Germany and their nuclear bomb...

[nuuumannn]

The heavy water was being prepared in Norway

Norwegian heavy water sabotage - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The Heroes of Telemark - classic war movie.

 

[nuuumannn]

However, several He-177A5 (Werknummer 550001 to 550006) were modified with a single, very large bomb bay and often are incorrectly interpreted to be carrier of a nuclear weapon.

Yep, a number of prominent and knowledgeable post war authors have stated the same thing in books and this has been perpetrated further on the net; that undeniably accurate source of information. One aircraft that pops up is the He 177 V38 that was found in Czechoslovakia with a modified bomb bay. I recently read that He 177s were to go to Japan, which is known to be true, but were to be used to drop nuclear weapons on the USA by the Japanese!

 

[stona]

but were to be used to drop nuclear weapons on the USA by the Japanese!

Who had resorted to floating bomb laden balloons across the Pacific on the jet stream! I believe a handful of unfortunate people were killed in the USA.

The fact that the RLM/Luftwaffe modified the bomb bay for some undetermined reason does not make this He 177 a potential atomic bomber. It's that sort of ludicrous leap of faith that is at the bottom of many conspiracy theories. Many air forces modified the bomb bays of many different aircraft,with the exception of 15 B-29s none had anything to do with atomic weapons.

In April 1944 Be 177 V38 (W.Nr.550002,KM+TB) was transferred to E-Stelle Tarnewitz where it was used as a weapons test bed and to test various radar installations. It subsequently went to E-Stelle Werneuchen before ending up at Chleb.
None of this has anything to do with atomic weapons which didn't exist and about whose programs the Luftwaffe would have been completely unaware.

The internet can be a valuable resource but it can also,by its very nature,be a bit of a nuisance!

Cheers

Steve

 

[nuuumannn]

My point exactly Steve. Did you misread my post at all?

 

[stona]

My point exactly Steve. Did you misread my post at all?

No not at all,I agree with you entirely.

Cheers

Steve

 

[FlakDancer]

Stona, you bring up a great point about the level of secrecy and the fact one hand didn't know what the other was doing in terms of the military and the scientist. Now, perhaps that is not entirely true with the upper echelons of the military, but it is known very few in America knew anything at all. Harry Truman, who was a U.S. Senator when the funds for the Manhattan project were appropriated, signed on to what was then an unlimited black budget project from the military/ Executive Branch. No one knew what the money was for, just that it was needed and no one should ask any questions. Later, Truman would make one of the most important decisions of that century to drop the bomb he unknowingly help funded when he was a Senator.

The B-29 was also developed as a secret project and the crew members of the Enola Gay were not even told what they had until they were airborne. All throughout this one thing was happening here, another elsewhere. Only a very few had all the pieces of the puzzle Though I am not as aware of what happened with the other countries, I am sure they would held such a project with the same amount of secrecy. Putting it all together in the last days of an ever growing chaotic war situation would probably have been as difficult as building the bomb itself.

 

[stona]

You are quite right. Admiral Leahy called it "the best kept secret of the war".

Only a handful of senior civilian and military personnel had any real knowledge of the project. It wasn't until December 1944 that Maj.Gen.Groves (head of Manhattan District) recommended that senior commanders in the Pacific be let in on the secret.

John J Mcloy (Assistant Secretary of War at the time) told the story of a particularly bright Brigadier General who innocently suggested that the Army might do well to look into the possibilities of atomic energy. The unwitting officer found himself the object of the most intensive investigation.

So secret was the project, said McCloy, that when he raised the subject at a White House meeting of the Joint Chiefs of Staff in June 1945 it "caused a sense of shock even among that select group."

Cheers

Steve

 

[beitou]

How many other B29s other than Bocks Car and Enola Gay were prepared for the wartime bombs? I am presuming that the 15 B29s includes post war aircraft.

 

[GrauGeist]

Who had resorted to floating bomb laden balloons across the Pacific on the jet stream! I believe a handful of unfortunate people were killed in the USA.

