If the atomic bomb had been ready earlier in World War II, would it have been used against Nazi Germany? This is one of the great atomic “what if’s” — a hypothetical, counter-factual historical question that obviously can’t be answered because that’s not how history worked out, we can’t reshuffle the past around, and so on. Anything overtures in such a direction are just speculation. But it can be informed speculation — and, more importantly, it can highlight little-known aspects of history. And that, in my mind, makes it worth indulging in, at least on a blog.
The question is an interesting one for numerous reasons. At its heart, it gets at the question of how contingent all of this was. The primary factor that determined when the first atomic bombs were ready for use was when the serious program of their production started. If the Americans had been convinced in 1940, rather than 1941, that an atomic bomb was worth seriously pursuing, then the Gadget might have been ready by July 1944, not July 1945. Could they have been convinced that early on? I see no reason why not — the British scientists had drawn that conclusion by then.
Allied troops disassembling the German experimental research reactor at Haigerloch.
Up until early 1944, the bomb was still talked about as if it were going to be a deterrent against Germany. By August 1943, for example, Vannevar Bush was still reporting to Roosevelt that the Germans might be ahead, or at least neck-and-neck in the “race” for the bomb: “This may result in a situation where it will be necessary for us to stand the first punishing blows before we are in a position to destroy the enemy.” By early 1944, Groves had decided that the Germans having a bomb was “unlikely,” but that it still needed to be held out as a possibility. By late 1944, it was clear, from the Alsos mission, that Germany was nowhere near an atomic bomb — and indeed, they soon learned that the German program was in 1945 not even as far as where the Americans had gotten by the end of 1942. I put this out just as context for their thinking. Over the course of late 1943 through 1944, the bomb shifted from being a deterrent to a first-strike weapon — a weapon that was meant to be used, not held in reserve. So who would it strike?
The very earliest discussion of targets of any sort was held in May 1943. As the last item of a much longer meeting, talking about all sorts of other matters (like spreading around fake stories about what was going on at Los Alamos, E.U. Condon’s resignation from the project, and construction of the various enrichment and production plants), a group composed of Groves, Vannevar Bush, James B. Conant, Admiral William Purnell, and Major General Wilhelm Styer had this discussion:
The point of use of the first bomb was discussed and the general view appeared to be that its best point of use would be on a Japanese fleet concentration in the Harbor of Truk. General Styer suggested Tokio but it was pointed out that the bomb should be used where, if it failed to go off, it would land in water of sufficient depth to prevent easy salvage. The Japanese were selected as they would not be so apt to secure knowledge from it as would the Germans. 1
This has sometimes been cited as evidence that Japan was “always” the target. Personally, I think this seems like too loose of a discussion to draw big, concrete conclusions from. It was still over two years before the first atomic bomb would be ready, and, again, it is tacked on to a much longer meeting that is concerned with much more basic, much more practical things, like whether J. Robert Oppenheimer will get an administrative assistant assigned to him. But, still, it’s a data point. Note that the context, here, of choosing Japan over Germany is reflective of how uncertain they are about the bomb itself: they are worried that the first one will be a complete dud, and so their choice here is that if a dud were to land in Germany, it would be more dangerous thing than if it were to land in Japan.
Note that “the Harbor of Truk” (Chuuk Lagoon) is not a target on the Japanese home islands — it is in Micronesia, far south of the Japanese mainland, north of New Guinea. During World War II it was the Japanese equivalent of Pearl Harbor. It was a purely military, tactical target, not a strategic one. And by the time an atomic bomb was ready, it had been made irrelevant by Allied attacks and isolation (though it was still under Japanese occupation).
The first concrete discussion of targets came in the spring of 1945. These are the famous “Target Committee” meetings at Los Alamos which discussed what kind of target criteria they were using, what cities might fit it, and so on. Grim business, but entirely focused on Japan, in part because by that point it was clear that Germany’s defeat was imminent.
An elderly General Groves. This is from a fairly later period — 1967 or so. From the AIP Emilio Segrè Visual Archives, George Tressel Collection.
