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I doubt it would have been used anywhere else but Japan. By January 1945 Germany had effectively lost its will to fight and was basically in "strategic retreat" mode.
But did the Allies know? The Ardennes offensive took place over Christmas 1944 and was a very rude awakening.
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The civilian populace was too demoralized and war-fatigued to mount any significant guerilla opposition. The cost to occupy and pacify Germany had already been 90%+ paid in blood and treasure.
Again, I think this may be hindsight. There was plenty of Volkssturm (more-or-less) volunteers and while the well-equipped, highly-trained units needed for offensive operations had mostly evaporated, the production of low-tech last-ditch weaponry hadn't ceased. A stubborn and deadly defense could have been mounted, and the Nazis had decreed that it would be. And even with the strategic problems, the Reichsmarine had over 60 U-boats at sea on VE day. V2s dropped into Antwerp pretty much up until the end of the war.
The strategic defeat was a given, it was a matter of the cost of bringing it about. If dropping a nuke on Hitler's bunker would have brought it about 3 months earlier, I doubt the Allied High Command would have said anything but "How many do we have?"
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They're lucky we only had enough fissile material for two bombs at the time or they might have gotten a third while they twiddled their thumbs wondering what to do after Nagasaki was turned into a crater.
It was a close-run thing even then. The events surrounding the recording of emperor's surrender speech and keeping it out of the hands of the ultra-nationalist generals wanting to go out in a blaze of glory are harrowing.
The British had a heavy bomber that had a big enough bomb bay to A bomb Germany if the US had supplied one. The Avro Lancaster was actually considered by the US military as the aircraft to deliver a nuclear weapon over Japan.
During the early research for a bomb casing it was discovered that the dimensions of such a casing were to large to fit into a B 29. The B 29 underwent modifications later that increased bomb bay size. If the B 29 couldn’t have been modified then one might wildly speculate that Lancaster could have bombed Japan and even Germany.
Germany was going to lose anyway and the bomb would just make the rubble bounce and create a problem with our own people on the ground having to deal with yet another problem. The civilian population was largely defeated and only the top military class was unconvinced. The Russians were convincing them.
Japan posed a different problem and seemed not to be enthusiastic about a US invasion of the home islands. Unlike in Europe, you don't see bunches of Japanese soldiers coming forward with their hands up. A country that resorts to kamikaze attacks is not convinced. We dropped fire bombs on Tokyo in mid-March that killed 100,000 civilians and they were still not convinced.
Japan would have been the target. Both places were irrevocably broken by early 1945 and both should have surrendered by then, but Japan would have fought block-by-block all the way across the islands before reaching a final outcome. The US had largely avoided that in Europe's cities. We dropped 49 "Pumpkin" bombs on Japanese cities in July that were each carrying over 3 tons of explosives and they were still unmoved.
In the spring of '45, the Russians were closing in on Berlin (albeit with huge casualties) and were worse than an atomic bomb by the time they captured the Reichstag on April 30 and Hitler was dead. They were on the Oder just two weeks earlier and met US troops on the Elbe on April 25th.
Germany was going to lose anyway and the bomb would just make the rubble bounce and create a problem with our own people on the ground having to deal with yet another problem. The civilian population was largely defeated and only the top military class was unconvinced. The Russians were convincing them.
The question still is: How much of that did the Allies know then?
The question still is: How much of that did the Allies know then?
Germany had been beaten back almost entirely to its own borders by then, the Allies had total air superiority, and they had already started advancing into Germany proper which, unlike Japan, was already mostly in ruins by then. It wasn't a matter of if, but how soon. Pacifying Japan on the other hand was going to be orders of magnitude more difficult and costly and everyone knew it.
By January 1945, World War II had all but been decided in favor of the Allies. Most (though obviously not all) of the battles had already been fought, and it was essentially a question of not IF, but WHEN the Allies would win. The air campaign against German industrial targets and population centers was still ongoing, with many cities badly damaged. However, some prominent raids (such as against Dresden) had not yet happened. The air campaign was just getting started against Japan, and its cities were all still largely untouched at that point.
Let's say we had managed to develop and build two bombs by then. (Assume that we would not have any more after that before the war ended.) Where would we have dropped them? Presumably we'd want to attack whatever targets would get the war ended the quickest. Berlin and Tokyo seem like obvious candidates, though I'm not so sure. Berlin was already heavily damaged by conventional bombing, and we did not want to risk killing Emperor Hirohito. (When Tokyo was fire bombed starting in March 1945, targeting the Imperial Palace was strictly forbidden.) If not these places, where else would have given us the most "bang for the buck" in persuading the Axis to surrender?
Germany was done after Stalingrad and Kursk, well before D-day.
Germany had been beaten back almost entirely to its own borders by then, the Allies had total air superiority, and they had already started advancing into Germany proper which, unlike Japan, was already mostly in ruins by then. It wasn't a matter of if, but how soon. Pacifying Japan on the other hand was going to be orders of magnitude more difficult and costly and everyone knew it.
Remember, though, that the atomic bomb was considered by the war strategists as only a "big bomb." It would not have been in their minds any more destructive than the firebombing of Dresden...it would just risk fewer planes and air crews.
Timing is everything, of course. But no way the bomb would have been used in Europe. The reasons given for use in Japan were that it was a group of islands heavily defended and would have cost untold scores of American deaths to invade and conquer.
Remember, though, that the atomic bomb was considered by the war strategists as only a "big bomb." It would not have been in their minds any more destructive than the firebombing of Dresden...it would just risk fewer planes and air crews.
Oh nonsense. Those high enough in the chain of command to know about the a-bomb also knew full well it was a massively different strategic and psychological weapon than a conventional firebombing campaign. What the air raids did to Dresden over three nights, the a-bomb did to Hiroshima three times over -- IN SECONDS -- with no prior warning or conceivable defense.
Also, the reason why Dresden was such a disaster for Germany wasn't because the Allies were especially keen to obliterate it, but because Germany gambled (incorrectly) the Allies wouldn't attack it so its bomb shelter infrastructure was minimal and its air defense resources were deployed elsewhere, leaving the city virtually defenseless.
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where would we have dropped them?
