WI: Berlin Blockade of '48 Leads to WWIII?

Captain: Sir, the 6th Guards are approaching the river crossing by this town, with several unidentified motorized infantry regiments

Colonel: make the call to London

one B-29A flight later
h04_16.jpg


Post strike photo recon. Those units no longer exist

15kt is very useful in a tactical sense.
That why the joke in West Germany went ' All the villages are spaced 2 kt. apart'

In reality the conversation would go like this:

Captain: Sir, the 6th Guards are approaching the river crossing by this town, with several unidentified motorized infantry regiments

Colonel: make the call to London

Captain: Yes sir.

One phone call later

Captain: Sir, London says it would take two days to ready the strike even with the weapons they have on hand. They can't assemble the bombs any faster. The motor-rifle regiments would be over 100 kilometers west of the river by then.

Colonel: What? Why didn't they have any pre-assembled?

Captain: They can't sir. Once assembled, the bombs have will only work for another two days after which they have to be disassembled to replace the batteries for the fuse system. They told us their going to preserve the warheads for use against strategic targets once they've built up enough.

Colonel: Well... fuck.

The joke doesn't really become relevant until the mid-50s.

Given that the B-29/B-50 silverplate modification was a standard thing, after a relatively brief interval you could have non-nuclear B-29/B-50 bombers going through rework to silverplate rather quickly. The issue of "nuclear" airfields had to do with the absence of the pits needed for bomb loading and some bomb completing/arming facilities. These can be built fairly quickly, they were not complex bits. You can also load a weapon on a B-29/B-50/B-36 and then ferry it to the UK fully loaded, however the bombs are not armed until they take off for their mission. Certainly less than optimum, but certainly doable.

All of this would eventually happen, of course, as well as the training of actually capable crews (an issue I noticed you don't address)... but you are wrong that it would be remotely quick and the time it would take would be much longer then the time the Soviets need to overrun Europe. US war planning is specific on this: nine months, minimum, between the commencement of hostilities and the execution of an atomic offensive against the USSR. It would be little good for the US force in the path of the Soviet assault, which consisted of a single division at less then 50 percent readiness and a trio of constabulary regiments. In fact, General Bradly reported that there was only a single division in the entire US Army deemed combat ready in 1948 and it was on the wrong side of the Atlanta. Anglo-French and Low Country forces add another nine divisions in varying states of low readiness. German forces no longer existed: the remains of the Wehrmacht had long been disbanded and what few weapons not used for testing purposes scrapped. (US Warplans, 1945-1950, Pg 11-12) Against it would be arrayed a minimum of 31 and a maximum of 70 Soviet divisions, depending. Given this, it's no wonder that the Joint Staff Planners had the Soviets on the Pyrenees within 60 days of hostilities commencing.

The issue is were the 5 Soviet weapons actually deliverable, as their first explosion in 1949 was a "gadget".

Yes they were, just as the Gadget was: the Gadget was literally a Mk 3, a Fat Man, minus the bomb casing. The Soviet design was slightly different in that it had a somewhat more streamlined bomb casing, but the internals were a carbon copy.

TcCVNIw.jpg


Presumably though everything I said about the Mk 3s also applied to them though. The bigger issue, as you alluded, is if the Tu-4s can make it through British and US air defenses... which I am of course rather dubious on.
 
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SB26.jpg

This was Gadget
Here's Joe without the case
c2b8af91c968380cfefe9d0e3ce0a522.jpg

Now Fatman at Tinian
Fat_Man_Assembly_Tinian_1945.jpg

Fatman did not have the odd dished access panels in the nose.

Going from Joe-1 to the 2nd test of with Joe-2 took years, September 1951, in part to production bottlenecks of rushing Joe-1 to completion.
As I posted elsewhere, Polonium 210 production was a real roadblock for the early bombs, plus Joe-2 used improved core geometry that the Soviet researchers had thought of independently of the Los Alamos crew, bus as in both cases, the leadership wanted a bomb now, improvements could wait.

As far as I can tell, Bomb pits were in place at Scampton and Waddington in England, and Furstenfeldbruck in West Germany in 1948. Fatman was still something of a prototype, the later Mod bombs were faster to ready for use
 
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Cook

Banned
All you would need is if a Soviet pilot decided to buzz one of the C-47's causing a problem, maybe a crash or something.

Really, is it that hard to do a bit of basic research before commenting?

