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This was a huge problem for the Nazis too, Hitler loved hugely complex and massive “super weapons” and wasted immense amounts of money and scientific effort to
by SteveNuts 3y ago
This was a huge problem for the Nazis too, Hitler loved hugely complex and massive “super weapons” and wasted immense amounts of money and scientific effort to build them. The allies built practical and easy to maintain equipment in great quantities.
- wavemode 3y agoI mean... the Allies also spent billions developing a superweapon. (And used German scientists to do it!)
- spanktheuser 3y agoAnd it wasn’t even the most expensive. The Norden Bomb Sight cost slightly more than the Manhattan Project. B-29 development and production cost nearly 3x the cost of the fission bomb.
- speed_spread 3y agoWell, if you include the cost of decontaminating the Hanford site, amongst others, the numbers grow rapidly. Once the B-29 was done, it was done.
- dreamcompiler 3y agoThe Norden stands out because it couldn't see through clouds, and Europe has very few cloud-free days. So it turned out to be largely useless in practice. The US didn't get much value for its money with that project.
- resolutebat 3y agoThe Allies would have won without the superweapon though (remember, Hitler had already surrended and Japan was clearly on the ropes well before Hiroshima), and the jury is still out in whether it even sped things up.
- hughesjj 3y agoI always saw the atomic bomb as more of a defensive rather than offensive tactic. We were super worried about the Germans getting there first and wanted to ensure we could respond in kind of they did
- LtWorf 3y agoAnd then germany surrendered and it was still dropped. Twice. Doesn't hold.
- ipaddr 3y agoJapan was never going to surrender. They were going to fight until the end. More lives would have been lost. The bomb saved lives.
- dimask 3y agoIt was really aimed at "allies" (soviet union), not japan.
- _heimdall 3y agoWe had really, really bad aim if those two nukes were aimed at the Soviet Union.
- LtWorf 3y agoallegedly
- Staple_Diet 3y agoYou either have no knowledge of the topic or have some secret source of information that has evaded the world's historians, because it is a fairly acknowledged fact supported by both Allied and Japanese sources. Japan didn't even surrender after the first bomb was dropped.
- SteveNuts 3y agoSure, that’s true. I forgot to mention that most of them never saw action except the V2, which was only mildly effective (more of a psychological weapon than anything).
- WalterBright 3y agoThe material effect of the V2 was not in the destruction the V2 caused. It was in the massive diversion of Allied resources trying to stop it. See "Impact" by Benjamin King https://www.amazon.com/Impact-History-Germanys-V-weapons-World/dp/1885119518/ https://www.amazon.com/Impact-History-Germanys-V-weapons-Wor...
- jmspring 3y agoThe allies also had low tech solutions that helped greatly. One such example is the Ghost Army which used decoys and the like to make it look like there was a large force. https://www.nationalww2museum.org/visit/exhibits/traveling-exhibits/ghost-army-combat-con-artists-world-war-ii https://www.nationalww2museum.org/visit/exhibits/traveling-e... Last week, surviving members of the Ghost Army were honored in DC being awarded the Congressional Gold Medal. https://www.npr.org/2024/03/21/1239871379/ghost-army-congressional-gold-medal-world-war-2 https://www.npr.org/2024/03/21/1239871379/ghost-army-congres...
- polishdude20 3y agoReminds me of the time the allies literally dropped half sized fake soldiers from planes before Dunkirk or something like that.
- vt102 3y agoRight before D-Day: https://youtu.be/tm2oewPDwpw https://youtu.be/tm2oewPDwpw
- dotnet00 3y agoThe allies had their own set of "super weapons", like radars and proximity fuses. The Nazis had the issue that they wanted to field massive superweapons, but were nowhere near as mechanized as the allies, leading to them being unable to actually practically support those superweapons (and probably also why they went with such over-the-top ideas, hoping that they could do the job with a few units only and relying on scaring and demoralizing the allies into submission).