The cost of a B-61 nuclear gravity bomb is only $28 million (2012). There are approximately 400, of which 100 were moved to Europe in 2022. They can only be launched by an F-18 or F-35 with a special armament control package (not included in the $28 million).
$28 million gets you spin rocket motors that improve accuracy to within 10 meters, and internal and celestial guidance. The yield is variable ("dial-a-yield") (10-340kt) to allow selecting the amount of tritium for the explosion.
The cost for an F-22 is $191 million (2023). A B-2 is $2 billion.
$2 billion !!!!?!!!!
The joke is "B-2 isn't the name, it's the pricetag"
And we bought 21 of them. So $42 billion for the airplanes. This figure does not include operational costs such as training, fuel, maintenance, etc.
And we somehow managed to crash two of them - on takeoff. Like literally, while taking off. No deaths, thankfully, except for the pilots souls.
In the first case because of - wait for it - rain. [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2008_Andersen_Air_Force_Base...]
That is one expensive photo!
Well, it cost more to design and build.
I personally would consider the total cost of dropping two atomic bombs much higher, for hopefully obvious reasons.
EDIT: Although, per the article, I might have been wrong about that:
> The loss of life was shocking. The B-29 raid on Tokyo on the night of 9 March 1945 is thought to have killed as many as 100,000 people, making it more destructive than either of the atomic bombs that were to follow.
Fascinating bit of history though, thank you for sharing.
The US's conventional bombing raids on Japan were extensive - they had all but destroyed most Japanese cities by the time the nuclear bombs were dropped. Hiroshima and Nagasaki were not large and notable Japanese cities, but they were among the only ones left by that time.
Spared, even. There were more selection criteria, though, and Nagasaki was (IIRC) chosen at the last moment because of the weather.
Kokura was the primary target and three bombing runs were made before diverting to Nagasaki.
Leading to the concept of the "luck of Kokura" where you avoid a catastrophe without even being aware of it.
Thank you for sharing! I knew Nagasaki was alternate selection, but this is first time I’ve heard three runs were attempted before diverting.
It’s a bit worse as they were the only ones left because they were purposefully saved knowing the nukes would need a target.
I always see this claim repeated, and the same for Wiesbaden and Heidelberg in Germany. But no sources give credibility to both claims.
Wikipedia claims Hiroshima was saved for atomic bombing, about a month ahead:
> On 3 July, the Joint Chiefs of Staff placed (Hiroshima) off limits to bombers, along with Kokura, Niigata and Kyoto
Nagasaki was not explicitly saved, but was just a difficult target to hit:
> Nagasaki had been spared from firebombing because its geography made it difficult to locate at night with AN/APQ-13 radar.
> Unlike the other target cities, Nagasaki had not been placed off limits to bombers by the Joint Chiefs of Staff's 3 July directive, and was bombed on a small scale five times.
Anyone with better sources could please fill out the Wikipedia article some more:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atomic_bombings_of_Hiroshima_a...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atomic_bombings_of_Hiroshima_a...
July 3 was one month prior to the nuclear bomb dropping. By that time, B-29 bombing raids with conventional bombs had been operating since 1944. Further, the fact that they had to order it to be preserved on July 3 implies that it hadn't been saved until that point. So, Hiroshima was saved for a month, but only after it had been an equally viable target for the prior several months to a year.
Crossover from the other front page article. I tested out ChatGPT5 search mode and there are some good sources!
I had read it in The Making of the Atomic Bomb by Richard Rhodes and it lines up with what my sibling comment is saying.
Amazing book
And they were just ramping up.
Between May and August 1945, US bombers dropped an average of 34,402 tons/month of bombs on Japan. This would have reached 100,000 tons/month by September, 170,000 tons/month by January 1946, and 200,000 tons/month by March 1946.
The atomic bomb was more of warning and show of force to the Soviets rather than the Empire of Japan. The purpose of the bombs wasn't (just) to get Japan to surrender, since they were already near defeat anyway, it was to show the Soviet Union that the US had the wonder weapon already working and that they should back off and fall in line unless they want a piece of that. I think many people miss that part of history.
There was plenty of fight left in Japan. The battle of Okinawa was absolutely horrific and small a scale guide to what invading the homeland would have been.
There were 76,000-84,000 allied casualties and 105,000-110,000 Japanese. The civilian death toll was 40,000-150,000.
Claiming that lives were saved by bombing cities with nuclear weapons is always going to be a hard one to prove and morally dubious, but it might also be correct. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Okinawa
> There was plenty of fight left in Japan.
After the first dropping, the War Cabinet met on August 9th and concluded in the morning that the US probably did not have the resources to build more than one bomb, and it was decided to keep fighting.
Then in the early afternoon they learned of the second dropping. After further debate the War Cabinet voted 3-3 on whether to continue fighting.
It took two bombing to get to a tied vote (both of the War Cabinet, and the full cabinet): the Emperor had to be called to break the stalemate. I do not understand how anyone could believe zero bombings would result in a cessation of hostilities.
And even after the decision was made, there were still attempts to prevent surrender:
I think it's hard for people to fathom how hellbent the Japanese were at the time.
The last coup was quite a stretch. They hoped to stop the surrender by stopping the Emperor's message from being broadcast. Crazy.
I suppose there were some coups that succeeded because the plotters controlled the news media.
> The last coup was quite a stretch.
Yes, but it still shows the mindset (of some) in the military.
And military action against government wasn't a new thing in Japan either:
> Prime Minister Inukai Tsuyoshi was assassinated by 11 young naval officers. The following trial and popular support of the Japanese population led to extremely light sentences for the assassins, strengthening the rising power of Japanese militarism and weakening democracy and the rule of law in the Empire of Japan.
> It wasn't to get Japan to surrender, since they were already near defeat anyway
I'm not a historian but I've always read that the Japanese government famously did not intend to surrender despite being cornered.
They had some operations scheduled for October 1945—they surrendered 1 month before due to the bombs.
The Japanese government didn’t have any intent to surrender until the emperor at the time asked/told them to.
I’m fairly certain that happened after the bombs.
Then they suggested they’d surrender if the poition of the emperor was untouched.
Even _after_ the emperor asked to, it was not smooth sailing.
