How Would History Be Different if the Nazis Built the A-Bomb First?
Today’s PJ Lifestyle Bookshelf selection comes From Ed Driscoll’s “Far from Complete: Great Books Missing in the Kindle Format” article:
Fatherland, by Robert Harris: The birth of the modern world in the early to mid-19thcentury gave man many blessings, but it also created the technology — and more importantly, the totalitarian worldview and the concept of “Start From Zero” — that unleashed newfound horrors a century later, as seen in Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union. But how similar where these two ideologies?
In Robert Harris’s best-selling alternative history book, first published in 1992, it’s 1964, Nazi Germany won World War II by getting to the atom bomb first, and a stalemate — a Cold War, if you will — exists between America and Germany. President Joseph P. Kennedy, who won the White House due to the appeasement with the Nazis he preached during World War II, is scheduled to fly into Germany to begin discussions leading to détente between America and an Evil Empire. Sound eerily familiar? As Orrin Judd wrote in a perceptive review of Harris’s book, Fatherland is a brilliant metaphor for the Cold War:
A nuclear balance of terror surely would have kept America from invading Europe and, after a suitable period of huffy pretense, there surely would have been a significant segment of public opinion, particularly in academic intellectual circles, advocating detente–just as has actually happened with both the USSR and Red China. And just as the Holocaust failed to draw the U. S. into WWII in the first place, and just as the millions of victims of Russian and Chinese communist oppression failed to deter rapproachments with those countries, it’s easy to believe that the “disappearance” of Europe’s Jews would have little impact on an American/German détente.
The story is engrossing enough on its own, but these speculations, and the subtle way in which they implicate the past sixty years of Western history, turn the book into a disturbing and subversive novel of ideas. Conservative historians–like Robert Conquest, Richard Pipes and Allan Bullock–have beaten their heads against a wall for years, demonstrating to an uncaring elite establishment how little the Soviet Union, Stalin and Communism differed from Nazi Germany, Hitler and Nazism. But this popular thriller makes the same points, and reveals the moral emptiness of our policy of détente, in a wonderfully imaginative way. What more can we ask of an author than that he entertain us and at the same time raise questions that trouble our souls?
Apparently, Fatherland was included in the early books rushed into Kindle format, and is still available on the Amazon UK site for British Kindle owners, but isn’t currently available in the States. Is it a case of Amazon or the publisher losing the electronic format licensing rights? Otherwise, what on earth is stopping Amazon from rectifying this?
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I got a copy of Fatherland from one of the used bookstores in my area of Texas years ago. It is an entertaining read, the description of Berlin, and a Europe run by the Nazi was fascinating, chilling, and realistic. The book’s plot about a German cop investigating a murder let the author lay out this alternate future in a un-preachy fashion that still made its point, and made it well.
Ironically, it was the very core of Naziism, namely hatred of Jews, that probably prevented this from happening. If the Germans had embraced their Jews with their ‘Jewish physics’, rather than trying to destroy them, it is very likely that we would all be speaking German now.
When the United States dropped the first atomic bombs on Japan it had complete air superiority. There was no risk of these priceless secret weapons being shot-down en route. Germany never had anything like that kind of dominance in the air over the UK or USSR, and it never had a bomber capable of reaching America. Any attempt to deliver an atomic bomb against a strategic target by aircraft would have been likely to fail, and they never had a missile that was sufficiently large and reliable to do the job. The only realistic options for deploying the weapon would have been to drop it on enemy troops, in which case there would still have been a risk of the bomber getting shot down, or using it as a nuclear landmine.
This would have been sufficient to deter the Western allies because there were very few places on the French coast where an invasion force could actually land. It would not have required many atomic bombs to create an impassable barrier. Even the knowledge that they might be there would probably have convinced allied planners that a landing was never likely to succeed.
But it would not have been enough to deter the Soviets. Firstly, because it would have taken a huge number of bombs to block all the possible lines of attack through Eastern Europe. Secondly, because Stalin didn’t care about casualties. Losing a few more million to atomic bombs would have meant nothing to him. The Red Army would have taken the whole of Germany, and then Stalin would have found some pretext to continue into France.
