Given that the Japanese had correctly deduced the plan and would have had 12,000 aircraft ready to meet the invasion, half of them kamikazes?
How bad would it have been?
Given that the Japanese had correctly deduced the plan and would have had 12,000 aircraft ready to meet the invasion, half of them kamikazes?
I thought the idea was to concentrate on Kyushu first
It was. Second stage was the Kanto Plain then Tokyo. But the Japs would have had very little left at that point, defending Kyushu was the main focus.
Probably about as bad as people said at the time. While Okinawa as an incredibly important battle, it was nowhere near the importance of islands such as Peleliu or Saipan. Its main goal was essentially to gauge what an invasion of mainland Japan would look like, and that is to say fucking awful. Similarly to urban warfare, there are only really so many situations that have an adequate way to achieve victory with minimal casualties, and there are a lot of situations where all you can do is grit your teeth and take 30-50% casualties. Japan knew whole heartedly that the "warrior-spirit" of the Japanese solider was completely inadequate when against battle hardened American armoured and mechanized brigades with ridiculous artillery and air support. Japan's only goal past 1943 was the preserve the existence of the emperor through any means necessary, and they planned to do that by making the Americans bleed for every inch of soil.
A conservative estimate is 700,000 Americans dead, with another 700,000 other allied dead (not including a potential Soviet invasion), and anywhere from 10-15 million Japanese dead. The Americans would fight by having previously unseen artillery barrages and aircraft bombardments on suspected Japanese positions, then sending in armoured battalions to wade through a sea of mangled body parts, and the Japanese would fight by placing a human being with a Type 99 rifle behind every blade of grass. It would be probably the bloodiest and most traumatic military operation in history, being the closest thing to hell humanity would experience. And imo, kino of unmatched proportions. If you think I'm exaggerating, look at pic rel, and really take a moment to read and reflect on the amount of dead, and then extrapolate that the Japan is 313 times bigger than Okinawa, and its population in 1945
The japanese predicted the landing zone of the first wave and prepared for such landing, the name was Operation Ketsugo. You know thing are going to get really bad when the enemy have their own counter operation to your own operation with prediction of a million dead on their sides.
I read last year something similar to a Soviet Invasion of Hokkaido which would outright turn into a big mess of failure
>In some different timeline soviet division where mashed by japanese farmers and school girls with type 30 rifle and lunge mine
Yeah, it would've been fucking awful. The US knew that they'd definitely take the beaches at Kyushu, but its insane how they predicted 50-80% initial casualties before seizing the beaches, for the veterans of the Pacific.
But honestly, one of the most horrifying thing that there is is that there would be little to no distinction between civilian and soldier, so eventually (if the Soviets landed), the USA and USSR would simply stop treating the civilians as civilians. Not to insult the people who fought in the 1944-45 western front, but all in all it was a relatively easy advance. As all allied divisions were mechanized and Western Europe had very good infrastructure as well as a receptive population, it was a war of maneuverer with the vast majority of land being seized peacefully due to Germans withdrawing to avoid routes. The allies were very picky at avoiding collateral damage and civilian castles, which is why only 25k-30k died in the entire battle of France.
Downfall on the other hand, mainly due to the Japanese way of fighting, would result in there being really no such thing as a civilian. There would be no attempts to minimize collateral damage, and the civilian population would suffer horrendously. The US literally planned to use tactical CAS nukes when advancing through Kyushu. Drop a nuke on the city to destroy all defences, wait 2-3 days, advance in uncontested. While I'm not so sure about the allies executing civilians, you know for sure that the red army would start carrying out mass executions and revenge killing on the Japanese population, and honestly 10-15 million as a conservative estimate really has no equivalent comparison.
>USA and USSR would simply stop treating the civilians as civilians
USA & Britain & USSR butchered civilians non-stop, what the fuck was the bombing of Dresden, the bombing of 66 Japanese cities and nuclear bombardment of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
Are your drunk? On drugs? Retarted?
I wish we dropped more
it'd probably be worse than the taiping rebellion, imagine battle royale but suicide bombs instead of collars
you're trying too hard
Dresden was a viable military target and the soviets wanted it removed. All post conflict Vatnik propaganda won’t change that
jesus christ meds now
Literally everyone did strategic bombing. Its very different to soldiers on the ground firing on civilians. Americans had to do that a fair bit at the end of the island hopping campaign and it was awful for them
Bomber Harris did nothing wrong
>but I wish he did
The bombing of Dresden was 100% and was the best thing that could of happen to the city in the circumstance
>non-stop
Sure once it started, but was only in retaliation once the axis powers had started bombing and massacring civilians. Its not like they went into the war with the express intent of slaying innocents (unlike the krauts and japs). And it was done to a military end, inmediately stopping once hostilities had ceased (aside from the soviets, but they're subhuman socialists so doesnt count)
yeah it was so deadly Japan's population never recovered that's why they are disappearing from this planet today
stupid Americans ruined it for all of us who wanna breed submissive Japanese qts
japans population rose more then 50% since ww2
rolled and owned
Do it again harris
what kind of bullshit are you writing?! All actions of USA against japan aimed at killing civilians.
Babies, children, women, the elderly, citizens of all kinds.
According to Robert McNamara, who served as an officer in the Army Air Forces under General Curtis LeMay during the bombings of Japan, LeMay once said that had the United States lost the war they would have been tried for war crimes, McNamara agrees with this assessment. McNamara believed that, "He (LeMay), and I'd say I, were behaving as war criminals." and that "LeMay recognized that what he was doing would be thought immoral if his side had lost. But what makes it immoral if you lose and not immoral if you win?"
Russia will nuke you and not 1 cell of an american will remain.
>All actions of USA against japan aimed at killing civilians.
There was more than just a strategic bomber campaign in the Pacific
>what kind of bullshit are you writing?! All actions of USA against japan aimed at killing civilians.
>Babies, children, women, the elderly, citizens of all kinds.
And they would've absolutely deserved it.
>Russia will nuke you and not 1 cell of an american will remain.
Bold of you to assume that they have enough working ICBMs and IRBMs to completely wipe out the United States and NATO countries in Europe.
Good morning sir!
My late father in law was cooking his heels on Guam waiting for Operation Olympic to kick off.
This after fighting in the Battle of Manila as an anti-tank gun crewman.
We’re ALL ABOUT nuclear weapons at MY house.
Every Purple Heart issued to US service members since 1945 was struck on a contract run anticipating the casualties from the invasion of Japan.
That all said…I don’t think it would have been as bad as people think.
We had General Curtis LeMay in charge of the Air Corps, and he would have happily firebombed every single structure in Japan.
We would have had the entirety of the US Navy freed from their duties in the At
Atlantic and the Med in on the action.
We would have had battle hardened divisions from the ETO there too.
I suspect that quite literally Japan and the Japanese would have been turned into ashes had they not surrendered.
By 1945, our War Machine was pretty dialed in. Twenty miles behind the Japanese front line would have been fire bombed to cinders. From twenty five miles in, medium bombers would have been doing their thing. Ten miles in, CAS and artillery would have been doing their work.
And then here comes our mechanized infantry and our armor.
Good luck with THAT, you Nip bastards.
I don't doubt that the US would have shock-and-awe'd the Japanese into oblivion, and enjoyed kill ratio's of potentially 10:1, 15:1 or maybe even 20:1, however like I said in
, Japan's biggest ally in operation downfall will be Murphy's law, being that if something can go wrong, something will go wrong. If you've got 30 million people lying behind blades of grass with Arisaka's, then someone's gonna die just by sheer weight of numbers. And considering that the Japanese very accurately anticipated where the Americans were coming from, and had 12,000 kamikaze's ready to crash into landing craft 80% casualties for the marines is very realistic.