Didn't the Soviet invasion of Manchuria also boxed them in? Some Historians(Paul Hamn for once) have said that was the primary reason for the surrender.
Manchuria was across the Sea of Japan from the Japanese home islands. The Soviet invasion of Manchuria did nothing substantive to directly threaten Japan.
Japanese strategists wanted to be in Manchuria and Korea because of their proximity to imperial Japan, but that was also why they had invaded the Philippines (to defend seaborne lines of communication to their oil supplies in Borneo).
By the time the Soviets invaded, the Japanese had been ejected from much of their outlying empire, yet they had not surrendered, because Japan itself had the capability to fight.
The Soviet invasion of Manchuria did not change that, an invasion of Japan proper could only have come with involvement from the rest of the allies, including the sealift used for the invasions of Normandy and southern France.
> Didn't the Soviet invasion of Manchuria also boxed them in? Some Historians(Paul Hamn for once) have said that was the primary reason for the surrender.
The Japanese were already expecting a Soviet attack: the only 'unexpected' thing about what the Soviets did was make a move in Summer 1945 instead of Spring 1946.
But the Japanese knew what was going to happen eventually.
Oh, yes - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soviet_invasion_of_Manchuria
From the Japanese PoV, imagining that they could hold off the US/UK suddenly ceased to matter. Obviously Japanese armies could not stand against Soviet armies. So - "OMG, who could have imagined the Americans inventing a super-super-duper bomb! I guess we'll have to surrender to them" was a face-saving way to avoid a quick & brutal Soviet conquest & occupation.
The Soviets could never have done a large invasion of Japan. They had a few ships that the USA had given them as part of Project Hula, but that is nothing compared to what would be needed for a full scale invasion of Japan. They did have plans to possibly attack Hokkaido, but as the wikipedia entry says "Historians have generally considered it unlikely that an invasion of Hokkaido would have succeeded."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proposed_Soviet_invasion_of_Ho...
In comparison, the proposed allied invasion was planned to have 42 aircraft carriers, 24 battleships, and 400 destroyers and destroyer escorts. Even that wasn't considered enough:
>...Ken Nichols, the District Engineer of the Manhattan Engineer District, wrote that at the beginning of August 1945, "[p]lanning for the invasion of the main Japanese home islands had reached its final stages, and if the landings actually took place, we might supply about fifteen atomic bombs to support the troops."
Japan's decision to surrender in Aug'45 was based on when the Japanese knew then, not on what historians know now. And several previous Japanese conclusions of "the USSR will not be able to do X" had proven catastrophically wrong. For example - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soviet_invasion_of_Manchuria#B...
>Japan's decision to surrender in Aug'45 was based on when the Japanese knew then, not on what historians know now.
Nobody is saying anything different.
>...And several previous Japanese conclusions of "the USSR will not be able to do X" had proven catastrophically wrong. For example …
The Japanese had already moved all of their experienced troops from Manchuria before the invasion. They were surprised that the USSR would break the Soviet–Japanese Neutrality Pact, but the defense of the home islands was their main concern at that point.
As your source says:
>...The Soviet entry into this theater of the war and the defeat of the Kwantung Army were significant factors in the Japanese government's decision to surrender unconditionally on 15 August, as it became apparent that the Soviet Union had no intention of acting as a third party in negotiating an end of the war on conditional terms.
The Japanese knew the USSR was not a threat to the main islands and the USSR knew they would likely fail if they tried to invade Hokkaido. The Japanese had hopes that the USSR would be willing to negotiate with the Allies on their behalf, but once the Soviets declared war was, they knew that would not happen.
Also, Japan had been hoping that the Soviets would act as a go-between for surrender negotiations with the US, but the Soviet declaration of war on Japan put an end to that possibility.
I'm also no historian, but find it difficult to believe this when the firebombings on Japan did more damage than the atomic bombs. The US and Soviet Union would have leveled Japan without atomic bombs anyway. So the US history stories puts the success of the end of the war on the atom bombs, but Japan were defeated anyway, atom bombs or not.
I agree the outcome was clear. And this was a feudal system with an Emperor, and a culture of extreme adherence to culture.
As in, Kamikazis because ordered, honour in death, or killing yourself with your own sword. Not really a culture of capitulation. Most of their cities were already firebombed, as you elude to, some more than once, yet there was still no surrender.
Without surrender, a country isn't really done. Leave it be, and they'll arm and rebuild, still at war with you. Invade, and your troops die, for a standing army still existed. Japan also had colonies, islands, resources.
And of course without surrender, even if you occupy, now you have insurgents.
It's hard to view the world through the eyes of even 80 years ago.
War weary, endless soldiers lost already, an unsurrendering Japan, and a way to put an end to it...
> Without surrender, a country isn't really done. Leave it be, and they'll arm and rebuild, still at war with you.
Of course, after surrender, a country can still arm and rebuild, and again be at war with you...
And even with the atomic bomb, and Russia's declaration of war, they still had an attempted coup to keep the emperor from surrendering.
Two history books, "Code-Name Downfall" by Allen and "Downfall" by Frank point out that the Japanese high command was horrified by the effects of the nuclear bombs, cared a great deal about the loss of life, and were highly concerned that the next target would be Tokyo.
So they chose to end it.
There's a fair amount of detail and references in those books if one wishes to dig into it.
(I say they are "history" books as opposed to "activist" books. The latter are not worth reading.)
Some material I've seen claimed that the Japanese leadership didn't know it was a nuclear bomb. The Japanese knew immediately it was nuclear bomb, because they had a nuclear bomb development program themselves.
I think the material that claims the Japanese leadership didn't know what atomic bombs were is some revisionist's attempt to paint the actions and decisions of the time in a bad light. Fortunately, the emperor referenced atomic bombs in his surrender speech so it is fairly clear.
"Furthermore, the enemy has begun to employ a new and cruel bomb, causing immense and indiscriminate destruction, the extent of which is beyond all estimation."
Japan had no idea how many bombs we had and part of the strategy of using them in quick succession was to give the perception that we hod more than we did. It seems like Tokyo was going to be the next target:
Truman had ordered a halt to atomic bombings on 10 August, upon receiving news that another bomb would be ready for use against Japan in about a week. He told his cabinet that he could not stand the thought of killing "all those kids". By 14 August, however, Truman remarked "sadly" to the British ambassador that "he now had no alternative but to order an atomic bomb dropped on Tokyo", as some of his military staff had been advocating.
