Even the guys who designed them? :dubious:
The guys who designed them wanted to bomb Germany and weren’t so hot on the idea whe the target was Japan.
Peace
Only through Liberty
rwjefferson
In general terms, they undoubtedly did. What’s more relevant to the OP is that the agreement between them at Hyde Park in September 1944 was that the atomic bomb, when it became available, would be preferentally used on Japan:
FWIW, I’m really not convinced that the reasoning behind this agreement was racist (though certainly many of those involved were racist against the Japanese). Nor is this evidence that, if the threat of a German atomic bomb had become evident at this stage in 1944 (in the event it didn’t), the Allies wouldn’t have used any available atomic weapon against Germany first.
[I’ll pedantically note that this Hyde Park memo seems to have had a minimal effect on the decision process in 1945, since Roosevelt’s copy appears to have been misplaced and only to have come to the attention of the rest of the US admistration relatively late in the developments that led to Hiroshima. But it is still very relevant evidence as to the thinking of Roosevelt and Churchill in the autumn of 1944.]
Truman on the Bomb.
http://www.trumanlibrary.org/whistlestop/study_collections/bomb/large/index.php
First, he is sure he wants to use it on a dual-purpose target. Homes and factories, both.
Then… after they hear what it really does…
Later on, what looks like a later version of the Yalta conference. Mr. Truman does not like the commies at all.
http://www.trumanlibrary.org/whistlestop/study_collections/bomb/large/documents/fulltext.php?fulltextid=16
The Trinity explosion, described.
http://www.trumanlibrary.org/whistlestop/study_collections/bomb/large/documents/index.php?documentdate=1946-12-12&documentid=25&studycollectionid=abomb&pagenumber=1
Truman defending the decision, calling the Japanese savages, and estimating 250,000 american lives were saved.
From these, and other documents, on the site, I have to conclude that before Trinity, it was viewed as a very big bomb.
Afterwards, it was viewed as… more than that.
From the decisions of target, I remain doubtful Berlin would have been the point of impact. Perhaps Dresden would have been nuked, though. Anyone got a rough analysis of Germany’s status ca '44?
I’m not sure if ‘racist’ is the right word. Suffice it to say that, to an American of the time, a German is understandable. He will surrender, he knows the rules of war. A Japanese soldier acts in a different manner entirely, and it is hard to understand why. (Yes, I’m familiar with how they obeyed the Geneva convention better than the Russians in the Russo-Japanese war. I am trying to understand the point of view of a man sixty years ago)
This had to affect their thinking, in some manner. It should not be ignored, nor should it be stamped with the simple word ‘racism’. That creates a cartoon drawing of the truth.
I simply submit that the justification needed for nuking Japan was lower than that of nuking Germany, and that this part of it should not be ignored.
Or, of course, overblown.
Good thought—and a quick aside, if I may…would Von Braun and his staff been spending a lot of time at Peenemunde itself around then?
Another reason we didn’t nuke Tokyo: we’d already heavily firebombed it (killing 100,000+). So, by that token we probably wouldn’t have nuked Hamburg, either.
Actually—you might already know this, so please forgive me bringing this up if you do—we did intern some Germans. (Wikipedia says “tens of thousands of Italians and Germans, most of whom were foreign nationals or otherwise seen as subversive enemy aliens.” It didn’t give a breakdown of exactly how many were aliens, how many were citizens, how many were native-born citizens, how many Bund members we interned, etc.) And I’ll freely admit that this wasn’t quite the same as rounding up all the German-Americans in the United States for ethnicity alone.
Mmm. We did want to brain-drain them, and the V-weapons weren’t… useful, really. Terror weapons, but not much more. Don’t know. Good choice, though.
Sorry, I didn’t quote the exact line. Somewhere on the Truman page it specifically says “We’re not going to use it on the capital of Japan.” I decided that Berlin would be out by the same reasoning. The page is really worth reading.
Here we go.
http://www.trumanlibrary.org/whistlestop/study_collections/bomb/large/documents/fulltext.php?fulltextid=15
Yep, not quite the same thing. Tens of thousands versus, well, all of them unto the third generation. Big difference. Even if the numbers were similar.
