One thing that always seemed to put that mindset in perspective for me was the plans for the invasion of Japan. From what I remember about Operations Olympic and Coronet there were tentative plans to drop nukes to soften up the Japanese positions and then have American troops go in after that. (So pretty much the S.O.P. of bomb or shell and then bring in the troops.)
We strongly disagree on various points, but mainly, there’s no comparison invading Germany 1944 from the West and invading Japan 1945. Also, there were plans for Germany from both the Soviet Union and the US well before 1945, even before 1944, in which nuclear bombs didn’t fit, to say the least.
It seems like to me dropping the bomb so quickly after the fist test meant they had a lot of things ready for it to be dropped. Was part of the bomb already with the bomb group before July 16? Maybe the outside case?
I believe the bomb (or final parts) were sent to the Pacific via boat and not by plane. Did they send the ship out real soon after July 16?
Keep in mind that the Russians wanted to invade Japan, too, and our use of the atomic bombs was partly motivated precisely by the goal of thwarting them in doing so. If we had the bomb in time to use on Berlin, we absolutely wouldn’t have been stopped by “Stalin wouldn’t like that”.
The firebombing of Tokyo resulted in more immediate fatalities (over 100,000) than either Hiroshima or Nagasaki.
Why? Could you explain, in your own words, how nuclear bombs are different from other bombs?
These days people don’t know or forget that other bombing campaigns in WW II wiped out cities and killed 100,000 people so that makes them think an A bomb is way worse than a normal bomb. Of course now the A bombs are so powerful they can wipe out way more than just 1 city.
Had the bomb been ready in time, it would have been used against Germany, but possibly not Berlin.
The military felt that the best target would have been the German industrial region in the Ruhr valley around Essen; with places like the Krupp plants. That would caused a much bigger drop in the German ability to fight a war. However, the political leaders argued for Berlin (or wherever Hitler & the leaders were at the time) because they felt that with Hitler & the other Nazi leaders gone, the Germans would have surrendered earlier.
Of course, this was all being argued after the fact – none of these people even knew the bomb existed until later. I think I read that even Gen. Eisenhower didn’t know about it until after it had been dropped.
Truman was in (actually just outside) Berlin for the Potsdam Conference. He was notified of the successful test, and wired back to prepare for its use against Japan, “when ready but in any case not sooner than 2 August” (the date the Potsdam Conference ended).
Everything was shipped in pieces and some components were indeed being stockpiled on Tinian, though not even casings arrived until after the Trinity test.
Some parts, including nuclear ones, went by plane. But the first fissionable material to reach the island was the uranium gun projectile that arrived on the USS Indianapolis on 26th July (together with the main casing and barrel of the same). It had set sail on the 16th, more or less coincident with the Trinity test, but as noted earlier in the thread this design was not dependent on the result of it. They flew out the rest of the Little Boy uranium in stages over the next few days.
The plutonium core for the Nagasaki bomb was ready to travel on the 25th and arrived - by air - on the 28th.
I guess the Hiroshima bomb was the only weapon never tested before being used in combat.
Just speculation on my part but I think Peenemunde might have been chosen as a target for the atomic bomb.
I don’t think so.
The rockets being launched from there, while ‘terror weapons’, were not doing any significant damage to the war effort in Britain. They were hugely inaccurate (+/- 25 km or so, as I recall) and so couldn’t be specifically targeted onto any militarily critical point.
Nor were they effective as a ‘terror weapon’.
While they did scare people, most of the British public accepted that these were a last desperation effort by the Germans as the war headed toward its’ inevitable ending. They were certainly not causing the level of panic that would have caused any changes in Allied policy.
So Peenemunde just wasn’t important enough as a military target.
Yes, in those days it was just one more weapon. Why not use it? If you can firebomb a city with 1000 bombers and 20000 bombs, killing 100,000 people- why not with one bomb?
We only consider it’s unthinkable after 60 years of MAD- Mutually Assured Destruction, where any use of a nuke IS unthinkable, as it means the end of life as we know it. Back then, it just made more dead enemies.
Now, yes, even Hitler had some weapons- nerve gas- he wouldn’t use. But they were against the Geneva Conventions*. A atomic bomb wasn’t, of course.
