WI: Allies Get the Atomic Bomb in 1943

You really do need more than one - crews need to be able to practice flying the mission profile, you have to account for failures and breakdowns, and so on. You don't want the whole Kiel bombing mission to get held back 3 months because your only plane that could carry the bomb got lost in a storm while ferrying over the Atlantic.


Generally multiple prototypes are built preproduction. Sometimes just two, sometimes three or more. How fast they are built varies according to funds available, the number of changes expected as tests are made, how soon potential or contracted customers want results. In this case building 4 - 6 actual bombers is not much more demanding that building a single example. 'Training' aircraft also need not have all the characteristics of the operational models which simplifies providing a few more for that purpose.
 
Something i've not been able to determine is if he people who said no to the Vickers Victory bomber because it only carried one bomb know much about the bomb and vice versa.

Not sure when you have have to say 'yes' to the Victory bomber to meet the availability of the bomb though.
 
Something i've not been able to determine is if he people who said no to the Vickers Victory bomber because it only carried one bomb know much about the bomb and vice versa.

Not sure when you have have to say 'yes' to the Victory bomber to meet the availability of the bomb though.

The people who said no to the Victory bomber were proven right with the utter failure of the Vickers Windsor. It failed to meet altitude and speed projections and was a terrible airplane as well.
 
IIRC they were turbosupercharged Allisons, so were not able to lug at high altitude. Those engines were reserved for the P-38.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allison_V-1710#Supercharger

There is a reason the Mustang had to be reengined from the Allison to the Merlin and gained massive speed and altitude in the process.

That's not really correct. If provided with suitable turbos, pretty much any decent engine will become a high-altitude monster. That's why the Air Corps were monomaniacal about the things, to the point of snubbing a decent high altitude supercharger (the second best option) for the Allison. Problem was that suitable turbos were real bleeding-edge tech in the ww2 timeframe.

However I'm sure a handwritten note from FDR would have sourced adequate numbers of turbos for a nuke-617 equivalent. Again, we are talking relative handfuls of machines here. Centaurus type-tested at 2000 HP in 1939, sabre at 2200 in 1940, v-3420 in 1941.All these monster motors had the same issues as the 3350 - first much lower priority than immediately needed engines like merlin/1710/2800. Then engineering issues rushing them into mass production while still managing hundreds of hours of reliable operation. Given a priority rating sufficient to allocate enough craftsmen to hand-build say 75 engines and overhaul them every 20 hours, you could solve the power problem well enough to plan and train for a 3-4 plane mission. Airframes might be trickier, but a dozen or two of something could probably have been handcrafted if it was war-winningly important and you threw a bomber wings worth of support staff at them.

Would probably end up with a squadron of space shuttles rather than of one specific type, but who cares if they work?
 

Saphroneth

Banned
Actually, that bit about all the support staff... I could contribute a PoV character to this one! My paternal grandfather was an Erk.
 
Talking of limited or one use airframes, did any of 617's Upkeep Lancasters get converted to standard bombers or did they all remain in storage until scrapping?

Edit: Could they be converted back to standard bombers?
 
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What if the Manhattan Project is begun over two years earlier and is able to produce an atomic bomb in 1943 and not 1945?

When in 1943?

Let's say exactly two years earlier - 6 and 9 August. Mussolini is gone, and the Allies are closing in on Messina in Sicily. Hamburg has been destroyed by firestorm. The Soviets have just counterattacked at Kursk and driven across the German start line. In the Pacific, U.S. forces have just taken New Georgia in the central Solomons, Australians are fighting for Salamaua and Lae in New Guinea, and the British Arakan offensive in Burma has failed.

The Allies use the Bomb on Berlin. They probably don't get Hitler with the first one - it will be dropped at night, and it would take a pretty close hit to cave in the Fuhrerbunker.

The second and third Bombs? Koln and Hamburg have been savaged already by Bomber Command. The second Bomb - probably the Ruhr. The third Bomb: Bremen? Frankfurt? Kiel? Munich? Deep targets would be avoided except Berlin.

These are hammerblows. The handwriting is on the wall. Hitler and his Nazi cronies will reject surrender, but almost everyone else will want to give in ASAP. That means general Army support for a Schwarze Kapelle coup d'état. The war is over by the end of August.

(Italy, the only other possible target, will be frantically signalling its intent to surrender. The other Axis powers will also surrender.)

There has been no Teheran Conference to allocate occupation zones. Things will be rather ad hoc, with Hungary, Romania, and Bulgaria hoping to refuse entry to Soviet forces, which are still hundreds of km to the east. It's possible that Churchill will press for US/UK occupation, with a Soviet minority role, and that FDR will go along. The USSR is in a far weaker position, and the US position is rather heady.

Japan will freak. At this time there is no way to Bomb Japan, but it won't take long for the concentrated power of the US/UK to get one. Though OTOH, at this time the USN carrier fleet is very limited. Four of the six pre-war carriers have been sunk; the only new carriers are the first three Independence class CVLs.

It wasn't until November 1943 that the Allies attacked a Japanese island by purely seaborne force (Tarawa in the Gilbert Islands).

But the Allied war effort in the Pacific is just getting into gear. In the 20 months after Pearl Harbor, the Allies basically only checked the Japanese advance and made very small inroads against them. The next few months saw additional minor progress in New Guinea and the Solomons.

Then in the next 19 months, the Allies swept forward, gutting the Japanese Empire. A year after the first landing in the Gilberts, the US invaded the Philippines, 6,000 km away.

Having the Bomb should be useful, but how?

There aren't many useful targets that aren't also occupied Allied cities - one wouldn't Bomb Rangoon or Singapore, or even Rabaul. Truk is about 2,000 km from the nearest Allied base - about as far as England to Romania, or Tunisia to Ukraine.

