Chapter XVIII: Birth of the Atomic Age, 1945.
On Sunday May 6th at 01:00 AM the fruit of the labour of the Uranverein Program was loaded onto a heavily secured armoured train at the secret installation in southern Bavaria near Berchtesgaden. It was transported to a test site in Thuringia near the town of Ohrdruf, which had already been completely evacuated with the locals receiving generous subsidies for their relocation. At 05:00 AM local time the weapon codenamed Thor was detonated, generating a 22 kiloton blast and a flash that illuminated the northern slope of the Thuringian Forest brighter than day while base camp was as hot as an oven. The resulting crater was 1.3 metres deep and 75 metres wide and the abandoned town had been destroyed. The blast was noticed as far as 150 km away as were the lights, but a press release prepared weeks in advance explained it to the civilian population as an explosion in an ammunitions factory. Chancellor Franz von Papen and Emperor Wilhelm III, who had succeeded his father in 1941, were informed that it was “a healthy baby boy.” The weapon was an implosion-type plutonium based design, as the bomb designers had decided against the less efficient though easier to build gunshot-type uranium based fission bomb.
The
Kaiserliche Deutsche Luftwaffe (Imperial German Air Force) had primarily been designed to win a war in Europe and to provide tactical air support, so its largest aircraft up until the war had been medium bombers and dive bombers. Luftwaffe officers such as Erhard Milch and Minister of Aviation Manfred von Richthofen, however, realized that the United States might be drawn into a future war either through an escalation of the U-boat war (which had caused tensions between Germany and the US in the previous war) or through conflict with Japan in the Pacific. Their foresight meant that by 1945 Germany had a strategic bomber capable of carrying first-generation nuclear weapons, which weighed 4.5 tonnes. The Messerschmitt Me 264 still had a range of 8.600 km with a six tonne payload.
An Me 264 took off from a military airfield near Berlin on Monday June 18th 1945 and crossed the North Sea, reaching the intended target: Newcastle upon Tyne, selected for being a centre of coal production and for the role of its heavy industry in the production of ships and armaments. The bomber reached the target at 07:45 AM and released the weapon, which detonated with a yield of 20 kilotons and produced a second sun in the sky. Out of a population of roughly 335.000 about 75.000 people, almost all of whom were civilians, were killed and the body count would double within six months due to injury and radiation sickness. The radius of total destruction was about 1.6 kilometres and 80% of the city’s buildings were either destroyed or severely damaged.
After the atomic bombing of Newcastle, Germany threatened “prompt and utter annihilation” if Britain refused to surrender unconditionally, prompting a cabinet crisis. The aging Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin didn’t want to see more cities destroyed and was in favour of trying to negotiate to get the unconditional element of the surrender off the table. He thought returning Germany’s colonies lost in 1916 would go a long way. The Germans indeed were planning to demand their old colonies back and a few French ones for good measure, so Baldwin’s assumption was correct. Foreign Minister and Defence Minister Winston Churchill, however, argued that Britain hadn’t surrendered when other cities had been bombed and shouldn’t surrender now either. In his persuasive style he argued that peace meant a Russo-German continental hegemony dominating Eurasia. This would constitute the demise of the balance of power that Great Britain had striven to maintain for centuries. This would make the British Empire vulnerable. The Russo-German bloc could impose a successful version of Napoleon’s Continental System, i.e. an embargo that could force Britain to accept demands from Berlin and St. Petersburg. In his view Britain would then be susceptible to the whims of a continental tyranny. He accused Baldwin of being a weak, spineless old man who wasn’t up to the job anymore.
After an intense debate, the majority of the cabinet sided with Winston Churchill and Baldwin resigned citing health reasons (he was 77 years old at the time). Up until 1945 Winston Churchill had been the only person besides John Simon who had served as Home Minister, Chancellor of the Exchequer as well as Foreign Minister (without obtaining the office of Prime Minister). Besides these offices he had also served as President of the Board of Trade, First Lord of the Admiralty, Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster, Secretary of State for War, Secretary of State for Air, Secretary of State for the Colonies and Minister of Defence. Churchill became Baldwin’s successor on June 20th.
The prize of Prime Minister was now added to this impressive list, but views on the legacy of his short premiership vary widely. Defenders of the British Empire cast him as a tragic hero who had valiantly tried to prevent Britain’s decline to second-tier power status vis-à-vis an authoritarian Russo-German bloc and had failed due to circumstances. His opponents paint him as a fool who tried to delay the inevitable or as an ambitious, careerist, power hungry politician determined to add the title of PM to his impressive curriculum vitae. Modern views of him are somewhere in between.
