Would the US have dropped the bomb on Europe?

[raccoon]

Thomas Cahill said on Bill Moyer's Journal not long ago that he thought no way the US would have.
(That is, they wouldn't have dropped the bomb on white people.)

I'm not sure what I think about it.

[NoodleBoy]

1. no, the bomb was dropped on Japanese soil because there were no Americans on it

and it COULDN'T have been dropped on Europe because the war in Europe was over before the bomb was ready.

[raccoon]

3. I realize that. The question is, if the bomb had been ready, would they have dropped it? nt

[NoodleBoy]

6. at what point? the beginning of the war? near the end, when allied forces

basically just had to walk through already bombed-out cities (compared to what they had to go through)?

Yes, I think that if the allies had the bomb earlier in the war, say, during the height of the blitz, one of Germany's industrial centers would have become a radioactive dust heap. The situation was that desperate then.

The reason it was even used on the Japanese home islands was it was projected that at least one million Americans would die in the invasion, plus millions more Japanese civilians, since even women and children were being armed, trained, and indoctrinated to throw themselves at the enemy when the land invasion came.

[nadinbrzezinski]

12. You are aware that there was a POW camp near one of the two targets?

and that gosh, there were AMERICANS in it.

[raccoon]

16. Which one? nt

[NoodleBoy]

21. which one?

[Zywiec]

24. How many Americans were killed in these camps because of the bombings? n/t

[uppityperson]

26. I didn't know that. Which target please? Thanks.

[SteppingRazor]

2. I think we absolutely would have.

[tuckessee]

4. Without a doubt.

They showed no hesitation to destroy German cities by firebombing.

Had the European war lasted a few months longer Germany would've received the first A-bombs. The Pacific was always a secondary theatre.

[grahamhgreen]

5. I say yes... we did firebomb Dresden which was similar

[krispos42]

22. We firebombed a LOT of cities with similar results

Tokyo was hit with a firestorm after one bombing that killed as many as Nagisaki and Hiroshima combined, and Frankfurt was hit as hard as Dresdan was a couple of months later.

Generally speaking, incendiary bombs work better than explosive ones in destroying stuff. Fire spreads, which both destroys more stuff and gives the civilian population time to flee an area.

In the case of Dresden it seems that many of the casualties were caused by a firestorm, made worse by poor emergency planning. Also, Dresden had been virtually untouched up to that point, so there was a lot more to burn.

[mondo joe]

7. Think that might have to do more with endangering the citizens of countries who

WEREN'T at war with the US?

[jmg257]

8. Hmmm...good question, and I say it is a tough call.

While we were looking at U.S. estimated casualties between .5 Million and 1 Million and who knows how many Japanese civilians (a LOT more) if we invaded Japan, conquering Germany was figured to cause/caused no where near that.

I think we might just have held off on using it in Europe. It wasn't necessary IF we only had a couple available.

[rockymountaindem]

9. I think so

Germany's atomic program was the impetus for our development of nuclear weapons, and as others have posted upthread, we basically did our level best to destroy Dresden as well as some other German cities such as Hamburg, so I see no reason why they would have been spared the atomic bomb if it were ready in time.

[nadinbrzezinski]

10. Yes, but don't let history hit anybody in the ass

the only reason it wasn't is that that the Alamo Gordo test happened in July of 1945 when the word ended some months before...

[aikoaiko]

11. Yes.

[krispos42]

13. Interesting question

I guess it depends on a few things.

If we had lost the Battle of the Bulge and been pushed back in disarray across France, then that would have prolonged the war to the point that Little Boy may have been dropped on a critical German city. Probably not Berlin in the same way that we didn't nuke Tokyo. The Germans were also working on nuclear weapons so defeating them before they could nuke London or Moscow (or both) would have been a priority. Nuking the Nazis into surrender, or perhaps nuking whatever city they were developing their nukes at, would have been critical to prevent the world's first nuclear exchange.

If, on the other hand, we developed the nuclear bomb a year early... with Japan in full retreat across the Pacific, Italy defeated, and the Nazis being pushed back on all fronts by Patton and Montgomery after the Normandy invasion, victory by conventional arms seemed inevitable and the bomb might have been held in reserve.

