Atomic bomb deployed against Germans

Vaccuum tubes are a lot more resistant to effects of EMPs than later circuits. About ten million times harder than integrated circuitry than that used even in the 1970s.

As Carl noted though it knocked out Japanese radio and telegraph for quite a while and (IIRC it's been years since I've seen the stuff on this) while the tubes themselves weren't actually damaged there was arcing and other damage (good old "arcing-and-sparking" :) ) throughout the system. Sure it was simple as replacing a fuse here and there but you have to find the fuse and quite often that's not where you start looking nor quite as obvious as that. Keep in mind the US didn't even really begin to understand EMP issues till the mid-50s.

Radiation wasn't also well understood at this period. Keep in mind the U.S. also planned to use atomic bombs in Japan during Operation Downfall, meaning American troops and marines would be exposed to deadly fall out while fighting the IJA.

The sad part is it's unlikely they'd have actually 'noticed' for decades given how the assumption was that both the Allies and Japan would resort to heavy chemical use and the troops and civilians would be dealing with a heavy aftermath of that which could hide the radiation problems for decades. Let's remember in context that the A-bombs in this case are simply another "tool" in the box and any studies of the aftermath are likely (specifically in Japan) going to be hindered by a very hostile population as well as hostile conditions. Using them in Europe would probably have more near-term effects and indicators but you'd have almost every single Allied and ex-Axis government not wanting those results to be public knowledge.

Randy
 
The sad part is it's unlikely they'd have actually 'noticed' for decades given how the assumption was that both the Allies and Japan would resort to heavy chemical use and the troops and civilians would be dealing with a heavy aftermath of that which could hide the radiation problems for decades. Let's remember in context that the A-bombs in this case are simply another "tool" in the box and any studies of the aftermath are likely (specifically in Japan) going to be hindered by a very hostile population as well as hostile conditions. Using them in Europe would probably have more near-term effects and indicators but you'd have almost every single Allied and ex-Axis government not wanting those results to be public knowledge.

Randy
I saw this historical documentary on Netflix about the effects of radiation poisoning in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. If memory serves, the survivors from the blast were observed by American doctors but none were told about the side-effects of being exposed to the deadly dose produced by the atomic bombs.

Then from this period in the late 1940s and early 1950s, I read and saw documentaries where personnel are actually exposed to radiation, especially in both American and British nuclear tests. Since these military personnel were often watching it from a safe distance but the fall out would also drench into them.
 
I saw this historical documentary on Netflix about the effects of radiation poisoning in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. If memory serves, the survivors from the blast were observed by American doctors but none were told about the side-effects of being exposed to the deadly dose produced by the atomic bombs.

Then from this period in the late 1940s and early 1950s, I read and saw documentaries where personnel are actually exposed to radiation, especially in both American and British nuclear tests. Since these military personnel were often watching it from a safe distance but the fall out would also drench into them.

In context of the thread that second part would in this case not have been 'testing' but the operational combat plan. To be fair they did try to minimize the exposure to direct fallout in the tests but winds and conditions change and it was how they a-bombs were supposed to be used operationally so they had to try it.

Now have them actually BE used operationally with as little planning as was going into the direct use planned, (no testing beforehand) and imagine the carnage and after that the even MORE intensive testing going on to 'prove' our an acceptable doctrine since they are now considered "just another weapon" for operational use. It's not going to be until you see the H-bomb deployed that they will go back to thinking of them as 'strategic' weapons.

In context, having had a-bombs used as tactical weapons someone like Truman is not going to consider them the 'wonder-weapon' he did OTL. Not only does that have butterflies that would effect post-war drawdown and demobilization (and budgets) but it would also effect his attitude should another war (like Korea) break out. Without the hype of the weapon being 'super-destructive' from the initial blast, (as it was considered OTL and without the longer term effects which were add on to the mystique later) the temptation and operational planning to use them more often is going to be there underlying every future conflict and situation.

Scary thought....

Randy
 
The Me 262A supposedly had a ceiling of about 40,000 ft but the engines usually flamed out around 25,000 ft. With careful handling, one did get to 40,000ft.

The Focke Wulf Ta 152 H was coming on line from late '44, could reach 44,000ft and was armed with a pair of 20mm cannons and and engine mounted 30mm cannon. That would have been more likely to go against the B29.
 
It's worth considering that the Germans might not surrender after 2 bombs like the Japanese did. The NSDAP leadership might just see it as yet another layer of hurt coming their way as Hitler sits in his bunker dreaming of final victory. The result could be that nukes are dropped on numerous cities and battlefields as part of the effort to speed up the war. America might end up taking all of Germany up to the Oder if it can advance fast enough.
 
I saw this historical documentary on Netflix about the effects of radiation poisoning in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. If memory serves, the survivors from the blast were observed by American doctors but none were told about the side-effects of being exposed to the deadly dose produced by the atomic bombs.

