- cross-posted to:
- noncredibledefense@piefed.social
- cross-posted to:
- noncredibledefense@piefed.social
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The Man in the High Castle is set in an alternate timeline where the Germans did win the war by developing nukes first. They then bombed DC, leading to the US surrendering. Germany then took over Europe, Africa and most of the Americas while Japan conquered Eastern Asia, Oceana, and the American West Coast.
But in reality, it was not a close race. The Manhattan Project was invested in heavily due largely from fears that Germany would develop nuclear weapons first, but their Uranproject had largely been abandoned by the time the US started their equivalent. German physicists first discovered nuclear fission, and their government began seeking how to develop a bomb shortly after. However, Germany essentially gave it up as unachievable in the near term as they never managed to achieve a chain reaction or even enrich Uranium. Secret recordings show their scientists did not initially believe the news about Hiroshima, thinking it impossible with then-modern technology.
They did come fairly close to developing the first nuclear reactor however, as scientists were still interested in civilian if not military applications. It’s interesting that today Germany houses US nuclear weapons for defense as part of NATO but has a population firmly opposed to nuclear power.
It’s interesting that today Germany houses US nuclear weapons for defense as part of NATO but has a population firmly opposed to nuclear power.
The West German civilian reactor program was just meant to cover the development of all the parts needed to develop nuclear weapons. The Soviets ran a massive propaganda campaign against it and the Western allies did not like the idea that Germany, which recently did invade most of Europe, had nuclear weapons. However the fear of West German politicans of Soviet invasion was somewhat justified, so to calm them down the US station US weapons in West Germany as a sort of insurance. However you do not need nuclear reactors to built nukes with highly enriched uranium, but just an enrichment plant and the ability to put a nuke together. Guess which parts of the civilian reactor program are still around.
You know it’s an American movie because it depicts the USA as being a threat to Germany lol. Moscow would have been bombed first, and England second.
I kinda agree with you but taking the US out of the war wouldn’t have been a stupid objective as they were a manufacturing powerhouse keeping aid flowing to Britain and other allies.
Germany could have won WW2 if they had appealed better to Americans and convinced them to join the Nazis.
It would have been easier than that; they had a non-aggression treaty with Russia that they broke. Had they not done that, Russia likely would not have joined the Allies, and it’s not out of the question that they might have joined the Axis.
That wouldn’t guarantee an Axis win, but without nuclear weapons, the Allies wouldn’t be able to sustain a land war against a Germany/Russia alliance.
If Hitler hadn’t declared war on the US, we may have only focused on Japan. Fortunately for Roosevelt things evolved in just 3 days from ‘holy shit japan attacked us’ to ‘we’re gonna beat the whole fucking world to death with superior manufacturing’. good thing there’s absolutely NOTHING either japan nor germany can do to bomb detroit or the rest of US production. Pretty soon liberty ships are coming off the line in numbers that ensure the germans can never stop aid to the UK. And japan - sure they sunk a bunch of nice (but obsoleted by carriers) battleships but that’s pretty much where it ends in terms of punishing US installations.
There were already skirmishes between US ships and German u-boats for well over a year before US was bombed at Pearl Harbor. So, even if Pearl Harbor didn’t happen, there is another Lusitania moment waiting to happen for US to justify declaring war on Germany.
(As a side note, the bit of history on US and German naval skirmishes before Pearl Harbor seems to be getting sidelined and unknown by those who weren’t alive at the time)
valid, the wolfpacks had the entire east coast mapped out and were chomping to attack more US shipping. BUT. imho this simply illustrates how stupid hitler was. Picking a fight with the ally of your enemy to stop just supplying and start shooting stops working rapidly as liberty ship production outpaces the german’s ability to sortie subs (and of course we were reading their comms eventually, making it a turkey shoot). it’s like the japanese and germans thought they had some magic way they’d keep the rust belt out of the war and oops, that kinda destroyed them. our ability to endlessly manufacture new and better shit as the war went on, and their inability to hurt production at all while theirs was being destroyed… history is full of “what were they thinking?” moments in hindsight.
