The germans where coming on top in regards to aeronautical technology, no matter how many P-51s you assign to defend a bomber formation, when the jet powered Me.262 zoomed by the Mustang pilots may just as well pop out the popcorn and enjoy the fireworks. A Germany not bled by resources spent on the Eastern Front could had fielded a very impressive air defense.
As for dropping the bombs, there´s a very distinctive difference between Germany and Japan, the later didn´t have any means of retaliate by the time it was bombed, Germany had the UK right there. I imagine that V-1 and 2s armed with chemical and biological warheads would have rained on England after such an attack.
Since some of you apparntly didn’t listen, I will repeat: bombing raids were routine over much of germany, and the germans never did or could stop them. They could take a painful toll on the defenders, but with nuclear weapons it would be child’s play to grind down Germany.
Although an Me-262 looks good on paper it was not a good return on investment. The engines required a lot of TLC during flight or they would grenade due to the state of metallurgy at the time. They would be useful as launch beds for missiles but not in a dogfight.
The biggest obstacle Germany had during the war was the manufacturing capacity of the United States. It’s tough to fight a war when your enemy can produce one B-24 every hour in a single plant and none of the plants are within bombing range.
And if Germany tried to use chemical or biological weapons against England then they would in turn be bombed with the same weapons. Dresden represented a bombing capacity comparable to a nuclear weapon so the idea that a nuclear strike wouldn’t greatly affect the outcome is not really a matter of debate. For all practical purposes the event occurred and was repeatable.
Let’s see …
Berlin was bombed conventionally fairly early on, but not as a matter of routine. (Where’s David Simmons when you need him?) Maximising the effect took time and the strategic bombing campaign retreated from the likes of Berlin for a long time. It’s really only in 1945 that Berlin starts to get flattened.
An atom bomb on Berlin would have caused “grotesque disruption”? Sure. But the aiming doesn’t really come into it. Still - and that’s the OP- would it have been enough to end the war?
Huh? You have heard of the Ruhr, etc.?
No 1945-scale nuclear weapon used against any city on Earth, then or now, could probably kill a million people. Hundreds of thousands, yes.
I am listening and paying attention, for example to the premise of the OP, where Barbarossa was successful and Germany grabs oil fields in the Caucasus. Without the Eastern front to draw and grind the Luftwaffe, and with plenty of oil to fuel the planes the situation is completely different; in that scenario bombers coming into Germany would had faced a much greater oposition.
The bulk of the day bombing campaing was carried out when the Luftwaffe was already depleted of veteran pilots and fuel, by the end they had to cart the planes around before and after flights by pulling them by horses.
Good thing they didn’t have to dogfight then!, with 250+ speed advantage over the fighter escort you just zoom past them, bust a bomber and let them bitting the dust, rinse and repeat. Only a fool would bother to dogfight the escorting planes, the air defense fighters went up to bring down the bombers, not the little planes.
You may not kill a million people but the wounded need to be treated and infrastructure restored and that would absorb a lot of war-time labor. While a small nuclear device would “only” kill 100,000 it would tie up a lot of people. And after seeing pictures of the devastation I can imagine that large cities would become very unpopular as a place to work.
Things start to fall apart here. Losing at Stalingrad would not have cost the USSR the war by any stretch, and holding them at bay would still have been painfully expensive for the Germans. Soviet industry was by this point already relocated securely beyond the Urals, and at the least defeating the USSR would have required taking Moscow, and more likely driving deep into the Urals. Doing this would have kept the war in the east going until 1943 at the earliest, and required Germany to still devote most of its war effort there during that time.
The early strategic bombing efforts against Germany were painfully expensive, and it was only in mid/late 1943 and early 1944 that the Luftwaffe was ground down to dust by losses and the cost of bombing strategic targets deep in Germany became less painful. I can’t see this being avoided by winning at Stalingrad.
I could see Germany being able to repulse an invasion in France in 1944 if they had defeated the USSR in 1943, but the strategic air war had already shifted against their favor by that point. The tactical air war had already long since shifted against them; the fighting by the Western Allies in North Africa from 1942, Sicily and Italy was pretty much free from Luftwaffe interference. D-Day would never have been attempted as such without heavy aerial superiority if not supremacy. The A-bombs would simply have gotten through, possibly not 100% of the time, but as they say close counts in horseshoes and hand grenades.
A better starting point to diverge from history would probably be if Barbarossa had succeeded wildly and the USSR was knocked out of the war in 1941, and Nazi Germany was smart enough to divert a lot of effort into aerial defense.
Except that it didn’t have a 250+ speed advantage. It was about 100 mph faster and not as maneuverable. It’s guns were prone to jamming and the engine couldn’t be pushed in a dogfight.
Had the BMW rocket engine factory not been bombed the Me-262 would have been able to use the Ruhrstahl/Kramer X-4wire guided missile against the B-17 bombers. It would have been a different animal with this as it didn’t require a direct hit and could be fired as a stand-off weapon. The missile had an acoustical proximity fuse, which was tuned to the pitch of the B-17’s propellers. They’ve got one at the Air Force Museum in my area if you ever want to see one (along with a Me-262).
Would you believe me I was thinking about kilometer per hour not knots? Darned Americans and their archaic measurement system! 
Still, the Me-262 was more a Zerstörer or bomber destroyer than a fighter (and on Hitler’s loonie insistence, a bomber too :dubious:) The big but slow guns where the thing to bust big planes out of the sky on a single, well aimed shot. Not to try to nail a small, nimble fighter. So whether it was a good dogfighter or not is not very relevant.