Then from this period in the late 1940s and early 1950s, I read and saw documentaries where personnel are actually exposed to radiation, especially in both American and British nuclear tests. Since these military personnel were often watching it from a safe distance but the fall out would also drench into them.
They did not watch from a safe distance. My father was a Navy Corpsman assigned to the Marines in Korea. He came home and got to go to a special school to learn how to operate these new “detectors”. His unit went to the desert. They would be in trenches for the blast. After the shockwave passed out then back in, they would advance towards ground zero. They wouldn’t stop until the detector was almost pegged. No PPE, no breathing protection, nothing. They would be covered with fallout. They did this 4 times. He got cancer so many times and type we almost lost count. It eventually killed him.
 
The A-Bomb ended the war in the Pacific for a whole host of factors that wouldn’t be in play here such as Japan was sent signals a relatively soft peace awaited them if they surrendered. The signals Germans were sent was division, deindustrialization, and the heavy loss of territories they had for a very long time.

Even a non-Nazi military government was going to fight on to the end nukes dropping on their cities or not.
 
As Carl noted though it knocked out Japanese radio and telegraph for quite a while and (IIRC it's been years since I've seen the stuff on this) while the tubes themselves weren't actually damaged there was arcing and other damage (good old "arcing-and-sparking" :) ) throughout the system. Sure it was simple as replacing a fuse here and there but you have to find the fuse and quite often that's not where you start looking nor quite as obvious as that. Keep in mind the US didn't even really begin to understand EMP issues till the mid-50s.


Randy

Actually it seems to have been a lot of fuzes. As well as replacing weak connections that arc a bit too much. Beyond that there is the problem of any phone exchange, radio shack, or HQ actually inside the overpressure zone. The resistance of Capacitator tubes or Fuzes is irrelevant where the building is collapsed & the operators maimed & dead.

Back when I used to plan these things for real we had some decision aids written out. One was a priority matrix. Without going into detail here's a common priority list from that .

1. HQ/Communications hubs

2. Nuke, Chemical, Biological weapons

3. Supply & logistics sites

4. Fire support: Artillery, air fields, missile sites

5, maneuver units: infantry, armor,


Nothing set in stone about that. Actual list and choices will vary by circumstances. For our notional battlefield nuke perhaps this makes more sense:

1. HQ/Communications hubs

2. Reserves: maneuver units: infantry, armor,

3. Supply & logistics sites.

& lets shift the notional battlefield to March 1945 & Operation Plunder. Here Im thinking the ability to paralyze the defenders C & C for a couple days is valuable than the logistics base. In Germany you were practically on top of the supply sources, and the robust rail net makes of a highly dispersed and decentralized supply network. If reserves are identified and concentrated enough nuking them might be more useful in the tactical PoV that the logistics sites. However if the local army HQ location is known, then I'd argue for that.
 
I would use the Lancaster bomber. It actually was better suited to dropping an atomic bomb than the B-29 was. With that, the Allies could have hit anyplace.

If I were in charge, I would start with Berlin. Yes, it kills the leadership. It would kill all command and control. Individual generals in the field would be lost without orders. Would Germany have been able to coordinate a war without Berlin? Would the soldiers in the field fight on when they find out that the capitol of the Reich was gone? Many wouldn't. Hamburg was another logical alternative. That would kill imports. Of course, that had been pounded over and over. Or you could pick a city on the Ziegfried Line and blow it and the nearby section of the line up. Cologne or Dusseldorf maybe? Both are in pretty level areas so that would aid the blast.

Stuttgart is bordering mountainous, lots of variation in height. Not as good for the shockwave spreading. I don't think Munich would be ideal either. It's up high enough that the AA guns are more likely to get lucky at like 600 meters. It's 500 meters closer to the target than Cologne. Terrain wise, Berlin would be best at 40 meters and pretty darn flat. Of course, it would be the best protected place AA wise.
 
Personally I don't see the Americans deploying the Atomic bomb on a fellow White Western European Christian population no matter who they are (Nazis or what not). If anyone was gonna be the test dummy, it was always gonna be the Japanese in this scenario
 
I would use the Lancaster bomber. It actually was better suited to dropping an atomic bomb than the B-29 was. With that, the Allies could have hit anyplace.

If I were in charge, I would start with Berlin. Yes, it kills the leadership. It would kill all command and control. Individual generals in the field would be lost without orders. Would Germany have been able to coordinate a war without Berlin? Would the soldiers in the field fight on when they find out that the capitol of the Reich was gone? Many wouldn't. Hamburg was another logical alternative. That would kill imports. Of course, that had been pounded over and over. Or you could pick a city on the Ziegfried Line and blow it and the nearby section of the line up. Cologne or Dusseldorf maybe? Both are in pretty level areas so that would aid the blast.