Actually this early war action by the Japanese was a great idea on paper and had it succeeded, would have created great havoc on the west coast.
Wth massive forest fires raging, it would have disrupted commerce, wood production and tied up vast amounts of manpower.
Then add the impact on the population that these bombs were showing up out of the blue, much like the V-2 did

 

[stona]

How many other B29s other than Bocks Car and Enola Gay were prepared for the wartime bombs? I am presuming that the 15 B29s includes post war aircraft.

Actuallly more were built/converted during the war though I can't find the exact number. The conversion took 6,000 man hours,so it was not an easy task. 29 went to the 309th and 15 were available for the atomic attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. They never had or were going to drop 15 bombs! It was probably all part of the cover story.
By December 1947 65 B-29s had been converted to the "silverplate" specification.
Cheers
Steve

 

[stona]

Actually this early war action by the Japanese was a great idea on paper and had it succeeded, would have created great havoc on the west coast.
Wth massive forest fires raging, it would have disrupted commerce, wood production and tied up vast amounts of manpower.
Then add the impact on the population that these bombs were showing up out of the blue, much like the V-2 did

The balloons were launched from the beginning of November 1944 which I don't think is "early war". It coincides almost exactly with the time that the americans were starting to give serious thought as to how they would use an atomic weapon.
They carried a maximum load of 35 Kg of ordnance.It was possible to intercept these balloons as they descended towards the coast,as was historically done. That's not quite the same as a V-2 with 738 Kg of amatol packed into its warhead which had arrived before you heard it coming.
The Japanese launched more than 9,000 of these balloons and aside from the unfortunate six people killed they had pretty minimal effect.
Cheers
Steve

 

[FlakDancer]

That era was somewhat of a strange time for those types of aircraft for the Americans. The B-36 (one of my all time favorite aircraft) was close at hand, but troublesome and in reality outdated when it came on line because of the on coming advance of jets and jet fighters. The B-47 was a great airplane, but didnt really have the range or size needed to carry some of the early larger bombs, and the B-52 was not in service until 1955.

The B-36 really pushed what was the "then" technology on how to build such a large plane. It took a lot of effort just to get some sort of landing gear that would acutally hold the plane during take offs and landings.

 

[davebender]

Except for dozens of Soviet agents working within the Manhattan Project at all major research locations. Stalin knew as much about the project as President FDR and was better informed then Vice President Truman.

 

[stona]

Except for dozens of Soviet agents working within the Manhattan Project at all major research locations. Stalin knew as much about the project as President FDR and was better informed then Vice President Truman.

There were a handful of men supplying information from Los Alamos and Oak Ridge.Cohen and Fuchs,possibly Hall,had access to the good stuff. There were some others acting as conduits (Gold,Sax) or supplying relatively low grade information (Greenglass,Koval,May,Lerner at a pinch though he was more of an idiot idealist than a spy).

Now you name some of the "dozens" you mentioned working at "all major research locations".

The Soviets didn't get a really good idea of how the american bomb worked until 1945.

The information gained from espionage,particularly Fuchs,certainly shortened the time needed to develop the Soviet weapon,noone believes they would have carried out their first test in 1949 without it,but don't imagine that much of the development wasn't carried out using indigenous Soviet expertise and engineering ability.

As an aside Fuchs was finally convicted of "passing information to a friendly nation" which of course the USSR was at the time of his espionage activities. It still got him 14 years,he served less than 10.

Cheers
Steve

 

[davebender]

Sacred Secrets: How Soviet Intelligence Operations Changed American History: Leona Schecter, Jerrold Schecter: 9781574883275: Amazon.com: Books

Read "Sacred Secrets" or a similiar book that conducts a serious investigation into WWII era Soviet Espionage. Every U.S. weapons program of any importance had embedded Soviet Agents. The overall Soviet intelligence program was massive and hugely successful.

 

[FlakDancer]

Trust was never a huge commodity between the Soviets and the US. Now, when we had a common, very lethal foe to defeat, that changed somewhat, but after the maelstrom, things went back to normal, lol. However, this was not just any knowledge, this was something specialized beyond ordinary understanding and if given away had to be put into the right hands or it would have been gibberish. This topic here is something that I have always found fascinating. e-Dossier No. 11 - Was Oppenheimer a Soviet Spy? A Roundtable Discussion | Wilson Center If not him, who? Was it a small group of scientist? I don't know or claim to know. I know some commentators have said it couldn't be Oppenheimer. I guess some things in history will always be conjecture.

davebender, this mentions the book you talked about, btw.