Oh and the US probably shouldn’t have strangled Japanese with oil embargos which probably precipitated actual hostilities.
Russia likely would not have joined the Allies
The USSR spent the previous decade trying to build an antifascist pact and was snubbed as the western powers signed their own non-aggression pacts with Germany. They pledged to send 1 million troops to invade Germany if the western powers would support them. Instead the western powers handed over Czechslovakia to Germany and Poland, hoping they would go east and deal with the greater threat, communism.
The USSR didn’t sign a non-aggression-pact with Germany because they wanted their number one enemy to succeed, but because it was the only way to draw the western powers in against Germany. Hell Britain was only stopped from sending troops to invade the USSR during the Winter War on the side of the axis by Sweden denying them transit.
The only way Germany was winning the war was if they got a whole new leadership structure that didn’t rely on a cult of personality.
The Nazi bureaucracy was deliberately convoluted, which paralysed decision making. The OKW oversees the Western theatre of Europe, while the Heer looks after the Eastern front. The OKW is officially the general staff who should lead the overall operations of all branches of the military, but the Heer was given the duplicate responsibility on the Eastern front. So, there was competition between the allocation of resources for both organisations and the prioritisation was divided and inefficient.
Edit: mix up between OKW and Heer
Would have probably taken a few more months, since only 2 nukes existed in August of 1945.
there was a third, which was scheduled to be dropped on 19 August. That bomb became the demon core.
We nuked Japan because we wanted to test nukes, not because it materially affected the war effort. It’s possible our government would have considered it “wrong” to nuke white Europeans.
This is false. A conventional invasion of the homeland would have been extremely costly. The Japanese were deeply convinced of the war being live or death for everyone.
to illustrate the scale of this: The invasion of japan was estimated to produce hundreds of thousands of dead and millions wounded US servicepeople. We still haven’t used up the production run of Purple Hearts produced in anticipation of the war lasting for years longer.
https://www.historynewsnetwork.org/article/75-years-later-purple-hearts-made-for-an-invasion-
Excusatio non petita, accusatio manifesta. Is it so hard to see both reasons are true.
It turns out that they were already about to surrender
citation?
I’ve read that Hirohito may have wanted to surrender or sue for peace but the generals / admirals controlling the war basically refused, and it was only the second bomb that finally pushed them to allow the emperor to surrender.
Don’t have a link for it, it was written in the atom bomb museum of Nagasaki I think, or Hiroshima, but I think it was Nagasaki
The Peace Museum is such a disingenuous monument.
It’s all “boo hoo, they dropped the bomb on Japan”, but the only context given, or reference to the absolute horrors Japan inflicted on SE Asia is like “somehow Japan found itself at war”
Japan sees itself as a victim of the war, not the bloodthirsty, psychopathic nation that murdered millions of innocent people out of imperial greed.
The museums are about the bombs, not the war. Other atrocities like the destruction of Tokyo also weren’t mentioned, so if you call it disingenuous you might’ve missed the point to be honest. 300.000 lives were destroyed in an instant, with many of them suffering greatly over day, weeks, years and even decades. The museus show what happened on those 2 days and why nuclear bombs should never be used again
All 3 can be true; dropping the bombs were a warcrime, being an untargeted attacked against civilians of a country that already tried to surrender, Japan committed atrocities across EA, and has failed to come to terms with its past.
I don’t think it was ‘about to surrender’ in the way your interpreting.
don’t get me wrong, it was a war of annihilation - on the 6th the US drops the bomb on Hiroshima, on the 8th the soviets flood 1m+ soldiers into manchuria, the next day the US drops on Nagasaki, then on the 10th the emperor breaks the deadlock in the cabinet.
On the 15th the Emperor makes the radio address and it’s pretty much over.
https://www.nationalww2museum.org/war/articles/japans-surrender-military-coup-1945
the problem is there’s a LOT of moving parts on both sides trying to figure out if it’s over or just the beginning of another series of conflicts that will split japan between the western allies and the soviets - something I think the Japanese feared more than actual destruction.
