Look, early on, the Germans could have gotten GB out of the war by not letting Dunkirk happen, which would have made Halifax PM, and a deal would be made, That was Hitlers last chance of Victory. If Germany could focus on the USSR, and the USSR has not gotten any aid, the Germans could have won. Stalin himself admitted that without lend lease the Russians would have lost. Mind you the war in the East would have dragged on for a long time…
The war in the Pacific would have been interesting with GB and the USA being able to focus against the Imperial Japanese.
As long as the Allies were aiding the Russians, the Germans could not win.
Right. or starving therm out. In either case, setting aside the higher US casualties (maybe a million), some estimates say there would have been like ten million Japanese dead or more. The Bomb was actually the humane decision.
Right. That was the real turning point of the European war.
What I’m about to say is a terrible thing to say, but it is Realpolitik at its most stark.
The ~350K almost entirely civilian people who were killed by the USA at Hiroshima and Nagasaki performed a gigantic service to the world. Unwittingly, and in a horrible fashion, but it was an act of service and sacrifice all but unparalleled in all of world history.
By dying horribly in an emotionally wrenching fashion, those folks prevented the use of far more and far larger nukes some time in the 1950s and 1960s between the USA & USSR and perhaps NATO Europe.
Had nobody ever really seen what a post-nuke city and it’s people look like, nuclear warfare would have been seen as far more fightable and far more winnable. By the folks who had the means, and the motive, to wage one. And certainly had no end of instigating causes ranging from the erecting (and late dismantlement) of the Berlin Wall, to the Cuban Missile Crisis, to the Korean war, to umpteen other provocations great and small across 70+ years of leaderships on both sides.
I actually read a book about this, If the Allies Had Fallen: Sixty Alternate Scenarios of World War II and it has an entire chapter dedicated to atomic bomb alternative scenarios. But the historians involved agree with that assessment, it was better to use the atomic bomb right then and there, then have it’s first use be in Korea or Eastern European in the late 40’s or early 50’s when both the US and Soviet Union would both have them, and a lot more of them.
You have to remember that Russia was fighting with Allied supplies. If England is removed from the war then there is no supply line from North America and Russia’s ability to fight is drastically reduced. Take out their tank factory and they’re left with one really good ground support aircraft with nothing to support. Germany has the tank production facilities of France and Belgium to boost production. If you think losing 15% of your population is bad imagine a 1 front war without Allied support.
If England is out of the picture and Russia is forced to surrender before 1945 can the US threaten Germany with nuclear weapons in a war that is effectively over in Europe?.
Not initially, and they stopped the Germans in front of Moscow and Leningrad, and retook Rostov, before the end of 1941. At that point the Germans have already lost; time and weather and distance and population and industry are all on the Russians’ side.
You are referring to the Archangel convoys? But most supplies reached Russia via Persia/Iran and the Pacific.
They had more than one tank factory. And you never replied before; how? They have no strategic bombing force.
They had those historically and still lost. How does that help them any more in your scenario?
Not even through Alaska (admittedly an even longer way round)? Though granted, the prospect of getting Congress to aid the USSR directly and as sole opponent of Hitler looks difficult.
Exactly. I don’t think the world would appreciate what nuclear weapons really do without a ghastly real-life demonstration of what they do. (and detonating one over the desert, at Trinity, doesn’t do it psychological justice.)
Without the two A-bombs on Japan, we’re just kicking the can down the road until someone decides to use nukes in some subsequent war. Not to mention those A-bombings saved millions of Japanese and American lives.
Alaska wasn’t even a long way around. There’s just no way to move stuff from Alaska to Siberia except by boat. Or to get stuff to Alaska. And at the time, there was no Alcan highway and the boats would have to go to Vladivostok, which takes them near Japan.
The Alcan Highway (now often called the Alaska Highway) was built as an emergency project in 1942. Without it, you’d have send any sizeable amount of materiel by ship, so you may as well skip Alaska and ship them directly from the west coast to Vladivostok. But the US would be at war with Japan, so those ships will be in danger of being sunk.
Sometimes “my enemy’s enemy is my friend” really works.
