WI:Hurricane in Berlin?

Possible planes to deliver operation hurricane

  • Lancaster bomber

    Votes: 17 54.8%
  • Victory bomber

    Votes: 11 35.5%
  • Short Sunderland

    Votes: 0 0.0%
  • Other

    Votes: 3 9.7%

  • Total voters
    31
  • This poll will close: .
For a delivery aircraft I reckon an Avro Lincoln with a pair of podded Rolls Royce Derwent or Nene turbojets mounted outboard of the engines should be good enough. The turbojets only need fuel for 20 minutes or so, run in drop and get the hell out of the way.

A testbed Lancaster with 2 Nene's in the outboard engine positions was good for 420mph so with 4 turning and 2 burning a Lincoln should be in the same speed range.
 
Quite a significant fraction of the total weight was armour - to prevent a lucky AA shot from disabling the bomb, from memory. I'm also puzzled why people assume that B-29 performance to drop a bomb safely - the bombs were moderately retarded anyway (the tail fin design was called a "California Parachute" and had both braking and stabilizing effects), so increasing the level of aerodynamic braking would not be particularly difficult - especially if as per UK practice it was to be dropped at night.
 
A night detonation would get some serious attention. Electrical visuals & all in the minutes after the detonation If it were only a couple hours before dawn there would be a nice tall cloud reflecting the sunrise too keep everyone focused.
 
1, I don't think we'd have been so stupid as to nuke a target as close to us as Berlin. Given the slightest easterly wind, it'd have been suicide.
2, the Victory concept was unremittingly awful, unworkable and would have made the Vickers Windsor look like a tremendous success... they never made a successful 4-engined type until the Viscount.
3, re 9 vs 617, there's a thread over on PPRuNe about the 30-year battle between them over the Tirpitz bulkhead, and the extraordinary lengths to which they went to gain and retain possession thereof, including a 9 Sqn Vulcan fuelled for Akrotiri declaring an emergency on takeoff from Waddington and diverting to Wittering, landing fully fuelled (without the aid of the brake 'chute), where it picked up the newly-stolen bulkhead from a Transit van that had raced down the road, as 617 had been searching every departing 9 Sqn Vulcan before takeoff... and when 617 got it back out at Akrotiri, 9 likewise searched every aircraft heading to Britain... but not the Shorts Belfast going to Masirah! Guess where 617 had hidden the bulkhead... finally, after 30 years and a great deal of use of power tools and explosives, a building at Marham was so badly-damaged in the theft of the bulkhead in the early 90s that the RAF Museum intervened and retook possession of it for display at Hendon, where it has remained ever since.

There's a similar story about 43 and 111 Squadrons at Leuchars, involving a Navy Wessex from Yeovilton, some graffiti vandalism, the theft of 43's squadron mascot, and a supermarket frozen chicken...
 
1, I don't think we'd have been so stupid as to nuke a target as close to us as Berlin. Given the slightest easterly wind, it'd have been suicide.
Fallout from an airburst weapon really isn't that bad - essentially all the radiation sickness cases and nearly all the cancers come from exposure to the prompt radiation from the bomb (gamma plus neutrons) rather than fallout. It's also worth remembering that attitudes to risk were very different at the time, and it wasn't for another ~20 years or so before people started worrying about fallout - for a long time after the war people were parking dug-in soldiers very close to bomb bursts to make sure they understand how to survive an attack properly. If they'll do that, they won't worry about a small amount of fallout coming from the other way to the prevailing wind.
 
The fallout from Fukushima was barely detectable 50 miles from the plant. The news said that was a greater radiation output than any of the 3 devices exploded in WWII.
 
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