> is some revisionist's attempt
Yeah, it was in an activist's writings someone was using as a cite to me. Tells for an activist book:
1. hyperbolic language
2. no discussion of alternative explanations
3. mind reading - "surely so-and-so must have understood that..." and "so-and-so's reason must have been (something nefarious)"
Massive scale strategic bombing and nuclear weapons are not substitutable from a military strategy standpoint and everyone would have understood the implications of that. Any similarity is superficial.
The massive bombing of Japan was a grinding war of attrition that has well-understood limitations and challenges. Military leaders in Japan were perfectly capable of understanding what those campaigns couldn't do, so it came down to a willingness to accept the losses to maintain strategic optionality, which they clearly were.
Most of the limitations of strategic bombing campaigns do not apply to nuclear weapons, which is something the Japanese military leadership also understood, though the scope of capability was uncertain (which also probably helped). If the US switched to nuclear weapons instead of conventional bombing campaigns, which was the risk Japanese military leaders had to consider, it takes most of the strategic optionality off the table at which point there is little to gain by continuing.
I think there was also the shock effect of this one tiny bomb with that much power. And the Japanese didn't know that America only had those two available. They could have had thousands for all they knew.
And this is also something that could strike their leadership. You can build bunkers against conventional bombs but for nuclear that's a different ball game
They had three and the capacity to make about three per month.
My understanding is that Japan had agreed to surrender under the conditions that they got to keep their emperor, but the US had rejected that looking for an unconditional surrender*. A lot of the research around that time indicates the drivers for dropping the nukes included both sending a message to the Soviets and the overall cost of the Manhattan project (and an unwillingness to let the war end without “recouping” some of that cost). Whether the Japanese surrendered when they did or surrendered a couple months later, though, Japanese surrender was largely expected at that point.
One can argue about the increased cost in terms of lives if the bombs weren’t used, but my understanding is that by that time, we’re talking about shortening the war by maybe months, but certainly not years.
(*Worth noting that in the final terms, the Japanese did keep their emperor, but the US was demanding an unconditional surrender as a matter of principle.)
> "Whether the Japanese surrendered when they did or surrendered a couple months later, though, Japanese surrender was largely expected at that point."
By whom? In actuality, both the US and Japan were planning for a long campaign on the Japanese home islands: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Downfall. The Japanese intended to prolong fighting as much as possible to force the US to abandon the invasion because of mounting costs and casualties.
Even the night before the surrender, some among the Japanese military attempted a coup to prevent it and continue the war: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ky%C5%ABj%C5%8D_incident
Your understanding is incorrect. Even with the atomic bombs and the Soviet entered to the war, the cabinet still split about surrendering.
Before that The Japanese had started to talk about a cease-fire, but that cease-fire was expected to include ongoing control of China, Korea, and some of the islands they had taken in the war. In other words it wasn’t a surrender, but rather a let us keep these last little bit bits and maybe we won’t kill you. It was delusional to the extreme.
The debate in Washington at this point not if Japan would be invaded or not or would surrender.
Operations downfall and Olympus were planned. They were projecting anywhere from hundreds of thousands to 1 million casualties on the US side. No one bothered to do the calculation on the Japanese side, but the Japanese leadership believed that their path of victory was to make it prohibitively expensive in American lives to take the islands and they didn’t care how many Japanese died. You can take a look at the ratios of Japanese dead to American dead on Iwo Jima, the Philippines to get an idea of the bloodbath that that would’ve been.
Of course, some Americans were seeing that the Japanese were far stronger on the islands and they anticipated. And we’re pushing for a total naval blockade instead. Japan’s economy and agricultural harvest had already collapsed. A total net naval blockade would’ve killed millions.
This is false. There has never been any historical record at that time that shows that “warning the soviets” was any part of it. In fact, the USA disclosed the bomb to stalin beforehand hand. Anyone who postulated that was not in the chain of command. The Americans still very much believed at this point that the best post wore outcome was an ongoing alliance between the United States and the USSR. It was only after the scale of Stalin‘s ambitions in Eastern Europe became apparent and the aftermath of the Nuremberg trials that it was becoming obvious that there would be an ongoing confrontation.
I strongly suggest the recent book on operation downfall, as well as the recent popular works on the last months of the war from the Japanese point of view.
> The atomic bomb was more of warning and show of force to the Soviets rather than the Empire of Japan.
[citation needed]
This claimed gets brought out every time atomic usage comes up, but are there official US policy documents that date to 1945 that explicitly bring this up as a motivation?
Significant portion of the field of history is speculation and reading between the lines.
> Significant portion of the field of history is speculation and reading between the lines.
Government decisions and policies, especially in more modern times, runs on memos. If such options were discussed between departments there would be paperwork.
Japan was refusing to surrender even after the first atomic bomb
The emperor of Japan directly referenced the atomic bombs in his surrender speech:
"We have considered deeply the general trends of the world and the current situation of the Empire, and We have decided to take extraordinary measures to bring the current state of affairs to an end. We hereby inform Our loyal and devoted subjects."
...
"Furthermore, the enemy has begun to employ a new and cruel bomb, causing immense and indiscriminate destruction, the extent of which is beyond all estimation. Should we continue to fight, not only would it result in the ultimate collapse and obliteration of the Japanese nation, but it would also lead to the total extinction of human civilization."
However there were was a major faction that did not want to surrender and had conspired and committed a coup d'état to prevent it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ky%C5%ABj%C5%8D_incident
The idea that Japan was going to surrender is revisionist nonsense.
The US manufactured millions of purple hearts in anticipation of an amphibious invasion.
To this day those are the purple hearts used.
Nuclear weapons saved millions of lives.
Particularly amongst the civilians in Asia who had suffered over the last 10 years. Ending the war quickly stopped this killing, aside from the Japanese and American + allies lives.
And the early bombs were merely efficient ways to level a city. 1 B-29 rather than a few hundred. 16 sq miles of Tokyo got burned down in one night, for example.