I’m definitely interpreting their words correctly, something along the lines of “investigations have shown that Japan would’ve surrendered even without dropping the bombs.”
I didn’t fact check this of course, but I assume the museum did. In the end it’s difficult to say for sure, there were a lot of variables like you said, but that is the conclusion that the museum came up with
But… I’ve heard (from people online) nuking Japan was a necessary evil. Is that not the case? (I am big dummy and legit don’t know, suck at history. Though I am somewhat skeptical hearing potential USians say their violence was necessary)
Even after the bombs were dropped there was a coup attemptto overthrow Emperor Hirohito so that Japan could keep on fighting to the last man, woman and child.
It was a necessary evil, but it was just that. Evil.
Japan could keep on fighting to the last man, woman and child.
“fighting to the last man, woman and child” invokes a long-standing racist orientalism, with this notion of a super-honorable Japanese race who are incapable of making rational decisions - conveniently played up and accepted as gospel to justify the mass murder of a six-figure number of civilians whilst also painting them as not normal humans.
Volunteer Fighting Corps conscripted all males aged 15-60 and all unmarried females aged 17-40
Operation Downfall estimated casualties in the millions for both sides with the USA still using purple hearts that were made FOR Downfall
It’s not racist to say that a society that would rather commit ritualistic suicide than spread shame or dishonour to their family would fight to the very bloody end than bear the shame of losing the war.
It’s not racist to say that a society that would rather commit ritualistic suicide than spread shame or dishonour to their family would fight to the very bloody end than bear the shame of losing the war.
It’s dictionary definition racism. You’re attributing something that a small number of people in the country did, to the entire group. It doesn’t get any more racist than that.
Your citations are poor as well, given the Allies also had conscription, and you’re citing Allied reports as though they could possibly be regarded as a reliable unbiased description of the Japanese.
You’re using “I’m not racist but…” racism, to justify mass civilian murder. Have a word with yourself.
Essentially, there were three options going into the second half of 1945: invasion, blockade, or the atomic bombings.
Invasion and blockade both had projected casualties in the millions. So Truman made the decision to attempt to use the atomic bombs as a weapon of intimidation, dropping them and promising total destruction by the means of more such bombings if Japan did not surrender.
I will never defend the firebombings over Japan, which did nothing to hasten the end of the war. But the atomic bomb was a new and devastating weapon which Truman, and much of US high command who were aware of its existence, correctly surmised would convince the Japanese government of the futility of further resistance (combined with a bluff that we had as many as we needed).
Notably, even after the Soviet Union joined the war and both bombs had been dropped, a significant faction of the Japanese government wanted to keep fighting, even attempting a coup to continue the war. Only the direct intervention of Emperor Hirohito, a key figure in the State Shinto faith pushed by the Japanese Empire at the time, pushed the Japanese government to the negotiating table on terms less than “We keep our imperial conquests but say sowwy 😊”
Is it not the case that the US favored the atomic bombs also because they saw that the USSR was carving a part of Europe into its sphere of influence and wanted to avoid the same happening in Japan?
The Soviets were preparing a massive invasion and they had started moving into Manchuria about at the same time.
Getting Japan to surrender now would allow the US to move in instead of the Soviets.
The Soviets never had any serious chance at making headway into Japan, even in its weakened state. The Soviet Pacific fleet was in terrible condition, and would not have been able to sustain anything more than a tiny expeditionary force.
OK thanks for the information.
I think it had to be a sneak attack, because planes didn’t have the long range they have now, so warning your enemies about the bomb would enable the to prepare.
There were warnings before bombings of some Japanese cities, and likely/possibly before the Hiroshima bomb was dropped.
It’s not clear if leaflets were dropped before the Nagasaki bomb however.
https://ahf.nuclearmuseum.org/ahf/key-documents/warning-leaflets/
We should have just like Sherman should’ve turned west from Savannah and not stopped until he reached the Pacific. No more half measures
Morgenthau 🫱🫲 Sherman
I would not be alive had it come to that. My dad was born in 1944 in Berlin.