- and he knew we could strike back with more of the same, of course.
Why is there no comparison between invading Germany from the west in 1944 and the invading Japan in 1945? They were both massive military operations against major opponents. By December 1944 the US had over 2.5 million men on the continent of Europe rising to over 3 million in March 1945. Looking back now we can say casualties in invading Germany were relatively light but there was no way of knowing this in 1943/4. For the invasion of Japan the Allied commanders feared the fanaticism of the civilian population but for the invasion of western Europe they - rightly - feared the strength and skill of the Wehrmacht. It was all to possible to forsee stalemate and rising American casualty rates.
As it was it still cost over 100,000 US and 40,000 other Western Allied lives between D-Day and May 1945 and the major reason these figures were not higher was that the main bulk of German forces were fighting - and killing - Russians. I haven’t got Soviet casualty figures for June 44 to May 45 with me but they suffered over 400,000 deaths in the attack on Berlin alone. (These Soviet casualties may in part be explained by their tactics but they are not out of line with casualty rates for the attackers in other successful major operations - see German casualties during Barbarossa.) The defeat of Germany in 1944/45 must have cost approaching a million Russian, American, British, Canadian, and other Allied lives - the figure often claimed for a projected invasion of the Japanese home islands.
Given this why would the American and British leaders hesitate to use a weapon that could prevent these deaths? They were not going to worry too much about German casualties - they were being killed by air attack anyway and many more would die during an opposed ground attack.
As to there being plans for Germany well before 1945, the Yalta conference that agreed to the partition of Germany was in February 1945 and, as I indicated in my post, there was not great rejoicing at the idea of Soviet domination of central and eastern Europe. This just recognised the reality on the ground, the Russian Army was crushing the Germans and likely to take the territory anyway. If the bomb had been ready in late 1944 Roosevelt (and Churchill) would have had an ace up their sleeve and another option - ending the war before the Soviets reached Berlin.
The V2’s might not have been effective but they were being used against Britain - so the British would have seen stopping them as a legitimate goal. It would have made as much military sense as blowing up some Wehrmacht or Luftwaffe base anyway.
There would have been other considerations too. The Ruhr valley was in western Germany, which meant its factories were going to be controlled by the western allies after the war. Peenemunde was in Prussia and was going to be occupied by the Soviets. I can see Washington and London thinking it would be preferable for Stalin to take possession of a radioactive ruin rather than a functional missile development base.
The simplest answer to Wakinyan’s question is twofold:
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The Germans had a tradition of surrendering when any hope of victory was lost; the Japanese did not. An invasion of Fastung Europa and of Germany, while expensive in military terms, would inevitably lead to a surrender at an ‘affordable’ cost in lives and materiel. (Pardon the apparent callousness; I’m trying to phrase the answer in military strategic thought, not ethical terms.) Not so with Japan – even if it were down to 13-year-old boys, grandmothers, and invalids wielding bamboo spears, they were committed to fight on rather than surrender.
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Unlike the situation the year before with Germany, we had a viable alternative. We could, if needed, bomb Japan into submission – or at least military irrelevance. (We could also blockade it, a viable threat against an island nation dependent on imports for its war economy.) We still planned an invasion – but the threats of starving them out or destroying them from the air were believable.
IIRC the Japanese did surrender in China, in large numbers. Against the W Allies OTH they were often not given that option, at one time Marines had to be offered a pint of ice cream for not killing Japanese.
True enough. George MacDonald Fraser (the author of the Flashman books) in Quartered Safe Out Here, his memoir of being a 19 year old soldier in Burma, makes it very clear that most of the 14th Army worked on the principle that a dead Jap was the sort they liked.
My guess would have been, had there been any target, Dresden. For much the same reasons as it was picked to be firebombed. It had sufficient industry to make it important to the war effort, it was a major communications hub between the Eastern and Western fronts, and there was enough of it left (unlike Hamburg, Cologne etc) to make a good demonstration.
And also, being in the East, it would serve the twin purpose of convincing the Russians we were helping them while at the same time sending them a very visible message on territory that they were scheduled to occupy (and therefore have to rebuild).