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Why would USA and Britain continue the war under such circumstances?
Why would USA and Britain continue the war under such circumstances?
Because the WAlies cannot be beaten Germany is bankrupt and there is a Bucket of Sunshine coming in 2 years.
Aside from that, if Germany had been able to maintain Air Superiority with air power focused on the Western Front and improved military leadership addressing at least some of the efficiency problems hampering Germany, getting bombers into Germany ... and back out would be increasingly difficult.As far as the "bomb" goes, one of the reasons the Allies were working so hard on developing an A-bomb, is because they thought that Germany was well advanced in developing their own. After Germany surrendered, there was no longer an urgency for the program.
The Allies didn't know that at the time.The Germans were years from a workable weapon...
While it was a sound idea with plenty of potential, seasonal timing and unpredictable jet stream currents denied the Japanese any success.
And here's a little bit of irony:It was an act of desperation and highlights the parlous state of Japanese war industries at the time. It was almost completely ineffective. 90% of the balloons never even made it to the US. At least it was relatively cheap, a fully equipped balloon cost the equivalent of about $2,000 dollars.
By contrast, the US spent at least 2 billion dollars on the Manhattan project, but at least it worked. I reckon that's at least 30 billion of todays dollars.
Cheers
Steve
... a futile effort to destroy Europe.
With German efforts more squarely placed towards night bombing defenses, the losses may have been unsustainable there as well. Not to mention the public/political situation building up as things progressed. (assuming a radical shift in Germany's government and corresponding diplomatic emphasis.Unfortunately, with no prospect of a ground war, this might be achieved when Britain ends up putting all of its eggs in the 'Bomber Command Basket'.
Before the Soviet Union and the United States joined the conflict, Britain's plan was for a front-line strength of 4,000 bombers - three times what was ultimately achieved.
After Barbarossa and Pearl Harbour the situation changed significantly.
The IJN were pretty crap at sinking merchant ships, the handful of German U-boats that were based in Japanese occupied Malaya probably sank more merchant ships than the entire Japanese navy. The German U-boats were very tough, generally able to dive twice as deep as Japanese and Allied subs and could survive a depth charging that would crush the other types. Germans had excellent night vision optics better than allied optics though not as good as the Japanese, they even infrared detection and ranging (it worked to perhaps 10km but was out ranged by radar) in the optical conditions of the pacific it might give them an advantage. The latter German radar, Seetakt, from FuMO 26,25 onwards had blind fire by lobe switching the receive aerial. Unlike allied systems this didn't broaden the beam leading to reduced resolution. (US capital ship radar had a width of 15 degrees which made it hard to select a target).
Generally the Germans had a tactical issue: they didn't switch on their radar out of desire to remain stealthy but were then often surprised (this is what happened to Scharnhorst) as their passive sensors were just not good enough. Their navy was designed to fight in the poor visibility of the Nth Atlantic and to operate as a stealthy raider till they developed a fleet with aircraft carriers.
The German Seetakt was perhaps a little short ranged, it might locate a target accurately but it was essential to detect gun splash for effective long range fire and since Tirpitz and Prinz Eugen was the extent of their fleet they were a little slow in upgrading, nevertheless the 1944 fit out of Tirpitz would have included microwave surface search radar FuMO 81 with PPI and a Seetakt power increased from 8kW to about 120kW. It compared favourably with Iowa Class and King George V.
It's true that the UK had deployed a crude, in terms of frequency terms, but effective radar generally known as Chain Home in the late 30s that had been well integrated in to a reporting system. This long wave radar was practical to implement fast due to its low frequency (around 10m-15m) but had significant limitations over land. Such a limitation would be very unattractive to the Luftwaffe with their need to detect aircraft flying over land (rising out of France) rather than intercepting over the coast.
The two radars the Luftwaffe deployed were Freya and Wurzburg. Freya(named after the F wave frequency rather than the Nordic goddess) which was a version of the German Navy's Seetakt (Sea Tactical) radar with wavelength increased initially to 1.8m instead of 60cm in order to increase power and range.
Freya was demountable and participated in the 1938 Sudeten crisis in Czechoslovakia and one was flown by Ju 52 and erected during Fall Gelb, the invasion of Norway, that arose when Vidkund Quisling informed Hitler that the Norwegian Cabinet had decided to surrender to Britain when the UK's pre-emptive strategic invasion of Norway occurred.