Little Boy and Fat Man were dropped early August.
The earliest that Olympic could have been done was about mid-September. That’s A LOT of firebombing on Kyushu. And quite a bit from the redeployed 8th and 15th Air Forces from UK and Italy. I suppose that they would have flown their B17s and B24s from Okinawa. While the B29s stayed on Tinian.
So Kyushu gets burnt up, and the island of Honshu would get a combination of firebombing and HE dropped on anything that even remotely resembled a factory or an airfield.
Eventually, punching Kyushu in the mouth gets handed off to medium bombers and naval gunfire.
I just don’t see this fanaticism of dying to the last Nip. Years of living under that authoritarianism had inculcated in the Japs to keep a very tight lip about how they REALLY felt.
It’s one thing to wave flags at a parade and cheer for the Emperor, quite another thing to send your 12 year old out against the Marines armed only with sharpened bamboo in an obviously lost cause. We would have found out.
So would have the Nips.
I’m not even concerned about the Soviets here…they were grabbing Manchukuo and China.
And then winter sets in…Japs would be dropping like flies.
>Americans wildly over-estimating what air-power can do
Never change bud, never change
No, he's absolutely right. Quit being butthurt just cause your country has an useless air force.
kamikaze
>20% get through (2400)
>focus on the landing craft
>Higgins boat (36 troops)
>86,400 KIA/WIA before even reaching Kyushu
Would that be enough to cancel Operation Downfall? probably not, but maybe the suicide boats could have made a bigger impact against the larger ships
>losing 2 divisions before landing
no way we'd have continued like that, the damage to the brass' political carreer would have been insurmountable
BOY LOOK AT THAT CAKE
yo he got a dumper tho frfr
Interesting purple heart info anon
Are we still using that same stock of purple hearts?
As far as I know, yes.
they ordered a few dozen thousand new production but the operation downfall stock is still being issued
My grandpa was drafted and trained as a BAR gunner in anticipation of the invasion.
Instead, he spent his whole tour during the occupation with a "stubby little New York dago" beating up morons and dragging them back to base when they went awol to fuck syphilis ridden whores.
If he was detailed to hump a BAR, he was probably on the larger side.
A stubby little Dago from NYC and big corn fed huckleberry would have made a good team to thump misbehaving Black folks in Occupied Japan.
There is no “maybe” here, the soviets would have invaded. They did not want Japan to be a purely American possession. They had already started massing troops in the east and preparing landing craft
The Soviets entire amphibious landing capability consisted of a few lend leased LSTs and all the river barges they could scramble for in the East. They'd have got utterly fucked if they tried.
Would have been a lot easier than boomers like to hype it up as being. The general population was already in open defiance of the military government by summer 1945, with workers abandoning their posts to flee into the countryside to escape the bombings. After Iwo Jima the Americans were really worried about the casualty inflation and had already decided to resort to usage of chemical/biological weapons if the fighting became too costly. This in turn would cause the number of civilians fleeing the cities to increase even further.
No, not only did the Soviets lack the means to invade Japan, but if they were more interested in ensuring China turned red than the fate of Japan.
of the soviets and the americans only one of them had recently carried out the largest naval invasion in history and had a navy to speak of
You have to wonder how the actual soldiers would have reacted. The trauma of massacring an entire population because its necessary and having most of your buddies die in the process would have been unprecedented. Vets of Iraq and all the rest get trauma because they couldn't tell who was a civvie and who was a jihadi pretending to be one, but how do you react when ALL the women and children are hostile? Harden yourself the slaughter? Complete mental breakdown? Would they even have mutinied, with all the casualties they would suffer and all the senseless killing they'd do?
I don't think anyone is in a position to give a complete picture about the effect on the national American psyche, however I definitely don't think it would be the V-J day of our own timeline, with American soldiers in a month long orgy of pure joy at the war being over. I imagine there would still be celebration, but in the context of a war weary, sick, tired population. It would essentially be the scene in the end of the movie Zulu, where the British officers mention feeling disgust and sickness, and not victory after killing 1000 Zulu warriors with 16 dead. It really puts it into perspective when you hear veterans talk about how they reacted to the surrender.
>"When word got around that the bombs had forced the Japanese surrender, we knelt in the sand and cried. For all our manhood, we cried. We were going to live. We were going to grow up to adulthood after all."
>>"When word got around that the bombs had forced the Japanese surrender, we knelt in the sand and cried. For all our manhood, we cried. We were going to live. We were going to grow up to adulthood after all."
Hearing true stories of battle hardened veterans breaking down in tears from the raw emotional havoc that war has on your mind is always going to be 1000x more potent than any anti-war film could possible do.
if America hates war so much, why did they attract so much heat in a sensitive historical era by moralfagging for a country against a growing power whose ambitions literally does not conflict with yours in any way? was FDR just a warmonging gay sensitive to british and chinese propaganda?
You have a misinformed understanding of the situation leading up to the war. The state department archives are open to the public and you can read about the thinking and motivations behind America’s actions in the 20s and 30s.
You cannot change the mind of someone who decided what to believe for emotional convenience and then sought information to justify it. At this point the State Department archives are largely public and we have so many intercepted communications from the Japanese that it outdoes their own archives. You can track the views and intentions of the war down to the level of the changing thoughts of individual diplomats, politicians, and generals.
At this point anyone who does not have at least a basic understanding with nuance has chosen not to be informed and is not available to persuasion.
>whose ambitions literally does not conflict with yours in any way?
off the top of my head, weren't the japanese gunning for the phillipines, which were under american control at the time? and maybe they just didn't like the country that was historically, opposed to free trade
>weren't the japanese gunning for the phillipines
The Philippines were located so as to threaten Japanese supply line to their planned conquests in Southeast Asia. It’s less that they wanted the Philippines as much as they wanted the Americans out of the Western Pacific.
And the fun part is that they could have just waited another year, as the US was in talks to grant the Philippines independence. But Japan wanted everything *now*, while the Brits and the Dutch (in-exile) were still at war with Germany.
>Does not conflict with yours in any way
But Japan and America both knew they'd have to go to war over the Pacific at some point, though? Literally every statesman knew it would happen within a century. Even that one guy who got egg on his face for saying "the Japs won't attack us" specifically said he thought the chance was 50% by 1945.
In the decades before it was obvious. 20 years before the war the Canadians pushed to terminate the Anglo-Japanese as would mean conflict with the United State which was undesirable.
The conflict of interests was obvious for decades. But the inability of the Japanese to end the war in China gave America absolutely no fear of acting however they wanted to with respect to Japan. And why should they have tiptoed around them and sold fuel to someone they expected to fight a war with? The Japanese started a war they couldn't end the Americans had no obligation to help a nation they knew was arming itself for a fight with the US too.
Japanese leadership resented this unwinnable situation but they had no one to blame but themselves for their endless war in China. It tied their hands while also giving the US and USSR options to weaken their enemy before the war started.
The Americans didn't kill even half of those civilians. Many died in American massed artillery, obviously, but LOTS of Japanese soldiers "encouraged" them to kill themselves.
Not much.
There weren’t very many mutinies at all in the Pacific War.
Remember that the war against Japan was personal for the USA. They had attacked us, and unlike the fucking Krauts, they didn’t look like us at all.
Shit went down on the islands that just would not have been done against the Guineas or the Krauts.
And by mid 1945, everyone slated for a ticket to the Big Show had had their cherries popped on places like Peleliu, Saipan, New Guinea and the Philippines.