Between 10 August 1948 and 15 August 1949, there were 733 incidents of harassment of airlift planes in the corridors. Acts of soviet pilots buzzing, close flying, shooting near, not at airlift planes were common. Balloons were released in the corridors, flak was not unheard of, radio interference and searchlights in the pilots' eyes were all forms of Soviet harassment in the corridors.

39 British, 31 American and 13 German civilians lost their lives in the Berlin Airlift.
 
SB26.jpg

This was Gadget
Here's Joe without the case
c2b8af91c968380cfefe9d0e3ce0a522.jpg

Now Fatman at Tinian
Fat_Man_Assembly_Tinian_1945.jpg

Fatman did not have the odd dished access panels in the nose.

I'm not seeing anything that contradicts my statement: anyone glancing at those photos can see how identical Fat Man and Gadget are. And the amalgamating of the external wires into those dish panels would actually make Joe-1 even better able to fit inside the bomb casing then Fat Man/Gadget which explains why the Soviet casing is somewhat more streamlined.

As far as I can tell, Bomb pits were in place at Scampton and Waddington in England, and Furstenfeldbruck in West Germany in 1948. Fatman was still something of a prototype, the later Mod bombs were faster to ready for use

I'm not seeing any source for this claim. On the other hand, Ross is quite specific:

"The 2000 mile combat radius of the B-29 did not enable SAC to cover many Russian targets from American bases. Forward bases were not available in Western Europe*. They did exist in Great Britain and Okinawa but lacked special weapons pits and atomic storage facilities." -US War Plans, 1945-1950, Pg 13

One interesting thing I noticed is that the US warplans never seem to have mentioned using the Japanese home islands as a base for atomic strikes on the USSR. And yeah, the later mods were faster to ready for use. But they weren't available in 1948 so aren't very relevant for the initial stage of the conflict.

*Presumably he means continental Western Europe, seeing as how he goes on to state bases were available in Great Britain.
 
I'm not seeing anything that contradicts my statement: anyone glancing at those photos can see how identical Fat Man and Gadget are. And the amalgamating of the external wires into those dish panels would actually make Joe-1 even better able to fit inside the bomb casing then Fat Man/Gadget which explains why the Soviet casing is somewhat more streamlined.



I'm not seeing any source for this claim. On the other hand, Ross is quite specific:

"The 2000 mile combat radius of the B-29 did not enable SAC to cover many Russian targets from American bases. Forward bases were not available in Western Europe*. They did exist in Great Britain and Okinawa but lacked special weapons pits and atomic storage facilities." -US War Plans, 1945-1950, Pg 13

One interesting thing I noticed is that the US warplans never seem to have mentioned using the Japanese home islands as a base for atomic strikes on the USSR. And yeah, the later mods were faster to ready for use. But they weren't available in 1948 so aren't very relevant for the initial stage of the conflict.

*Presumably he means continental Western Europe, seeing as how he goes on to state bases were available in Great Britain.

I'd guess the lack of plans involving strikes launched from Japan is due to the fact that America had a limited number of bombs and the fact that there are relatively unimportant targets in the Soviet far east. For example, nuking Vladivostok probably would have little impact on a Soviet invasion of Western Europe.
 
I'm not seeing anything that contradicts my statement: anyone glancing at those photos can see how identical Fat Man and Gadget are. And the amalgamating of the external wires into those dish panels would actually make Joe-1 even better able to fit inside the bomb casing then Fat Man/Gadget which explains why the Soviet casing is somewhat more streamlined.



I'm not seeing any source for this claim. On the other hand, Ross is quite specific:

"The 2000 mile combat radius of the B-29 did not enable SAC to cover many Russian targets from American bases. Forward bases were not available in Western Europe*. They did exist in Great Britain and Okinawa but lacked special weapons pits and atomic storage facilities." -US War Plans, 1945-1950, Pg 13

One interesting thing I noticed is that the US warplans never seem to have mentioned using the Japanese home islands as a base for atomic strikes on the USSR. And yeah, the later mods were faster to ready for use. But they weren't available in 1948 so aren't very relevant for the initial stage of the conflict.

*Presumably he means continental Western Europe, seeing as how he goes on to state bases were available in Great Britain.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but I don't see a pit taking longer then a few weeks at tops to construct.
 
Sorry for the late reply, but Holiday hours at a grocery store are hell to say the least.

Raymond P. Ojserkis address most of them in Beginnings of the Cold War Arms Race: The Truman Administration and the U.S. Arms Build-Up.