So the most likely result of the Nazis getting the atomic bomb first is that the Soviet Union would have ended up in control of the whole of Europe, from the Atlantic to the Urals.
The novel “1945″ (Newt Gingrich and William R. Forstchen) attempts postulates a world where Nazi Germany conducted an air raid against the nuclear plant at Oak Ridge, Tennessee.
A more reliable attack strategy for atomic weapons would have been suicide U-Boats exploding in our harbors.
Actually the nazis had plans for ballistic missiles capable of hitting the us they could have fielded them in the early 50s
The Germans would have used the V2 rocket, or one scaled up to carry the payload that a uranium fission weapon would have represented. The obvious and primary target for that weapon would have been the east coast of Midland and Southern England, especially before June of 1944. The V2 rocket could and did reach London.
Another delivery system may have involved one of their jet powered bomber designs, such as a modified Arado, which they had and used primarily as an uncatchable recon platform.
Nuking Britain would have denied the Allies the use of Britain as an unsinkable aircraft carrier and springboard for the Normandy invasion.
It could have been used, depending on the availability of the isotopes needed and construction time, as a theater weapons agains the Russians in the east, or against the British and Americans in Italy, to vaporize key sectors of the front.
Remember, we had much more resource available to pursue the atom bomb than did the Germans, and when the time came to deploy them, we had exactly two bombs, one of U235 and one of Pu239. Enola Gay and Bocks Car were able to fly to the targets unopposed by the Japanese. The bombs were so new and so frightening to the people that used them that they had to be armed only after the bomber had taken off from Tinian, options not available to the Germans launching V2s.
Frankly, Nazi Germany being what it was, there was no chance of them getting this weapon first. History spoke and I listened.
Remember, we had much more resource available to pursue the atom bomb than did the Germans, and when the time came to deploy them, we had exactly two bombs, one of U235 and one of Pu239.
In an interview by Studds Terkel about 10 years ago, Paul Tibbets said there was one more bomb still back in the states. When the Japanese didn’t immediately surrender after Nagasaki, he was ordered to go get the other bomb and to drop it personally. Fortunately, the war ended before that was necessary.
Those early bombs were large and heavy. The “Little Boy” U-235 bomb weighed 9,000 pounds and “Fat Man” weighed 10,000 pounds. It took years of work to make smaller nuclear weapons and neither could’ve been delivered by any aircraft* or missile in the German military at the time. They had some grand plans for longer ranged missiles (A9/A10) and bombers that could’ve reached America but they hadn’t even started work on them in 1945.
*While the Me-323 Gigant could’ve physically carried one of those bombs, it was a very large, slow and vulnerable transport plane, not a bomber.
Excellent book.
To me, it is a book about Auschwitz/Oświęcim and how a German finds undeniable evidence of extermination.
It makes you think, “What would I have done in Germany, in 1938?” For the West, that question is the ghost in every man’s past. The answer to that question is the substance of your humanity.
After I read that book back in 1992 or so, it stimulated me to move from fiction to non-fiction, to educate myself about the holocaust. There is a lot to learn.
What if? There are so many counterfactural variables that it is hard to say for sure. However, one class of things would have come about, and with out any if’s, when’s and but’s. No European Jews would have survived, hardly any Slaves (Himmler had announced a post-victory slaughter of Slaves) and, not so strangely, in the long run no Christians would have survived. Why the termination of Christians, for afterall they do not constitute a race? The reason lies in the fact that Himmler, Hitler too, could not tolerate the idea of a reality beyond, above and greater than they. Hitler and particularly Himmler had had a Catholic education and knew enough of what Christianity had to say. Himmler specifically rejected “humanitas” (a Christian relic of his education) in favor of the “Volk”. In short the Nazies would have ended the Jews, most Slaves (or enslavement) and imitated Stalin in his elimination of Orthodoxy in Russia. No if’s, and’s and but’s here.