Is there any evidence that anyone in power would have considered atomic bombing Germany, though, had they the ability? The only insight I’ve found on this comes from a postwar interview that General Groves gave, sometime in the early 1960s: 2
REPORTER: General Groves, could we go back for a minute. You mentioned in your book [Now it Can Be Told] that just before the Yalta Conference that President Roosevelt said if we had bombs before the European war was over he would like to drop them on Germany. 3 Would you discuss this?
GROVES: At the conference that Secretary Stimson and myself had with President Roosevelt shortly before his departure, I believe it was December 30th or 31st of 1944, President Roosevelt was quite disturbed over the Battle of the Bulge and he asked me at that time whether I could bomb Germany as well as Japan. The plan had always been to bomb Japan because we thought the war in Germany was pretty apt to be over in the first place and in the second place the Japanese building construction was much more easily damaged by a bomb of this character than that in Germany. I urged President Roosevelt that it would be very difficult for various reasons.
The main one was that the Germans had quite strong aerial defense. They made a practice, as every nation does, that when a new plane came into the combat area, that they would run any risk that they could to bring such a plane down so that they could examine it and see what new ideas had come in so that they could make improvements and also would know the characteristics of the plane so that they could prepare a better defense against it. We had no B-29’s in Europe. If we had sent over a small squadron or group as we did against Japan of this type, everyone of them would have been brought down on the first trip to Germany. If they hadn’t been, it would have been through no lack of effort on the part of the Germans.
The alternative would be to bring a large number of B-29’s over to to England and that would have been a major logistical task and the other possibility would have been to have used a British plane which would not have been a bit pleasing to General Arnold and also would have created a great many difficulties for our general operation because then it would be an Allied operation with the United States furnishing the bombs and everything connected with it but using a British plane and a British crew to actually drop the bomb and it would have raised a tremendous number of difficulties.
And difficulties like that — while you say you should be able to handle that — you can but in a project of this character there are so many little things, each one of them key, that you can’t afford to throw any more sand into the wheels that you can help.
The bombing of Germany with atomic bombs was, I would say, never seriously considered to the extent of making definite plans but on this occasion I told the President, Mr. Roosevelt, why it would be very unfortunate from my standpoint, I added that of course if the President — if the war demanded it and the President so desired, we would bomb Germany and I was so certain personally that the war in Europe would be over before we would be ready that you might say I didn’t give it too much consideration.
Now this is an interesting detail, is it not — that FDR himself was interested in whether they could drop an atomic bomb on Germany? One has to always question postwar recollections, especially the General’s, but this has the ring of authenticity to it. I don’t think Groves would fabricate memories of conversations with Roosevelt. At this meeting, Groves had thought that the first uranium bomb (Little Boy) would be ready by late July, and that the first plutonium bomb would be ready by early August — far too late for use in the European war. But it is worth contemplating Roosevelt’s intentions. Did he really want to drop this bomb, or was he trying to figure out what exactly the USA’s chips were before entering into discussions with the Soviets? Would Roosevelt have made the same concessions to the Soviets that he ended up making, had he thought the US had an atomic bomb at the ready? Would he have insisted that the Soviets enter the Pacific war? More hypotheticals than I can deal with, but it does add an interesting wrinkle to the discussion.
The B-17 bomber (left) and the B-29 bomber (right). Source.
Groves’ argument against using a bomb in the European theatre is also interesting. Essentially he is saying that the choice not to deploy B-29s in Europe, and the choice of the B-29 as the weapon for the atomic bomb (a decision made in late 1943), had profound practical consequences. It is easy to forget that the first atomic bombs could not be dropped out of just any old plane. They were huge by the standards of World War II: the Fat Man bomb was a single, 10-foot-long, 5-foot-wide weapon that weighed over 5 tons. Neither the B-17 nor the B-24 could carry such a load in weight alone, much less in one fat bomb. The Little Boy boy bomb was just as long, weighed a little less, and did not have as large a diameter. It was also a bit over the maximum load ever carried by those other planes. The British Avro Lancaster bomber could have carried Little Boy, though — the Tall Boy and Grand Slam bombs were larger than Little Boy, though with much smaller diameters than Fat Man. My guess is that the Lancaster’s bay was too narrow for Fat Man. 4
Does one buy Groves’ reasons? Part of me is suspicious that his justification has the feel of a post facto justification to it — it’s just a little too thought out for a quick reply to Roosevelt. If I were to guess, it was the fact that he didn’t expect the bombs to be ready anytime soon, and didn’t want the obligation of trying to get one ready for use against Germany, that really was the reason for him not wanting FDR to think that the bomb might be ready for that piece of the war. Having one ready to drop on Japan by August 1945 proved to be a tough job as it was.