Having found a copy of this online, I'm not seeing anything distinctly in your favor. The relevant portion concerning Soviet strength comes from Chapter 2.5 and the estimates contained therein all come from two sources, one a JCS report and from a Major General in the war department. To quote from the JCS report itself:

"The Joint Chiefs of Staff felt that "if war occurs, little or no warning will be received" due to the difficulty in gathering information from the other side of the Iron Curtain."

In other words, everything they say is guesswork and they have nothing to confirm it. Next, we have the estimates of Major General Lauris Norstad:

"Another, more alarmist, report, submitted to Truman by Major General Lauris Norstad, serving in the Operations and Planning Division of the War Department, claimed that the Soviets had 208 divisions, with 93 of them facing western Europe. Norstad added that the Soviets had 15,500 operational aircraft.129 The JCS believed that the Soviets could put 320 divisions in the field within 30 days of the start of mobilisation, and that this could be increased to 470 divisions and 12 million troops after one year of mobilization."

This was pure fantasy in 1944, little alone 1948 or 1949:

Bagration, 1944, Osprey Campaign Series -

"Soviet rifle divisions were generally smaller than their German counterparts, averaging 2500-4000 troops. At the time of Operation Bagration a concerted effort was made to bring these units up to an average of 6000 troops. No serious effort was made to bring them up to their nominal TOE strength of 9600 troops."

Red Army Handbook, 1939-1945, by Steven J. Zaloga -

"By this time, however, it was becoming apparent that the Soviet force structure of 500-plus Divisions simply exceeded their capacity to support it. [..] in mid-1944 more drastic action was necessary. Either some of the rifle divisions would have to be demobilized and their personnel used to fill out other units, or divisional strengths far below envisioned norms would have to be accepted. The Stavka opted for the latter alternative."

Soviet Military Doctrine from Lenin to Gorbachev, 1915-1991, by Willard C. Frank -

"Soviet sources reflect manpower deficiencies by emphasizing the low strength of rifle units and the draconian measures used to enlist soldiers in liberated regions. By 1945 Soviet rifle divisions were often under strength, with only 3,500 to 5,000 men each."

Another Osprey book (I can't recall which, but I can try to hunt it down if requested) mentioned that something like 10% of Soviet frontline strength by the time of the Berlin Operation was Polish draftees.

Honsetly, the document itself supports the assertion: there is no citations for their claims on Soviet force readiness in the 1940s and 50s... which itself amounts to a single sentence (two if we count their assertion about Eastern European readiness... which is faster and glossed over). There is no evidence provided to back up the assertion, no further analysis made. They simply assert it and move on.

So in other words, there is nothing to back it up and it can be safely discarded out of hand. As was noted on Pg 49 of THE UNITED STATES & THE BEGINNING OF THE COLD WAR ARMS RACE:

"Both of the traditional armed services disliked the reliance on nuclear weapons. The Army favoured a strategy of "forward defense" in Europe, in which it would play a leading role.43 In the event of a war with the USSR in Europe, the Army would attempt to fight the Soviet forces as far to the east as possible, retreating as slowly as practically possible until reinforcements could be transported from America.....The Navy, basing its strategy on the success of aircraft carrier groups against the Japanese in the Pacific War, wanted enormous carriers. It tended to support the Army's assertion that a conventional war should be planned for, since the Navy would play a critical role in such a campaign, fighting the Soviet submarine menace in an attempt to funnel troops and material across the Atlantic, and possibly into other war zones, such as the Middle East. The Navy had to defend itself against Air Force assertions that surface ships were obsolete in an age of trans-oceanic bombers."

In other words, as I previously stated and according to your own source, most of the War/Defense Department had a vested interest in making the Soviet threat more scary than it actually was.

Yes, it can very much be contested. I'll address the bombers when I reply to your point about the B-50s, but the total US nuclear arsenal by the end of 1948 was 50 weapons when the earliest tentative USAAC/USAAF estimates drafted in 1945 called for a minimum stockpile of 123 weapons and a ideal one of 466. Even further, these weapons would not be instantaneously ready. The first generation of nuclear bombs, and their associated aircraft, were crude and unwieldy devices that took considerable time and preparation before useage.

And by 1950, peacetime production had allowed for the stockpile to reach into the hundreds despite extremely low defense budgets, which would not be the case in war time where money and resources could immediately be made available to increase production. That the U.S. could seriously increase production in 1949 cannot be in doubt if a war were to breakout. My initial estimate was that the war would end in a year, which I do believe is probably optimistic now, but that hostiles would end within two in an overwhelming Western victory cannot be challenged.