 

[tyrodtom]

Sacred Secrets: How Soviet Intelligence Operations Changed American History: Leona Schecter, Jerrold Schecter: 9781574883275: Amazon.com: Books

Read "Sacred Secrets" or a similiar book that conducts a serious investigation into WWII era Soviet Espionage. Every U.S. weapons program of any importance had embedded Soviet Agents. The overall Soviet intelligence program was massive and hugely successful.

I read Sacred Secrets maybe 10 years ago, i was so full of inaccuracies in the area that I did know something about and could be crosschecked that I considered it junk and never finished it.

 

[krieghund]

Anyone venture a guess what aircraft types were on that airbase in Norway. At first I thought they could have been He177A5's converted to the A-7 variant but further research shows the A-7 to be a paper airplane and Green produces a picture claiming an A-7 with a larger wing span and fuel to fly to Japan. That aircraft is really A-5 W.Nr. 550256 and was been prepared for flight to Wright-Pat when it blew a tire on take-off and was written off. I suppose one could strip everything off the aircraft to give it a range to the Continental US but it is a one-way mission only.

All I know from the description is they were large aircraft and the Brits had them converted to scrap quickly. My friend related his father and the work crew were paid handsomely to clear the field working around the clock. He thought it strange they used heavy construction equipment to disassemble the aircraft (rip them apart) into manageable sizes of scrap metal and trucked off.

Just another of those nagging data points that raise a lot of questions, maybe the reporter and the workers didn't know their aircraft very well and they were just Ju-88's or such relics laying about or he did report what he saw.

 

[GrauGeist]

The balloons were launched from the beginning of November 1944 which I don't think is "early war". It coincides almost exactly with the time that the americans were starting to give serious thought as to how they would use an atomic weapon.
They carried a maximum load of 35 Kg of ordnance.It was possible to intercept these balloons as they descended towards the coast,as was historically done. That's not quite the same as a V-2 with 738 Kg of amatol packed into its warhead which had arrived before you heard it coming.
The Japanese launched more than 9,000 of these balloons and aside from the unfortunate six people killed they had pretty minimal effect.
Cheers
Steve

That's what I get for a hasty reply when I'm at work...lol

The theory (as most weapons of this nature) looked good on paper, as I mentioned, but came up short of thier goal as both a psychological weapon and a nuisance weapon.

It cannot be compared to the V-2 in it's outright destructiveness, since it's goal was to start forest fires and nuisance damage. The small percentage of them that did fall here in the western forests found them arriving in wet or snowy conditions (many others landed in farmland or desert to the east). One of the most intact specimens ever recovered happened only 30 minutes from my front door. The gas envelope exploded and burnt but the undercarriage (including bombs) were recovered intact.

However, if (and I say IF) they had fallen in the forests during drought years (like it was in 2008, for example) the fires would have been devestating and very costly and disruptive on many accounts, therefore offering the Japanese some success in thier intented venture.

 

[stona]

Sacred Secrets: How Soviet Intelligence Operations Changed American History: Leona Schecter, Jerrold Schecter: 9781574883275: Amazon.com: Books

Read "Sacred Secrets" or a similiar book that conducts a serious investigation into WWII era Soviet Espionage. Every U.S. weapons program of any importance had embedded Soviet Agents. The overall Soviet intelligence program was massive and hugely successful.

The Soviets did carry out very successful espionage against the US in this era. Noone has denied that. Fuchs in particular gave the Soviets vital information,contributing towards the rapid success of their atomic project. It depends who you ask but his information probably knocked a couple of years off their programme,which is significant.
Others making rough (and inaccurate) sketches of laboratory facilities or making home movies of Oak Ridge installations may have assuaged their own moral consciences but made little contribution to the Soviet atomic progranmme.

I alluded to the fact that at this time the USSR was an ally and friendly power and of course we all did and still do spy on our friends!

The idea that there were literally dozens of people channeling valuable information to their Soviet handlers is sensationalist and untrue. It has a faint whiff of McCarthyism about it.

Cheers

Steve