Was racism a factor? This sometimes gets asked as well. One of the tricky things about racism is that it only rarely factors into reasoning explicitly. I’ve seen nothing in the discussions of the people in charge of target selection that make me think that racism played any kind of overt role in the decisions they made — at least, in the sense that they would have dropped the bomb on the Japanese but would not have dropped it on the Germans. It doesn’t mean it didn’t, of course — just that I haven’t seen any real evidence of it. This is an entirely separate issue from whether racist dehumanization was encouraged for the populace and the troops (it obviously was). But, again, I don’t see any evidence to support the idea that the Americans would not have used atomic weapons against the Germans because they were whites, but would have used them against the Japanese because they were not. The Allies clearly were willing to massacre German civilians, as they did drop firebombs on several German cities, though that obviously does not tell the whole story.
So what’s the take-away answer? The long and short of it is, of course, that they didn’t have the bombs ready to use in the European theatre, knew they wouldn’t from fairly early on, and so never took the time to try and clarify the logistical issues that would have made it practicable. But Roosevelt’s question to Groves does leave open the possibility that they might have done it, if all of those things had turned out differently.
- Minutes of the Military Policy Meeting (5 May 1943), Correspondence (“Top Secret”) of the Manhattan Engineer District, 1942-1946, microfilm publication M1109 (Washington, D.C.: National Archives and Records Administration, 1980), Roll 3, Target 6, Folder 23, “Military Policy Committee, Minutes of Meetings.”[↩]
- Leslie R. Groves interview with Fred Freed (n.d., ca. 1963), National Archives and Records Administration, RG 200, Box 4, “Groves, Leslie.”[↩]
- “It was at the same conference that Mr. Roosevelt informed me if the European war was not over before we had our first bombs he wanted us to be ready to drop them on Germany.” Groves does not elaborate on this in the book at all. Leslie Groves, Now it Can Be Told (New York: Harper, 1962), 184.[↩]
- And the Gadget was pretty snug inside the Fat Man ballistic casing — I don’t see them reducing the diameter.[↩]
Another approach would be…what if D-Day failed or the Battle of the Bulge wrong stalling the allied advanced against Germany. Or Stalin dies of stroke in 1944 and the Soviets pause or create a separate armistice. The atomic bombs would have become usable when Germany was still fighting.
Let’s say D-Day failed … the Soviet advance from the east would have proceeded more slowly, as Germany would have been able to devote more troops to the Eastern Front, but it probably would not have been completely stopped. Fears of a D-Day repeat would have obliged Germany to keep considerable forces in the west. So it’s late 1945 or early 1946. Germany’s complete defeat is only weeks away. The Allies are still bottled up in Britain, while the Soviets are on the verge of overrunning all of Germany – with nothing to stop them from going all the way to the English Channel, for that matter.
Would it have been morally acceptable for the United States to use nuclear weapons to hasten Germany’s inevitable defeat, if a German surrender might have been enough to get the Soviets to call off their advance?
I think this response is colored by Cold War history – during WW II, the Soviets were our treasured allies, not our enemies. Perhaps Truman was influenced by this theme, but FDR certainly was not – he wanted a rapid conclusion to the war, and was willing to make peace with the Russians – as perhaps Churchill was not. The Russians lost far more lives in their effort to block the German advance into the oilfields of Baku etc. than British and American forces did, after all – and it was their determination to block German efforts to seize control of those oilfields that was the greatest determining factor in the outcome of WWII (followed closely by British and American efforts to halt the German advance across North Africa into the MIddle East oilfields, however). Without this cooperation, Hitler might very well have been successful. Indeed, the whole Cold War might have been avoided by clever diplomacy – something that Truman was sorely lacking in. It could have been avoided, but that was not the way history went. For this diplomatic failure, who do we have to blame?