If atomic bombs never developed past what they dropped in Japan it's somewhat likely be used in war commonly. They are large and nasty, yet still require a lot of them for metropolitan areas.
It's the civilization enders we developed in the 30 years after that woke us up.
I always found this the most interesting aspect of the timing of the bombs. They occurred at the one moment in 20th century where their power could be seen in a way that everybody immediately grasp the outcome of it and that no response was physically possible. They also occurred at the one moment in time in which a multipolar world essentially coalesced to a bipolar world. And the people that use the bomb had every intention of moving towards a true United Nations with use of the bomb governed via the UN. If any of those things change, I think history looks very different
The civilization-enders were in mass production a mere 9 years later:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_17_nuclear_bomb
Mk-17: produced Jul 1954-Nov 1955
No. built: 200
Blast yield: 15 megatonnes of TNT
This is 1000 times the power of the atomic bombs dropped on Japan.
From 1935 to 1955 you could plot "firepower deliverable by a single aircraft" and see a trend that looks a lot like Moore's Law for mass destruction of life and structures.
Edward Teller thought that it was possible to make bombs a thousand times more powerful than the first generation thermonuclear bombs, but fortunately nobody was willing to commit resources to exploring the concept. Merely testing such a bomb on Earth would have been an act of mass destruction.
FTA: “The B-29 had entered service in a little over three years since design work began. "It's very quick, even for World War Two standards," says Kinney”
Not for German standards. Near the end of the war, their schedules were frantic, for example https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heinkel_He_162_Volksjäger#Volk...: “On 8 September 1944, the requirement was issued to industry; bidders were required to submit their basic designs within ten days while quantity production of the aircraft was to commence by 1 January 1945
[…]
During January 1945, the Luftwaffe formed an Erprobungskommando 162 ("Test Unit 162") evaluation group to which the first 46 aircraft were delivered“
I remember reading about even faster development cycles, but cannot find links.
And how many pressurized bombers with a flight profile and carrying capacity similar to the B-29 did the Luftwaffe produce? Zero.
If you read the article it goes into the technical innovation introduced by this aircraft. It was not a slight modification of an existing design, but a total rethink of how a bomber jet could be designed.
Each turret had it's own analog computer. Here's an explanation by the curator at The Museum of Flight in Seattle.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UOX-2d9qLec
The B-29 also had ECM detectors and transmitters, so they could block enemy radar signals.
The animated training film for B-29 gunners.[1]
For a sense of what air to air gunnery is like without computer assistance, see the corresponding training film for B-17 gunners. [2].
[1] https://archive.org/details/19584-army-air-forces-gunnery-in...
Really enjoyed this.
A few months ago I took an Appleseed rifle skills course. It's amazing what goes inyo "just" hitting a static target from a static position at 25 yards with soft time constraints. It's amazing what goes into hitting a moving target from a moving plane in a few seconds.
So it basically worked like dogfights in starwars ep.4
I love these military training movies, they're so good at teaching complex concepts. This one about celestial navigation is really good as well:
The best video on the topic I ever watched
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZTC_RxWN_xo
"Secret History of Silicon Valley" talks a lot about electronic warfare of ww2.
There's a good book by Malcolm Gladwell called "the bomber mafia" that's all about the airforce doctrine of indiscriminate bombing to break the population and the rebel faction within the airforce who advocated high precision bombing instead. Crippling industry instead of punishing civilians.
They eventually lost out to the former, culminating in horrific napalm raids on Japan that continued even after the atomic bombs were dropped and had more casualties
Like most Malcom Gladwell works this is confused and sloppy.
The "bomber mafia" (they didn't call themselves this) were prewar strategists who thought you could destroy an enemy's ability to fight by hitting his strategic and tactical assets with bombers.
Basically they thought that bombers would be to the next war what artillery was in WWI.
What ended up happening is level bombing wasn't very precise, it was often hard to identify the correct targets, and modern mechanized war machines were more resilient than expected so bombers ended up not being as decisive as expected.
"Area bombing" or "carpet bombing" and the strategy to "dehouse and demoralize the population" were tactics developed during the war when the earlier tactics weren't working.
They also thought that citizen's morale would break when a few bombs landed. WW II proved that it's more resilient, or perhaps resignation is stronger than giving up?
Maybe the Americans were still remembering the first World War, in which the Germans already had low morale by the time the USA joined the conflict. The USA joined in the thick of WWII when the Germans/Axis were doing considerably better. A prevailing (but ahistorical) view among Germans after WWI was that they had surrendered prematurely in 1918, so that might have also led to a cultural disdain towards surrender.
Precision bombing during WW2 was not possible at the required scale. To put a bomb precisely on target back then you needed something like a dive bomber, a tactic which is incompatible with strategic-scale bombing. Even "precise" methods using advanced analog computers like the Norden bombsight could only do so much.
>Under combat conditions the Norden did not achieve its expected precision, yielding an average CEP in 1943 of 1,200 feet (370 m)[1]
This means that 50% of bombs fell within 1,200 feet of the target, which is an absolutely awful accuracy if you're trying to hit anything specific.
This was further compounded during the campaign against Japan by the heavy reliance of Japanese wartime industry on cottage industries which were dispersed almost randomly within Japanese population centers, rather than being located within specialized industrial districts. From a purely strategic standpoint which is only concerned with destroying the enemy's ability to make war, the most effect way to disrupt these kinds of industry with 1945 technology was essentially to burn every building in the city to the ground. Other options were simply ineffective.
Precision bombing? With WW2 era tech?
In WW2 you were lucky if you managed to hit a city-sized target, never mind an industrial site.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Precision_bombing#World_War_II "These provided impressive accuracy—British post-raid analysis showed that the vast majority of the bombs dropped could be placed within 100 yards (91 m) of the midline of the beam, spread along it a few hundred yards around the target point, even in pitch-dark conditions at a range of several hundred miles. But the systems fatally depended on accurate radio reception, and the British invented the first electronic warfare techniques to successfully counter this weapon in the 'Battle of the Beams' "
I do hope wherever you are from that your cities are larger than a few hundred yards.
The article you link to is about radio navigation based on ground stations. The USA would have required at least an island near the Japanese mainland on which to establish such a ground station, or perhaps a ship if it could maintain an accurate position based on traditional methods.