Most of the civilian killing would have come from aerial bombardment, naval and field artillery gunfire, and cold and starvation, (gets cold in Japan in wintertime, and they can’t feed themselves).
And no US troop wants to gakk it in the last 3 months of the war, so everyone is going to be keen on slow and steady advance with bombs and arty and mortars blowing the fuck out of anything and everything even remotely threatening.
I think a good compairon would be that Operation Downfall would be the cultural significant of the Western Front for European nations. Despite what you may believe based on the future of Europe, Europeans in 1900 subscribed to an "end of history" mindset, where they believed that society had progressed so much in that last 100 years that war no longer makes any sense, and that while there may be colonial conflict between savage natives, European nations are too civilized to go to war. This can be reflected in the insane optimism and quality of art and literature in pre-war Europe at the time, with an emphasis on beauty, rationality, passion, and religion.
Even though WW1 may not be as deadly as the Eastern or Chinese fronts in WW2, or even previous wars such as the Taiping rebellion, it was by far one of the most culturally impactful wars in human history. Men born in 1890 who were previously convinced of the end of history and an eternal peace got shoved into a war so horrendous nothing even comparable had ever been seen before in history, and spent 4 years lying in muddy trenches dying in some of the most horrible ways possible for a seemingly asinine cause. Its not an exaggeration to say that WW1 mindbroke the entire European population, with Britian losing dominance to the USA, France losing all of its bravery and fighting spirit, Germany becoming insanely bitter and creating the Nazis, Russia falling to Communism, and the Ottomans and Austria-Hungary ceasing to exist.
America wasn't that invested in WW1, and arguably benefited greatly from it so it never had its own equivalent which is why to many it maintained such an idealistic and optimistic spirit since. Depending on slaughter, I can easily see the killing fields of Kyushu or the slow slog up Honshu being the cultural equivlanant of America's Somme or Verdun.
On the other side though, we may get some kino poetry.
>In some different timeline soviet division where mashed by japanese farmers and school girls with type 30 rifle and lunge mine
orcs fear the samurai
Soviets would have raped the shit out japs though. Just look at Manchuria
The Kwantung Army was an absolute joke by 1945 and on the border, the Soviets themselves were divided on whether they could take Hokkaido, they performed poorly in their amphibious operations
The lack of alternate history media exploring this angle is a damn shame.
True but I can also see why there is no alternate history media on Operation Downfall. There is absolutely not question about whether the allies would win, its just a question over how much raw human suffering there is before we get there. The Japanese have no ability to conduct anything resembling a counter attack or put up long term meaningful defensives, and can just kill as many Americans as they can before they get killed themselves.
Alternate history conflicts are cool when you have huge modern, mechanized and armoured disciplined militaries going head to head, but not when its probably the best military in equipment and training going against a bunch of women and young boys with rifles.
Massacring by air ≠ Massacring by land. The allied bombings of axis powers were conducted by scientists, mathematicians and people operating from a purely clinical mindset, devoid of any hatred, despite what revisionaries may tell you. Bombing campaigns treated a city as a delicate ecosystem, where if you disrupt one aspect it has a ripple effect and disrupts a cities total output. What would make this killing different is the fact that you're actually seeing the faces and mangled bodies of the people you killed, and marching forward along their mangled bodies along a country the size of the entire fucking east coast of the USA. I pointed this out in the context of the trauma it would have on the US soldiers and by extension the society in large. I don't believe that a pregnant mother or child killed by a bomb or a bullet is of any less value, but I believe that if you see that happen its gonna fuck you up 1000x times more.
>no alternate history media on Operation Downfall
my brother in christ there are more than a couple of books on the operation downfall going forward, death is lighter than a feather, 1945 by conroy maybe something by turtledove but they definitely do exist
Because nobody wants to admit that bombing Hiroshima and Nagasaki was the right call.
My history teacher got us to debate the dropping of the atomic bombs. Funny thing is he was married to a Japanese lady.
wat
It usually goes with the idea of a split Japan between the soviets and America. A neat alt history of a American invasion of Japan would a slightly altered future where people just talk about the invasion as being too costly, and that they wish there was a better way.
I think this could be a catalyst for a very interesting alternate history. If Japan had been partitioned between the soviet union, the strategic situation in the pacific would be pretty bad for the united states.
I imagine after losing 700,000 americans to take japan that maybe Truman would be less hesitant to use nuclear weapons in the coming wars of containment in the pacific. How would the korean war go down with the northern half of japan under the administration of the soviet union? would it even happen at all? maybe instead there's a proxy war in japan and truman authorizes the use of nuclear weapons again?
>How would the korean war go down with the northern half of japan under the administration of the soviet union?
MacArthur might've actually been able to nuke China if they ever got involved.
There's a decent book called "Decisive Darkness" that you might like, analyzes an AH reality where Operation Downfall did happen from an historian's perspective.
Amazing, that is perfect, I'll definitely begin reading this tonight. Thanks for the recommendation PrepHoleommandbro.
By far the most kino alt history that can come out of this is that the USSR chooses to wait for the Allies to land in Japan and start experiencing massive casualties in a slog up 3000km of incredibly mountainous terrain with committed defenders, and then when the allies were at their weakest in Europe he'd essentially do a reverse Barbarossa to get the Allies out of Europe as fast as possible. Imagine the fucking kino of the Americans spending 4-5 months slogging through complete hell, taking over 1 million casualties most likely, only for the Soviets to launch an all out assault with the US at its weakest in Europe.
The thought of Americans using tactical nukes over the USSR while fighting tooth and nail for every inch of European territory, probably until 1947-1948 makes me so fucking hard.
Interesting take on Stalin’s narcissism to do so, but if the Reds had kicked it off in Europe, we would have simply kicked it off in the Soviet Far East, and all of a sudden the USSR would be a third of its size.
theres nothing simple about that tho, especially with 1940s logistics. its also just a shitty trade of territory for the americans
No, the other thing is how weakened for manpower America would be at the time. The Soviets could grab Korea and Anatolia and Greece. Making otl containment impossible.
>The thought of Americans using tactical nukes over the USSR while fighting tooth and nail for every inch of European territory, probably until 1947-1948 makes me so fucking hard.
Ummmmm no. In December of 1945, the Red Army would have made to the Rhine in about a week. And since nearly half of France was openly Communist at that point, the war is over.
Did literally ever Japanese solider die?
you dishonor yourself and the emperor if you surrender
Until 1945 not one single organised japanese military unit surrendered to its enemies. Even then it only happened a handful of times. Japanese fight to the death
>Japanese would fight by placing a human being with a Type 99 rifle behind every blade of grass.
Sharpened bamboo poles.
>The Americans would fight by having previously unseen artillery barrages and aircraft bombardments on suspected Japanese positions, then sending in armoured battalions to wade through a sea of mangled body parts, and the Japanese would fight by placing a human being with a Type 99 rifle behind every blade of grass.
H O L Y K I N O
>strength: 76,000+ soldiers
>losses: 77,166 soldiers dead
Fucking hax
US combat troops
dead/missing
>1 in 20 chance of being killed, captured, or otherwise lost
Holy shit
You forgot the worst statistic.
>40,000-150,000 civilians killed out of a pre-war population of 300,000
At worst fifty fucking percent of the population died, and that is BEFORE there is even a main landing on actual Japanese soil. Imagine how bad it would've been with the Japs fighting over their home turf.
I had a buddy I used to work with who was Okinawan, he fucking despised the 'mainland' Japanese because they to this day still treat the Ryukyu (ethnic Okinawans) like second class citizens. He said his grandmother was taken onto an IJN ship and never returned one day and the government of Japan still won't acknowledge it; add to that the Emperor gave all the citizens of Okinawa an order to kill themselves rather than live under the Americans and I see where he's coming from. Wasn't very positive on his views on the American occupation either but was usually just neutral in a "what are you going to do about it" sort of way.