And yes, they would have used nuclear weapons against Germany, if they believed that it would have forced a surrender – but given the timing, nuclear weapons were not needed. If D-Day had failed in the face of German nerve gas attacks, and Soviet forces had been driven back with similar tactics, then it would have been inevitable – the European theater war commanders would have begged for such armaments, in such conditions.
—Were there, in December of 1944, any targets in nazi-controlled Europe, that could have been attacked with ship carried atom bombs?
“The test was devised to investigate the effects of a ship-smuggled bomb (a threat of great concern to the British at the time). The ship was mostly vaporized by the explosion, except for scattered fragments of hot metal that set fires to the spinifex scrub covering Trimouille. ”
http://nuclearweaponarchive.org/Uk/UKOrigin.html
The difference in diameter of the Grand Slam bomb and the Fat Man was a bit over 40cm. Avro were pretty adept at modifying the Lancaster to meet specific requirements, so I think had it been necessary they could have produced modified Lancs capable of carrying Fat Man.
I’m not an airplane guy, but everything I’ve read has suggested that the Grand Slam itself barely fit (it required removal of the bomb bay doors, for example, among other modifications). I’m not saying it was impossible, but I doubt it would have been anything too easy. Even the B-29s used for the atomic bombs required modification (Silverplate program), and Fat Man was pretty dang snug in the B-29 bomb bay.
The only reason the Lancaster could carry such a heavy bomb load was because it had such light defensive armament compared to the B-17 or B-24. It carried a mere 8 .303 calibre machine guns in 3 turrets and had a much smaller crew which enabled it to carry more offensive ordnance. It was virtually defenseless during daylight hours and so would be unsuitable to deliver an atomic bomb.
Actually the Silverplate B-29’s had all their defensive armament and armour removed to save weight so they too were defenseless.
(Small point: they had their tail guns and tail armor remaining, but all other armor and defensive armaments stripped.)
Groves’ argument that using a British plane would necessarily imply an Allied Operation with a British crew
seems implausible to me. I rather suspect that a quiet Roosevelt-Churchill chat could have persuaded Churchill to “lend” the US a plane or three, and I rather suspect that the USAAF could have trained a few
of their own crews to fly the British planes. It appears to me that the key point is that this would have been
politically embarrasing for Groves and the USAAF (as per the point about Arnold).
Alex,
I cover some of this in my book. I said on pp. 316-17.
“Norman Ramsey was assigned to head the Delivery Group of the Ordnance Division and later served as deputy to Parsons. . . . Given their size and weight, there were only two possible choices for an aircraft to deliver the weapons, the British Lancaster or the American B-29, which had begun production in September.
Ramsey favored the Lancaster and traveled to Canada in early October 1943 to meet Roy Chadwick, the plane’s chief designer. Chadwick was in Canada to observe the initial Lancasters coming off the production line at the Victory Aircraft Works, Milton Airdrome, in Toronto. Ramsey showed Chadwick preliminary sketches of the large — thin-shaped and stubby-shaped — bombs and later wrote with more details. Chadwick assured Ramsey that the Lancaster could accommodate them.
When Ramsey returned, he wrote to Parsons suggesting that the Lancaster be seriously considered and planned a memo to General Groves recommending that a modified Lancaster be used.
The bomb bay was thirty-three feet long and sixty-one inches wide. The depth was only thirty-eight inches, but this could be modified. The Lancaster’s ceiling was 27,000 feet, its speed 285 miles per hour, and takeoff required only 3,750 feet of runway — a critical matter wherever it would be based.
Groves had not been informed about Ramsey’s preference and was at a loss for words when he found out. It was beyond comprehension that Ramsey could consider using a British plane to deliver an American atomic bomb. Needless to say, Groves found an ally in General Arnold when he discussed this matter with him. The new Boeing B-29 Superfortress would carry the atomic bomb.”
Alex, On Germany as a target I have the following footnote on page 647.