Unlikely. There wasn’t the same level of racism against Germans.
Man, we utterly flattened Germany with a sustained campaign of strategic bombing, and seriously considered ethnically cleansing a good portion of the country after the war. If it seemed like Nazi Germany was going to hold out for another million Allied casualties, you bet your ass they would’ve had a can of sunshine opened on them.
Of course there were millions in casualties, but they were russians, so USA saw that as a win-win.
I mean, the Soviets were very clear with the Western Allies on what timetables they wanted. Many of those Soviet casualties were a choice by the Soviet Union '43-'45 regarding the Soviet Union reclaiming its ‘rightful’ sphere of influence.
Yeah the only question is which German cities would’ve been nuked, not if
Which German cities were left to be nuked, even. Many were smoldering rubble by the end of the war.
Honestly, it probably would’ve been used on troop concentrations rather than a city. The reason cities were chosen in Hiroshima and Nagasaki were because, absent an active invasion, there were no heavy troop concentrations of the sort that would have emerged as a front developed in an invasion of the Japanese home islands.
Was there even close to enough precision to try to bomb Obersalzberg as a statement? Nuclear or no, it was not a huge target and I know it had anti aircraft defenses
Enola Gay dropped it’s nuke from 30,000 feet which as fas as I understand was well out of the practical range of AA guns at the time.
I would guess that altitude makes targeting an issue but obviously precision with that type of destructive weapon isn’t really a concern.
“It is my opinion that the use of this barbarous weapon at Hiroshima and Nagasaki was of no material assistance in our war against Japan. The Japanese were already defeated and ready to surrender because of the effective sea blockade and the successful bombing with conventional weapons.” -Admiral William D. Leahy, 1950
The Japanese had, in fact, already sued for peace before the atomic age was announced to the world with the destruction of Hiroshima and before the Russian entry into war… The atomic bomb played no decisive part, from a purely military standpoint, in the defeat of Japan. - Chester W. Nimitz, 6 October 1945 Commander-in-chief of the US pacific fleet in WWII
First, the Japanese were ready to surrender and it wasn’t necessary to hit them with that awful thing. Second, I hated to see our country be the first to use such a weapon - Dwight D Eisenhower 1963
Based on a detailed investigation of all the facts, and supported by the testimony of the surviving Japanese leaders involved, it is the Survey’s opinion that certainly prior to 31 December 1945, and in all probability prior to 1 November 1945, Japan would have surrendered even if the atomic bombs had not been dropped, even if Russia had not entered the war, and even if no invasion had been planned or contemplated. - US Government Strategic Bombing Survey, 1946
Another myth that has attained wide attention is that at least several of Truman’s top military advisers later informed him that using atomic bombs against Japan would be militarily unnecessary or immoral, or both. There is no persuasive evidence that any of them did so. None of the Joint Chiefs ever made such a claim, although one inventive author has tried to make it appear that Leahy did by braiding together several unrelated passages from the admiral’s memoirs. Actually, two days after Hiroshima, Truman told aides that Leahy had ‘said up to the last that it wouldn’t go off.’
Neither MacArthur nor Nimitz ever communicated to Truman any change of mind about the need for invasion or expressed reservations about using the bombs. When first informed about their imminent use only days before Hiroshima, MacArthur responded with a lecture on the future of atomic warfare and even after Hiroshima strongly recommended that the invasion go forward. Nimitz, from whose jurisdiction the atomic strikes would be launched, was notified in early 1945. ‘This sounds fine,’ he told the courier, ‘but this is only February. Can’t we get one sooner?’
The best that can be said about Eisenhower’s memory is that it had become flawed by the passage of time.
Notes made by one of Stimson’s aides indicate that there was a discussion of atomic bombs, but there is no mention of any protest on Eisenhower’s part.[74]
Even after both bombs had fallen and Russia entered the war, Japanese militants insisted on such lenient peace terms that moderates knew there was no sense even transmitting them to the United States. Hirohito had to intervene personally on two occasions during the next few days to induce hardliners to abandon their conditions. That they would have conceded defeat months earlier, before such calamities struck, is far-fetched to say the least.
