What would be the best way for a B-29 to drop a nuke in contested airspace?
- Thread starter Parmenion
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RamscoopRaider
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Depends on the exact circumstances
The ideal situation is that you have heavy fighter escort the whole way to clear the air first, with the escorts only breaking off for a few minutes during the bomb run
If out of range for that, then send a whole bomb wing of conventional bombers with the nuke carrying bomber, or ideally bombers, mixed in, with the nuke carriers breaking off at the last minute to do their run, relying on strength in numbers
If you're at extreme range and say relying on limited midair refueling, send in an attack at night with heavy EW support and accept the potential losses to night fighters
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That’s very debatable. Most authors today disagrees with this notion. Paul Ham in Hiroshima and Nagasaki is one example. Japanese high command barely took notice of bombings even days later, only obsessing about a possible Soviet invasion.
Either way, by no measure is good to have 150k civilians killed and another 1 million on conventional bombings.
You need to achieve air superiority if not supremacy in that area. This is extremely difficult when you’re dealing with a continental power. There’s also the issue of what do you do if the leadership is too fanatical to give up even after entire cities have been wiped out. Think about Japan and Germany IOTL. The Japanese leadership nearly voted to continue fighting after two atomic bombings and Hitler didn’t surrender when Soviet troops were firing artillery at his bunker from a mile away. As discussed in other threads first generation atomic bombs aren’t magic bullets or instant war winners like what existed later.
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I wouldn't send a deep penetration bombing in contested airspace.
If I was a western power Leningrad, Stalingrad or Baku might be nuked before Moscow as it would be much easier.
There was a second surrender broadcast to the IJA which emphasised the Soviet Situation.
Volume swamping the defence system to saturation across multiple targets in the same defensive systems is the best idea in 1945.
Well done. We are all biased as historians. When we recognise it or are called on it, to see it and admit it is mature. This is the high standard of posting that makes this such a valuable historical forum.
Volume swamping with both aircraft and bombs, like Sam said. Initial raids would be actually be directed at the air defense network itself, “peeling away” the layers of radar and air command posts to allow the successive waves of bombers to penetrate deeper and deeper into enemy territory without effective large-scale intercept.
Of course, this required a substantial number of bombers and bombs, not to mention the ready infrastructure to support them. You not only have to have the excess available to cover for losses to enemy efforts, but also for aborts, duds, and airplanes being down for maintenance. SAC ID’d the above as readily as early as 1946, but the demobilization fever in the late-40s meant they didn’t really have the material and training to do it until well into the Korean War arms build-up.
Of course, this required a substantial number of bombers and bombs, not to mention the ready infrastructure to support them. You not only have to have the excess available to cover for losses to enemy efforts, but also for aborts, duds, and airplanes being down for maintenance. SAC ID’d the above as readily as early as 1946, but the demobilization fever in the late-40s meant they didn’t really have the material and training to do it until well into the Korean War arms build-up.
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Historians reading over thousands and thousands of pages of documents, writing papers, peer reviewing, for several decades, when they only had to listen the short and very political broadcast and never look to the subject again. Silly them.
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My $.02 worth.. (and I expect I am missing a lot points..)
Get intelligence on stuff such as radio frequencies used by the defenses for Ground Control Interception (ie. sending instructions from the ground to interceptor air craft.)
Get intelligence on radar systems (ie. Early Warning, Ground controlled intercept, Gun laying etc..) used by the defenses.
Get intelligence on any proximity fuses the defenses may use.
Gather WW2 veterans with the needed skills and the necessary equipment to deal with (ie. jam, spoof or ?) the likely threats based on the intelligence collected.
Figure out what existing navigation aids can be used to find the target at night and find veteran B29 air crew with some experience in using such aids (there are probably two or more parts to this problem , finding the target area, and dropping the bomb(s) at the desired point which will likely be done at night and thru cloud cover.)
See if any assets on the ground near the target area could be expected to provide real time weather info to the bombers via radio to help with bomb aiming (ie wind speed and direction ?)
Probably look into fusing methods for the nuclear weapons that can't be jammed or spoofed and assume any methods used during the missions over Japan were compromised.
Discretely practice in an out of the way area.
Maybe fly a few non nuclear missions into the target nations airspace to collect and or confirm some of the intelligence information.
Pick a dark (ie. no moon and preferably lots of clouds at various altitudes if possible) night for the nuclear mission(s) (so that non radar equipped air craft will struggle to carry out an interception, search lights from the ground won't help much if at all etc..)
If possible fly several aircraft via different routes but at more or less the same time to maximize the chances of getting at least one of them over the target and having at least one bomb detonate over the desired ground zero.
IMHO so long as the defenses didn't have sams or post WW2 radar equipped Jet powered interceptors there would be a reasonable likelihood of getting an aircraft to the bomb away point, depending on how much information was known about the sams or Jet Powered radar equipped interceptors the mission might also still work but success would be less likely in my view
I tend to agree but I suspect I would be inclined to simply go with the third option, but no doubt there would be lots of trade offs and I suppose a lot would depend on details that might change in a hypothetical fictional scenario.
I suspect in reality heavy EW and the cover of night and or clouds would be needed to deal with the ground based AA defenses during the final phase of the mission no mater what approach was used. That being sadi I suppose given massive conventional air superiority flack suppression missions could be flown by fighter bombers but flying such missions against Moscow seems unlikely to me, and if such missions can in fact be flown then the whole issue of dropping nukes on Moscow might a bit of a moot point ?
I completely understand the IJA didn’t care about the atomic bomb and feared the Red Army, especially since the Red Army could overrun their fiefdoms in Manchuria and Korea while the atomic bomb could only kill people.
Of course, the decision to surrender was Emperor Hirohito’s to make, not the IJA’s. I am certain you would be correct if it was the other way around.
Depends on if there is radar or not but the best way to do it is to do it when they don't know you're doing it. B-29 could operate at about 10KM altitude so nobody will probably notice it at night. But thats without radar. With radar yo have to get the shortest route to Moscow(from an allied nation that would be) with as much escorts as possible until they are out of range and then hope for the best. Thats what i think they basically did in the cold war if they ever had to go for it. Of course they didn't use B-29s anymore by then.
Not exactly. The second message was dispatched precisely because some army commands had started to declare they were not going to obey the general surrender order, so getting their buy-in was important in order to make the surrender stick everywhere.
Historically, the southern approach to the Soviet Union was never made practical for atomic-armed B-29s. A silverplate loaded down with a Mark-3 needs an 8,000 foot runway to successfully take-off and the first such runways were only built in the Cairo-Suez region in 1952 (only to be abandoned two years later after Egypt decided to evict the British), while the requisite storage and assembly facilities for Gen-1 atom bombs were never established. Any strike in the first stage of a late-1940s war (defined in Allied war plans of the time as being within the first six months) would effectively be forced to strike from along the western approaches, right where the Soviet air defense network was the thickest.
Now in the event of an actual war, undoubtedly improvements would be made over time. But it'd take some months just to get the relevant construction units over and all the work would be done under the potential threat of a Soviet-inspired rebellion from the local nationalists or a sudden breakthrough on the Ramallah Line. Habbaniah itself wouldn't be of much use in such a scenario regardless: as it was well east of the Ramallah Line, the defense plan for the region called for its evacuation and as much demolitions as possible so as to deny it to the Soviets.
Fighting World War III from the Middle East: Allied Contingency Plans, 1945-1954 by Michael Cohen is a useful primer on this subject, if you're interested.
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