I took a vacation to Osaka once, visited their museum of ethnology. In their section on Japan they had a section set aside for Okinawa, with one particular exhibit about the Ryukyu's "tearful gratitude" at being reunited by their "brother liberators" in 1971 when the US gave administrative control of the islands back over to Japan. I showed him the pictures I took of the exhibit and he just got really red in the face and walked outside, didn't say anything. Never brought it up to him since, don't think I will if I ever see him again either.
Copying some shit from a reddit thread about the pic of a Japanese soldier bayonetting a baby, and I find it really interesting how every single non-Japanese ethnicity has some story about how they despite the Japanese.
bump
Fuck im retarded
Its really telling when looking at relations between Germans and the French, even relations between Germany and Israel, a nation created largely because of the holocaust that they get on perfectly fine, however relations between Japs and everyone in Asia is horrible.
bro what tell me this is a joke lmao 'i was born in harbin so i knew what went down' hahahaha just lmao thats literally like if i told you rn i was born in maine so let me tell you all about the battle of vicksburg
that's a lot of chinese propaganda plants, from reddit no less.
>reddit
The Okinawans hated the Japanese even before the war. They have been sacrificed, treated like shit and used as cannon fodder by home islanders for over a century. We should never have returned them and instead forced them to be an independent nation, because even now, after EVERYTHING Japs did to them, they're still treated like shit and utterly reliant on US military bases to have a decent standard of living.
Yeah pretty much. I was stationed out at kadena for over 2 years, and got to do a lot of touring and such. During covid, nobody was allowed off base to go out and eat for a while, and it damn near shut down half the economy of local restaurants and such, especially in american village (just south west of kadena, big tourism area). There were local business owners who literally begged for us to be allowed back. One of my favorite ramen joints was closed for like 6 months.
I thought they didn't like the bases?
Protests every friday morning at 8am, mostly older japanese people, if i had to guess like 50+ years old. Was annoying because it closed gate 1 (the western gate) and that was the quickest way to work for me from my apartment, so i had to go all the way around and add like 15 min to my drive. But the younger generation didnt seem to mind us. They knew we had money, so they were always gracious when i went out. I had a good time there at least.
How big were the protests? Never thought much about it, but the age gap makes sense. Not the way I'd want to spend my retirement.
There were prbably like on average 20-50 people. The japanese police would also be there to help cordon off and keep the area safe of car traffic. It was just a pain. They had a bunch of signs in english saying "close all us bases" and such. I understand, the marines down at foster had several accidents that harmed/killed the locals and even had marines rape locals (rarely, but happens). So sure, there are shitheads there but we are keeping china at bay so fuck it.
thanks
Like
said, it's mostly the old people who remember the times directly after the war when Oki was pretty much under martial law. When I was stationed in Japan most of them had a much more negative view of regular Japanese people instead of Americans, probably because of this
shit. They, like the Ainu, are still absolutely second class citizens in Japan.
Most people treated me warmer when they found out I wasn't a marine, except some (always old) who wouldn't believe me. Been stationed in mainland Japan too and it's usually a toss-up over whether people will be friendly to you or refuse to even be in the same room with you. I got a lot of angry glares from upper-crust Japanese people when I was in the nice parts of Kyoto (Kyoto in general has the rudest people in Japan that I experienced) but absolutely fucking everyone wanted to drink and talk with me in Osaka and Nagoya. Tokyo and Yokohama can go either way.
>it's mostly the old people who remember the times directly after the war
or old people remembering the times DURING the war, increasingly rare though admittedly
my grand-uncle was a community hero because he saved a bunch of girls from being raped by Japs. my grandmother was traumatised enough by the atmosphere of fear living under occupation that she insisted her daughters dress like boys (like she did then) for some time after, to avoid being raped
we all know that Japs now are different people, but that doesn't mean these things didn't happen. some older folks will be more recalcitrant than others.
you would too if Granny got comfortwomanned and you read shit like that
>I showed him the pictures I took of the exhibit
epic troll
like taking a garden gnome to an exhibit glorifying Auschwitz
>everyone on the net is a glowie!
idiot
at best the "granddaddy was an OSS" kid is embroidering it a little
Okinawans still hate Americans. Some of the shit USCAR did is so fucking arbitrary and stupid in retrospect you'd swear it was intentional internal sabotage. We basically turned half of the Ryukus into permanent Communist Party of Japan (which is fucking somehow no longer Marxist) voters.
>Instead of paying soldiers in USD and allowing Okinawans to accept it, USCAR implemented a complex system of scrip that literally only had value on Okinawa
Do Americans really?
they should be thankful the ospreys dont crash into all their schools
>up to 50% civilian dead
BUT THE NOOKS WERE EVIL GUYS AMERICA SHOULD HAVE HONORABLY I MEAN ETHICALLY INVADED INSTEAD
The worst part is that the Jap top brass didn't even care that much about the nukes. They surrendered because the Americans finally hinted that they might possibly, maybe, allow the emperor to not be executed and the Imperial bloodline dispersed forevermore.
It wasn't even a direct confirmation. They said something to the effect of "The emperor will subordinate himself and his authority to whomever we place in charge of the occupation" and the Japs took this as "he'll survive and keep some authority so fuck it" and surrendered.
It wasn't the top brass who chose to surrender. It was the Emperor himself. Some of the top brass tried to launch a coup attempt and place him under house arrest, with a shogun-type ruling in his name. And the secret offer to not end the dynasty was on the table before the Bombs. It took both events, plus American claims that there were hundreds of Bombs ready to go, to make Hirohito blink.
>It wasn't the top brass who chose to surrender. It was the Emperor himself.
This is literally untrue. The emperor gave a public sentiment of "we should probably surrender" after four of the big five said they should. Only the one Army minister whose name escapes me disagreed, and it was his junior officers he didn't immediately stop that tried to coup. When the emperor said "no, really, surrender", he killed himself and apologized for his "failure" in his suicide note.
This guy is correct. It's important to understand that the Japanese Imperial Court operated more to codify the decisions of the government, and later junta, as official policy. Very rarely did the Emperor ever actually set policy, and when they did it was highly irregular. It's not well codified because, well, nothing about Japanese Imperial governance was well codified, but there's a broad notion that for the emperor, as a form of divinity, it would be unseemly to engage in such disputes.
T. Weeaboo who studied Japan in college before realizing the point of a degree is to get a job and doing something else.
>T. Weeaboo who studied Japan in college before realizing the point of a degree is to get a job and doing something else.
if you come from a not so well off backround then sure but i think many people disregard less practical pursuits of knowledge or arts and then they end up complaining when the people pursuing those paths disagree with them.
I think its mostly the fact that if you are in a class for some niche field that has few jobs available then you are fighting for a position from EVERY single student in the class for the last 10 years while at the same time waiting for someone that has the position to fucking die. Japanese history major jobs dont grow on trees and your most likely use for the degree is to teach japanese history and since a teacher will teach hundreds if not thousands of students during their career good luck getting the job after he dies IF he dies and opens up a spot. Other than that what is a degree like that gonna do for someone? Not a whole fucking lot.
The issue isnt that the classes exist or that people take them but that a lot of people do silly shit like go all in on them and then wonder why they cant get a job. They are secondary interests at best you take alongside something thats actually practical.
yeah thats fair
I don't disagree, but I wasn't willing to go on to a Master's in the field and job competition at the bachelor level was tight. Had money been no object, sure, but it very squarely is for me so better to get a degree in something employable and then buy as many books and guns as I want.