One might see Bombs used to clear island targets for invasion; the radiation hazard being set against the often-horrendous casualties from conventional attack. (E.g. Tarawa, Peleliu, Iwo Jima...)

The Allies can now flood the Pacific and SE Asia with troops and land based aircraft, but can they compensate for the lack of carriers?

A wild card here is that Stalin, somewhat thwarted in Europe, may look to Asia for opportunities. The USSR can apply massive force directly against Japan in Manchuria, which might be decisive. Thus where the US might claim credit for zapping Nazi Germany with The Bomb and winning that war, the USSR might end up with primary credit for defeating Japan.

There is another possibility: if the USSR enters the war against Japan, Vladivostok is less than 1,000 km from the Home Islands, easy range for a Bomb-carrying plane. But would the USSR agree to host a US atomic-bomb squadron when the US is not sharing the technology? And would the US trust the USSR not to grab any Bombs?

The war ending sooner saves many lives and much destruction. A million or so Jews spared from the Holocaust.

The war ending sooner greatly reduces the aggregate US war effort. Mobilization wil reach about the same level, but casualties and combat veterans much reduced. The prestige of the Air Force will be colossal; they will have Won the War in Europe, with everyone else's efforts pushed aside by comparison.
 
You'd probably get more German victimization after the war the way Japan has used it. Its a much more visceral reaction than the firebombings (though those were worse in terms of deaths and damage) both in Europe and Japan.

Clearly, cities like Munich or Nuremburg have huge symbolic value for the Nazis so their destruction would have a psychological impact.

Hm.

Nuking Munich or Nuremberg might inadvertently give Nazism the sort of ideological post-war "staying power" it could only dream of IOTL. Martyrdom is a powerful concept in human culture, as we know.

Also........

Oddly enough, my understanding is Oppenheimer and the other scientists were much more willing to use the bomb against the Nazis (for obvious reasons).

"So what if the Nazis shot a few Jews? The Jews immolated entire Nazi cities!" :eek:
 
This assumes you want the bomber back. If you copy the Short Maya composite then one of the aicraft could be unmanned and controled by the other. The controling aircraft seperates and retires to a safe distance. The mission commander presses the button and the target gos bye bye. the controling aircaft returns to blighty for tea and medals. Needless to say thogh this cold only work at night, while Bomber Command stages a thoisand bomber raid to draw off the German night fighters.
With a Mossie as a getaway plane? Yeah, I could see that. Do you want to drop the bomb, or let the whole plane dive, Mistel style?
 
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Do you want to drop the bomb, or let the whole plane dive, Mistel style?

You won't get the plane back anyway, so why bother dropping it? I can't see how the effectiveness of the bomb would be significantly reduced by being inside an airframe when it goes off.
 
This might have been discussed, but how soon would the B-29 or another long range high altitude bomber capable of delivering an atomic bomb have been available? Assuming the combination of weapon and delivery system was available in 1944, I think there is a possibility the Allies might not immediately try to drop one on Berlin or any other high profile target. German air defenses in 1944 were far more capable than the Japanese and I suspect there would be a concern the aircraft carrying the nuclear bomb(s) might be lost.

Well Boeing flew the B-29 prototype in September 1942 (some two years after submitting the Model 334 in their bid) they had numerous issues with the plane in the production stage. Both prototypes suffered engine fires (December 1942 and February 1943) resulting in the final product not flying until May 1944.

Boeing shows that even with a model proposed you are looking a two year turn around before the prototype comes out and even then thing may not work as intended causing delays.
 
Japan will freak. At this time there is no way to Bomb Japan, but it won't take long for the concentrated power of the US/UK to get one.

One of the ideas presented in Victory Through Air Power (1943) was to attack Japan using air bases in Alaska but that required a 3000 mile striking radius. All the other idea presented in that film have problems and those problems all have to deal with the range of bombers in 1943.

Even the B29 only had a range of 3,250 mile. Great if all you want to get to do is get to the target...not so good if you want to get home again.
 
One of the ideas presented in Victory Through Air Power (1943) was to attack Japan using air bases in Alaska but that required a 3000 mile striking radius. All the other idea presented in that film have problems and those problems all have to deal with the range of bombers in 1943.

...


A Group of B24 did some test missions from Alaska. I think they may have refueled on Kiska or Attu. the Targets were on Hokkaido. The tests were a technical success, but military failure. Weather in Alaska made to operational cost far to high, and weather over Hokkaido meant frequent alternative targets, or entire mission scrubbed & bombs ditched on return flight. They may have flown less than a dozen missions. Not even one hundred sorties.
 
I also agree that the Allies would have definitely considered a suicide mission - or several for that matter. Surely the number of air crew who die in these missions would be less than the number of soldiers, sailors and civilians who would die between 1943 and whenever a suitable bomber was ready in 1944. I'm just looking at a list of merchant shipping sunk. The death toll for June 1943 alone was 484. Between June 1943 and June 1944, the allied death toll on ships sunk was 2824. That's not to mention everyone else who dies in bombing raids, armed conflict and in concentration camps. If there were volunteers, I think it would have definitely been on the table.

I'm not advocating it, I'm just saying that (pulling a figure out of the air here) 150 bomber crew over the course of dropping a few bombs compared to potentially thousands or tens of thousands of other deaths doesn't seem that illogical or even immoral.
 
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Even the B29 only had a range of 3,250 mile. Great if all you want to get to do is get to the target...not so good if you want to get home again.

The crew could head north-west after hitting Japan, and ditch in the neutral Soviet Far East. They'd be interned for the remainder of the war and the bomber written off, but that seems like a small price to pay.
 
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