Sorry to go off topic, so on the question of the German war, I think that even as early as February with the progress of the ground war and the endgame agreed among the Allies, I think a Silverplate Special would be "questionable" unless it is dropped on Nurnberg or Berlin. Decapitation was the only justification. it would be done on that basis.
The Japanese needed multiple shocks. Bombs and the Russians in combo was what convinced the war criminal, Hirohito. People forget, HE made the call to quit and HE made it stick. The other members of the war council lacked the authority or the prestige to decide. He was the god-emperor, until MacArthur took him down a peg in that famous postwar Shogun photograph.
Whatever gripes I have about "Mister Corncob Pipe", he understood the politics and the symbolism.
What do you know? I've got a
@McPherson post I can pretty much agree with.
This topic has come up a number of times at AHC. Sometimes the context shapes the answer. And the biggest context we have to clarify is:
When does this happen? When in this ATL do the Allies have the Bomb ready? Because that makes a difference. @ObsessedNuker rightly raised this point just now. If it's close enough to VE Day, when the Allies are on or over the Rhine, I think the odds are Roosevelt and Churchill do *not* drop the Bomb on Germany. Because a) it is not needed any longer to defeat Germany (let alone to avert an Allied defeat), b) high risks involved (See below), and c) dropping it on Germany alerts the Japanese to its existence, and Roosevelt and Churchill were pretty damned sure they were going to need to use it on Japan.
The last time the subject came up, the premise was basically a year or so earlier -- early enough that its use might make a difference in the war against Germany. So let's say it its a least late (3Q/4Q) 1944 or earlier. That being the case, I can copypasta a lot of one of my earlier posts on this....
McPherson hints at the first point I would like to make: Any targeting plans regarding Germany would have been considerably shaped by the
more robust aerial defenses the Reich still possessed at the end of 1944 -
defenses which were much more robust than those of Japan in August 1945 (which were negligible at best, with the remaining planes, fuel and pilots being hoarded for use against OLYMPIC and CORONET).
In fact, there wasn't really any planning at all with regards to targets in Germany. In part this was because of the prospect that the Bomb would not be ready in time anyway, but also because of concerns over the dangers that a bomber would be shot down, and
the risk the Germans might recover it intact. The
first targeting discussion, in early 1943 (involving a group composed of Gen. Groves, Vannevar Bush, James B. Conant, Admiral William Purnell, and Major General Wilhelm Styer)
actually proposed Truk Lagoon, which at that point was the main base for the IJN Combined Fleet:
The point of use of the first bomb was discussed and the general view appeared to be that its best point of use would be on a Japanese fleet concentration in the Harbor of Truk. General Styer suggested Tokio but it was pointed out that the bomb should be used where, if it failed to go off, it would land in water of sufficient depth to prevent easy salvage. The Japanese were selected as they would not be so apt to secure knowledge from it as would the Germans.
More directly interesting is a postwar interview with Leslie Groves, where
he brings up the dangers of German aerial defenses:
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.
Working from this discussion, I think that if Groves had been
ordered to bomb Germany in late 1944, what you would need to do would be this:
1) Proceed to deploy a sizable number of squadrons equipped with B-29s to England in 1944 as soon as they became available (which would, unfortunately, impinge on deployments to Guam), and work them into bombing raids over a variety of German targets during daylight, along with frequnt dispatch of slights of just 1-3 bombers o recon missions, so that the Germans become used to such flights;
2) Efforts would be escalated to wear down Luftwaffe fighter defenses and radar networks in western Germany;
3) The target would very likely be a) within fighter escort range, and b) no deeper into German aerial defenses than necessary, and, if possible (and this is not an easy one, since most German coastal cities had been badly bombed by 1944) c) a city still substantially intact, in order to assess effectiveness of the bomb, and also to gain maximum value from it.
To me, the most obvious fits would be one of the German coastal cities on the North Sea or perhaps Baltic -- it maximizes the chance that a shootdown drops the bomber and a-bomb into the sea. Of course, most were pretty well bombed conventionally by that point. RAF and USAAF commanders might be ordered to ease up on the primary city in the months before the attack, perhaps.
@McPherson argues for a decapitation strike on Berlin, and it does have a certain attraction. Certainly the arguments against Tokyo in OTL would not be weighed in the same way against Berlin, since Hitler did not fill the same cultural and political role as Emperor Hirohito did, and indeed Hitler's death would
probably produce a regime more willing to surrender, or surrender sooner, at any rate -- though that might depend on whether Himmler takes power. Still, Berlin would be a very high risk target. Any Silverplate B-29 would need to fight through a lot more air defense than
Enola Gay did. And there is always the chance that Hitler is somewhere else when you bomb it.
4) On the raid itself, maximize protection of the bomber with heavy fighter attacks to tie up Luftwaffe assets; heavy bombing raids on other cities; and accompany the bomber itself with a sizable force of other B-29's and fighter escort.
Of course, employing a large escort means you put other planes and crews at risk for damage from the blast. There is just no getting around the fact that dropping a bomb on Germany would have been a more difficult task than doing it over Japan.
5) Given the risks involved, it might even be the case that the Allies would choose to wait until they had
several bombs ready (based on OTL, this could be as little as two months delay), and attempt to drop them all at once for a) maximum shock value, and b) maximizing the chance that some actually get through. Calbear offered a variation on this strategy in his Anglo-American Nazi War timeline, and I think there is something to be said for it.
...
Now, if we are talking about earlier in the war (before D-Day, or even before Husky), then the analysis gets trickier. The B-29 would likely not be ready as delivery vehicle, for one; and German air defenses would be tougher. Roosevelt an Churchill would also appreciate that its use on Berlin or some major German cities (or even a handful at once) would be less likely to force a German surrender. Using a few on an invasion beach, on the other hand, has certain advantages, though you might have to put De Gaulle in a straitjacket in a soundproof room first....
Final Point: The OP asks specifically about the wider cultural impact. Well, I think the context in which the Bomb gets used is going to shape that response to a considerable degree.
