US Planned To Drop An Atomic Bomb On Europe During WWII

In early August 2002 Studs Terkel interviewed Paul Tibbets, the pilot who flew the Enola Gay on its mission to nuke Hiroshima. In the middle of this fascinating interview, General Tibbets dropped a bombshell of a different sort. Tibbets relates that after being briefed about his upcoming mission by General Uzal Ent (commander of the second air force) and others:

General Ent looked at me and said, "The other day, General Arnold [commander general of the army air corps] offered me three names." Both of the others were full colonels; I was lieutenant-colonel. He said that when General Arnold asked which of them could do this atomic weapons deal, he replied without hesitation, "Paul Tibbets is the man to do it." I said, "Well, thank you, sir." Then he laid out what was going on and it was up to me now to put together an organisation and train them to drop atomic weapons on both Europe and the Pacific--Tokyo.

Studs Turkel: Interesting that they would have dropped it on Europe as well. We didn't know that.

Paul Tibbets: My edict was as clear as could be. Drop simultaneously in Europe and the Pacific because of the secrecy problem--you couldn't drop it in one part of the world without dropping it in the other.

This is the last thing Tibbets says about nuking Europe, and Turkel never follows up! Thus, we don't know which city was to be targeted (presumably it was a German one) or why the plan wasn't carried out. The Memory Hole has written to Tibbets, asking these logical follow-up questions. Assuming he responds, we'll let you know what he says.

Later in the interview, Tibbets reveals another important piece of hidden history--that the US was just about to drop a third atomic bomb on Japan when it surrendered:

Studs Terkel: Why did they drop the second one, the Bockscar [bomb] on Nagasaki?

Paul Tibbets: Unknown to anybody else--I knew it, but nobody else knew--there was a third one. See, the first bomb went off and they didn't hear anything out of the Japanese for two or three days. The second bomb was dropped and again they were silent for another couple of days. Then I got a phone call from General Curtis LeMay [chief of staff of the strategic air forces in the Pacific]. He said, "You got another one of those damn things?" I said, "Yessir." He said, "Where is it?" I said, "Over in Utah." He said, "Get it out here. You and your crew are going to fly it." I said, "Yessir." I sent word back and the crew loaded it on an airplane and we headed back to bring it right on out to Trinian and when they got it to California debarkation point, the war was over.

Source: "'One Hell of a Big Bang'" by Studs Terkel. Guardian (London), 6 Aug 2002.

This is really a complex issue. The B-29s were stripped of the machine guns and armor because of a change in tactics. The B-29 was significantly different from the B-17 in a number of areas. It was designed to attack from a much higher altitude. It was fully pressurized. At these altitudes, the number of fighters capable of intercepting the B-29 was drastically reduced. While these higher altitudes offered significant advantages, it meant that the bombers encountered the jet streams. The jet streams over Japan tossed the bombers about so much (and interferred with the falling bombs) as to render precision bombing techniques ineffective.

Le May solved this problem by attacking at very low altitudes and at night. This combination exploited a hole in the Japanese air defense. The Japanese were incapable of effectively vectoring fighters against large low altitude night time attacks. Since there was no effective defense, there was no need for armor or defensive guns. Le May could then increase the bomb loads by removing the unneeded weight. Of course, we would not be able to conduct precision strikes under those conditions. Le May realized that massive fire bombings would exploit the fact that most Japanese buildings were wood and that the massive number of fires would over-whelm the Japanese fire fighting system. Accuracy was unimportant when firebombing cities. BTW, the Japanese suffered far more casualities in these fire bombing attacks than from atomic attack. Millions versus a few hundred thousand.

Now, the Germans did have jet fighters but even by April 1945, they were not all that effective. The combination of an advancing allied army and raids on their support bases made it very difficult for the Germans to launch a signficant number of 262s. Those who did launch faced the fact that, while in the air, they did have significant advantages over the Mustangs they did have to land. A significant number were lost when jumped by Mustangs while on their approach runs to their bases. The Germans were forced to constanly relocate their fighter bases which disrupted fuel supplies, repair parts, repair operations, etc. These conditions would have only gotten worse by the time the bomb might have been available in the European theater.

Whether the Luftwaffe would have perceived the threat posed by a single bomber becomes somewhat irrelevent under the conditions. In fact, we could have flown multiple flights of two or three bombers (as a fake) forcing the Luftwaffe to react while we blanked their bases with Mustangs awaiting the return of the 262s. We could also have flown larger formations than were used against Japan. Even if the formation was intercepted, the few German fighters (two maybe three or four) would not have known which aircraft was carrying the bomb.

Bottom line, I just don't think that the Luftwaffe would have offered any more of a threat than did the Imperial Air Force.

The targetting of civilians started too late. A German general said that had we started right from the beginning of targetting their logistics infrastructure, the war would have been won by allies 2 years earlier.

Read Albert Speer's "Inside the Third Reich". He agrees. He studied the bottlenecks in German industry and concluded that if the Allies had concentrated their bombing against ballbearing and oil refineries they could bring German war production to a virtual standstill. The funny thing, at the same time that Speer was arguing to disperse German ballbearing production, Bomber Harris was arguing that the Germans must already have dispersed it. In the event, the Allies started targeting ballbearing production only after it had been dispersed, but there was a window of opportunity. OTOH, oil production got about 5% of Allied bombing and caused about half the decline in German war production.

>> I think the bomb rack itself ended up being hurriedly classified and recalled once its existence became known to the facility restoration crew at that time, and they were asked not to say anything about it (supposedly they didn't, for a while).

The entire 509th Composite Bombardment Group's only mission was to deliver nuclear weapons. They reported directly to Hap Arnold completely cutting out MacAuthur. They had made practice runs against Japan dropping simulated atom bombs several times. Tokyo Rose taunted them "Men of the 509th bombard group, your weapons have had no effect". The Japanese must have been puzzled by B-29's dropping 10-ton dummy bombs on parachutes and turning suddenly 135 degrees. If the Japanese been looking, they would have seen it coming. One German physicist noticed that all reference to fission and nuclear research in English Language physics publications suddenly ceased in 1942. He took it to mean that the Anglo-Saxons had launched on a program of nuclear research and such matters were now considered military secrets.

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