Imagine that the role of FDR were taken by a gamer with some future knowledge. In the game Civilization, you win when you invade and occupy every other rival nation.
Well, in ww2, atomic weapons made for a unique opportunity. Essentially, the alternate strategy is :
a. Total wartime commitment to the Manhattan project, with the goal of mass producing devices and a long range variant of the B-29 for deploying them
b. Sink Japan’s ships, but don’t bother with island hopping. You just need 1 island to win. (an island long enough to launch a heavily laden B-29 for the bombing missions)
c. Help the soviets only a little, to stop them from totally collapsing. Titrate the lend lease aid to create a stalemate between Hitler and Stalin.
d. Develop the U.S. army into a true mechanized force. More APCs, better tanks, more trucks. You will need to cover ground rapidly in the radioactive wasteland of Europe.
And then of course, let em have it. Send long range bombers on one way surprise attack missions and nuke Berlin, Moscow, and Tokyo. The logistics of it would be tough, I’m uncertain how much you could extend B-29 range but I think it could be done. Then, with follow up bombings to annihilate all 3 enemy’s production, invade Russia from the East, land in France from the West (probably easier to storm the beaches after you’ve nuked the place and let it cool a week) and basically occupy all of Eurasia. China would be weakened greatly from it’s invasion by Japan, Japan wouldn’t do so well after getting it’s primary productive cities nuked, and so on.
A couple of key questions remain : how fast could the Plutonium production be scaled up? This would be 1947 or so, could 100+ bombs worth be made by then? Did the USA have the military age population needed to actually occupy that much territory, even if the opposing force had been nuked and thus had a shortage of everything? (you wouldn’t have enough bombs to hit troops in the field, you’d hit their factories and petroleum refineries and major command cities)
Something like 70-90% of all German casualties were on the eastern front, so conquering the USSR would not be easy. They pretty much beat the Germans by themselves.
Also our allies probably wouldn’t take to kindly to the US going total war like that. Canada, UK, Australia, etc. all contributed to the war effort. What would they do if we decided to do that? Would they break the alliance, would they declare war on us?
I predict in this scenario, our allies become horrified and steal nuclear secrets, and then create their own bomb to keep us in check. I could see Canada, the UK, France, Australia, etc. working together on their own manhattan project to make sure the US could be contained.
Plus the US doesn’t have the manpower to truly conquer all those nations. Maybe with forcible conscription, but we’d be facing massive insurgencies if we went full blown empire like that.
I don’t understand your premise. Are you saying you want to keep the war going until you have enough bombs to nuke everyone?:eek::eek::eek:
You understand that Germany surrendered before we even had ONE bomb, right?
You seem to think there was a less than all-out effort to end the war. In fact, the B-29 cost more than the Manhattan Project.
Boeing got the contract to develop the B-29 in 1940 - more than a year before Pearl Harbor - and it wasn’t until June 1944 that they actually flew missions. The B-32, which was the backup for the B-29, was ordered at the same time, but took even longer. Both planes faced huge technological challenges, and if there hadn’t been a war going on, they probably would have stayed on the ground for several more years while the engineers tried to work out the problems. Hell, the B-36 was fastracked in 1943, and they couldn’t get a prototype built before Japan surrendered.
The U.S. had planned to take the Marianas since late 1943, so they weren’t screwing around with island-hopping. As it was, they couldn’t invade until mid-1944, and it took a month to capture the islands.
The bulk of the American Lend-Lease shipments to the Soviets were Jeeps and trucks. Essential, to be sure, but not the kind of offensive weapons that conquered the Nazis. For that, the Soviets put 34 million troops in uniform.
As for the rest of the flaws in your logic, I’ll leave those to someone else.
This part isn’t true. Radioactive fallout follows the Nuclear fallout - Wikipedia and we’re talking about relative low yield, 20 kiloton range devices. It’s not carpet bombing - it’s gutting the primary industrial and organizational centers of the enemies of the U.S. The occupying troops would be ordered to mainly avoid these smoldering ruins, especially in the first few weeks.
Moral implications aside: Invading France seems impossible without British cooperation. Invading Russia from the east means a lunatic slog through thousands of miles of trackless wasteland. Is there anything worth seizing past Vladivostok?
No, there is nothing worth seizing past Vladivostok. The Russian Far East is worthless as a launching pad for an invasion of the Soviet Union.
To put in in a way someone might understand, imagine the Japanese landing a couple of divisions in Anchorage Alaska, and telling them to drive to Washington DC to conquer America. Yes, Moscow is technically connected by land to Vladivostok. So is South Africa. Why not land in Capetown and drive to Moscow from there? Or start from Mumbaii, which is also connected by land to Moscow.
I mean, sure, if we’re going all Patton and seamlessly switch from fighting the Nazis to fighting the Commies, we’ve got our Pacific fleet and so we might as well take Vladivostok. And then the Pacific front against the Soviets is complete, and you won’t have another use for your expensive Navy except convoying millions of men over to Europe.
And it mistakes the effect of the atomic bombing on Japan. Japan had already been beaten by the time we dropped the bombs on Japan. The overseas possessions were crushed. The army in China was cut off. Japan itself was starving. New war material could not be constructed. The only strategy left to Japan was 100 Million Shattered Jewels, whereby the entire Japanese population died rather than surrender. All the atomic bombing did was reveal that even that was pointless.
So a world where the United States sits back until they have a large stockpile of atomic weapons and then starts dropping them is not a world where the Japanese, Germans, and Soviets have already demonstrably lost the war(s) and the only choice is to surrender or accept national destruction.
In real life, by the end of the war, both the Germans and the Japanese had not only lost but had undergone such destruction that the loss was obvious to anyone. And any German or Japanese who couldn’t accept surrender and who would fight on no matter the consequence had already done so and was already dead.
Not even close, and in fact this is a very recent meme.
as Patton allegedly said* “No bastard ever won a war by dying for his country. He won it by making some other poor dumb bastard die for his country.”
*
Stalin himself said that without Lend Lease and the Second Front, the USSR would have lost.
As for marching troops through bombed country, the US atomic bomb tests had guys in trenches standing up to watch. There was no idea about the damage that radiation would do, despite Japan.
I’d say spare the Germans and attack Russia with them. Nuke the Russians. Britain and France went to war over the invasion of Poland, and look how Poland came out of WWII.
But after four years of WWII, I don’t see FDR, Truman or anyone talking the US citizens into starting another war to send their children and husbands off to fight.
There is an apocryphal story of a sailor asking Truman, “Mr. President, what do you think of Stalin?”
“Well, son, I think he’s a son of a bitch. But them I believe he thinks the same way about me.”
70-90% of German casualties were on the eastern front. Granted the allies helped supply Russia with war materials, but the Russians put up quite a fight and would do the same if the US invaded.
I don’t know a lot about it but weren’t the Russians manufacturing a lot of their own military hardware by wars end? I’m under the impression that aside from aircraft, the Russians could make their own small arms, artillery, tanks, transport vehicles, etc. If I’m wrong someone correct me.
With factories and raw materials the Allies provided.
Yes, the USSR put a quite a fight no doubt and without Russian manpower, British Sitcktoitness and American manufacturing the was would have gone differently. But the USSR in no way won the war by itself and in fact this is a very recent meme. No one thought so during or just after the war.
One data point supporting this: even today, there is no road connecting Vladivostok with the rest of Russia. There is a single railroad line. You couldn’t get troops out of there.