Stuttgart is bordering mountainous, lots of variation in height. Not as good for the shockwave spreading. I don't think Munich would be ideal either. It's up high enough that the AA guns are more likely to get lucky at like 600 meters. It's 500 meters closer to the target than Cologne. Terrain wise, Berlin would be best at 40 meters and pretty darn flat. Of course, it would be the best protected place AA wise.
I though the lancaster lacked the speed and ceiling to be suitable for delivering Abombs. The speed might not matter so much if you can slow the descent of the bomb enough to allow the lanc to escape the blast and turbulence but insufficient ceiling would be a problem. Could it fly high enough to be useful?
 
I though the lancaster lacked the speed and ceiling to be suitable for delivering Abombs. The speed might not matter so much if you can slow the descent of the bomb enough to allow the lanc to escape the blast and turbulence but insufficient ceiling would be a problem. Could it fly high enough to be useful?
It would have to be a night raid. Could it escape the bomb blast? That's not exactly relevant. It could get a bomb there and deliver it. It had the carrying capacity and the range. So what if seven men die ending Nazi Germany? So what if seventy men die? Not when so many were dying every day and hundreds could be lost conducting a single conventional air raid.

The lancaster can't, there's a reason why the B-29 is developed and why the project cost more than the manhattan project

That wasn't why the B-29 was developed. It was to bomb Germany when England fell, and when that wasn't going to happen the project just kept on going. It actually would have been easier to shoehorn one of those atomic bombs in a Lancaster than a B-29. The bomb bay was larger. They couldn't even close the doors of the bomber while it was flying to drop the bomb. See this picture of the Enola Gay in flight to Hiroshima.
p02yt28w.jpg
 
Personally I don't see the Americans deploying the Atomic bomb on a fellow White Western European Christian population no matter who they are (Nazis or what not). If anyone was gonna be the test dummy, it was always gonna be the Japanese in this scenario
It was very clear from Day One of the atomic bomb project that it would absolutely be used against Germany. In fact, the British project that did some of the basic research to demonstrate the feasibility of nuclear weapons started when Germany was the only country they could plausibly be used against.
That wasn't why the B-29 was developed. It was to bomb Germany when England fell, and when that wasn't going to happen the project just kept on going.
The B-29 didn't have the range to bomb Germany if the UK fell - that was what the B-36 was for.
It actually would have been easier to shoehorn one of those atomic bombs in a Lancaster than a B-29.
There's more to carrying an atomic bomb than whether it fits. The Lancaster was totally unsuitable for the job on several grounds:
  • Not fast enough
  • Not high-flying enough
  • Not American enough
The first two would mean it couldn't fly the mission. The last one meant it wouldn't be given the chance. Any discussions around using Lancasters were purely a means to apply pressure to Boeing when the B-29 work was slipping.
 
Wasn't that the B-36? The B-29 still didn't have the range to bomb Germany from air bases in North America, the B-36 did.
The B36 was the final goal, but that's why they started the B-29.

There's more to carrying an atomic bomb than whether it fits. The Lancaster was totally unsuitable for the job on several grounds:
  • Not fast enough
  • Not high-flying enough
  • Not American enough
The first two would mean it couldn't fly the mission. The last one meant it wouldn't be given the chance. Any discussions around using Lancasters were purely a means to apply pressure to Boeing when the B-29 work was slipping.

By far, the biggest problem of the three was the last one. Wikipedia said in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Avro_Lancaster

Prior to the decision to carry out extensive modifications under Silverplate to the Boeing B-29 Superfortress to allow it deliver atomic bombs over Japan, serious consideration was given to using the Lancaster with its cavernous bomb bay instead. Using the Lancaster would have required much less modification to the aircraft itself, but would have necessitated additional crew training for the USAAF crews. Major General Leslie Groves, the director of the Manhattan Project, and General Henry H. Arnold, the Chief of United States Army Air Forces (USAAF), wished to use an American plane if this was at all possible.

Wikipedia's reference for the quote was Groves, Leslie (1962). Now it Can be Told: The Story of the Manhattan Project. New York: Harper & Row. pp. 254–255. ISBN 0-306-70738-1. OCLC 537684.

Could a British crew have been used without retraining them? Surely. Remember, we are talking about bombing Germany. After mid-1944, we would be bombing Germany from France. Range was definitely not the issue. In a night mission with good fighter support with radar, I don't think speed or altitude would be an issue. The RAF conducted many successful night time raids using the Lancaster.
 