There’s a lot of daylight between “The USA would prefer the Nazis lose” and “The USA has declared and is waging active war against the Nazis”
If FDR had a choice between manufacturing a bunch of expensive war materiel then shipping it to the Soviets so they could get killed while using the stuff to kill Nazis, or instead to hire a couple million young Americans to get killed while using the stuff to kill Nazis, I have a feeling I know which alternative FDR would have supported.
Yes, subcontracting the dying to a 3rd party has its own challenges. But it’s still a pretty attractive way to run at least part of a foreign policy; countries all over the world try it pretty regularly.
I always wonder though, since it is generally agreed that we were making more bombs, why drop them on cities? Why not drop the first off shore and wait for a response? And then the second? Why drop both bombs on cities when an example of the bomb’s power could have been made without doing that? More were on the way, if it didn’t work.
I missed this post. There was no effort to attempt a demonstration. And as we know now, the USA had more bombs on the way. So why annhilate 2 cities as a demonstration, when a relatively less costly* demonstration could have been made? (Eta, costly in terms of lives and damage)
Lend-lease had first been passed by Congress in March 11, 1941. It was originally meant to aid Britain, but FDR approved 1 billion bucks in interest-free loans to the USSR on on October 30, 1941. Bit of a nitpick, but this was six weeks before Pearl Harbor and the formal declaration of war on Germany, which took place on December 11.
This is about as relevant as later statements by Soviet authorities denigrating the importance of Allied aid to Russia. The following view has gained general acceptance.
“Most likely, the Soviets would have won regardless, as the Eastern Front for the Germans was unwinnable after the Battle of Stalingrad, before most of the aid to the USSR arrived. But Lend-Lease also certainly helped shorten the war and saved lives.”
Hiroshima was actually a valid military target. There was a large military presence there as well as numerous weapons and munitions factories. Hiroshima also hadn’t been bombed much by conventional bombs, and the military wanted to see the nuke’s effectiveness against a real-world target, which you don’t get by plonking a bomb into the shoreline. Exactly how devastating it would be wasn’t really known yet.
Hiroshima was home to the Japanese 2nd Army Headquarters, which had primary responsibility for the defense of southern Japan. Keep in mind that hindsight is 20/20, and that nukes at the time were just big bombs and weren’t considered terror weapons like they are today. There were a lot of folks in the military who didn’t think that the Japanese would surrender even after two nukes, so throwing the Japanese homeland defenses into disarray by wiping out the 2nd Army HQ made a lot of sense.
If you’re not sure that even two nukes will be enough to force a surrender, why on earth would you want to waste them against a shoreline? The military folks were certain that the Japanese definitely weren’t going to surrender if you did something like that.
Kokura was supposed to be he second target, not Nagasaki. Kokura was also a valid military target since it had the largest factories for aircraft and other weapons production. Kokura was spared only because of bad weather. Kyoto was also on the list of potential targets, but was removed from consideration because its importance to Japan was more cultural and historical than military. Nagasaki was chosen because it was a port city and was being used as a transportation hub for military weapons and supplies.
You also have to keep in mind that precision guided bombs weren’t really a thing back then. If you wanted to take out a factory, you carpet bombed the entire area and hoped that enough bombs hit their targets. And you carpet bombed the surrounding area because that’s where the factory workers lived.
Modern ideas about doing what you can to spare civilians weren’t practical and weren’t really a thing back then. If you worked in a factory, you were helping Japan to fight the war and you were a legitimate military target.
My point is that they didn’t even try. I think that they should have, considering they had more bombs. “Offshore” can mean anywhere where it wouldn’t cause massive casualties. The fact that there were military facilities changes nothing. These bombs were meant to show a power far above any that had ever been seen. Hindsight is of course 20/20, but in retrospect the best way to demonstrate the power of these bombs would have been to do it in a way that kept damage to a minimum. That is not what they did.
The US was already annihilating cities on a fairly regular basis, nukes or no nukes. The air raid over Tokyo in the final days of the war was ths single most destructive air raid ever, dwarfing Hiroshima or Nagasaki.