Even then, I don't think it would be correct to say that the Americans had no other capabilities for targeted attacks. With air superiority you can do strafing at relatively low risk, which is very accurate. And the USA had also developed rockets by this point, which could drastically improve accuracy when compared to unpropelled bombs. They even used these operationally against Japan before the atomic bomb attacks.
The norden bombsight was a game changing piece of tech that allowed more precision than had been possible.
The RAF tended to carpet bomb at night, but the USAF wanted to precision bomb by day.
It was nowhere near as precise as today's tech but it vastly improved during the course of the war.
Ultimately it didn't work because the theory didn't work. German manufacturing was not disrupted by precision bombing enough to matter
Masters of the air also touches on this, and some of the disastrous missteps during the raids that led to aircraft loss
The norden bombsite was a incredibly cool and fascinating piece of technology that did not have the operational performance its designers were promising.
Level bombing with dumb bombs was never going to be particularly precise regardless the sophistication of the bombsite because bombs in free fall don't have the momentum of an artillery shell so their trajectory is less dependable.
The norden also had a multitude of parameters that the bombardier had to input quickly and accurately as they were changing during a bombing run under flak barrage.
That being said the real problem with the air war in Germany was target selection. If you want to know more I'd suggest the book The Collapse of the German War Economy
https://uncpress.org/9780807858509/the-collapse-of-the-germa...
I guess there must be something about cities that attracts bombs then, maybe all these magnets on the fridges in people's homes.
During the bombing of Dresden bombs somehow gravitated towards the city center 2km in diameter, while factories and railway hubs on the outskirts weren't damaged at all.
The reviewer gets very snippy over style things that likely would not matter to him if the substantive content was different, but I think this review is essential reading along with the book: https://thebaffler.com/latest/narrative-napalm-kulwin
The core of the critique remains on substantive issues.
For those interested in this period, I highly recommend the Errol Morris interview with RSMcNamara[1].
> The bombers had been built by hand because the factory was also making other aircraft on the assembly line, and the B-29s differed in hundreds of tiny details. No B-29 in those first batches weighed exactly the same, a worrying state for such a highly complicated aircraft. Only 20% of the "finished" aircraft could be flown out of the factory. Badly fitted windows and observation panels bled air or were distorted, and many electrical plugs in the plane's 16km (10 miles) of wiring didn't work properly.
Any European today still wonders why Tesla workers in the US still cannot hold a screwdriver, producing widely worrying results and claiming that the product is a valid car.
That story is not representative of the American aerospace industry as a whole, though. Lockheed were producing among the highest-quality airframes in the world at that point.
The British Overseas Airways Corporation (BOAC) were desperate for new aircraft after the war. They would have bought Lockheed Constellations if they hadn't been pressured into rescuing the British aircraft manufacturing companies from financial obliteration, which had of course narrowly avoided direct obliteration from German bombing. Instead of buying new American aircraft, they converted British bombers like the Avro Lancaster into sub-par airliners and eventually brought the Bristol Britannia into service, which was a fine aircraft, just ten years too late.
The de Havilland Comet eventually made BOAC and British engineering competitive internationally again, but I think it would be improper to not give credit to American workers and designers for being the first to create such advanced aircraft as the Constellation which really did keep the Allied war effort going behind the scenes.
As for the Germans, they had rockets and all kinds of incredible experimental aircraft, but nothing quite like the USA when it came to high-altitude air freight.
> Any European today still wonders why Tesla workers in the US still cannot hold a screwdriver, producing widely worrying results and claiming that the product is a valid car.
A couple decades ago when I was doing my mandatory work experience at school, I spent a week at the Lotus car factory. It’s amusing how much of your point applies to what I saw there at the time, and I feel deeply sorry for whoever ended up buying an Elise with a pedal box assembled by me.
They also were trying to produce the most powerful non-jet engine going, which is a difficult technical problem. Parts were magnesium to save weight, which could get rather excited if some parts broke and the fire started. A small time to bail out before the wing root burned through.
The gun technology, pressured hull, ... all were novel. They didn't know it was possible when they committed to building it.
Why do Europeans buy American cars?
I never could figure that one out either…
American brands like Ford typically sold models that were both designed and manufactured in Europe such as the popular Ford Escort and Ford Transit. They are completely different to what is sold in the US.
Seems only about 9% of US manufactured car exports go to the EU[0], which is down from 12% in 2022.
So there are some who buy US made cars, but why they would...
[0]: https://www.acea.auto/fact/fact-sheet-eu-us-vehicle-trade-20...
We don't, for the most part. Most American brands are fairly unpopular here. Tesla is (was?) the exception.
I'm not sure - I certainly see a lot of Vauxhall/Opel cars about, and Ford Transit vans are pretty universal. Caterpillar vehicles are hard not to see on construction sites in Europe. The only sector where American brands seem to have absolutely no market penetration at all is that of heavy trucks, to the extent that I have never seen one except at vehicle shows.
The Transit was made in Europe for Europe and it’s only quite recently that they have been sold in the US.
Ford in Europe wasn't entirely controlled by Detroit at the time it was first produced, though I don’t really know what that means in terms of ownership. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ford_Transit
Wow, I didn't know that. I always assumed that there was only one Transit van. It looks like both the American models and the European models were sold in the UK, with the European models being significantly smaller; is that right?
Opel is a German brand with a German headquarters and production, iirc, primarily in Germany.
Opel - the fastest rust in Europe. The only decent one were the later runs of Insignia and we all joked that the whole project was a failure because you could expect for the car to work straight out of the factory.
Opel is Stellantis which despite being headquartered in the Netherland for tax purposes is controlled by Americans, French, and Italians.
There are no Germans on the board or in executive positions.
I recall Opel was owned by GM already before WWII? And iy was only relatively recently that GM got out?
(Ownership aside, Opel has been producing cars made in Europe for (mostly) Europeans for AFAIK the entire post-WWII era.)
Would you call the Ford Transit an American vehicle?
I wish trades here in New Zealand used them, rather than the ubiquitous and fairly dumb Ford Ranger. Other than towing capacity, I can’t see why Rangers are popular.
