A few years back, it became very fashionable to suggest that atomic weapons were used against Japan rather than Germany in WWII due to racism. My review came to the conclusion that the decision was based on something more practical. It was easier to guarantee that an experimental bomb would reach its target if dropped over Japan than if used against Germany. The concern was that if the bomb never detonated, it could be recovered and reverse engineered, and the Germans were far more likely to do that than the Japanese. Since atomic weapons had never before been used in war, no one really knew how effective, or deadly, they would be.
By August 1945 the war against Germany was over!
It was even simpler than that. The timeline of development, test, and preparation for bomb-ready deployment did not fit the progression of the war in Germany. Essentially VE day happened before the US was ready for such.
The Trinity Test was on 5:29 a.m. on July 16, 1945. VE Day was May 8th, 1945. Dropping it on Germany would not only have been a war crime, but also resulted in a number of friendly casualties, since any German city of any size was already occupied by the Allies.
During the Battle of the Bulge, an anxious FDR asked the Army if they could speed up the delivery of the A-Bomb, just in case the German offensive was successful. If the Allies had had the A-Bomb in June 1944, Berlin, and Germans in general, today would be even more sanctimonious and insufferable than they already are.
The U.S. in August 1945, had plans to drop one A-Bomb every 10 days on Japan, a schedule they had every intention of sticking to. Had Unternehmung Wacht am Rhein been more successful, today German might only be spoken in Hell.
Germany was also clearly at the end of its rope. There was no tactical or strategic need to use the weapon on a nearly depleted enemy.
The original plan was to nuke Germany and Japan on the same day.
Nobody who saw the burned out husks of every major city in Germany could doubt for one second that if we had had the bomb when the war was still going on with Germany, we would have used it.
BTW, the first people we unleashed the horrendous new weapon dow chemical came up with - napalm? The Germans. We used it in Operation Cobra and devastated the crack Panzer Lehr division and several others in our decisive breakout from Normandy.
By the time the bomb was ready, Germany had already surrender.
There was a real possibility that the soldiers who fought in Europe might have mutinied if they were shipped to the Pacific.
My uncle fought on Okinawa. He and many others cried when they heard the japs surrendered. They knew they wouldn’t have survived an invasion of the mainland.
Date of first atomic fission bomb test - July 16, 1945.
Date of Germany surrender - May 8, 1945.
We didn’t drop the bomb on Germany because we didn’t have a time machine.
We also apparently have a whole lotta people with no clue what they’re talking about.
We never had an atomic bomb to use on Germany.
We bombed many German cities into dust. The only reason we didn’t nuke the Germans is that the Bomb wasn’t ready until after they surrendered.