“In Dec. 1944, FDR, discouraged by reason of the Battle of the Bulge, did tell me he thought the war might be prolonged and that we should be prepared to use the bomb against Germany.” LRG, Memo to File, August 1, 1965, Folder, Comments on The New World, Box 3, Entry 7530J, Papers of LRG, RG 200, NARA. Elsewhere he said, “Mr. Roosevelt told me to be ready to do it.” Ermenc, Scientists, 252. Vannevar Bush felt the same way. “If he [FDR] had any doubts, he never expressed them to me.” Quoted in Zachary, Frontier, 214.”
The pacing item had always been that when there was enough HEU or plutonium for a bomb it would be used soon afterwards. There was not enough of either material by April/May 1945 and Groves was able at that time and well before to calculate what was being produced at Hanford and Oak Ridge.
In what was an extraordinary coincidence there was enough of each type ready on almost the same day. All of it was rushed to Tinian and used when the weather allowed. Had Dupont’s schedule been followed there would not have been enough plutonium for the test bomb until mid-October and enough for a combat bomb until mid-November or later. It was through Groves’ “speed up” initiative that both types were ready when they were.
[…] some kind of legitimate, diplomatic threat seems pretty out of character. Though do remember that Roosevelt asked Groves about using the bomb against Germany in December 1944 — so maybe, somewhere, this kind of idea was kicking around inside the heads of some people who […]
[…] Alemania con una bomba nuclear; el presidente Roosevelt era uno de los más interesados en hacerlo. ¿Hubiera sido Alemania atacada por una bomba nuclear en la Segunda Guerra Mundial?(3) De no ser por el reporte de Berg y la confianza de ganar la guerra en el terreno, probablemente […]
Groves’ book describes one conversation with General Henry Harley Arnold on the subject of planes. Alex Wellerstein and Stan Norris have clearly read these paragraphs already, but they’re worth quoting in full, for comparison with the interview quoted here.
(Leslie Groves, Now it Can Be Told, “Training the Air Unit”, p254)
In both the book and interview, Groves is clearly trying to put the best possible spin on his wartime decisions. It’s fascinating reading, but I’d never trust it as an unbiased account – especially when the British and French are involved.
I think if we had lost England and been forced to developed the Intercontinental Bomber AKA the B-36 the war in Europe could have been extended a couple of years and the use of the atomic bomb in Europe would become a option. That being said knowing what we now know about Hitlers state of mind the use of one or two Atomic bombs would have little effect on his war plans.
Paul Tibbets always told the story that his original orders from General Ent in late fall of 1944 were to create this unique air group (509th Composite Group) that would be trained to drop the as-yet undeveloped atomic weapons simultaneously on both Germany and Japan. Of course, Germany surrendered months before either Little Boy or Fat Man had been finished.
It seems pretty unlikely, given how keen Roosevelt’s diverse cabinet was to implement the Morgenthau plan and kill millions (more) Germans.
[…] from the beginning. The first concrete discussions about what cities to target with the atomic bomb did not take place until the spring of 1945. On April 27, 1945, the first “Target Committee” meeting was held in the Pentagon. […]
There’s an additional document worth considering: the aide-memoire from a Sept. 19, 1944 meeting between Roosevelt and Churchill, which states: “When a bomb is finally available, it might perhaps, after mature consideration, be used against the Japanese, who should be warned that this bombardment will be repeated until they surrender.” (Martin Sherwin, A World Destroyed, p. 111)
It doesn’t say why Japan and not Germany. The possibility can’t be discounted that, by that point, it was considered unlikely that the bomb would be ready before Germany’s defeat, although Groves’ comments that you quote suggest the option of Germany was still being considered later. I’m sure that, when I was researching this question long ago, I saw other documents confirming the view of the May 1943 meeting that the Japanese would be less able to decipher the meaning of an unexploded A-bomb than the Germans were.
I’d consider this a slightly racist view, especially considering that, as I recall reading, there was a Japanese physicist who’d gotten much farther in theoretical fission research than the Germans ever did, so the Japanese weren’t that scientifically or technologically backwards after all.
But it does emphasize one other point: the concern of the planners that, even after the bomb was tested, any given specimen of it might fail to detonate, a major consideration in planning and one which I hope you discuss elsewhere in posts I haven’t gotten to yet.