Read history and see just how close the Krauts came to WINNING ww2!

Interesting and educational post for me, thanks for bringing it up.

A little more information- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manhattan_ProjectManhatten Project

This gentleman was one of our residents. He passed away a few years ago. He fought the Japanese in the South Pacific. His picture was taken when he was 18 years old. After 2 days fighting the Japs. He is the young man holding the cup of coffee.
And yes. Between the Germans and the Japanese. The world came close to being taken over.

Check out a book called, The Fall of Japan" by William Craig. It came out in 1967, I've read it a couple times, the first time in junior high long ago. A fairly short but well constructed narrative of the last month of so of the Pacific War. Craig, however, starts it off with the "Meeting House" fire bombing of Tokyo in March of 1945. As someone mentioned already, even if the USA would have had THE BOMB in say 1942, there was no bomber that could carry the first two weapons because of their size.

The B-29 didn't become operational until 1944 and the first 9 months of their use was ineffective. One reason was we were trying fly them out of China and also at high altitude (30,000+ feet) over Japan. Neither worked well. The logistics over "the Hump" from India was a major PIA and a lot of coastal China was Japanese held so if a crew had to bail on the way back to their bases, their chances of being captured by the not too kind Japs typically didn't end well.

The taking of the Marianas in the summer of '44 solved the China problem but not the winds at altitude over Japan that messed with precision bomb dropping and the Japs did have some good interceptors so there were B-29 losses. At this time (late 1944) we hadn't taken Iwo Jima to have P-51 Mustangs fly fighter escort for the B-29s so the bombers were going into Japan air defenses alone. Only by late Feb. 1945 were P-51s based on Iwo that could go all the way with the B-29s.

But Army Air Force (the Air Force didn't become a separate service until after the war) General Curtis LeMay was an energetic man who pushed his staff to "think outside of the box" so they came up with the idea of attacking at night, at less than 10,000 feet, and using "fire bombs (magnesium "bomblets" inside of standard 500 lb bobs that would explode a certain height above the ground to scatter the magnesium incendiaries.The Japanese cities were highly flammable. The Americans had intel that the Japanese were "piece mealing" out parts of their military industry to have workers do their jobs at home so all of civilian urban Japan now became a target. The first large-scale, night time fire bomb mission was "Meeting House" and it was a gruesome success. More Japanese were killed that night than on August 9 in Nagasaki.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bombing_of_Tokyo_(10_March_1945)

By sometime in later July, much of urban Japan had been burnt out and the Emperor, a rather timid and physically small man, want to surrender but he feared the hard cores and a civil war that would be happening as the American war continued. The two atomic bombings gave Hirohito a way out but that was still a near thing, as an attempted military coup tried to over throw him within the palace and key government buildings. Things were still uncertain between August 9 and Aug. 14 when Hirohito announced Japan's surrender.

I've looked at the "Trinity" rest site in New Mexico across several dates using what most people familiar with aerial photos to be "course" resolution 60+ and 30 meter satellite imagery. For most of the 1970s through maybe early 2000s, you could see that basically barren nice half a mile wide circle in the desert shrublands were the bomb was denoated. However, in more recent times, the bareness is less visible as shrubs are recolonizing the immediate blast zone of the first "wild" nuclear explosion. Below is a recent aerial photography or higher resolution commercial satellite of "Trinity" found with Google Maps.

What's the line from that Jeff Goldblum's character in the first Jurassic Park says about the 20th century dinosaurs, "Life finds a way". And so it does, in the end...