DBWI: Could the bombing of Liverpool and Glasgow been avoided ?

General Zod

Banned
A question that has haunted the historians since the end of WWII, during the Long Drum Roll between the anticolonialist USA and the imperialist European Union, could the nuclear bombing of Liverpool and Glasgow have been avoided ? Was the use of nukes truly necessary to force the Guardist regime of Britain to surrender ?

By the time the nukes were used, Nazist France had been overrun by the Russo-German-Italian alliance, Britain stood alone in Europe, and Japan was besieged by the USA and on its last legs as well. Should the Russo-Germans have gone along with the planned Operation Barracuda, the conventional invasion of Britain ?

A justification proffered by the Russo-German leadership for the use of nukes was that the invasion would have caused inacceptably high losses to their troops, and to the British civilian population itself, since the fanatically nationalist-militarist Guardist leadership would have unleashed total war to defend their island.

Others retort that both the invasion and the use of nukes would have been unnecessary, Britain could have been brought to its knees by the continued combined use of naval blockade and air carpet bombings, as the Triple Alliance had begun to apply in the last months of the war, and the USA successfuly used to subdue militarist Japan on their own.

But the Russo-German-Italians were just too eager to send an indirect warning to their erstwhile ally, and next rival superpower, the USA. They worried about American seizure of Australia and growing rivalry about South and East Asia, which had been growing throughout the 1920s and 1930s, only to be temporarily dampened by the growing revanchist threat of Nazi France and Guardist Britain, their Axis with Japan, and the explosion of WWII.

Other commentators look further back, and remark that the blame must be cast squarely on the injustices of the Potsdam treaty: honestly, one cannot help but recognize that the treaty, by imposing exorbitant reparation and harsh military limitations to France and Britain, stripping most of their colonial Empires away, removing Lorraine, Nice, Savoy, Corsica, and Nord from France, and Canada from Britain, was just too much for those two proud nations, and made the rise of Nazism and Guardism all but inevitable.

It must be remarked, however, that casting the blame for the genocidal atrocities of Nazi France (the Holocaust of Jews, Roma, homosexuals, North African Arabs, and African Blacks) and the aggressions of the Nazi-Guardists (Spain, Portugal, Norway, Sweden) prior to the war, not to mention the carnage of the WWII itself, on Potsdam is in all evidence injust and excessive. After all, French society was already rife with racism and right-wing extremism and British society was scarcely democratic even before WWI, and the shock of losing the war made the rise of totalitarian dictatorships arguably inevitable in both countries, even if the peace treaty drafted by the Four Great Powers (Germany, Italy, Russia, and USA) had been more lenient.

One may point to the contrary example of the defeated countries (Austria-Bohemia, Netherlands-Flanders, Canada, British West Indies, Slovenia, Dalmatia, Montenegro-Albania, Poland, and Romania), which adapted to incorporation in Germany, USA, Italy, and Russia remarkably well after WWI, without falling prey to intractable and destructive nationalism. Of course, the seemingly intractable sores of Serbian terrorism in Europe, and Muslim insurgency in ex-Ottoman/Persian territories, offers countrary evidence.

And many point out to the fact that the economic prosperity and liberal political regimes of the victor countries justify the relatively smooth incorporations of the conquered territories, while the Allies only cared about callously ripping their war booty, in annexations, colonies, and reparations, from the defeated Entente countries that they could not wipe off the map like A-H and the Ottomans, and eventually abandoned Britain, France, and Japan in the throes of economic collapse, political instability, and nationalist extremism.

Some have even argued that Potsdam was, if anything, too lenient: instead of leaving British, French, and Japanese industrial and demographic potential intact and able to unleash yet another round of aggression on trhe world, Britain, France, and Japan should have militarily occupied after WWI, and maybe France should have been divided by the Allied powers, much like the European Union and the USA did after WWII.
 
I don't think the US had any other choice. It was either that or a costly amphibious invasion of Britain which would have dragged the war out at least another year.
 

General Zod

Banned
I don't think the US had any other choice. It was either that or a costly amphibious invasion of Britain which would have dragged the war out at least another year.

OOC: Actually, it is the German-Russian-Italian Triple Alliance to nuke Britain. Since in this universe, Germany, Russia, and Italy won WWI, they became liberal constitutional monarchies, and evolved into a proto-EU, so there never was any exodus of Jewish scientists to the United States, so they would be the first to develop nuclear weapons at the end of WWII. I assumed that without those scientists, the USA would develop nukes slightly later, at the end of the 1940s, not in time to use them against Japan.

IC: Yes, but can we assume the casualty estimates of the Allies for Operation Barracuda were realistic ? Would have Britain really fought such an all-out total war as to cause such outrageous losses ? Did the Guardist regime kept the operational capability and the fanatical allegiance of its population as to fight the invasion to the last man ? And why could not the European Allies simply force britain to surrender through airtight naval blockade and continued carpet bombing ?
 
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