>if you come from a not so well off backround then sure but i think many people disregard less practical pursuits of knowledge or arts and then they end up complaining when the people pursuing those paths disagree with them.
Tall white mocha, hot please. And yes I want fries with that.
>many people disregard less practical pursuits of knowledge or arts and then they end up complaining
In the OECD the problem is too many liberal arts and management degrees when reality is that most need STEM or technical certs and to get a fucking job
>t. CPA, MBA, DBA, university lecturer
Tactical nukes were being considered for Operation Downfall anyways. From what I gather they weren't seen by American brass as something radically different, just really big bombs.
Trent Telenko, among others, has dug up some fairly good evidence from MacArthur's staff's planning notes that they had triangulated the major IJA HQs on Kyushu, and that the infamous "I want 9 Bombs for the landing" that everybody assumes was for the beachheads were actually going to be dropped on the HQs in charge of Kyushu's defenses. That might have really messed up their efforts to oppose the invasion, but fortunately we'll never know.
What would the world be like if America just said fuck it and not only nuked Japan again and invaded, but nuked Moscow and Beijing? We legitimately had a chance to control the world until the Soviets had stolen enough info to build their own nuclear weapons.
There was no reason to nuke Beijing because China was still under Nationalist control and aligned with the West at the time.
They actually considered it, it was called Operation Unthinkable. The problem is that the Soviets would have had a massive short term advantage in conventional forces in Europe. And Oppenheimer was (figuratively) building the nukes by hand in his basement, so they would only have a few. And those were only ten or fifteen kilotons a piece. Even if they rearmed the entire German army and threw them at the Soviets it would be dicey.
>Peleliu
>important
Was it though, horrific battle don't get me wrong but in the grand scheme it was really an unneeded battle. It did provide some level of experience with how the process of island clearing was going to go, in that lots of cave based hardpoints were going to be key to the Japanese tactics, as was a lot less instances of suicidal charges. But largely all it did was give a window into what tactics future operations would hold. The airfield wasn't really needed or used. And the garrison on that island could likely have been bypassed without fear of them having any strategic importance for Japan.
Stupid ass question here from someone who has read Helmet for my Pillow and With the Old Breed.
What was the importance of Pelieliu exactly? Didn't we have it isolated and couldn't we have bypassed it like Wake Island?
>What was the importance of Pelieliu exactly?
There was none.
It was important in giving the Americans and airbase and denying the Japanese submarine bases to refuel Submarines, which was a real problem for Commonwealth nations. The controversy comes from whether it was worth both the opportunity cost and the thousands of marines dead, and the answer is probably not.
>with another 700,000 other allied dead (not including a potential Soviet invasion)
I wonder how the other allied countries would feel about the invasion. Did the Brits, liberated France and the low countries really have the political will to send a large force?
Britain and the Commonwealth were slated to take part and the RAF had Tiger Force ready to join the bombing campaign.
My first job was based in a vast, sprawling complex in northern England which was built in 1945 as a hospital for the vast numbers of casualties expected from the invasion of Japan.
the Dutch and free French weren't really in a position to do much in 45 but would send what they could
But the Brits and commonwealth would have joined in the "fun" en masse
sunk battleships
When I think about the empire of Japan I get a deep sadness come over me about what could’ve been
t.
The Japanese Empire in China makes the Germans' exploits in Eastern Europe look absolutely humanitarian in comparison.
If they went for Tokio first they would have likely surrendered fast anyway.
As long as the emperor didn't accept to leave like during the bombings of Tokio as soon as he was at risk himself he would surrender to "spare the suffering of the Japanese people"
Is this worth getting?
I read it and it wasn't as interesting as I thought it would be
could those cunts possibly engrave more bullshit on to that poor poor slide?
Why bother invading at all? Even without nukes the blockade and firebombing had reduced Japan to the verge of starvation.
Stalin has ordered a build up for invasion of northern Japan
this is why the nukes were necessary
russian invasion and occupation would have been an infinitely worse outcome for Japan
russian occupation of japan would have been impossible
would simply not happen
How would the Soviets even pull it off?
Of all the major amphibious landings during WW2, I'm not aware of the USSR successfully pulling off a single one
it would be supported by +10k aircraft they'd have available, and if I recall right their merchant marine numbered in hundreds of ships
The US was transferring the USSR an amphibious landing force and training them for that purpose
look up Project Hula
Russia had already shown a capability for it when they invaded the Kuril Islands and Sakhalin. Sure, they were relatively small affairs, but they were previews to Russia's growing amphibious capability.
>Russia's growing amphibious capability
Russia's entire landing capability was based on a few lend leased LSTs and fucking river barges.
Watch this interview. The audio quality isn't the best, but it's still well worth your time.
Here's the short version: it was Fat Man, together with US propaganda that it had "hundreds" of Bombs ready to go, that *bluffed* Hirohito into stabbing his own generals in the back and surrendering. The Japanese government was willing to lose half their population trying to kill a million GIs, because they expected the American public would give up first. Many generals were willing to fight to the last civilian, but the internal police reported that if half the population died, the remaining half might revolt in sufficient numbers to actually overthrow the Emperor, ending the entire dynasty.
So, when Little Boy went off, Japan's nuclear scientists (quite possibly the best in the world after the US) correctly determined that the US could only produce enough HEU for a couple Bombs a year. Certainly not as great a threat as the firebombing and aerial mining campaigns that were going on at the time. But Fat Man... a second Bomb, coming that close to the first, with residue indicating that it was plutonium-based (which everyone thought was impossible, until the US came up with the implosion design), wrecked all of their assumptions. Suddenly, the American propaganda that there were hundreds of Bombs sounded true (it wasn't; there was a third, plus one more every ten days or so). Hirohito blinked, and took his secret golden parachute (he was the only one who could order a surrender and have it actually obeyed, so he had been quietly promised that his dynasty would be preserved if he surrendered), and stabbed his generals in the back. Some of them promptly tried to launch a coup against him, which was spoiled in part by a fluke (a nighttime bombing raid had troops on high alert right as the coup was launched). Funny how history works out on occasion.
The Showtime docudrama from the 90's did a damn good job covering this.
>so he had been quietly promised that his dynasty would be preserved if he surrendered
Well that and the occupation forces realised Japan would be ungovernable without maintaining the Imperial Family and key members of the old elite who could be rehabilitated.
What the fuck was the end goal for these generals?
>war is completely unwinnable, we have absolutely no means to stop our people from being bombed with almost complete impunity much less make any offensive maneuver
>actually making any kind of threat to the continental united states that could force peace talks went out the window years ago
>melting down pots and pans to make pig iron shell casings for arisakas made from office furniture
>issuing fucking sharpened bamboo to civilian militias
>two cities annihilated with the most destructive weapon ever built by human hands
>emperor, the only person who could make such a call, finally realizes the end has come and moves to surrender
>TIME TO KILL THE EMPEROR!
See, they thought the war *was* winnable--just kill a million or more GIs, and Joe and Jane Public would grow tired of the war, and demand that the US negotiate... at which point Japan would magically gain most of what it had originally wanted in 1941, because every time the American negotiators objected to one of Japan's conditions, they would simply threaten to resume the war and kill more Americans, and the American public would be strongly against that.
Given how Democratic leadership in the White House and Congress has thrown away multiple victories since WWII in favor of short-term political posturing and has never been punished at the polls for it... were they entirely wrong?
Note that they goal of the coup was *not* to kill the Emperor. It was to seize control of him, put him under house arrest, and run the government in his name. Basically, establish a new shogunate. Also, remember that these were the same people who were *willing* to send over half of their civilian populace to their deaths in order to achieve victory, and largely the same people who had been responsible for (or at least supportive of) the whole *host* of atrocities that Japan had committed against POWs and occupied civilians over most of a decade.
