Allies getting the Atomic Bomb Before Dday

What if the US had successfully tested a nuclear bomb before the DDAY invasion lets say April 1944. Would the entire DDAY invasion have been called off and the US would have just nuked Germany city after city till they surrendered? Would this change how the postwar Europe looked like as well even though the Allies and the Soviets had agreed to how they would partition Europe?
 
Bombing Berlin makes a good distraction on June 4th for the planned invasion on the 5th, as every fighter will get ordered to Bomber interceptions, with Bomb #2 being dropped just behind the beaches, maybe on Caen
 
Bombing Berlin makes a good distraction on June 4th for the planned invasion on the 5th, as every fighter will get ordered to Bomber interceptions, with Bomb #2 being dropped just behind the beaches, maybe on Caen

Berlin I can understand. But Caen? Bit too close for comfort there is it not?

Nevermind you would have the French pissed off to oblivion.
 
with Bomb #2 being dropped just behind the beaches, maybe on Caen

I feel like this is a really good way to lose a lot of French support very quickly. Also not sure the Allies would bomb Berlin immediately for the same reasons Tokyo wasn't the first target, with the added difficulty of it being far inland. I'd expect an industrial city that isn't much of a cultural center (same criteria used on Japan) in northwestern Germany to be hit first, but I'm not an expert so I have no idea what it might end up being. Maybe Hamburg? But that seems to be a pretty major cultural center. So maybe Bremen then?
 
Unlike Japan in 1945, Germany still had a working (but weakening) air defense network by June 1944, so I don't think anyone was counting on Germany surrendering to just nuclear weapons.
Considering how little was known about radiation back then, I'd expect a tactical use at some of the beaches, followed by the loss of the invasion force in that beach to radiation poisoning. I don't think that would loose French support - France was bombed by the allies during the war and allied forces, including Free French troops, did their share of raping in France
 
But Caen? Bit too close for comfort there is it not?

Sure. Maybe you have forgotten the talks on this topic among US planners for Olympic and Coronet. They did not rule out having their own troops into nuclear-bombed areas after 48 hours from the bombing.
 
I feel like this is a really good way to lose a lot of French support very quickly. Also not sure the Allies would bomb Berlin immediately for the same reasons Tokyo wasn't the first target, with the added difficulty of it being far inland. I'd expect an industrial city that isn't much of a cultural center (same criteria used on Japan) in northwestern Germany to be hit first, but I'm not an expert so I have no idea what it might end up being. Maybe Hamburg? But that seems to be a pretty major cultural center. So maybe Bremen then?
Both are mostly toast by June 1944. Bremen had the first thousand plane raid in 1942 and had industrial targets hit constantly after that.

Finding Berlin with the newest USAF AN/APQ-13 is easy.
Its not to damage Berlin(though it certainly would) but to provoke a Nazi reaction
 

nbcman

Donor
What if the US had successfully tested a nuclear bomb before the DDAY invasion lets say April 1944. Would the entire DDAY invasion have been called off and the US would have just nuked Germany city after city till they surrendered? Would this change how the postwar Europe looked like as well even though the Allies and the Soviets had agreed to how they would partition Europe?
The USAAF lacks the Silverplates to carry them. They were pre-production in June 1944. The first B-29s weren't delivered to the USAAF until July 1943. The first test of a B-29 bomber and scale dummy a-bomb was done in August 1943 and it was not a success. Plus the US Army Engineers had to design and construct the runways that could support the weight of these superheavy bombers which had not concluded by early 1944. So there is another item that has to be dramatically accelerated over OTL to get the delivery mechanism and the runway sturdy enough to support the delivery mechanism plus the bomb ready by the April 1944 deadline. That's a whole bunch of PODs.
 
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The USAAF lacks the Silverplates to carry them. They were pre-production in June 1944. The first B-29s weren't delivered to the USAAF until July 1943. The first test of a prototype bomb was done in August 1943 and it was not a success. Plus the US Army Engineers had to design and construct the runways that could support the weight of these superheavy bombers which had not concluded by early 1944. So there is another item that has to be dramatically accelerated over OTL to get the delivery mechanism and the runway sturdy enough to support the delivery mechanism plus the bomb ready by the April 1944 deadline. That's a whole bunch of PODs.