They have to be removed from their storage facilities, transported across first the US and then the Atlantic, brought to their specific air field, and only then assembled and be made ready for loading onto their use aircraft. Assembly of the weapon alone took two days and there were only enough of the specialist assembly teams to work on a total of 14 bombs at any given time. (Ross, Pg 12) As for airfields: the atomic weapons of the day required not just strips capable of handling their bombers but also specialized storage and assembly areas for the bombs as well as specially created bomb pits for the weapons to be loaded onto the aircraft. None of the designated airfields in Great Britain and Okinawa had these facilities. (Ross, Pg 13)

The transition to storing warheads on their forward airfields in a ready-to-use configuration was very much a 1950s innovation.

That is all contradicted by THE UNITED STATES & THE BEGINNING OF THE COLD WAR ARMS RACE, which states that by August 30, 1945 the USAAF had prepared a report that stated the need for bases in places like Japan and Britain for a future war against the Soviets, that one of the reasons why the military budget in the late 1940s was higher than that of the 1930s was because of the need to maintain bases in places like the aforementioned nations, and finally notes that by July of 1949, a force of roughly 30 bombers had been forward deployed to England as a result of the Berlin Blockade. Now, granted on that last one such a force is a small one and was late, but that was in peacetime conditions with all that entails for the contemporary situation; a new war would certainly change quite a bit, as should be obvious.

They have a large, modern fighter inventory, experience in defending against similar operations (particularly long-range German logistical interdiction attempts of the last war), and plenty of their own observations. They actually have an established early-warning net by 1948 and large numbers of experienced pilots in solidly performing aircraft.

I've yet to see anything that supports this notion, in particular the fighter strength, which comes from Western estimates that shouldn't be trusted as I've already shown. In fact, your own source elsewhere seems to suggest against exactly this, by noting that the JCS report only estimated about 600,000 men in the Soviet Air Forces while the USAF rapidly expanded to nearly 900,000 during the Berlin Crisis. We'll further address this later on.

The MiG-9's service ceiling exceeds that of the B-50 by nearly 6,000 feet. Even leaving aside that example, the difference between the maximum service ceiling of the B-50 and that of any Soviet fighter is pretty marginal and most aircraft don't actually fly right at their maximum ceiling when conducting operations anyways.

Hence why I said most.

This is without noting that the B-50 was very much just entering production in 1948 and none were made available to SAC until 1949. The backbone of the strategic nuclear delivery arm at the time remained the Silverplate modifications of the B-29, whose service ceiling is in fact inside of that of all Soviet mainline fighters, of which there were 32 operational at the start of 1948 with only 12 fully certified crews. And this is not even taking into consideration that even the certified crews training left something to be desired: they did not train for navigation over the East European and Russian landmass, they were trained in daylight when they were expected to deliver the weapons at night so as to minimize detection, and their practice with RADAR bombsights was basically as handheld as it get with the practice targets being outfitted with reflectors and the like. It's no wonder that when Lemay took over SAC in late-1948 he proclaimed that none of the crews under his command were capable of doing a professional job (Ross, Pg 12-13).

As others have already pointed out, the modifications to the B-29s were easy, and in 1949 you start getting the B-50s and B-36s, with the B-47s not too far off either. That instantaneous bombing was not feasible is a given, but that within a year the USAF could rapidly begin destroying the Soviet ability to wage war cannot be doubted.

I can understand why, given that you have no apparent understanding of Soviet industrial developments during the course of 1945-48. Soviet industrial indexes were recovering across the board even before the war was over and while the full damage to their country wouldn't be fixed until the mid-50s, from a war fighting standpoint they were already in a massively superior position then at any previous point in their history, with or without lend-lease.

This is false according to your own sources. To quote directly from THE UNITED STATES & THE BEGINNING OF THE COLD WAR ARMS RACE:

"There was evidence indicating that the Soviet economy was weak. Even the Soviet government's published statistics, which were thought to be generally exaggerated, revealed an economy far behind the west. Soviet diplomatic actions in the immediate post-war period, whether in the form of attempts to gain more favourable conditions for Lend-Lease payments, Soviet lobbying for a large German reparations payment, Soviet demands to gain Austrian oil,122 or the transportation of basic infrastructure from conquered eastern Europe to the Soviet Union all indicated economic deficiencies. General Walter Bedell Smith, a future head of the Central Intelligence Agency, estimated that it would be another 10 to 15 years before the Soviets had recovered from the last war.123 The CIA's Office of Research and Estimates (ORE) tried to appraise the Soviet Union in terms of war potential, looking at the industrial strength, technology, and possible bottlenecks to increased production. The ORE concluded that Soviet economic weaknesses gravely limited the ability of Moscow to fight a prolonged war with the North Atlantic Treaty nations."