I highly recommend that you watch the whole video; there's a lot of interesting stuff in there, like how the "race to Berlin" was never even possible, because a large chunk of Ike's divisions had already been earmarked for the invasion of Japan. The logistics of it all were... staggering.
Delusion.
It is not pleasant to think about, but the fact is that humans are in actuality quite insane. Not "runs around the streets naked with underwear on their head" insane, but the overall worldview of humans is not compatible with reality. And why would it? We don't have some sort of psychic link with the truth. So cargo cult mentalities spring up where we think things like "if only we honor our ancestors, we will be rewarded" or "if only we fight hard, eventually our enemy will realize we will never surrender and give up" or "it is better to die gloriously than to eat crow".
We would be saying the same thing about the North Vietnamese if America had won. The Japs had the right idea, just the wrong timing.
Nah. The Japs had the problem that they started the war with an attack on US soil. The public was never going to be okay with them being anything less then defanged and neutered for decades so they couldn't ever do it again, whereas Vietman had no real stakes for US citizens beyond the very nebulous domino theory bullshit.
It wasn't *just* Pearl Harbor. It was also the treatment of POWs, and to a lesser extent, the treatment of non-American civilians. All of that stuff offended Americans' sensibilities, to put it mildly.
The Vietnamese weren't very nice to their prisoners either, but that ties back to the point I made about the average citizen not having any skin in the game, as far as they were concerned. While the odds of the nips ever actually launching an attack on California were extremely low to the point of being laughable, Pearl Harbor put the fear and anger into the US in a way that the NVA's atrocities never could motivate the US by virtue of being constrained to local brown people and US soldiers. Bataan was particularly bad for Japan because they'd already set the precedent that it might happen to Joe Bob the potato farmer someday. It also helps that the US didn't suffer the same level or number of POWs that they did to the IJA which meant less publicity of said inhumane stuff as well.
Vietnam suffered by the south Vietnamese government being unable to get its shit together. A large chunk of public sentiment was that Americans were being sent to die to defend one group of authoritarians from another. The press played a role in this, but I think if Diem hadn’t been assassinated American support of Vietnam would have lasted longer.
Oh, sure there is plenty of reason that Vietnam was fucking pants on head retarded by the US and the public was right to be skeptical of it, but I was just limiting the discussion to the topic of Japan's belief that they could kill enough GIs that the US would go home which is the plan that sort of worked for the NVA.
North Vietnam had political backing from the rest of the communist sphere. Their logistics was just moving materiel manufactured from abroad into combat positions, they didn't have to make every single component of every bullet that was fired. Vietnam also had a porous border that allowed troops to scatter and regroup in what was nominally neutral territory beyond the reach of their enemies.
Japan was an island that had gone to war with every neighbor and had the most powerful military alliance to ever exist in human history coming for them. There was no outside support, nowhere to run and they were out of absolutely everything from food to fuel to metals.
"If we all died, wouldn't it be beautiful and poetic... Like a chrysanthemum set on fire?"
i mean every man woman and child of a nation being obliterated in one last stand because death is preferable to dishonor would be a tale that would be told throughout the ages
history is written by the Victor's, or in this case who's still around
we'd probably write them off as society of troglodytes for doing a mass coordinated sodoku
"If we can kill enough Americans coming ashore then the American public will decide to settle for peace."
Really, it was their entire worldview was shattered and they couldn't function with the reality they had lost. Decades of military buildup, fanatasicm, and nationalism disappeared in five years.
Surrender is dishonorable, death is preferable to dishonor.
To add to the other great points other anons had made, the Japanese high command wasn’t immune to their own propaganda and misinformation. The army and navy would overestimate how many casualties they’d inflicted or how many and what class of ships they sunk. Over the years as these reports made their way up the chain of command, it left the people at the top believing that far more Americans had died by 1945 than actually had.
Many of the issues Japan had could be traced back to the high brass being retarded and stuck in the past. The original plan to end the war in one decisive naval battle that never came and insisting the Zero’s successor be as maneuverable as the A6M3 when Horikoshi proposed something more similar to a Hellcat are two I know off the top of my head. When you’re not living in reality you make dumb decisions.
When you're a severely posturing militaristic regime you start drinking your own koolaid and enter lala land, many such cases
dying for the emperor was to them very much like martyrdom
continuing to fight wasn't wasting lives but fulfilling lives by giving people the chance to do the best they could do with theirs
And while they didn't care about casualties in a moral sense or quite to the contrary would see them as a positive, not x killed but x having done the best they can in life and going to shinto/budist heaven. They knew that americans did. So once confined to the home islands and facing the soon to be hard reality of massive casualties. The hope was to get a deal that would have more or less left them to keep on being them just confined to the home islands. Sure some people would have to face the music for what they had done, losing the colonies would suck and a thousand other irritants but sacred japan would be maintained
"Would it not be wondrous for this whole nation to be destroyed like a beautiful flower?" - War Minister Anami Korechika
>stabbing his own generals in the back and surrendering
that's hardly fair, not only were the generals constantly killing each other and were in fact actively trying to get him removed at the end, he was emperor and by the same ideals that said they had to fight to the death his word should have been enough to make them surrender anyway
This literally isn't true. The Big Five (minus one whose tacit approval of the attempted coup led to his suicide) agreed to surrender and okayed the Emperor calling for it. If you want examples of Hirohito going off the reservation, the attempted coup in 1936 (The 2.26 Incident) was him also crushing a coup, but this time by his own volition in opposition to coup members (who before he said anything were pretty warmly accepted by the military) trying to overthrow the government for his sake.
Every single Imperial decision was okayed behind closed doors before ANY kind of public "discussion" took place. We know this is the case because what few documents the Japs didn't burn or hide state as much explicitly.
Would the US actually have to invade though? Their idea of casualties breaking the US's back could've been easily turned around by NOT invading japan and just bombing them to shit. They're islands, it's not like they can just go lay train tracks to china and move their industry or their people next door.
Their navy is the only defense. And that got crippled at Leyte Gulr and Phillipine Sea months before the nuke dropped.
What exactly was stopping the americans from having a continuous supply chain to the japanese frontdoor and just bomb them to shit basically out of range of any japanese defenses?
Very bad, without the treacherous use of the horrendeous atomic weapons, America would have been defeated.
I've read somewhere that one of the ports were the allies were stockpiling supplies for the operation was hit by a typhoon not long after the japanese surrendered. I wonder how true that is
the Divine Wind strikes again
An absolute nightmare grind. Its entirely possible the American public would have lost its stomach for invasion part way through
The loss rate among the ships from kamikazes alone would have been staggering. 6000 kamikaze aircraft would have been available, and one in six were expected to hit their target as they would be approaching the fleet over hills and there would be less warning. On top of that there were mini-subs and suicide speedboats packed with explosives and manned torpedoes. It would have been a fucking slaughterhouse before a beachead was even established.
Pre-invasion fighter sweeps would take out almost allJapanese aircraft. And Japan had very little fuel for the planes.
Only if they can find them, Japan had hidden planes under dense vegetation and in caves and buildings in anticipation of fighter sweeps to be launched off of improvised airstrips when the order was given.
There's also the mistake of thinking of these as planes rather then oddly shaped guides missiles.
Jesus, imagine slogging through Europe fighting the Germans then being told you were up for the invasion of Japan. It would have sparked mutinies.
