War in ’49
The Great War of Liberation
“Only the dead have seen an end to war”
-Plato
“I know not what weapons World War III will be fought with but, World War IV will be fought with sticks and stones”
-Albert Einstein
August 6th, 1945: At about 8:15 a.m. local time, the American B29 bomber Enola Gay dropped one bomb on the Japanese city of Hiroshima. The bomb’s codename was Little Boy and it is one of the most famous bombs in history. But there was nothing little about what followed, the bomb detonated about 19,000 feet above Hiroshima with the equivalent of 15,000 tons of TNT. The city was flattened, hardly one brick stood on another. About 70,000 people, mostly civilians, were killed by the blast and another 70,000 or so wounded. The explosion was so bright and so hot that it burned shadows into the sidewalk. Burns caused flesh to fall off in roasted chunks when touched, the dead were truly the lucky ones.
August 9th, 1945: The B29 bomber Bockscar flew over the city of Nagasaki and dropped a Bomb codenamed Fat Man. It killed 40,000 people and wounded 25,000. Due to the hilly terrain in Nagasaki the damage was not as wide spread as it was in Hiroshima.
August 15th, 1945: Emperor Hirohito makes a radio address announcing Japan’s Unconditional Surrender. World War Two is over, on September 2nd the Japanese Instrument of Surrender is signed on the deck of the USS Missouri. The Allies celebrated their joint victory but the philosophy of Communism and the philosophies of Democracy and Capitalism are at odds and shortly after World War Two the Cold War started and both sides became locked into a great arms race and were constantly planning the others’ demise.
Mutually Assured Destruction or MAD was the only thing that kept World War Three from breaking out between NATO and the Warsaw Pact. MAD is a policy of deterrence, its key is to make it so there is no way for one side to launch a sneak attack and destroy the other country without massive retaliation. Thousands of nuclear weapons were made mobile or hidden or scattered so that they could not be destroyed before having the chance to launch a retaliatory strike. It was the assurance of MAD that kept both sides from going to war.
But what if the US had not developed the Atomic Bomb in World War Two? During the summer of 1945 US war planners drew up the plan for the ground invasion of Japan called Operation Downfall. It was to start on X-Day, November 1, 1945 and it would have gone forward had not the Atomic Bombs ended the war first. A War Department study estimated 1.7 to 4 million US casualties including 400,000 to 800,000 dead. The Generals and Admirals planning it predicted between 31,000 and 49,000 casualties by X-day+30 and 125,000 by X-day+120. To put that in perspective, total US casualties in World War Two were 1,080,000 with 418,000 dead.
The casualty estimates were based on losses incurred fighting the Japanese for nearly four years. The closer to the Japanese mainland they fought the more determined they became and their military was not the only thing they had to fight. Japanese civilians were being prepared to fight to the end as well. Women, children and those not fit for the military were being organized to rush US troops on the beach with nothing but sharpened bamboo stakes. US casualties would be much lower than the Japanese’s, in the end Japan would have been a devastated no-man’s-land with few or no Japanese left to rebuild.
As staggering as the estimated casualties of Operation Downfall are, the casualties of a World War Three, with or without Nuclear weapons, would have made World War Two look like a skirmish. That is what this book is about, World War Three in a world without the A-Bomb. Using now declassified war plans from the late ‘40s and theoretical fielding of experimental weapons of World War Two and the early post war years, I try to imagine what it would have been like had there been a War in ’49.
The Great War of Liberation
“Only the dead have seen an end to war”
-Plato
“I know not what weapons World War III will be fought with but, World War IV will be fought with sticks and stones”
-Albert Einstein
August 6th, 1945: At about 8:15 a.m. local time, the American B29 bomber Enola Gay dropped one bomb on the Japanese city of Hiroshima. The bomb’s codename was Little Boy and it is one of the most famous bombs in history. But there was nothing little about what followed, the bomb detonated about 19,000 feet above Hiroshima with the equivalent of 15,000 tons of TNT. The city was flattened, hardly one brick stood on another. About 70,000 people, mostly civilians, were killed by the blast and another 70,000 or so wounded. The explosion was so bright and so hot that it burned shadows into the sidewalk. Burns caused flesh to fall off in roasted chunks when touched, the dead were truly the lucky ones.
August 9th, 1945: The B29 bomber Bockscar flew over the city of Nagasaki and dropped a Bomb codenamed Fat Man. It killed 40,000 people and wounded 25,000. Due to the hilly terrain in Nagasaki the damage was not as wide spread as it was in Hiroshima.
August 15th, 1945: Emperor Hirohito makes a radio address announcing Japan’s Unconditional Surrender. World War Two is over, on September 2nd the Japanese Instrument of Surrender is signed on the deck of the USS Missouri. The Allies celebrated their joint victory but the philosophy of Communism and the philosophies of Democracy and Capitalism are at odds and shortly after World War Two the Cold War started and both sides became locked into a great arms race and were constantly planning the others’ demise.
Mutually Assured Destruction or MAD was the only thing that kept World War Three from breaking out between NATO and the Warsaw Pact. MAD is a policy of deterrence, its key is to make it so there is no way for one side to launch a sneak attack and destroy the other country without massive retaliation. Thousands of nuclear weapons were made mobile or hidden or scattered so that they could not be destroyed before having the chance to launch a retaliatory strike. It was the assurance of MAD that kept both sides from going to war.
But what if the US had not developed the Atomic Bomb in World War Two? During the summer of 1945 US war planners drew up the plan for the ground invasion of Japan called Operation Downfall. It was to start on X-Day, November 1, 1945 and it would have gone forward had not the Atomic Bombs ended the war first. A War Department study estimated 1.7 to 4 million US casualties including 400,000 to 800,000 dead. The Generals and Admirals planning it predicted between 31,000 and 49,000 casualties by X-day+30 and 125,000 by X-day+120. To put that in perspective, total US casualties in World War Two were 1,080,000 with 418,000 dead.
The casualty estimates were based on losses incurred fighting the Japanese for nearly four years. The closer to the Japanese mainland they fought the more determined they became and their military was not the only thing they had to fight. Japanese civilians were being prepared to fight to the end as well. Women, children and those not fit for the military were being organized to rush US troops on the beach with nothing but sharpened bamboo stakes. US casualties would be much lower than the Japanese’s, in the end Japan would have been a devastated no-man’s-land with few or no Japanese left to rebuild.
As staggering as the estimated casualties of Operation Downfall are, the casualties of a World War Three, with or without Nuclear weapons, would have made World War Two look like a skirmish. That is what this book is about, World War Three in a world without the A-Bomb. Using now declassified war plans from the late ‘40s and theoretical fielding of experimental weapons of World War Two and the early post war years, I try to imagine what it would have been like had there been a War in ’49.
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