Well, you can always use a Lancaster. They could carry the Tallboys in June 1944, so why not a Little Boy in May... Bit less safe, in terms of altitude, than a B-29, though.

Generally speaking, I suspect that if the Allies do begin seeing readiness of the first device as a possibility for May 1944, they'll see that at least a year in advance, and they will begin plan for the delivery platform accordingly. Maybe the USAAF just buys a squadron of Lancs.
 
The USAAF lacks the Silverplates to carry them. They were pre-production in June 1944. The first B-29s weren't delivered to the USAAF until July 1943. The first test of a prototype bomb was done in August 1943 and it was not a success. Plus the US Army Engineers had to design and construct the runways that could support the weight of these superheavy bombers which had not concluded by early 1944. So there is another item that has to be dramatically accelerated over OTL to get the delivery mechanism and the runway sturdy enough to support the delivery mechanism plus the bomb ready by the April 1944 deadline. That's a whole bunch of PODs.

What was the bomb tested in August 1943 that was a failure? Test site, bomb type, etc.
 
Unlike Japan in 1945, Germany still had a working (but weakening) air defense network by June 1944, so I don't think anyone was counting on Germany surrendering to just nuclear weapons.

The other problem this fact presents is the high risk of losing the aircraft, and the Nazis recovering the bomb in some shape. The Japanese, of course, basically had no fighter defenses to speak of in August 1945.

We've had threads about this before. Lesie Grovers was actually interviewed on the subject of using it on Germany:

REPORTER: General Groves, could we go back for a minute. You mentioned in your book [Now it Can Be Told] that just before the Yalta Conference that President Roosevelt said if we had bombs before the European war was over he would like to drop them on Germany.3 Would you discuss this?

GROVES: At the conference that Secretary Stimson and myself had with President Roosevelt shortly before his departure, I believe it was December 30th or 31st of 1944, President Roosevelt was quite disturbed over the Battle of the Bulge and he asked me at that time whether I could bomb Germany as well as Japan. The plan had always been to bomb Japan because we thought the war in Germany was pretty apt to be over in the first place and in the second place the Japanese building construction was much more easily damaged by a bomb of this character than that in Germany. I urged President Roosevelt that it would be very difficult for various reasons.

The main one was that the Germans had quite strong aerial defense. They made a practice, as every nation does, that when a new plane came into the combat area, that they would run any risk that they could to bring such a plane down so that they could examine it and see what new ideas had come in so that they could make improvements and also would know the characteristics of the plane so that they could prepare a better defense against it. We had no B-29’s in Europe. If we had sent over a small squadron or group as we did against Japan of this type, everyone of them would have been brought down on the first trip to Germany. If they hadn’t been, it would have been through no lack of effort on the part of the Germans.


The alternative would be to bring a large number of B-29’s over to to England and that would have been a major logistical task and the other possibility would have been to have used a British plane which would not have been a bit pleasing to General Arnold and also would have created a great many difficulties for our general operation because then it would be an Allied operation with the United States furnishing the bombs and everything connected with it but using a British plane and a British crew to actually drop the bomb and it would have raised a tremendous number of difficulties.

And difficulties like that — while you say you should be able to handle that — you can but in a project of this character there are so many little things, each one of them key, that you can’t afford to throw any more sand into the wheels that you can help.

The bombing of Germany with atomic bombs was, I would say, never seriously considered to the extent of making definite plans but on this occasion I told the President, Mr. Roosevelt, why it would be very unfortunate from my standpoint, I added that of course if the President — if the war demanded it and the President so desired, we would bomb Germany and I was so certain personally that the war in Europe would be over before we would be ready that you might say I didn’t give it too much consideration.
In addition to what Groves says, I have long thought that if they did indeed hit Germany, it would be something at the out edge of its fighter defense net, preferably coming in over the sea so that, if it *is* shot down, there is a good chance that the plane and bomb fall into the sea. To me, this suggests a target like Wilhelmshaven, Bremerhaven, Bremen, or Hamburg. Probably at the same time you're pasting another city with a huge conventional raid, to draw off Luftwaffe fighters.
 

nbcman

Donor
What was the bomb tested in August 1943 that was a failure? Test site, bomb type, etc.