>It would have sparked mutinies
No? The forces in Europe were needed in Europe to deter the western allies. They had a separate eastern build up for Japan, and intended to take it all. Part of dropping two nukes was to tell Stalin "don't fuck around we have a plurality of these super weapons"
As best I recall a lot of fresher forces would have been rerouted east. Your average infantryman who made it through Europe probably would have remained an occupier.
Elite units like the airborne, however, would absolutely have been sent, and the points system as designed ensure that Normandy and Bulge vets would have gone.
To paraphrase a Japanese politician decades after the war: Thank God for The Bomb
Soviets take ALL of Korea.
Back then? If you couldn't contest the skies you could only hide wait and hope.
But now? With stockpiles of PGMs and JDAMs and JDAMs being stupid fucking cheap?
A 155mm artys hell is 15 lbs give or take, the smallest JDAM is 500lbs. And we hit what we aim at.
Yes airpower is that overpowered. And drones make it worse.
155 is not 15 pounds you dink
NTA but the HE fill is around 3 to 4kg isn't it?
most 155/6in class shells weight around 100 pounds and have 15-25lbs of explosives filler.
A GP bomb is about 33% explosive by weight
Thank you
Maybe I'm misremembering 105mm
There's a couple of alternate history books about it and how it essentially ends with the destruction of Japan.
>the war follows much the same path as in the real world with the notable exception of the Manhattan Project, as Albert Einstein does not approach President Steele to propose an atomic bomb program. Without nuclear weapons, the invasion of Japan sets the stage for the end of the Second World War, with American troops invading from the South and Soviet troops invading from the North. After Emperor Hirohito is killed in an air raid, the Japanese lose the will to fight and surrender.
>In the aftermath of Japan's surrender, the Soviets occupy the island of Hokkaido and the northern part of Honshu, under Fedor Tolbukhin with some Japanese Communists acting as his puppets in the new "Japanese People's Republic" (North Japan). Similarly, the U.S. establishes the "Constitutional Monarchy of Japan" (South Japan) in southern Honshu, Kyushu, and Shikoku. Hirohito's 12-year-old son Akihito becomes the new emperor, although he acts as a puppet to General Dwight D. Eisenhower, who is the one to actually run the country. The Agano River acts as the border between the two states with a demilitarized zone of three miles in either direction.
>Meanwhile, the Soviets liberate the Korean Peninsula from the Japanese in mid-1945 and established the puppet state of the People's Democratic Republic of Korea with Kim Il-Sung as its ruler.
>japan sending endless child soldiers are the allies and soviets
>had 12,000 aircraft ready to meet the invasion,
Any evidence of these existing? Sounds like vatnig tier propaganda.
The vast majority of these were trainer, civilian or transport planes loaded up with explosives. Prior to a hypothetical invasion, all the Kamikaze's were military aircraft such as Zero's or other light aircraft, however if the time came then these could be used as Kamikaze's with much inferior pilots flying them.
How is that vatnig tier? They used around 2,000 in Okinawa alone, Japan produced a ton of planes and anything from the latest fighter to the shittiest trainer qualified
it sounds like the kind of thing a vatnig would have made up in 2021
>xaxaxa great pussya is invincible we have 12,000 planes to crush da west better no make us raise our eyebrow
but for japan
anyway seems like it wasn't true since they were including trainers so I was right
WW2 was a period of absurd numbers of equipment by todays standards. This is largely possible because none of them had any electronics to worry about. For all we know they had a squadron of kamikaze pilots flying biplanes holding with its payload being a handheld grenade. It wouldn't ruin a flight deck but it'd certainly decimate a squad clenching their buttholes in landing craft. I would not put it past the Empire for doing something like that.
>they had the planes but not the ones I consider to be planes so I’m right
They had around 10,000 ready by the surrender and it would have been about 12000 by the time of the invasion.
most were probably only good for one way travel, allies would launch a feint or practice landing and get the japs to blow their wad prematurely
Moron
Every Japanese town burned to the ground. Ten times more civvies dead than soldiers. It would be real hell. A real war of annihilation that would end in the permanent colonization of at least some of japan
>invade the main island in November '45
>then the south in march
How does that work?
Have you checked for color-blindness? Kyushu was scheduled for November, Honshu for March.
quality thread, informaition dense posts, I wish every thread in k were like this.
Vietnam
If japan had been capable of getting 12000 planes ready in 1945 they would have done so before the invasion.They never had even close to that during the entire war.Nor did they ave enough pilots.
These were intended to only make a short one trip. Strip an aircraft down to its most basics and remove most of its equipment and they can become very cheap to produce. Also expand the definition of “combat aircraft”.
by late '45 the Russians would have rolled through northern China and into Korea, RoC would have taken back the southern parts.
The USN with bases on all sides of Japan could roll through with impunity and level everything withing 30 miles of the coast with naval artillery. Airforce could firebomb the cities to ash and spray defoiliants over the country side, this could reduce the population by about 25% in one year. Invasion forces could be bolstered using USSR and RoC forces, so that could be another 5M soldiers on the ground. Likely to still be a messy fight, but at this point the Japanese would be reduced to infantry weapons only.
I would guess 1M allied dead, and 50M japanese dead
One important thing is regaining the ability to operate strategic bombers out of China, so unfortunately disrupted by Ichi-Go. A land route to China had been won, and Guangzhou was set to be captured in CARBONADO in the autumn. The throughput of strategic bombing could be massively increased.
I don't agree with the later bits of your assessment. 50M is an absurd number, unabsorbable by any combatant. Society would have collapsed long before that point.
>50M japanese dead
>Society would have collapsed long before that point
As a matter of fact it did collapse: Japan surrendered.
FYI the Japs themselves estimated 18 million casualties (25%), and Okinawa took 50% casualties which is potentially 36 million. USSR took around 15% casualties (200 million -> 170 million) and consider themselves "winners". So while 50 million is probably absurd, double digit millions is well probable.
Invasions are always much worse than simply bombing the crap out of your enemy.
Any gain from capturing enemy land intact is almost never worth it. Might as well just bomb them to bits.
has anyone done the math of invasion vs. a protracted deindustrialization and depopulation campaign.
it would take a large effort during the first leg, but could be scaled back substantially once the major cities are destroyed, then starve the population until they revolt.
No need. Japan relied and relies on food imports. They would have starved relatively quickly under a blockade.
While I have zero proof of this, I firmly believe that if the Allies had blockaded Japan, Japan would have ended up starving like North Korea, I.e. the civilians would starve, the military would be just above starving, and the generals would have all the food they want. And when Japan finally gave up, reintroducing them to the world would be even worse than reintroducing North Korea
That's literally what the Allies' plan was, though. The ONLY reason they even CONSIDERED an invasion is because Stalin did not give a FUCK about losses and would have sent eight million more to die in order to make Japan commie. If Stalin didn't exist, they wouldn't have even entertained an invasion.
That was already happening as a result of the US's submarine and mine campaign.
the process could have been accelerated using targeted air spraying of herbicides and cloud seeding (not sure if the knowledge to do this existed in the 40s).
could have effectively halved or quartered rice production
them trying to figure out how to do this is how Agent Orange got invented, it took a few decades longer but the efforts began for use against ww2 japan
Japan didn’t even control the skies over their own islands at the end of the war. Allied bombers were hitting them with impunity. How could they possibly have had 12k planes?
Maybe if they gathered literally all planes available they'd have reached something close to that number. But as you may expect, they wouldn't be very effective in combat, even as kamikaze. Normal kamikazes were already borderline ineffective, and those people were trained pilots using proper fighters. Trying to do the same thing with civilian planes plioted by amateurs would've ended in a catastrophe
They had aircraft, just little that could actually contest the skies.