So those industrial indexes were false, and according to your own source they were in an extremely weak state, and basically in a position they had to win a short war. Industrial production also has exactly nothing within it to refute my point on food production which was still only at 50% of the 1940 level in 1945 and went into famine levels for 1946 and 1947 once Lend Lease food aid was stopped. That suddenly recalling all of the manpower back to the Red Army, diverting tractor production back to tanks and using fuel for military purposes would stress the food situation, to put it mildly, should be obvious. Adding to this is the fact that, according to your source, there is still about 50,000 to 200,000 partisans in the Ukraine and attacking food production seems like an obvious play for them.

"In particular, American analysts felt that the Soviet petroleum industry would find it difficult to produce enough high octane fuel, the Soviet machine tool industry did not produce enough spare parts, there was insufficient rolling stock to handle war time needs in the USSR, and the Soviets had perennial shortages of certain non-ferrous metals and certain types of finished steel.124 Complicating these problems, and, to an extent, causing them, were the Soviet deficiencies in properly trained technological personnel and managers."

How can the Soviets hope to maintain 15,000 aircraft, even presuming they have that many, without fuel or spare parts? Or how can they somehow overrun most of Eurasia with a mechanized force that, even ignoring the small matter of parts, lacks the rolling stock to maintain their logistics network (They received about 70% of their WWII supply from the United States)?

The plans I'm citing were not created to push for a political agenda. They were created by the US military for the US military to act as a guideline in the eventuality of war with the Soviet Union. The recipients of the plans were not the people who controlled the defense departments purse strings (IE: Congress) but for the specified military departments and commanders who were expected to execute them in the eventuality of war. In this they have the same purpose as the pre-war Rainbow Plans: to set broad strategic goals and establish basic operational approches. and it was the post-war budgetary restrictions which influenced the plans... and not the other way around. The RAND corporation report you cited is more liable to be underlined by the profit motives given that RAND was established as a corporate think-tank...

Which is in contradiction to your own source, and further in no way refutes the RAND study; I checked all of the footnotes for the Chapter 2.5 concerning Soviet strength, and all were based on contemporary reports by the JCS and such, while the RAND study was based on newer information.

Yes, millions. Tactical nuclear warfare was not feasible, owing to the crudity of early bombs, and never discussed in the late-1940s. The use of weapons to destroy deep supply chokepoints is the closest one comes to the conception of using nukes in support of battlefield forces in the late-1940s. The assertion that the US would be able to fully dictate the ground war is not exactly true either: US war planners identified that the US would have to commit to extensive ground fighting in the Middle East in order to prevent the Soviets from seizing the Suez Canal and would ultimately have to reinvade Europe... which would inevitably mean confronting the bulk of the Red Army.

I've already refuted most of this, but allow me to address the sheer insanity of claiming millions of U.S. casualties. According to your own source, there was less than 100,000 U.S. troops in Europe by 1948 and demobilization of American forces meant it would take at least a year to bring them back, meaning the earliest U.S. troops could land in Europe in force would probably be about Spring of 1950. By that point, assuming conflict broke out in late 1948 (I found it doubtful fighting would begin instantly in the Summer of '48), there would've been nearly 18 months of time to build up the USAF and do a grand strategic nuclear offensive that the Soviets couldn't hope to completely defeat while their own internal economic decencies would be hitting them hard. At best for the Soviets, they can inflict 200,000 casualties upon the Americans before the Red Army disintegrates.
 
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Oh for fucks sake. I make 80% of a post with cites and everything and go to save with the intention of completing over the next few days and the forum eats it. That sort of thing really sours my taste on debates when it happens so we're gonna have to leave this one for now. I had some numbers giving indications on things like Soviet rolling stock as well...
 
Oh for fucks sake. I make 80% of a post with cites and everything and go to save with the intention of completing over the next few days and the forum eats it. That sort of thing really sours my taste on debates when it happens so we're gonna have to leave this one for now. I had some numbers giving indications on things like Soviet rolling stock as well...

I know how annoying that is, so I'll go and concede just to save you the trouble and stress of responding. Enjoy your New Years.
 
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