Peenemünde probably would have been a good bombing target.
:smack:“exponentially, casuality rate”
should be "“exponentially increasingly casualty rate”
:smack:
I hate to say it but cite? I’m always willing to be proven wrong, but Berlin alone being responsible for 1/2 or more of Germany’s military output in WWII is a pretty incredible claim and goes against everything I’ve ever read being also a student of WWII history.
Fat Man, fat chance. A Little Boy type may go off, maybe not full yield but it could happen since there´s only one main explosive to slam one subcritical mass into the other. Even without the explosives going off the masses could come together and make a messy fizzle.
I would be very surprised. Do you have a cite for that?
Great discussion, everyone. I guess a further question is—what kind of stomach woule the Allies have for sustained atom-bombings? I think it’s fair to say that the Allies—esp. the Brits—were pissed off from years of bombardment. But if the Nazis don’t surrender within, say, 6 weeks … and bombing continues the whole time … and radioactive dust is drifting all over occupied Europe (killing just as many captive civilians as Nazis) … at some point stories about the conditions in Europe will make it back to the US.
I guess I’m feeling as though, overall (a) the Nazis would take more hits than the Japanese did (since we’re positing they’re in better health than the Japanese were; the same might be said if we had developed the bomb in 1942 and dropped it on Japan—I doubt they’d have surrendered after 2 bombs) (b) they wouldn’t surrender unconditionally © they’d try for a negotiated peace that left them in control of Europe (d) the Allies would eventually lose the stomach for the bombing (or the prospect of a 2nd D-Day) and agree to a negotiated peace (e) the Cold War would be waged between NATO and Germany.
You’re thinking about the past from a modern day prospective, not how things were at the time. WWII was a time of total war, burning cities full of civilians to the ground. A shit-ton of friendly civilians died in occupied territories from conventional bombing in France, Italy, Belgium, the Netherlands, etc. The stories making it back to the US is a very recent way of thinking about things. It was simply accepted or not thought about. When hundreds of thousands of enemy civilians dying in fires is OK, some neutral innocents getting caught up in it is pretty irrelevant. And mass bombing civilians was the way things went in WWII.
Very unlikely. Actually, extremely unlikely. Japan was willing to fight to the point of national suicide in a way that even Nazi Germany wasn’t. By the time the A-Bombs were dropped, the situation that Japan faced was far beyond hopeless. That it took 2 A-bombs for them to finally accept the inevitable was a sign of insanity or stupidity.
They would when facing the inevitable –even Japan did so while they were preparing for national suicide facing invasion after most of their cities had been burned to the ground.
They tried that historically, and pretty much got what part of unconditional surrender don’t you get thrown back in their face. A lot of the anti-Hitler factions thought they could negotiate with the west to make peace with them and still continue the war against the USSR. The western allies simply weren’t interested in this.
This simply wasn’t going to happen. Again, it’s putting a modern day prospective on the past. Millions of civilians died in conventional mass city bombing in WWII and nobody lost the stomach for it. Eh, should probably repeat that – [i}millions* of civilians died from dropping high explosives and incendiaries on cities with the full intention of murdering innocent civilians who were part of the military-industrial complex in some way, even if they were just a janitor sweeping the floor of an industry plant.
You’re thinking about the past from a modern day prospective, not how things were at the time. WWII was a time of total war, burning cities full of civilians to the ground. A shit-ton of friendly civilians died in occupied territories from conventional bombing in France, Italy, Belgium, the Netherlands, etc. The stories making it back to the US is a very recent way of thinking about things. It was simply accepted or not thought about. When hundreds of thousands of enemy civilians dying in fires is OK, some neutral innocents getting caught up in it is pretty irrelevant. And mass bombing civilians was the way things went in WWII.
Very unlikely. Actually, extremely unlikely. Japan was willing to fight to the point of national suicide in a way that even Nazi Germany wasn’t. By the time the A-Bombs were dropped, the situation that Japan faced was far beyond hopeless. That it took 2 A-bombs for them to finally accept the inevitable was a sign of insanity or stupidity.