The other radar was Wurzburg A of late 1939, a marvel of portability , it could be towed after folding in half the 3m dish and brought quickly to operation. It was intended as an early warning radar. Wurzburg-A had three operators: one tracked range, the other two would wobble the dish in elevation and traverse to track the target. This gave about +/-2 degrees bearing accuracy and about 120m range that had allowed some crude but successful blind fire. It had Height finding and an ability to move with the troops, rare among portable radars. It was very useful at directing search lights and measuring target range.
By Early 1941 the next edition came out: Wurzburg-C. It introduced conical scan so only one operator was required for elevation and bearing tracking and they could do so to within 0.3 degrees. By June 1941 the Wurzburg-D came into service with 80 on the production line that month. It reduced range accuracy to 25m and transferred the data directly to a FLAK predictor. At the same time Wurzburg-Riesse came into service at several locations using a 7m dish and offering 0.2 degree accuracy and a range of about 140km.
The Allies had nothing like it in service till the US made SCR-584 entered service in late 1943. For two years, between 1941 to 1943, the only decent FLAK/AAA radar was Wurzburg. In late 1943 the Luftwaffe introduced Wurzburg-D's intended replacement, Manheim, which reduced range accuracy to 6m, introduced automatic tracking for the range gate and much more accurate circuitry. If it had locked on to a target even in the worst windows and carpet jamming it could still track though it was hard to find the target.
One technique used on German radars was the locking of the oscillator via a frequency divider/multiplier to a stable quartz crystal that allowed coherent pulse Doppler radar. This allowed the Wurzburg to see through windows. This wasn't possible with magnetron radar. Doppler radar had been developed as part of programs to detect low flying aircraft and weather radar research that proved fortunately suitable to avoid windows. Wurzburg however couldn't cope with simultaneous carpet jamming and windows from hundreds of aircraft until a circuit called k-laus was introduced.
The British radar advance was the use of multicity magnetrons with circular cavities and narrow slits to produce 9cm and latter 3cm radar. The Germans had in fact developed this type of magnetron (multicavity, narrow slits) but had failed to appreciate its uses in radar. In parts this was because their existing naval radars were so satisfactory at around 50cm-80cm. For instance in 1938 both German light cruisers and destroyers could carry 60cm Seetakt that gave a narrow beam able to detect submarine periscopes and conning towers, a problem British radar was still struggling with at the beginning of the war. Latter a special type of receive only lobe switching gave true blind fire to German cruisers.
Ironically the Japanese had Beaten Britain's Randal and Boot to developing the multicavity magnetron by at least one year. They even deployed them on cruisers before Britain deployed them on sub hunting warships, however they were slow to deploy and invest in the technology and to add refinements such as PPI till late 1945.
Being a Japanese Navy sponsored project the magnetron didn't make it to the Japanese Army Air force or the Germans (who ironically shared self calibrating technology called Rehbok that made it practical to deploy Japanese microwave radar on ships to small to carry electronics technicians.
The Germans immediately understood how British microwave radar worked and deployed about 100 radars during 1944/1945, they were hard to deploy because the bombing campaign had massively uped..
They had their own path to microwaves via something called a disk triode, Soviet radar used the German designs till the 1970s. The Germans shared their Wurzburg design with the Japanese, the copy was a bit late: it had been troublesome to make the precision vacuum tubes.
but an implosion type would merit a test firing much more than the gun type -hence why Little Boy wasn't tested before deployment, the design was felt sound enough to be foolproof and besides that the US was unable to enrich enough Uranium for a test at the time -with Japan's more limited resources, a larger amount of lower enriched -barely- weapons usable Uranium may have been plausible, especially if their test bomb didn't actually work properly -not enriched enough and/or too little material or a flawed implosion type mechanism)
There were considerable stores of chemical weapons possessed by many countries at the time and the U.S. had a stockpile of them on hand in Europe in case the Germans used theirs. Hitler did not use what they had because he knew that would bring retaliation.I always thought it remarkable that Germany didn't use chemical weapons in the end.
Hitlers personal experiences may play a part, as certainly the risk of retaliation would do.
In a discussion about the decision to use the Atomic bomb against japan, I read that the USA had the worlds largest store of Chemical weapons (can't remeber which book). Using them were one of the alternatives considered to bypass the need for an invasion of the Japanese home isles.