In fact, during the highly successful German air raid at the Italian port of Bari, one of the ships hit was stuffed to the gills with mustard gas. The Allies were prepared to resort to gas warfare that late into the war, and they had far larger stockpiles than anyone realizes.
A bit of a hijack here, but I recall watching a show about the crash of the Hindenburg a while back and an intresting idea came to me. One of the people featured on the show was a NASA engineer who specialized in hydrogen power systems. As a hobby he started studying the Hindenburg due the widely held belief that it was the hydrogen gas that exploded into the famous fireball.
Examining the old black and white film footage and tracking down actual witnesses he concluded that hydrogen gas could not have been the primary impetus for the fire. He gave several reasons, the two I remember is that the skin of the Hindenbug burned much faster than the spread of the fireball, and from eyewitness accounts, the leading edge of the flames was the wrong color to have been burning hydrogen (IIRC hydrogen in oxygen burns with a blue flame, the witnesses all reported the initial flames being red/orange).
From one of the eyewitnesses he obtained a small sample of unburned skin from the Hindenburg, when analyzed he discovered that the fabric had been treated (doped) with a compound high in aluminum oxides. Likely this was done to reflect exess heat and the normalize static charges across the body of the ship. But as a NASA engineer he was well aware of a modern application for aluminum oxide compounds, the solid rocket boosters for the space shuttle, as well as the engines for current air-to-air missiles use compounds not very different from what they treated the skin of the Hindenburg.
The company that built the airship did an internal study of the crash, and did identify the aluminum oxide doping agent as a likely cause, but decided to hush up what was then an embarrassing incident. Had they, or other German scientists/engineres seen the possible implications those compounds had as rocket propellant they might well have increased range and payload capacity of their missiles.