They’d have been there most of the time; it remained von Braun’s main place of work until the facility was evacuated in February 1945, in the face of the Soviet advances.
However, while arguably of some symbolic use, nuking Peenemunde in 1944 would have had little to no effect on V1 or V2 production. The base had after all been targeted and heavily bombed on multiple occasions in 1943, causing extensive damage. The result was that by mid-1944 the production facilities had all been dispersed to other sites, most famously the underground factories in the Mittelwerk. Peenemunde was kept as the main research centre on the projects, but that role was less significant as they moved into actual production and that was underway by D-Day.
Offhand, I’m fairly sure that Allied intelligence knew virtually nothing about the whereabouts of the production facilities until much later.
I think we need to avoid rewriting history here as well. The Japanese did have a different culture. They were more stubborn, and inclined to fight until the death. There were no German soldiers surfacing in the Bavarian mountains in 1974, having held out because they received “orders” to fight to the last man. Germans surrendered at much higher rate than the Japanese. I do not believe (at least in the West, which is what we were concerned with) that you saw the, “100,000 casualties, 878 prisoners” types of tallies that you did with the Japanese.
The Japanese were prepared to defend the home islands with every man, woman, and child. There were some half-baked peace initiatives through the Soviets, but nowhere near the total surrender that was demanded.
Finally, with respect to Germany, the D-Day invasion had already occurred, and it occurred on a continent that was much more spread out and harder for one nation to defend. To attack Japan, “D-Day” would have been an assault against an island, that happened to be the nation we were at war with. A much more difficult proposition.
I remember reading somewhere that politicians and soliders at the time were talking about the subjugation of Japan as something that would take generations. They may have been wrong, but that was the theory. Remember, they had just gotten done fighting in Okinawa, to damn near the last man, with families throwing themselves over cliffs rather than surrender.
In September of 1944, the allies mistakenly believed the Germans were on the verge of surrender. It was expected that the war in Europe would be over in a few weeks.
One thing I’ve heard is that the scientists had a pretty good idea how big the explosion would be but underestimated the amount of radiation. Because of this, they figured that anybody who would have been killed by radiation would already be killed by the initial blast. They also failed to appreciate the lingering effects of the radiation.
There were proposals to drop an atomic bomb on the invasion site in Japan a few hours before the American troops landed. It was felt this would destroy most of the defending forces without endangering the incoming troops.
To be exact, the estimate presented at the Quebec meeting, a few days before the Hyde Park agreement was signed, was that the war against Germany would be concluded within ten weeks - by about December 1st or earlier.
Even if Roosevelt and Churchill were swayed by this prediction, there’s the complication that by the time their Hyde Park conversation took place on the 19th it may have been obvious to them that Market Garden was going badly.
As I put it in this old Comments thread, the radiation effects were “fairly well understood” at Los Alamos prior to use.
Not sure what you’re getting at, but as you said in your comment, “what wasn’t well understood were the medical effects of the exposure.” Which is really the whole point of course. After all, we’re not interested in radiation as an arbitrary thing in a nuclear explosion, but in how it affects people.
My point was that the amount of radiation - in fact, the various different sources of exposure involved - was reasonably well predicted and those involved were aware that this would have horrible effects.
What could also be estimated was what the immediate effects of such radiation would be in terms of death from burns. However, what was less well understood was exactly what other effects these large sudden doses of radiation would have on humans.
The suggestion that anybody liable to die from radiation would have been killed in the blast was made by American officials, but after the fact. (It’s mentioned, but not footnoted and the officials aren’t named, on p439 of Robert Norris’s Racing for the Bomb, Steerforth, 2002.) This was during the public controversy, discussed by Cecil in the column that led to that Comments thread, in September 1945 about whether people would continue to die from radiation left in the bombed cities. The military was talking a lot of nonsense to the press at the time - though they were right that there was minimal residual radiation - and it’s not obvious that the suggestion derives from any pre-attack prediction.