I think if Hitler did not use the last of his army in the Ardan offincive that they may have been able to win the war. But maybe not.
What do you think.
I assume you mean the Ardennes offensive? If so, it wouldn’t make a blind bit of difference - the Germans didn’t have a hope short of an intervention by Alien Space Bats!
It wouldn’t have made a difference for the outcome of the war wether the offensive in the Ardennes would have been launched or not. The war was lost for germany on the first day having enemies from different directions, west and east. If the war had lasted longer, they possibly had the chance to improve the “Wunderwaffen” (wonder weapons). Maybe the A-bomb would have been produced by Germany but then not only the Axis would have lost the war but mankind.
Well, they did have that flying saucer with plasma ray guns coming on line!
OK, so you guys actually want a serious answer? If the war had lasted more than a couple of months longer, it would be Berlin rather than Hiroshima which would have got the first dose of Instant Sunrise. Until around January 1945 or so the plan was always that the first atomic weapons would have been delivered by B-29s operating of of RAF Aldergrove in Northern Ireland.
The Nazis had stopped attempting to product an atomic bomb by 1943.
Due to mistakes in their nuclear scientists calculations, they considered any weapon to be too impractical, and the timespan needed to make it too long, for it to be of use in the war they were fighting.
That’s downright charitable. Heisenberg may have been OK as a theoretical physicist at times, but when it came to a nuclear weapons programme he was a total clown. He badly miscalculated the critical mass of U235, and IMHO both his correspondence with Bohr* and the Farm Hall transcripts demonstrate that he was committed to Germany getting a nuclear weapon. Furthermore, their investigation into what to use as a moderator was also incompetent - they ruled out Graphite after the testing they did used samples badly contaminated with Boron and Cadmium (both ravenous neutron absorbers) and they thought there was no way of obtaining purer graphite. This being at a time when the Manhattan project already had hundreds of tonnes of extremely pure Graphite made from Petroleum Coke.
Incidentally, there’s a vaguely amusing side-story with the Petroleum Coke which illustrates the problems with super-priority projects. General Groves or Robert Oppenheimer (can’t remember which) got hold of the people who supplied the stuff (IIRC it was DuPont, but not sure) and, on asking what the highest priority of anyone else wanting it was, got told “C”. His reply was that he could give them an “A” now, and an “AAA” by the end of the week - leaving the suppliers rather shellshocked. This got a rather peeved reply from his procurement guys shortly afterwards asking him not to do this in future. The problem wasn’t getting it to him in time - a lower priority would do that - but disruption elsewhere in the system coupled with it arriving sooner than he could make use of it. The Germans had many similar problems with resource constraints later in the war, but these were settled by the various little fiefs fighting it out rather than some overarching body deciding what was actually needed as in the US or UK.
Since your talking about the Atomic Bomb, I decided to get involved with this thread. Now that we are talking about nuking Germany, I would like to point out that the Americans would not have nuked Germany as the issue of surrender was only with the japanese. the Russians and all the alied forces would have had no problem defeating the Germans because of proximity and resources but the Russians were not really involved much with the Japanese and the Americans would not have wasted the A-bomb on Germany unless there was no Japan involvement in the first place. Given the choice, the Americans would have unquestionably nuked Japan over Germany. Germany would never have seen instant sunrise.
Uh huh. Which is why if you dig through the planning documents you’ll find that until it became clear that Germany would be beaten before the weapons were ready all plans were for an attack on Germany.
Indeed, Germany only eventually surrendered when it was virtually all occupied - small pockets of Germany and Scandinavia were all there was under German control when the surrender actually came on Lüneburg heath.
If Truman bombed Germany then we wouldn’t have had enough A-bombs to blast Japan. What would we of done then? I think Truman would have changed his mind anyways and concentrated on bombing Japan, given the circumstances.
Errr… made more? The only reason that the US stopped producing atomic weapons postwar was to allow them to transfer the gas diffustion and reprocessing plants to peacetime safety standards. Had they not done so then they would have been able to produce a couple of weapons a month - delaying the surrender of Japan by about 4 weeks.