I can remember back when most NZ tradies were happy with a Mitsubishi L300 or Toyota Hiace van that were smaller than a Ford Transit.
Yes, my recent (last 10 or so years) experiences have gone from being shocked at seeing full-size F250s in Amsterdam (!) to no more raised eyebrows. I've driven from Tallinn to Kyiv five times over the last year, and I've seen plenty of American vehicles. I know in Ukraine it's popular to kit bash imported wrecked US cars into something drivable, and I've seen plenty of full-size Dodge and Ford pickups on the roads in Poland.
On 13 June 2025, I took a picture of a Honda with dealership plate frame from Bellevue Honda in Tallinn. I imagine many of the vehicles in Holland and Germany are owned by US military folks, but they can't all be.
The vast majority of of Fords you see in Europe are designed in Koln at Ford Europe GMBH. I believe there are less than 5 models that are sold in both markets
Thought it was the N American love of (large) pickups and SUV's that's the real problem wrt Euro sales?
Hell I don't even know why Americans buy American cars.
Because American cars are absolutely massive? Like, if you want something that’s guaranteed to pulverize anything you hit in Europe, an american car is a good bet.
American cars today really aren't massive. Trucks are, and many American people drive trucks rather than cars.
Even the cars are massive. A Toyota Camry is nothing special in the US, here it’s a big long car
And the Lexus SUV range stops at the RX in Europe, with 3 smaller SUVs under that
Shocking as it may seems, people do like American cars. most American cars I see are stuff that just isn't culturally European - muscle cars - the new mustang for example, the biggest pickups - Tundras and the likes and Teslas.
They're pretty rare. Ford was really big here at one point but it's a shadow of what it used to be. Tesla was an exception until Elon decided to go full-on Nazi-wannabe.
And it doesn't look like it will recover again:
https://www.reuters.com/business/autos-transportation/teslas...
Other than that there are some people that have legitimate needs hard to cover with EU made vehicles, for instance larger pickups. Those are often imports, Toyota's, some Dodges, some GMs. Rarely Fords though, I don't remember when I last saw an F150 or an F250 here in NL, in Germany or Poland. The Dodge's are popular with landscaping crews here.
In '24 Tesla did very well here (NL), with close to 8% of the market. For '25 they'll be happy to have half of that. And I expect BYD to achieve parity or even to exceed Tesla for EVs. Ford is at 3.5% and Jeep at 0.5%. So in total, for NL including Tesla the USA represents about 12% of the market and next year more than likely less than 10% and if Trump keeps up his tariff bs it might be far lower than that.
> Ford was really big here at one point but it's a shadow of what it used to be.
Speaking for the UK at least, it's not like we were really getting US-originated models from Ford: it used to be the Mondeo or Fiesta but now it's the Kuga. Similarly GM (AKA Vauxhall/Opel, now Stellantis) pushed the Corsa/Astra and so on rather than, say, the Chevy Suburban.
A majority of them are made within Europe (if not necessarily the EU, between the UK and Turkey) so should avoid tariffs.
Yeah the oversized gas guzzlers of the US were never popular in Europe. They're hard to park here (parking bays are smaller), difficult to drive in narrow historical cities, expensive to fuel etc. And pick-ups are very unpopular here, unless you're a farmer there's no point in such a large open loading bed.
I remember choosing between a Nissan 100NX and a Ford Probe (both about 10 years old) but the latter had way worse fuel economy not being a Europe native model (though it wasn't really a US model either I think). Also the 100NX wasn't really a sports car, it was just a Nissan Sunny compact with a more sporty looking body and T-top. It was a super nice car though.
> And pick-ups are very unpopular here, unless you're a farmer there's no point in such a large open loading bed.
And even if you are a farmer, an american pick-up seems to be a rare choice around here. If you see something pick-up-like, it's usually more a variant of UniMog https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unimog .
And for the "small-time farmer without enough money to buy lots of equipment" (rare nowadays), tractors with tons of included functions were often more practical: https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fendt_GT (no english version, sorry). Since Germany is more dense and distances are smaller, low speed is less of an issue I guess, compared to the US. And you can pull real farm equipment, which a pick-up car usually cannot.
Yeah it's also that American pick-ups usually don't feature 4WD (unless as an even more expensive option) which is kinda a need if you're into farming. It's a weird niche for people that want to show they are outdoorsy somehow but aren't really.
And for people that just need to move a lot, having it exposed to the open air is usually a dealbreaker. Panelvans are much more popular for that. Or MPVs with removable seats.
I have seen other countries where they are popular though. Like in Australia where they call it a "Ute". But yes also a long-distance country like you say.
The difference between a 2WD model and a 4WD model is about 10% (4k) on a base model 40,000 dollar truck.
They're all available with 4WD however.
In our part of rural Australia ute (utility vehicle) is largely reserved for the classic Australian Ute (eg: 1974 HQ Holden Ute: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cztnXaND-Xo) which is a non US car footprint that'd be at home in Europe, cut down from a family sedan to be a single front bench seat in a two door cab, with everything behind as a tray.
Other parts of Australia do vary
As such things get bigger, get more doors, and veer towards a US size they get called crew cabs, trucks, pickup's, etc.
The wikipedia article: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ute_(vehicle)
Traditionally, the term referred to vehicles built on passenger car chassis and with the cargo tray integrated with the passenger body (coupé utility vehicles).
However, present-day usage of the term "ute" in Australian English and New Zealand English has expanded to include any vehicle with an open cargo area at the rear, which would be called a pickup truck in other countries.
A lot of Ranger pickups in the UK now too, at least from what I can see in London.
> Ford was really big here at one point but it's a shadow of what it used to be.
The Ford cars sold in Europe are mostly European-designed and European-built though, seeing an actual US Ford model on the road is quite rare (in Germany at least). And the Ford factory in Koeln is so old (founded in 1925) that I'd say it's not unusual to recognize Ford as a German brand over here.
What’s the thing with calling him a Nazi? Being against mass immigration? His support for the German AFD party? That’s the 2nd most popular party, hardly a fringe extremist Nazi party, despite its distant roots. Far left people are lately the most anti semitic, so it’s all ironic.
If you think he really did a Nazi salute, you’ve just drank the media kool aide.
