Off Topic — HabitableZone

Off Topic » in reply to Uh...we had the A-Bomb a year after D-Day.

It takes more than that
Larry J — (archived)

Had the Soviet Union been defeated, Germany would've been able to solidify their hold on Europe. They would've had access to tremendous resources, both natural and human (as in slave labor). It's possible that the British might not have been able to hold on, especially if the U-boat campaign had been stepped up. Without the British Isles, we might have had a few* atomic bombs, but we would have had a very hard time delivering them. Even the B-29 lacked the range to carry an atomic bomb across the Atlantic and make it back. Without the British Isles, not only would our bombing campaign been extremely difficult, but the invasion of Europe would've been much more difficult.

You can't easily compare the aftermath of dropping the bombs on Japan with what might have happened in Germany. First, Japan has few natural resources of its own and our submarine blockade was strangling them. The fire bombing campaign was destroying much of the rest of their economy. Even after Hiroshima, it took Japan 8 days to finally surrender**. Given the massive bombing of Hamburg, Dresden, Berlin, Munich, and just about every other German city, I don't know if dropping a couple atomic bombs on them would've been enough to force them to surrender, especially if they had the Soviet Union's resources.

*I've read that we actually used up all of our atomic bombs in 1945. One was detonated at the Trinity test, one was dropped on Hiroshima, and the last was dropped on Nagasaki. If that source was accurate, we didn't have the materials to build any more bombs until weeks or months later.

**Every now and then, I hear how some believe we should've dropped a bomb offshore of Japan as a demonstration in the hopes they would surrender. However, this really doesn't make much sense. Japan didn't surrender immediately after we bombed Hiroshima, so how can we believe they would've surrendered after a demonstration. It took a few days after Nagasaki was bombed before they finally surrendered, and even then, the hardliners didn't go down without a fight.

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