In the hands of my enemies: Japan shoots down the Enola Gay

What if Japan had shot done either missions to nuke Hiroshima or Nagasaki?

Yes this is another on of my tease threads with a cool (pretentious) title that sounds like a timeline but is really just a question.
 
Several weeks prior, the Japanese had stopped sending planes against American bombers in preparation for Ketsu-Go. If for some reason an air base decides to ignore this, the Japanese have shot down a B-29. The pilot will probably be congratulated but reminded not to disobey high command again.

Those who knew about that Enola Gay really carried will have a much more emotional and loud response I'm sure.
 
didn't the piliots and crew recieve suicide pills ? and anyways the japs wouldent think much about it if the bomb somehow landed intact,after all,no one knew what a atomic bomb was
 
didn't the piliots and crew recieve suicide pills ? and anyways the japs wouldent think much about it if the bomb somehow landed intact,after all,no one knew what a atomic bomb was

No need for suicide pills. The impact would have easily triggered off the nuke and the whole thing gets atomised.

Maybe, in a twist of irony, the Enola Gay or Bock's Car gets shot down, crash into the intended target and nuke wherever they were headed.
 

Cook

Banned
In July 680 B-29 Bombers flew over Japan, 3 were shot down.

The Japanese weren’t even trying to attack individual aircraft by then, only sending their fighters up against massed formations of American Bombers where there was a possibility of them getting in amongst the bombers before being pounced on by the P-51 escorts.

I am not saying it is impossible. I’m just saying the Enola Gay would have had to be very fucking unlucky.

Ok, so they shoot down the Enola Gay. In all likelihood the B-29 would have limped back towards Tinian or tried for Iwo Jima, crashing into the sea. In that case the first successful Atomic Bombing mission is carried out by B-29 Bockscar three days later.

If Enola Gay crashed on Japanese soil, they would have perhaps attempted to recover the Aluminium from its airframe, they would have just left the engines and the other strange wreckage as it wouldn’t have had any value to their war effort.

You weren’t expecting an undamaged Atomic Bomb to be sitting in the wreckage were you?
 
The Bomb exploded at 1900 ft indicating a altimeter firing device. If the Plane was shot down, the bomb would still have gone off. Just not on Target.
 
The Bomb exploded at 1900 ft indicating a altimeter firing device.


THIS.

Both Little Boy and Fat Man were armed after take-off from Tinian and the arming process included the activation of an altimeter firing device.

If Enola Gay or Bock's Car were somehow damaged enough to make reaching the target area impossible, the crews would have released the bomb in question and then attempted to make the special post-drop maneuver to put as much distance as possible between them and the coming detonation. If either plane was actually shot down, the bombs would detonate within plane once it dropped below a certain height.

The loss of either plane enemy action - an extremely low odds event as Cook correctly points out - would not effect the drop of the next bomb in the slightest.

Once Truman signed the executive order, Japan was getting nuked. Period.
 
Is that really Eleven11? Or someone else?

That thread was close to a year before The Thread.


Yup, it is. He's actually been all over the internet, posting the same stupid points and the same stupid antisemitism. Apparently what we got was only the tip of the iceberg-his world view includes no less than 65 separate conspiracies.
 
I was waiting for someone to bring that up...

"There was no back-up plan!"

Edit: By the by, here's Eleven11 in his full glory, complete with all the racial slurs and paranoia we missed out on: http://www.sciforums.com/showthread.php?t=65869

Wow. I love how other posters are just asking the simple questions. "Yes but, why would the Jews fake an atomic weapon?" And I love how dinosaurs and the moon landing are faked. I say we put him on display at the Smithsonian. "Prime example of early 21st century Troll."

Anyway, if the bomber is shot down over the city, then the bomb goes off and the crew gets posthumous Medal of Honor or another decoration. If it's shot down over the bay, then maybe the Japanese would just see the explosion and give up. Or not, and then Fat Man is dropped and history continues on its roughly OTL path.
 

loughery111

Banned
What if Japan had shot done either missions to nuke Hiroshima or Nagasaki?

Yes this is another on of my tease threads with a cool (pretentious) title that sounds like a timeline but is really just a question.

The bomb was an airburst, triggered by altimeter that was armed before entering Japanese airspace... thus you have a very large boom somewhere in the countryside that still manages to kill a few thousand people and one deeply unhappy fighter pilot (even if he is far enough away to live, he still goes blind and crashes)...
 
Why would the Japanese scramble for just three B-29s (one bomber, two observation craft)? They were use to a few bombers flying over at a time and dropping annoying leaflets upon their cities. The Japanese might just view that as a waste of fuel.
 
didn't the piliots and crew recieve suicide pills ? and anyways the japs wouldent think much about it if the bomb somehow landed intact,after all,no one knew what a atomic bomb was
Can you not use "jap"? That's a racial slur.

If Enola Gay crashed on Japanese soil, they would have perhaps attempted to recover the Aluminium from its airframe, they would have just left the engines and the other strange wreckage as it wouldn’t have had any value to their war effort.

You weren’t expecting an undamaged Atomic Bomb to be sitting in the wreckage were you?
Dunno, I would pretty much assume that if the bomb was intact, the Japanese would recover it. A huge bomb is probably worth a lot to the war effort.

Btw, the altimeter and the bomb itself was armed 30 minutes before the site. It wasn't armed all the time, so its definitely possible that in the extremely unlikely event of a shootdown, the craft drops down with the bomb intact. Wouldn't change much in the long run of course.
 
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