On June 23rd, Germany’s wartime leadership resolved to carry out a second nuclear strike and selected Scapa Flow as the next target, which served as Britain’s main naval base primarily because of its great distance from German airfields. The British realized that the new Me 264 bomber might well be able to strike as far north as Scapa Flow. Despite Churchill’s order to redeploy all ships still in Scapa Flow to Nova Scotia 48 hours prior, several major capital ships remained at Scapa Flow as their crews embarked and stocks were replenished before their evacuation to Canada. Battleships HMS Saint Andrew and USS Washington, battlecruiser HMS Invincible, aircraft carriers HMS Victorious and USS Wasp and heavy cruiser USS Wichita were still in port. The German bomb dropped on June 23rd at 10:00 PM produced an estimated yield of 22 kilotons, damaging the ships still in port beyond repair. There were 10.000 fatalities, about 80% of which were naval crews; the 2.000 civilian casualties amounted to one tenth of the population of the Orkney Islands. Though less fatal than the Newcastle strike, it gutted a community.
More strikes took place after that as German scientists cast plutonium cores as fast as they could to put in the pits of new bombs. British attempts to make a nuclear bombing campaign less effective didn’t work. Britain initially stubbornly refused to surrender and instead tried to deal with nuclear war by evacuating all but non-essential personnel to the countryside and dispersing essential industries to hastily built underground sites. One more nuclear strike took place in June a week after Scapa Flow was hit: Colchester, significant for its infantry and light-anti-aircraft training units and the large proportion of engines provided for British submarines and landing craft by the Paxman factory. Three new plutonium cores were put into bombs that were dropped on Dover, Folkestone and Hastings in July, resulting in tens of thousands of civilian casualties. A British counterstrike with mustard gas and phosgene against Hamburg led to a retaliatory nuclear strike on Manchester on August 1st, chosen for the Dunlop rubber works and several factories producing aircraft engines.
Faith in Churchill’s as a wartime PM sank to an all-time low in the cabinet and the high public support he had enjoyed in the beginning had melted away like snow in the sun. At this point it became clear to Britain’s leadership that Germany had the means and the will to continue producing atomic bombs with which it could continue to devastate British cities. The only question was which city would be next: would it be Liverpool, Edinburgh or maybe merry old London herself? After the atomic bombing of Manchester, motion of no-confidence against Churchill was presented in the commons by one of his fellow Tories: John Lees-Jones, Member of Parliament for Manchester Blackley, presented the motion and represented the desperation of his hard hit constituency. Churchill saw which way the wind was blowing and tendered his resignation to King Edward VIII after only three months in office, upon which Anthony Eden became the new PM.
Eden’s first order of business was to request a formal armistice from Germany, though at first trying to obtain a partial surrender only to Germany and Russia and not against Japan and Italy. German Chancellor Von Papen, Russian Prime Minister Stravinsky, Japanese Prime Minister Tojo and Italian Prime Minister Orlando responded with a communique that the war against Britain would continue until it signed an armistice agreement with the four of them. Eden had no choice and signed an armistice agreement containing the following terms: cessation of hostilities on all fronts, withdrawal of forces back to British territory, demilitarization south of the Thames, the surrender of military material and the Royal Navy in particular, the release of German prisoners of war and interned civilians, no release of British prisoners, and eventual war reparations. German troops occupied British territory south of the Thames to enforce the terms of the armistice and a German military governor was installed in the historically important city of Canterbury.
The surrender of Great Britain was a watershed event in the history of the British Empire. The dominions each concluded separate peace agreements quite easily as they had nothing Russia, Germany, Japan, Italy and their minor allies would want. Canada even seceded from the Empire, becoming a republic with a foreign policy oriented much more toward its southern neighbour. Meanwhile, India was now the most powerful remaining country in the British Commonwealth, with a standing army of ten million that took over the positions that British soldiers withdrew from under the terms of Britain’s armistice with the victors. The term “British Empire” would increasingly be phased out in favour of “Anglo-Indian Empire” as the dynamic shifted, with India now being the strongest economic and military power of the realm. The title Emperor of India eclipsed that of King of Great Britain and Northern Ireland as Connaught Place in New Delhi did the City of London.
The United States, however, were still in the war and still willing to win a partial victory by knocking Japan out of the war. It withdrew its naval and army assets from Europe and the Middle East to deploy them against Japan, which they planned to invade in 1946. Japan had been fighting a losing war, despite Russian deliveries of coal, oil and steel, because its partners couldn’t provide naval support against the overwhelming might of the US Navy. The Germans weren’t planning on sending the High Seas Fleet all the way to the Pacific and the Russian Navy was too small to matter anyway. German U-boats had some successes in the Atlantic and Russian subs in the Pacific, but not enough to matter.
The United States would feel the effects of this new weapon now too. With Britain out of the war, the German Navy might force the US Navy to redeploy forces to the Atlantic, but with nuclear weapons the Germans didn’t feel the need to use their fleet). Instead an Me 264 strategic bomber took off from an airfield in occupied France and dropped a 22 kiloton that devastated much of lower Manhattan. After Boston, Philadelphia, Baltimore and Washington DC were hit too, the United States reluctantly agreed to a separate peace that amounted to a to status quo ante bellum. This left the Quadruple Alliance in a position to redraw the world map.