Or we might have used one on each nation in summer of 1944, taking out Hiroshima and, say, Frankfurt, to either attempt to end the war quicky by threatening mass extermination of the Japanese and Germans with comparatively little Allied deaths, or to seriously damage the war effort. Hiroshima and Frankfurt were both major cities with manufacturing, and Frankfurt was a major link in the Nazi logistical chain. With Frankfurt gone, the ability of the Nazis to resist the Allied invasion would have been seriously reduced.





The fundamental problem is that Japan and German were different. Hiroshima and Nagasaki were coastal cities with seven thousand miles of ocean downwind of their respective Ground Zeros. Germany's terrain was different. A nuclear bomb dropped on Germany would have radioactive fallout spreading across Poland, Czechoslovokia, Austria, Hungry, etc., affecting millions of people downwind, including our Soviet allies fighting westward to Berlin.

[raccoon]

17. Good point, about the fallout affecting other countries. nt

[Didereaux]

20. dangers of fallout were not understood back then.,,so not a factor in any decision

[krispos42]

29. It was known.

It was not as well known as it is now, but the people involved knew about the dispersion of radioactive isotopes after the detonation of an implosion-type plutonium bomb at the Trinity site. Radioactivity has been studied for decades prior to the Manhattan Project.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trinity_test#Test_results

[Ganja Ninja]

14. We're damned if we do and we're damned if we don't.

So now we're racist because we didn't kill enough people in Europe during WWII?

[Didereaux]

15. of course, it was developed BECAUSE of the German threat! duh its called history 101

[Kingshakabobo]

18. as desperate as they were, England and Churchill would have insisted on it.

[Xithras]

19. Yes. They intended to.

The Manhattan Project was originally started as a counter to concerns that Germany was developing one, with the intention to develop one ourselves and hit them first. Japan simply had the misfortune to be the last man standing when the bomb was actually ready to go.

It hasn't been discussed much over the last couple decades, but for quite a while there was a belief that the bomb was only used on Japan to save some face. So much time, effort, and money had been invested in the Manhattan Project that it would have been seen as a "failure" if it had never actually been used during the war. By using the bombs to bring the war to a close, those people who had backed the project effectively justified its existence. If they hadn't done so, the technology would have remained classified and many careers would have been ruined over the "billions of dollars wasted on a failed wartime weapons project."

I don't think it was so much a racist issue, as it was an ego issue.

[melm00se]

23. Flyboys

You might want to read James Bradley's book Flyboys

he talks about the difference in perception by the American public between the Germans and the Japanese, the difference in propaganda and attitudes of the American public.

In essence it was that the Japanese, looking far different than any Northern European originated, white person, were far easier to demonize and dehumanize than Germans.

Because of that, the absolutely devastating and horrific firebombing of Japan was a simple thing to do, after all, the Japanese were subhuman animals.

I see that Dresden has been raised in several posts, but compared to the 1945 firebombing campaign, Dresden was limited airstrike: more than 50 cities were hit during a 6 month period leading to at least 500K deaths, 5 million homeless and cities like Tokushima, Fukui, Kuwana and Kofu damn near wiped off the map (75% or better destroyed)and the city of Toyama completely destroyed.

Jumping from that to dropping the bomb was not a big leap.

[MilesColtrane]

25. Yes

[Genanderson]

27. I don't believe so

Germany on its last legs was not synonmous with Japan. The Germans were not arming and training their citizenry with guns, spears and pitchforks to resist any incursion by foreign troops with the fanatical zealotry to ensure an outcome that couldn't be any less than genocide. The Japanese were. Also keep in mind that there were other major players in Europe, most notably the Russians. Once the outcome of the war was decided, a race began to keep as much territory out of the hands of communist Russia as possible. It would not have done much good to completely annihilate cities like Berlin when occupying it was a much more favorable an option.

Japan on the other hand was not fighting Russia. There was no land grab necessary. Combine that with the devastating losses projected on both sides of a Japanese mainland invasion, and an argument for turning to the atom bomb could be made where with Germany it could not.

[Tierra_y_Libertad]

28. They did the equivalent on Hamburg and Dresden.

“What difference does it make to the dead, the orphans and the homeless, whether the mad destruction is wrought under the name of totalitarianism or the holy name of liberty or democracy.” - Gandhi

[Tesha]

30. No, Europe is full of white people and relatives of many "real Murkans".

We did essentially vaporize Dresden, though.

Tesha