"If D-Day had failed...nukes?" Topic

If the Allied invasion on June 6 failed, would the Allies eventually have used atomic weapons on Germany as in Japan?

Wouldn't that depend on the nature of the failure?

The liberation of NWE from Normandy wasn't the only campaign under way. The invasions in Italy and southern France worked, and made it to the Alps before the war ended. The strategic bombing campaign was turning German cities into ash and rubble and consuming German planes and pilots. The Soviet juggernaut was advancing inexorably from the East. How many of these other grinding tides had to stall or ebb for nukes to be considered?

Russia would have continued to the English Channel by August, 1945 before nukes could be dropped. The Western Allies could hold Italy, and maybe conduct the Dragoon landings in Southern France to link up with Italy, but Europe would be much more red at the end of the war.

Bunkermeister.

Bunkermeister nailed it.

Sounds like it was a good thing it worked

Potentially. After all, a failure at D-Day would have represented a tremendous setback to the Allies. Assuming the same timeline (Fat Man test in July, 1945), I think the Red Army would still have been some distance from Berlin in April. An Allied failure at D-Day would have created a giant question mark around other large scale operations, and even if they were in progress, failure would liberate a lot of German reserves for Italy and the East. So it does not appear improbable to me that the first one would have gone onto Rastenburg and the second one on Berlin, perhaps simultaneously, to decapitate the German war effort.

The conventional American and British bombing would have continued, the war in Italy and perhaps Southern France would have continued. The Soviet Union would still have captured Berlin long before August.
More likely the coup against Hitler may have not happened since Hitler was "winning" or may have intensified with a more reasonable hope for a separate peace with the West. Maybe Germany keeps everything they captured in the East but gives back most of Western Europe as a demilitarized zone with no Allied occupation.
But either way by June 1944 Germany had lost the war to Russia, unless the Allies switched sides, or stopped aid to Russia and aided Germany to keep the Reds out of the West.
Bunkermeister

Interesting counterfactual.

The Potsdam Agreement established zones of control in post-war Germany. Although the Soviets initially occupied all of Berlin, they eventually withdrew to their designated sector within the city. The question arises: would Stalin have adhered to the Potsdam Agreement and refrained from further expansion? With no immediate Allied obstacles, he might have attempted to seize all of Germany. But would he have retreated to the assigned Soviet zone?

Conventional wisdom suggests that the Allies would have required at least two more years to prepare for another cross-channel invasion. In the meantime, German forces stationed to repel an invasion could have been redeployed to the Eastern Front, potentially slowing the Soviet advance.

However, Hitler believed that the Normandy invasion was a diversion and anticipated the main assault at the Pas-de-Calais. Consequently, he might have hesitated to move any units eastward.

Using the atomic bombs on Germany isn't as easy as it sounds. The only US aircraft that could deliver the bombs was modified B-29s known as Silverplates. The B-29 and its logistical tail were already established in the PTO. It would have been logistically difficult to send a small squadron and two atomic bombs to Britain. Not to mention the special loading facilities needed to load one bomb onto the aircraft. By the time this was all arranged the war in Europe would most likely be over.

The only other Allied bomber that could carry one of the atomic bombs would have been a modified Lancaster. Not only would the aircraft need to be modified but the RAF crew would have to be trained in Utah. It was a non-starter because there wasn't any way this bomb was going to be carried on a RAF bomber. Arnold and Groves would not stand for it.

German air defenses were much more sophisticated than Japan's. A small number of B-29s, a new aircraft in the theater, would most likely have been shot down and the Germans would attempt to study the wreckage of this new aircraft type, have any surviving crewmen interrogated, and have an Atomic Bomb to study.

There was never any plan to use these weapons on Germany. The only person that I have found who suggested it was FDR. According to Groves the President was very concerned about the Battle of Bulge and asked Groves if we could use them on Germany. He pointed out the difficulties which I have already mentioned above. Groves had always assumed it would only be used on Japan. Would a failed D-Day have changed any or all of this? I don't know.

The one thing I would add is that if D-Day had failed, I doubt if Dragoon would have gone ahead in the south. I think the latter was very dependent on the former.

Considering finished another book on D-Day, and getting another tomorrow, and a great video just put up on shipping to make D-Day happen. I am starting to think it was enviable it couldn't fail. The Germans were getting more troops thrown at them they couldn't hold everywhere.

There was never a plan to drop them on Germany because the bombs weren't ready until after Germany surrendered.

And I don't know that I agree about either the effect of the allied bombing campaign or the success of the Russian offensives. The timing of the Allied breakout from Normandy and the Russian campaign to destroy Army Group Center worked to the benefit of both. The Germans were unable to pursue their well-honed strategy of shifting reserves to deal with a crisis, because the Allies handed them two separate and overwhelming crises at once. An unsuccessful Normandy landing would likely have paralyzed Allied planning for at least a couple of months, and made it impossible for the US to get British acquiescence in the landings in the south of France. That would free up a lot of reserves, and even if it wouldn't be enough to change the outcome of the war, it could easily have prolonged it for four months, which gets you to August, 1945.

As for the bombing campaign, well, production rose until early 1945, when the advances in both East and west (and the late advent of a bombing program designed to disrupt the German transportation system) took it off a cliff.

So absent success in Normandy, I think there would have been both an opportunity to use a nuke, and considerable pressure to do so.

All of this assumes that Dr. Morell didn't succeed in killing Hitler before August, of course.

The way I read it, the Anglo-Americans would have invaded in July if thwarted in June by weather and in any case, the Soviet offensive in July 1944 smashed German defenses without any help from the West. And the Russians keep on coming. The postwar occupation zones were agreed upon in Sept. 1944 (the London Protocols). If the initial Normandy invasions had failed or been postponed, all I foresee happening is a 1945 Russian advance further into Germany than history records and so perhaps the Iron Curtain runs along the Rhine and not down the center of Germany, if Stalin decides to play hardball and refuses to withdraw to the occupation boundaries. But even that doesn't change postwar history by much. The Red Army didn't have the means in 1945 to keep pushing westward into France. German resistance wore out those Soviet units at a high rate and eventually the British and Americans get into France and start rolling up German forces there.