Not even close to General Staff's estimations. Manchurian Army, almost 1 million jap soldiers, was beaten in 2 weeks by the soviets, and majority surrendered without much resistance. US Army wouldn't face better soldiers during Downfall, all the fanatics and well-trained veterans died out in 1943-44
I read somewhere that the American generals had anticipated a massive kamikaze attack on the invasion force, and had planned to send a dummy invasion armed with a metric ass-ton of anti-air guns to deal with them.
Ez. I wouldn't even bother with Kyushu and Shikoku. Just sail into Tokyo Harbor with the Black Ships and watch them surrender in droves.
Thats not how literally any attack of any of the islands went much less their homeland. If the US had just invaded and occupied there would have been an insurgency for months but more likely years. The only option to end the war without continued fighting was to get them to capitulate. Japan didnt surrender on principle in almost every case so expecting them to do so in a direct invasion is silly.
That's literally how WW2 ended.
it would have been real bad
millions dead
lots of rape babies
just a much worse scenario for everyone in the long term
Seeing the shit i did in okinawa, and how hard the japanese fought is quite sobering and just makes you realize just how horrific an all out fight on mainland japan would have gone. This was a bunker by sugar loaf that we went to and the holes in the wall were from the japanese killing themselves with grenades. Out this room was a small hallway, maybe 10-20 yards long, and at the end was a door outside. The tour guide told us that all the japanese who tried to flee out that door were burned alive by flamethrowers waiting. Was some brutal shit man.
Tough shit, huh?
I’d have had a bulldozer just pack earth into the opening and keep packing it in until it’s about 10 feet deep, and he detail three troops with M1 carbines or grease guns and a few grenades to deal with any Jonas trying to dig their way out.
Maybe come back in a free months when it doesn’t stink so bad,
Look at how US forces captured Fort Drum in Manila Harbor in 1944.
Our boys gained Topside, and then poured gasoline down the ventilation ducts and set the fucker on fire.with the Nips inside.
This is I think an under utilized tactic, i think this was done once to Iraqi trenches. What other historical examples of simply bulldozing over your enemies
apparently done by seebees during Guadalcanal and tarwar
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fort_Drum_(Philippines)
Japs can't fight, they would have gotten smashed. The nukes were a mercy.
>Japs can't fight
watch your mouth boy
>At the Battle of Tsushima on May 27, 1905, Admiral Tōgō raised a Z flag on his flagship Mikasa.[3] By prearrangement, this flag flown alone meant, "The fate of the Empire rests on the outcome of this battle. Let each man do his utmost." (「皇國ノ興廢此ノ一戰ニ在リ、各員一層奮勵努力セヨ」).
>defeating the russian second pacific squadron (the most shambolic naval force to ever leave port) is their proudest accomplishment.
Why do you think they got so utterly btfo by the US navy?
man just copied Admiral Nelsons speech.
why innovate when you can imitate (quite immaculately tho)
They didn't need to invade or nuke
They simply had to wait them out and they would have negotiated a surrender
The US nuked not to avoid a bloody invasion but to flex its muscles and send a warning to Russia
All the senior generals at the time were later asked about nuking and said it wasn't necessary
The problem is, blockading Japan would extend the war by years, maybe even decades. North Korea and the various naval blockades and against Germany and Britain in the two world wars have proved that it's EXTREMELY difficult to starve a nation into submission. Not to mention, at this point, the US was already transitioning their industrial capacity back to peacetime production, which meant that they would be rapidly losing the ability to maintain the massive military buildup in the Pacific needed to enforce such a blockade.
And then there's the concerns about the Soviet Union, which at this point had swept up Manchuria and a couple of Japan's northernmost islands. Even if the US sat back, the Soviets would inevitably invade Hokkaido and at best Japan would be partitioned between the Soviets and US/UK, or at worst Japan becomes a new Soviet SSR.
The nukes were not necessary to win the war. Everybody on both sides knew the war was pretty much over. The only question was how many people were going to have to die before Japan would admit it.
Did the US ever consider an operation to assassinate the emperor and his entire family; i would expect that doing so in the lead up to the invasion of Japan would help cripple their spirit
Would've been fucking horrible. Hirohito was pretty much the only person who had the authority to call a surrender that would be unanimously obeyed by all the citizens in Japan. Killing the royal family wouldn't cripple the Japanese spirit, it would send them into a frenzy. The promise that the Emperor would not only be spared but still retain nominal control of Japan was a massive factor in the surrender.
your reading too much into the mindset of the IJN/IJA, there was extreme war fatigue even amongst the enlisted
Explain to me why there was any reason to land troops on the islands?
USA had 100% naval and air superiority. They could bomb with impunity. If the japs don’t surrender, then starve them out. At that point every factory was rubble and the farms bombed out with the labour force dying in Manchuria anyways. Why take 100k casualties when a completely safe blockade and strategic bombing campaign guarantees surrender.
And no, the Soviets had no chance of taking a slice of Japan. They had no navy or airforce capable of contesting the American blockade AND supplying a naval invasion that would make the logistics behind d-day look like a middle school play.
Fighter (fleet/land/float) : 1,845
Fleet reconnaissance : 173
Fleet bomber : 452
Fleet attacker : 379
Land-based bomber : 182
Land-based attacker : 236
Patrol aircraft : 68
Double-seat float reconnaissance : 220 or more
Three-seat float reconnaissance : 201
Submarine-based reconnaissance : 17
Flying boat : 9
Transport : 53
Other (including trainer) : 3,721 or more
Total : 7,556 or more
Apparently I am late to the party?
Here's a list of IJNAF aircraft holdings as of August 1945 that I was able to find. IJA is unknown, but probably the same or slightly larger.
Not an impressive number.
US Army/Navy deployed over 20,000 aircraft (not including trainer, of course) to the Pacific theater, with 1,000 B-29 alone and another 2,000 on standby on the US mainland.
those are only military planes. the plan was to take everything with wings and have children holding bombs in their laps try to crash them into landing crafts.
Aircraft are not the only ones fighting each other.
There is reason to expect that perhaps 15,000, certainly 10,000 kamikazes will kill tens of thousands of sailors and marines.
If America invaded Japan would they ever leave? Would the national psyche of the US be so incredibly warped by its losses and the horrors necessary to conquer Japan that the public demand annexation? Would we get some weird burgercore-Japan?
We're still there and nips have been successfully colonized
If we had to invade with troops it would be Hawaii 2.0. That wouldn't come for free.
what's wrong with Hawaii?
>I've never been
>hawaii 2.0
so basically welcomed with open arms???
just posting some interesting stuff related to downfall
proposed 4-way division of korea from the paris peace conference (iirc) that may or may not have been related to downfall
the proposed division of japan, i thought this was some bullshit but the next few images talk about it
this pic and the next few ones are from Inside GHQ: The Allied Occupation of Japan and Its Legacy by Eiji Takemae (Author), Robert Ricketts (Translator)
i cannot comprehend what the fuck wouldve happened with a KMT/NRA occupied shikoku
Chiang was rather favourable to the Japanese post surrender, actually. His commanders and soldiers, however, I could not imagine to be anywhere near as forgiving.
It was a proposed idea, and was scrapped.
Why would china join in?
They were still in their civil war and were extremely weak and irrelevant at this time.
>were extremely weak and irrelevant at this time
At the end of WW2 they were referred to as the Fourth Great Power, the first three being the UK, US and USSR. Kind of makes sense as everyone else was beaten to shit, and their massive population was recognised as a huge potential driving force of progress. And it might well have come about too, if only they hadn't been such retards as to lose to the fucking ChiComs
in many ways japan is lucky they were only subject to american stupidity
>Bongland Saga
Mite b kool