Ok, in Kmh that would be about 160 faster. And the return on investment of the fighter is measured in it’s sustainability. When they could keep one in the air it did OK but you can’t ignore a squadron of fighters. If you can’t throw up a bunch of them as a group then they cannot defend themselves. It was too little too late that took away from resources better spent. The Russians didn’t have the best tank in the war but they had a damn good one and they were able to move the factory when it was in danger of being overrun. 10 really good tanks that hold up in a Russian winter are better than 5 superior tanks that can’t take the cold.
The missile I linked to was a fraction of the cost of the Me262 and could have been fitted to the battle tested BF-109 or pretty much any of the established aircraft.
If you factor in production time/cost/required worker skill with everything else, the T-34 was probably the best tank in the war.
Magiver, I think we both have valid points, the argument is interesting and I actually agree with much of what you say, but I wouldn´t like to hijack this thread any more.
Thanks a lot, that was a very informative post; I believe it was indeed some article about Karlsch’s book where I got the idea from.
Might be hard to continue atomic bomb development if your research and fabrication facilities have been reduced to a radioactive lump of glass in a smoking pothole.
My feeling is that Hitler would have committed suicide much sooner. After that, Germany would have caved in to any Allied demands. I don’t think the German society had the same goals that Hitler did.
It’s also worth noting that Germany doesn’t have the same “surrender = extreme dishonour” thing that the Japanese had.
While the destruction of Dresden is comparable to 1945 nuclear weapons I don’t think the impact would be; one plane to devastate an entire city? My guess is that Hitler, considering the concept of surrender anathema (it was the German people who had failed, not him!) has an “accident” and the successors try to surrender to the Western powers and continue the war on the Eastern front. The Allies have none of it, threaten to nuke anther of Germany’s cities, and the war in the west ends. Berlin escapes unnuked as Tokyo did; you need someone alive to surrender to you. Plus nuking a capital has a lot more associations.
Interesting, since the Germans would in your scenario likely still hold large parts of Russia, the Cold War would be very different indeed; Stalin wouldn’t have the strong hand he did historically, what with the Red Army in this scenario still fighting on home soil; no East/West Germany? No Eastern Bloc?
Also; how would the war against Japan ended? The Allies threaten to use nukes as they would have in Germany, the Japanese still refuse to surrender and get nuked more or less historically?
I also get the feeling that seeing industrial centers going up in flashing light wouldn’t prompt the Germans to step up their own nuclear program (which, as stated, was far behind the Manhattan Project), rather signal “Game Over”, the Allies got there first. Further resistance = more cities up in mushroom clouds. Even if they did; they had no delivery system; the Luftwaffe by 1945 was FUBAR and strapping an atomic bomb onto a V2 would have been a Very Bad Idea™.
Another interesting aside - would shooting down a plane carrying a Fat Man type of atomic bomb mean that the bomb would still go off or not?
Indeed, this would be our best tactic. Without Hitler, the nation would fall apart.
Not sure how good an idea this would have been in the long term. I recall hearing that the Allies gave up on trying to pop Hitler for the “Ach, if only we’d have had our fuhrer,” feeling after the war. That and the fact he was an idiot.
This is only partly correct. Bombing went on from 1942-1943, then picked up again in late 1944. But the Germans never were able to stop the bombing raids and even with plenty of fuel couldn’t really mess with them.
The OP wasn’t about one A-bomb. Drop enough, and it would do the job. But even one bomb, placed right, could cripple the German war effort.
Mate, I studied German history more than I like. Berlin was the place, and something like half or more of the major war facilities were there. The Ruhr is nice, but it was nothing compared to Berlin.
I wasn’t talking direct blast. between the wind patterns, dust scattering, and inadequate medicine, you be talking hundreds of thousands from radiation. The decaptitated leadership would lead to the rest. They wouldn’t all be in the city, either, as I’m including armies cut off and without orders or supplies, starvation, and so forth.
To actually force a surrender, you might need to flatten Frankfurt, Hamburg, and so forth as well. But the first A-bomb in central Berlin could have easily made it merely a matter of time.
Unlikely, being that it’s an implosion type bomb it requires firing off the detonators simultaneously within a microsecond to produce any significant yield.
The firing mechanism itself was a mix of redundant barometric switches, fusing delay timers, and radar, along with safe/arming plugs. Even if the arming plugs were installed, the bomb still had to be released before the firing mechanism (X-box?) would be armed. I believe a lanyard was used start the fusing process after the bomb was released some distance away from the plane. Even if the arming mechanisms failed after release of the bomb, four contact fuses on the nose would have set the bomb off as a ground burst.
Speaking of ground bursts, if we had chosen this type in Nazi Germany (as opposed to the air bursts in Japan), the causalities would have been much higher as the fallout would have spread via the prevailing winds beyond the cities into other areas of the country (and not just Germany–what would have happened to Allied POWs in Germany, or the French and elsewhere?). Does anyone recall the panic in Europe as the result Chernobyl accident? Add the fact that in 1945 the public had very little understanding about what radiation could do to you in the short and long term. As you start dropping atomic weapons all over Nazi Germany, the government would have grinded to a halt because hundreds of thousands people were becoming sick and dying from the immediate and long term effects of the weapon. And the fact you couldn’t hide from it in the long term and the horror of dealing with a sickness that had no cure… Ultimately, the regime would have been confronted with an exponentially, casuality rate the longer they fought. I’d say Germany would have surrendered unconditionally–There’s no point in fighting for the “state”, if there is no state.
(bolding mine) Hamburg had already been flattened in 1943 during Operation Gomorrah, I would substitute Munich instead (also the symbolism wouldn’t hurt).