I think it was Austrian textbooks during the Cold War which had the bombing of Dresden, the Holocaust, and the atomic bombings of Hiroshima on the same page to compare them as being similar. Though it might have been Japanese ones. Either way, they would be used as excuses as for why someone bleeding with torn clothing bashing in the head of their attacker was more at fault. Now, anyone know how much of Hiroshima and Nagasaki was brick and cement versus wood? A lot of German cities would have wooded buildings in the older parts of the city, but I feel there would not be the firestorm of some Japanese cities from when people were sucked into the flames. Depending where the bombs are dropped, portions of some castles may even survive, not as likely with the castles build in the preceding century or for cathedrals, given how those would be a bit higher and more hollow.
 
I feel there would not be the firestorm of some Japanese cities from when people were sucked into the flames
This was observed in the firestorms in Hamburg and Dresden, as well as Tokyo; it wasn't unique to Japan at all. The comparatively minor firestorms at Kassel, Darmstadt and Ube don't seem to have done. Even with nuclear weapons, no firestorm was observed at Nagasaki.

Whilst German (and generally European) construction used more brick and masonry, I believe it used these materials to build higher than Japanese wooden buildings. I suspect that the result is that the total combustible load for European and Japanese cities was similar, leading to similar potential for firestorms.
 
They did not watch from a safe distance. My father was a Navy Corpsman assigned to the Marines in Korea. He came home and got to go to a special school to learn how to operate these new “detectors”. His unit went to the desert. They would be in trenches for the blast. After the shockwave passed out then back in, they would advance towards ground zero. They wouldn’t stop until the detector was almost pegged. No PPE, no breathing protection, nothing. They would be covered with fallout. They did this 4 times. He got cancer so many times and type we almost lost count. It eventually killed him.
Damn, that's terrible. The same way the British too when they did nuclear tests in Australia or the waters around it.
 
A few problem with Using the Bomb in Germany.
Assuming A Feb delivery date for a finished bomb. And assuming the war is 6 months behind were it was in the real timeline, This puts the Alies in a position just a bit earlier then the real timeline Market Garden. So the Allies have pushed Germany back to the Edges of its own Territory.
So dropping the bomb will have to take place basically in Germany to avoid getting it TOO close to your own troops, There is the first problem albeit relatively minor.
Problem 2 Germany still has a bit of an Active Air Defence including Jets.,, .I think the Drops were from about 30-32 K feet. Anyone know how high a ME262 can get or the 163?
Problem 3 you do not have B 29s in europe so you need yo bring them over as well as the support crews and parts and such which is not a little endeavor. (and NO the US is not letting GB drop the Nuke even if they had an Aircraft that could dobit)
Problem 4. if you. only bring over a few Silver Plates for the Nukes you are kind of giving away that you are doing something different. And you may as well blow a buggel if you have to do a second one. So you are definnintaly scream…. “Shoot THIS one, this one right here!”
Problem 5. If you bring over sine regular B-29s to use conventionally you are eating into the very limited supply that is despratly needed against Japan where range is a huge issue.
Problem 6. Even in a Slowed Europe theater the invasion of Germany is going yo be simpler then landing on Mainland Japan. and then having yo do it again for the next homecisland…. So you are going yo miss those Nukes.
Problem 7. There is a bit of a surpise factor involved in just destroying on sit out of the clear blue sky with no precident for it. I image that would be quite shocking. If you vaporised Hamburge a couplecmonths back then Japan is not going to be very surpised
Problem 8. By using the bomb and the B-29 combo in Germany you have warned Japan that they want to find a way to down one of this. This may not be enough to do Japan any good but…. It still shows your hand.
Problem 9. if the US could start hitting Japan with Nukes 6 as soon as a close enough air strip is available you could potentially safe more lives then using them in Germany. Or even hit the Islands. The casulties on those landers were horrendeous.
Problem 10. (my personal biggest problem). One of the most obvious Ztargets would be Hamburg. But If you hit Hamburg.. odds are i am not
here!

So while it can be done and none if the problems are so drastic as to be inposible to over come (except 10 ;) ) they do add up to the. point that you are probably better stock piling them until you can flatten the Japan.
2. Fairly irrelevant. A nuclear strike would be a small mission with a couple of aircraft, more like a reconnaissance mission, and unlikely to trigger a heavy response.
3. Yes a delivery platform would be needed. Deploying a few Silverplate B-29s would not be a logistical problem.
4. Nonsense. The Germans wouldn't know. Their aerial recon was negligible, their spies turned or imprisoned.
5. Irrelevant as I've stated.
6. What is this supposed to actually mean? If nuclear weapons are available six months early (perhaps by dropping the uranium bomb path and redistributing resources) then the historical production rate should be available.
7. They're still going to see cities disappear in a mushroom cloud. It might take a few more bombs but historically the US had eighteen weapons planned for by the end of 1945. Given six extra months that'd be approximately doubled.
8. Irrelevant.
9. Tactical use of nuclear weapons is potentially useful, though chemical agents would probably be better.
10. Irrelevant.
 
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