They would when facing the inevitable –even Japan did so while they were preparing for national suicide facing invasion after most of their cities had been burned to the ground.
They tried that historically, and pretty much got what part of unconditional surrender don’t you get thrown back in their face. A lot of the anti-Hitler factions thought they could negotiate with the west to make peace with them and still continue the war against the USSR. The western allies simply weren’t interested in this.
This simply wasn’t going to happen. Again, it’s putting a modern day prospective on the past. Millions of civilians died in conventional mass city bombing in WWII and nobody lost the stomach for it. Eh, should probably repeat that – [b}millions** of civilians died from dropping high explosives and incendiaries on cities with the full intention of murdering innocent civilians who were part of the military-industrial complex in some way, even if they were just a janitor sweeping the floor of an industry plant.
You’re thinking about the past from a modern day prospective, not how things were at the time. WWII was a time of total war, burning cities full of civilians to the ground. A shit-ton of friendly civilians died in occupied territories from conventional bombing in France, Italy, Belgium, the Netherlands, etc. The stories making it back to the US is a very recent way of thinking about things. It was simply accepted or not thought about. When hundreds of thousands of enemy civilians dying in fires is OK, some neutral innocents getting caught up in it is pretty irrelevant. And mass bombing civilians was the way things went in WWII.
Very unlikely. Actually, extremely unlikely. Japan was willing to fight to the point of national suicide in a way that even Nazi Germany wasn’t. By the time the A-Bombs were dropped, the situation that Japan faced was far beyond hopeless. That it took 2 A-bombs for them to finally accept the inevitable was a sign of insanity or stupidity.
They would when facing the inevitable –even Japan did so while they were preparing for national suicide facing invasion after most of their cities had been burned to the ground.
They tried that historically, and pretty much got what part of unconditional surrender don’t you get thrown back in their face. A lot of the anti-Hitler factions thought they could negotiate with the west to make peace with them and still continue the war against the USSR. The western allies simply weren’t interested in this.
This simply wasn’t going to happen. Again, it’s putting a modern day prospective on the past. Millions of civilians died in conventional mass city bombing in WWII and nobody lost the stomach for it. Eh, should probably repeat that – MILLIONS of civilians died from dropping high explosives and incendiaries on cities with the full intention of murdering innocent civilians who were part of the military-industrial complex in some way, even if they were just a janitor sweeping the floor of an industry plant.
should be “exponentially increasing casualty rate”
:rolleyes:
Dang, I need a vacation.
I guess Dissonance needs one, too 
What were the ceilings of bombers vs fighters? No one paid much attention to the Enola Gay, since a single high altitude bomber was not considered to be much of a threat. Conventional bombers had to be low enough to be effective, but not one dropping an atomic bomb. I suspect the first one, at least, might have gotten through with very little difficulty.
I’d think the shock to a populace who had been winning in this scenario losing a city to one bomb might have been significant, may be even more so that for the Japanese who had already basically lost. I agree that Munich would have been an excellent first choice, since the Allies would have had captured much of Italy by this point, and thus would have closer airbases. You also want the infrastructure to survive to respond to the request for surrender and to worry about being next.
Even the scientists didn’t truly understand the problems of fallout in 1945 – in fact, Operation Plowshare was still looking at the use of nuclear explosions in the 1960’s.
If civilians started getting sick and dying all over Europe, I suspect it would have been blamed on the Nazis using poison gas on their own people.
Dresden had a huge shock on the German people - the book I read said they were expecting more and it was going to be a war ender, but the conditions to repeat it simply didnt happen. They thought it was a reliable technique the allies had developed rather than a confluence of factors making it more successful than it could be in future.
So Id think theres little doubt being able to repeat it half a dozen times without needing the right conditions would have been more than enough.
Otara
Shush you, it happens to all men at sometime!