The AfD are literally pitching themselves as Nazi 2.0, so his support for violent racist extremists in Germany and Rest of World - notably the UK - is entirely on point.
But ultimately the Nazis were a specific brand of fascism. You don't need a Hugo Boss uniform and a lower limb disorder to be a fascist.
You do need to be actively opposed to fair elections and other bedrock progressive values, a cynical exploiter and promoter of race hatred and violence for political ends, and a dedicated corporatist.
The fact that his own chatbot labelled itself MechaHitler after he updated the system prompt is just icing.
To be fair you can ask the same question of boeing...
Nice article, thanks!
This is apparently a picture of the B-29 "Its Hawg's Wild" mentioned in the article before its restoration and flight to the UK: https://i.imgur.com/9e26SKj.jpeg
Taken from this blog which has some pictures of the restoration project: https://justacarguy.blogspot.com/2015/08/b-29-its-hawg-wild-...
I saw "Bockscar" (the B-29 that dropped the atomic bomb on Nagasaki) yesterday in Dayton.
It's an interesting feeling to stand by a beautiful, poised, marvelously-engineered mass death machine. It doesn't look scary at all, yet that silhouette must have been as terrifying in its prime as the B-2 is now.
They made 4,000 copies of this aircraft. That’s only $12.5 million per, in today’s dollars.
A wwii bomber is a weird first pressurised aircraft.. after all one bullet and you have explosive decompression.
Its not an issue when fighters can't reach your altitude.
Interestingly by the time it came into service the Me-262 could reach it.
B-29 service ceiling was 9710 m.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boeing_B-29_Superfortress#Spec...
For the Me-262 the service ceiling: 11,450 m
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Messerschmitt_Me_262#Specifica...
The B-29 was an absolutely insane technical achievement. But it's also completely crazy to think that as soon as it was in service the Me-262 had made it obsolete. Also the German development of guided surface to air missiles. The US immediately had to build a pressurized jet bomber that would operate in a considerably tougher environment.
The US had began working on what would wind up as the B-52 that would fly 6 years later in 1951.
By that point you'd think that everything would keep changing.
Yet here we are almost 75 years later and the B-52 is still a US combat aircraft that is expected to stay in service until the 2050s.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boeing_B-52_Stratofortress
The pace of technological development is so crazy.
B-52 age is my favorite "yes, but" series:
Yes, but the B-52H still in use are very different from the ones built in 1951.
Yes, but the youngest B-52H was built in 1962.
So much closer to the days of the Wright Flyer than to the present day.
Could be the reason that the B-29 was never used over Germany.
The ME109 could also reach the service ceiling of the B-29
I think the idea of the B-29 was to fligh high enough that flak or fighters couldn't reach it (but also because flying higher is more fuel efficient).
Wow what a wild bit of history. I knew nothing about any of this.
> In today's money the aircraft, from design to completion, cost the equivalent of $55.6bn (£41.2bn).
F-35: "Hold my beer."
Interesting comparison. A B-29 could carry up to 20,000 lbs of bombs. An F-35 in full loadout with external hardpoints can carry up to 22,000 lbs
Interesting, and the F35 isn't even designed as a bomber (though it is very multirole)
Seeing one fly low at an air show in San Francisco was insane. The power of that single engine…
The F-35 is 3 planes in one platform and cost something like 70 billion $ to design.
To quote a military friend of mine: "Why build 1 plane when you can build 3 planes for the cost of... does math... 3x!"
That was never the intention of course. But I guess there are still benefits of scale like maintenance parts, training etc.
"First rule of government spending... why build one, when you can have two, for twice the price!" -Contact, 1997
My fear would be that with current US acquisition, it would have been 3x 50 billion instead.
Hope it's far better than the F-111, another tri-service bird. The F-4 turned out ok, but it wasn't designed tri-service as I recall.
I’ve heard much higher figures; approaching 1 trillion dollars.
That's the estimated total cost of the joint strike fighter program including research, acquisition, and maintenance, up to its current intended retirement in the 2060s
Fair point, but we should look at the length of time from napkin sketch to first delivery of final product; not just the design.
I understand that the manufacturing and testing was a nightmare, with the need to redesign multiple subsystems.
If the estimated unit cost of ~90-110 million dollars is right, I'd argue it's a pretty big success. The absolute cheapest 4th generation fighter would cost you an order of 20-30 million dollars to import brand-new, whereas 4.5th generation platforms like the Rafale commonly fetch 100m+ a unit to import.
As far as credible 5th generation strike fighters go, that's a pretty cheap per-squadron price tag. My bigger gripe is with the "Big Bomb Diplomacy" tactics that require such a platform, but we'd end up wanting one either way if a fight with China is in the cards.
I thought that this was in Masters of the Air, but I was wrong.
If they had had B-29s, they wouldn't have had the almost catastrophically bad mortality rate.
I believe that the 100th Bomb Group had the highest casualty rate of any unit in the entire war, on either side (except the Kamikaze squadrons, I expect).
Highest casualty rate was actually u-boats. Of 40,000 kriegsmariners trained for u-boats during the war, 75% became casualties. Incredibly, this was even higher than Kamikaze squadrons (on account of the fact that not all flyers were assigned a mission, and not all missions ended up finding a target)
The B-29 was a fantastically unreliable aircraft until almost after the war was over - https://theaviationgeekclub.com/heres-why-the-b-29-could-hav...
Actually Kamikaze squadrons had lower mortality rates then when Japan did their conventional attacks against the US Navy. In conventional attacks whole groups of planes flew right into the teeth of US air defense, fighting threw 3 layers of death and getting annihilated.
The reason they adopted Kamikaze was that normal air-attacks were suicide but suicide with no results what so ever.
In Kamikaze the pilots had more freedom and often only attacked the outlining ships. And quite often they just bailed out, or faked engine problems and flew back.
In terms of the 'strategic' bombing in Europe, the US was just incredibly arrogant and didn't want to listen to the Brits who had already learned some lessons. The way they employed air-power was outright insane, suicidal and also completely and utterly ineffective.
It took smart people using internal politics to sideline the idiots to turn the strategy around and do something actually useful.
A lot of criminal incompetence was erased by the ultimate victory.