No I don’t think so. Your statement that Japan would have surrendered in 4 weeks is not likely. After the first 2 atomic bombs, America would have taken mths to produce more atomic bombs. Not that it makes any difference i.e. mths or weeks, but I really don’t think America could make a third bomb in 1 mth after the first 2 were built, as per my readings on the atomic issue during WW-2.
The surrender terms offered to both Germany and Japan were the same, unconditional surrender.
the Russians and all the alied forces would have had no problem defeating the Germans because of proximity and resources but the Russians were not really involved much with the Japanese and the Americans would not have wasted the A-bomb on Germany unless there was no Japan involvement in the first place.
The USA started to build an atom bomb due to fears that German had the capabilities to build one, at no point did the US ever consider the Japanese had any realistic chance of building a working atomic weapon.
Even when Japan was winning battle after battle in the early days of the pacific war, the USA still considered Germany her most dangerous enemy.
Given the choice, the Americans would have unquestionably nuked Japan over Germany. Germany would never have seen instant sunrise.
Nonsense.
The atom bomb was built due to the German threat. If the Germans had still possessed a significant military capability when the bombs were ready, they would had been used on Germany.
Well, depending on which german city to be nuked, it would have meant “semi-nuking” Denmark, Poland, Chechoslovakia, Switzerland, France, Belgium and the Netherlands as well…
interesting point, if America was to nuke Germany late in the war (say post market-garden) was their anywhere on German soil that they could bomb and not risk fallout effecting other already liberated countries?
I don’t know about the power of the first a-bombs back then and how far the fall-out would spread but there are actually no major cities in the center of Germany, maybe Hanover and Frankfurt (sorry, Drake). But after all the danger of contaminating liberated countries, own troops or even russian troops (just imagine…), who entered german soil in October 1944, would have been enormous.
Probably not.
INITIAL ENTRY - RADIOLOGICAL SURVEY
3.2
It was recognized that entry into the atomic-bombed cities of Hiro-
shima and Nagasaki might expose the occupation troops to residual radiation
resulting from the nuclear detonations. Therefore, with the concurrence of
General George Marshall, Chief of Staff, and General Douglas MacArthur,
Theater Commander, a special scientific group was organized by the Manhattan
Engineer District. The primary objective of this group was to insure that
occupation troops would not be subjected to any possible “toxic” effects. The
group consisted principally of medical personnel headed by Col. Stafford L.
Warren (U.S. Army Medical Corps) and civil and electrical engineers. In order
to survey these areas as quickly as possible, the group was split. One-half of
the group was in Nagasaki from 20 September to 6 October; the other half was
in Hiroshima from 3 to 7 October 1945. The group reported that the radiation
levels in both cities were very low and that these levels would not present a
hazard to the occupation forces.2
http://www.dtra.mil/documents/rd/DNATR805512F.pdf
Like I said I am surely no experts but do you know about the later lifes of these people? How old they grew and what diseases they got? Didn’t they tell these poor G.I.s at Nevada in October/November 1951 (Operation Buster-Jangle) they were not in any danger? Not to mention good ol’ John Wayne’s fate here…
i dont think so the japanese were out of supplies and the germans were wiped out
The thing about the nuclear devices they had built had issues
FAT MAN was built with components that had a half-life of 45 days. After that time, half the said elements would have deteriorated enough to cause problems with the chain reaction.
LITTLE BOY was primitive, dirty. It could be easily mass produced, but the mess it made when it was fired. Plus with two pieces of Uranium that close together and the plane crashes, or the charge was accidentally fired, would have consequences beyond imagination. FAT MAN was more manageable, components could be left out, preventing the device from going critical, similar to the accidents at Mars Bluff and Spain.
Groves pushed Truman to drop the devices on Japan as soon as they were built, so they could be proven as weapons and not have any fizzles due to radioactive decay.
8 months, in that time jet fighters would have came into being over Europe, both German and American. Lockheed’s Skunk Works put together the Gray Ghost, the P-80 Shooting Star and had several in England by V-E Day. It would have given the ME262 a run for the money, given post-war testing of mock dogfights between the two aircraft had them nearly evenly matched. Only thing that would have made the difference there would have been the pilots manning them.