Sorry, typo on me. That should have read 'bomber' not bomb-the only bomb that was used was a scaled model which was half the size of the expected bomb. It was this testing of a B-29 in VA per the Silverplate wiki article:

Arnold and the head of the Ordnance Division at Los Alamos, Captain William S. Parsons, arranged for tests to be carried out at the Naval Proving Ground in Dahlgren, Virginia, in August 1943. No aircraft was available that could carry the 17-foot (5.2 m) long Thin Man, so a 9-foot (2.7 m) scale model was used. The results were disappointing – the bomb fell in a flat spin – but the need for a thorough test program was demonstrate
 
Sorry, but I have to ask a fundamental question: how does one accelerate the fundamental science and engineering sufficiently to have one or more nuclear weapons ready about 14 months sooner than IOTL? This would require a successful prototype test in late 1943 (I'd guess) and accelerated production of fissionable materials. That has the reverse ripple effect of a successful nuclear chain reaction almost at the time of Pearl Harbor. It's a bit difficult to swallow that research would be at that point by then.
 
By the end of 1943, nearly a hundred B-29s had been built. Leaving out the troublesome computerised gun systems speeds things up.
OTL the first were conbat ready in May, 1944.
Nice timing, that.

Also, YB-29 #39663 'Hobo Queen' had visited Britain before in March 1944 in OD Green, so there were airfields that were usable. Bristol was also working on giant aircraft
 
Sorry, but I have to ask a fundamental question: how does one accelerate the fundamental science and engineering sufficiently to have one or more nuclear weapons ready about 14 months sooner than IOTL? This would require a successful prototype test in late 1943 (I'd guess) and accelerated production of fissionable materials. That has the reverse ripple effect of a successful nuclear chain reaction almost at the time of Pearl Harbor. It's a bit difficult to swallow that research would be at that point by then.

If some of the associated physics research had been more advanced say in the late 1930's it would have accelerated the design of a weapon, but that still left all of that massive infrastructure needed to produce the U235 and Pu238 in sufficient quantities for a weapon. The Manhattan project did go down several blind alleys particularly on the design and fabrication side, iirc the Little Boy design team spent some time actually worrying about barrel wear for the gun part of the weapon before twigging that it was a one and done kind of thing anyway.

If the Physics had been more advanced and the design and manufacturing teams had "lucked" into the right solutions first off I could see a possible earlier weapon, but that would still have left the delivery system and choice of target as thornier problems. The Lancaster might have been able to carry the weight, but it would have done so at a much lower altitude than a B29 and the Lanc would likely have been killed by the bombs blast effects.
 

nbcman

Donor
By the end of 1943, nearly a hundred B-29s had been built. Leaving out the troublesome computerised gun systems speeds things up.
OTL the first were conbat ready in May, 1944.
Nice timing, that.

Also, YB-29 #39663 'Hobo Queen' had visited Britain before in March 1944 in OD Green, so there were airfields that were usable. Bristol was also working on giant aircraft
Flown around Britain in a deception campaign, yes. But not with a full bomb & fuel load which would be necessary for a nuke bomb mission. Big difference in load.
 
Flown around Britain in a deception campaign, yes. But not with a full bomb & fuel load which would be necessary for a nuke bomb mission. Big difference in load.
Won't need a full fuel load, Scotland to Berlin is only 700 miles, vs 1300 with Tinian to Hiroshima
 
Sorry, but I have to ask a fundamental question: how does one accelerate the fundamental science and engineering sufficiently to have one or more nuclear weapons ready about 14 months sooner than IOTL?

Really, the only realistic answer is that you have to start the entire program that many months sooner.
 
Really, the only realistic answer is that you have to start the entire program that many months sooner.
There were goofs in building the Y-12 Calutrons and the K-25 Gaseous Diffusion compressors.

Gone as planned, that would have increased U-235 production enough for a years earlier use, and not needing to test Little Boy also saves a month
 
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