The Strategic Bombing Survey outright ignored material that didn’t fit their conclusion on the Pacific War, and I am aware of no serious trend in modern historical academia that regards the atomic bombings and the Soviet invasion and the impending American invasion to be immaterial in Japan’s surrender.
First, I trust the numerous first hand accounts of actual leaders of the time over this one historian acting like their memories aren’t great fifty years after the fact.
Second, the imminent Soviet invasion absolutely was a material factor. One of the reasons why the nukes were used were to end the war before the Soviets could invade so they couldn’t dictate any terms of surrender.
That historian is actually citing Japanese sources, which is more accurate than what the US leaders may have thought to be the case.
Hirohito actually used both the bombs as well as the Soviet invasion as justification to surrender. The civilian population was told it was due to the destructive power of the atomic bomb, the military were told they could not hold out against the Soviets.
It’s not unlikely that not dropping the bombs would have led to a Japanese surrender, but it would likely have delayed it by some time. The bombs contributed greatly to the emergency meetings of the Japanese war cabinet in which ultimately the emperor decided to surrender. But it was a multitude of factors; the emperor was for example also unconvinced that the defense of southern Japan would be ready in time for the invasion, as earlier timelines hadn’t been met. But he also said he did not want Japan and its innocent civilians destroyed due to further atomic bombs.
First, I trust the numerous first hand accounts of actual leaders of the time over this one historian acting like their memories aren’t great fifty years after the fact.
This may be shocking, but leaders often lie. Only Eisenhower’s memory was impugned in that statement. Sorry that contemporary accounts don’t back up their later politiking.
Second, the imminent Soviet invasion absolutely was a material factor.
Then why the fuck did you quote
Based on a detailed investigation of all the facts, and supported by the testimony of the surviving Japanese leaders involved, it is the Survey’s opinion that certainly prior to 31 December 1945, and in all probability prior to 1 November 1945, Japan would have surrendered even if the atomic bombs had not been dropped, even if Russia had not entered the war, and even if no invasion had been planned or contemplated. - US Government Strategic Bombing Survey, 1946
Ah. I checked your comment history. A campist bootlicker. I think we’re done here.
A material factor in the decision for the bombs to be dropped, not in the necessity for Japan to surrender. Those are two different things.
I would assume that the whole continent going red in response would have not been out of the question if that happened however.
I mean, nuking an European city would have been the ultimate permanent propaganda tool for the USSR why we need to band together against such barbarism.
Even if in that city it was literally Hitler?
Just a bit of personal 2 cents on that one:
I would not exist if Berlin was nuked in 1945. My grandmother was in Berlin as a refugee of war at the time. She was 4 years old. She would have died for the crime of …being in the same city as Hitler. Millions more would have died and even more would have never been born.
And millions of German workers, with friends and family all over the continent.
It would have went beyond ideology, and it would have dwarfed the Holocaust in being the defining evil of the war as remembered by Europeans.
Removed by mod
The bombing was strategic, not melting entire cities of mostly civilians.
Huh, a Dresden denier. Never seen one of those before. Weird.
I haven’t, although I should have made more consideration for that. There’s still plenty of degrees here, just like how the firebombing of Japan was also brutal. I think you’ll agree that the wholesale evaporation of a city to a nuclear bomb is a little different than bombing a city too hard yeah?
I think you’ll agree that the wholesale evaporation of a city to a nuclear bomb is a little different than bombing a city too hard yeah?
No, not really. More people died in the firebombing of Tokyo than in either Hiroshima or Nagasaki (at least according to some estimates). The main real difference the atom bomb represented was making it a lot easier to inflict such damage with one plane instead of 334 and the implications of that for the future of warfare, not the actual damage done to Japan.
not melting entire cities of mostly civilians.
Uhhh…
The allies carpet bombed multiple cities, my confused friend.
