Where would the first nuke have been dropped in Germany?
score:10
I found it, thanks to the comment of @Jon Custer:
The targeting committee did not meet until after the European surrender. A possible list may have been made, but not a final decision.
The targeting committee was the key. Once I got that, I found its first meeting was on 02 May 1945.
After the German surrender, on 10-11 May the committee met again, and came up with a list of cities that could be targeted.
Conclusion: The A Bomb was developed with the Germany First policy in mind, but when the development was in its final stage, Germany was on the brink of surrendering. Hitler was dead, it was just a matter of time before the actual surrender. No need to drop a nuke on Germany.
Why this question?
Long ago (decades, actually) I read a convincing article that presented Nuremberg as prime target. I was thinking about this article, and wondered if this was historic. With the help of Jon Custer I can conclude that this article was bogus.
Upvote:2
First post on History, so this may be too hypothetical an answer (to go with a hypothetical question), but when I saw the question it immediately made me think of The Berlin Project by Gregory Benford. Basically an alternate history where the bomb is developed a little earlier to be dropped on Berlin. I realize this is fictional, but a lot of the material in the book is based on real people and real events, with just enough fictional elements to change the outcome. It is clear that the author did a lot of research regarding the physics and logistics and other aspects of creating the bomb. Whether he did much research vs. speculation as far as where to drop the bomb, I don't know.
Upvote:9
The Battle of Kursk was July 1943, the Bombing of Berlin ran until March 1944, D-Day was 6 Jun 1944, and VE day was 8 May 1945.
General groves wrote 'Now it can be told' about his leadership of the Manhattan project and while a problematic source in a number of ways it includes chapter 19 'choosing the target' which indicates his tasking to identify target cities happened in Spring 1945 (Wikipedia has April, as source in answer). The 509th composite group to actually deliver the bombs was formed 17 December 1944.
By early 1945 the timelines to the Trinity test in July 1945 was reasonably clear, depending largely on the accumulation of sufficient material to actually make the weapon, with the actual bombings of japan happening in August 1945
Lining up events in Europe with the above it would seem a safe bet to planners in early 1945 that even if both parties invading Europe were substantially delayed, it would be likely that no large area targets/cities to usefully drop an atomic weapon on would exist mid year. As it was special action was taken to preserve potential atomic weapon targets in Japan from conventional bombing.
Groves writing in 'now it can be told' was already aware of the risks of fallout, so appears to have not even considered deployment of the first weapon in a tactical manner to support an attack, with the targeting choice being strictly strategic.
Upvote:45
For practical purposes, the decision to deploy all B-29 bombers in the Pacific Theatre had an untended side effect: Only Japan could be targeted by the Manhattan Project deliverables. Both Little Boy and Fat Man were 10 feet long and over 5 tons, significantly beyond the delivery capabilities of either the B-17 (3 ton maximum payload) or B-24 (4 ton maximum payload) even at minimum range. This left only the B-29 as a capable American bomber, and by its deployment only the Pacific Theatre as delivery zone.
General Groves discussed these points after the war in a recall of an interview with F.D.R.:
.... 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.
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