The insanity of the bombing campaign is one, others include the defective torpedoes that plagued the Navy for the first couple of years and killed countless sailors and airmen, and the homicidal policy of shipping in replacements to frontline units that were decimated multiple times.
WWI: “Hold my beer.”
The big issue with WWI, seemed to be staggeringly incompetent generals. This appears to have been on all sides. Maybe the Americans were better, but that just may be because they didn’t have time to get bogged down. I heard that Pershing refused to follow British and French tactics.
I assume that this was because many generals were trained on Napoleonic-Era tactics, that didn’t do well, against machine guns and semiauto rifles.
> Maybe the Americans were better
Belleau wood is the “chocolate box” of the US army.
> I heard that Pershing refused to follow British and French tactics.
Yeah, “these guys being at it for 4 years don't understand anything, let's show them how to do it” – proceed to get decimated in a couple days.
Part of the problem was that the US Civil War was derided as a second-rate war in a colonial country. It demonstrated the power of the defence over the offence, and the sheer magnitude of war that an industrialized nation could create. Most people figured WW I would have ended by Christmas. Oops.
The Franco-Prussian War demonstrated the opposite a few years later. Prussia was able to use field artillery effectively to support infantry attacks. The overall scale of fighting was similar to the US Civil War, but the war was much shorter and the individual battles larger.
If there was a war European WWI leaders had ignored, it was the Russo-Japanese War of 1904-1905. By then, technology had advanced enough that the teachings of the Franco-Prussian War were no longer valid, and defense was again stronger than offense.
It is one of the greatest military, cognitive dissonances of all time that European generals recognized how brilliant Grant was, and failed to understand every single one of the principles by which he eventually overcame the confederacy. It’s mind-boggling. I’ve always thought that it was crazy how much of a straight line there was between the trenches around Richmond and the trenches of World War II.
I believe you mean the trenches of WWI not WWII. But yes.
There's a theory that Longstreet saw it all coming, too, but was unable to get the point through to Lee. That is, he saw that trench warfare was going to be the future.
But yeah. The European general staffs were modeling all their train timetables on the fast Franco-Prussian War of 1870.
Lee was over his head.
Grant saw that you have to kill everyone or kill their ability to kill, or both. Lee was looking for the illusive decisive victory to create a political end to the war.
In fairness, the Confederates had an incentive to not see this, as an agrarian slave state cannot out produce a nascent industrial state.
This is an incredible misunderstanding of WW1.
While there were some generals that were a bit too resistant to changing strategy when it might have seemed reasonable, the fact of the matter is, is that this was the 1910s.
Everyone was trying to solve the problem of trying to figure out how to fight, and no one could keep up with how fast warfare was changing. Armchair generals watching people die in almost real time from drone footage in Europe did not exist in 1915.
I’m not sure it’s a “misunderstanding.”
Maybe calling them “incompetent,” isn’t fair, but they made a shitton of terrible strategic and tactical blunders, that resulted in millions of casualties.
Why they made those decisions sounds like exactly what you’re talking about.
"Donkeys leading lions" was a myth.
https://www.iwm.org.uk/history/were-british-first-world-war-...
That WW1 is special is mostly a myth.
The reason we have this view of WW1 is that after WW1 in the 20s many normal people in the 20s started writing about the horrors of war and that combined with the strong anti-war sentiment lead to the view we have now. Claiming that generals like Haig was an incompetent butcher. The whole 'lions led by donkeys' myth.
However non of that is actually true. Or not anymore true then in any other war. For example, there is stark contrast to right after the war, where Haig was considered a hero and most soldiers in their post-WW1 writing liked him.
In terms of causality rates, WW1 isn't that special, high intensity combat in modern war isn't that different, from Crimea to WW2. If you have warfare at that level, even if you are successful, you have massive causalities. The Somme for example wasn't that different from the Normandy campaign in WW2.
These generals had to deal with armies of literally million of people and they didn't even have wireless communications. How do you command 500 men in a coordinated attack without communication?
The Americans had to go threw the same learning curve as the others, but they started right away fighting against an enemy that was mostly veterans. Americans could have learned better, but it also has to be said that Pershing by command from the president was not allowed to fully integrate his troupes with that of the French army.
> I assume that this was because many generals were trained on Napoleonic-Era tactics
This is complete and utter nonsense. Please stop spreading these myths. This all just Post-WW1 anti-war politics propaganda.
> against machine guns and semiauto rifles
This is again a myth. Semiauto rifles practically didn't exist in the beginning of WW1. And machine guns had existed for a while and were not that effective.
The big killer on the battle field is the fast shooting artillery. Massive innovations in that had happened in the 30 years before WW1.
WW1 in a way was special, because you had modern weaponry with 19th century medicine (and arguably 19th century tactics - meaning an army that wasn't mechanized).
The fact that the war was effectively stalemate for 2ish years also contributed to both the medical issues involved and the psychological impact of combat too.
They did have fairly strong and comprehensive landline field phone networks, wireless wasn't really needed.
> Semiauto rifles practically didn't exist in the beginning of WW1
And even at the end of the war, only the French fielded a couple dozens thousands of them (sounds like a lot, is not).
The generals were looking for the 1914 style maneuver warfare. They didn’t understand and didn’t learn the lessons of the us civil war that the capability of production made defeat of the enemy in the field impossible. French strategy was attack, period.
They didn’t contemplate the impact of the lines moving out to 1000 yards, machine guns at the company or platoon level and the idea of the entire state as the enemy. Germany ultimately collapsed because their society was sucked dry.
Calling critiques of a conflict that slaughtered 20 million as propaganda is probably one of the more ridiculous statements I’ve read in awhile.
Eh. Certainly not worth fighting over.
> This is complete and utter nonsense. Please stop spreading these myths.
Which seems to be your goal, here.
Have a great day!
The one pilot they highlighted in the series completed his missions in European theater (to be fair he only flew a few when the Allied casualty rate was horrendous) then signed up to serve again and volunteered for B-29 training so he could fight in the Pacific but the war ended before he could fly missions against Japan. IIRC he then volunteered to help with the Nuremberg prosecutions.
By the end of the war the loss rate in B-29 missions over Japan was lower than the loss rate in B-29 training missions in the US.
