It means that millions of Japanese would have been killed. So many that Japanese people would be a small minority. Not because the Allies would systematically try to wipe them out, but because the casualties of a mainland invasion would just be that high for the Japanese side.
Japan is an island and had been stripped bare of anything that could sustain the population a year before the Allies would have landed. The starvation and disease would be extreme. The amount of fricks that the troops making landfall in Japan would have after the first few days would also be minimal to a degree similar to the Eastern theater in Europe. The double whammy of there being no food and any organized aid efforts looking exactly like what the civilian population had been told would be the Allies trying to round them up for genocide would make it an incredible shit show.
Even if the exact goal was not "directly kill every Japanese" the net result would be them being effectively wiped out as a society.
Nah, invasion would have irrevocably fricked the Japanese civilian population: >widespread malnutrition worsens as food requisitioned for soldiers >large bodies of civilians forcibly used as cannon fodder or replacements >other civvies shot out of hand by the japs because they weren't enthusiastic enough about dying for muh honoraburu emperor >saipan-style mass suicide but on a vastly higher scale >japanese units turning to simple banditry and brutality to support themselves like they did everywhere they went
And let's not even get started on Allied massed fires being used on urban areas. The Allied had zero sympathy for the Japanese at this point in the war and would probably have treated any Japanese not in a concentration camp behind the lines as potentially hostile. Cue massed air, naval and land bombardments of any kind of defended area with huge losses.
I don't think it was, given firebombing was much more effective as a terror/destruction tactic and the nukes were effectively plan D or some shit. Friendly reminder that the VT fuse and its implementation was not only more expensive than the entire Manhattan project, but the VT fuse and its implementation into just about every gun with a bursting charge and the ability to elevate above 40 degrees from the waterline won the entire fricking war in the pacific.
Military strategy counts on having the best air force in the world? Sure would be a shame if it turned into a cloud of fricking shrapnel and your raping/pillaging campaign in china starts going south.
Have fun watching your country get reduced to ashes by way of some incendiary bombs and some clever application of the weather forecast. Nippon honor and shit is great but you don't have the ability to feed a 30 million hungry mouths with bushido bullshit, and you're not going to get the chance either way because every rice paddy between here and Korea gets to turn into a lovely crater. I genuinely think the actual plan was to just flatten the entire island chain and then blockade it while constantly bombing/shelling until what was left of the government signed whatever they shat out onto paper. Short of a soviet invasion turning your potential new ally into a communist puppet, I don't think the allies even needed to do landings in mainland japan, let alone nuke it, but it sure did speed shit up by at least two years.
My only regret is how slow and inefficient the delivery process of the bombs were, had they cleaned that shit up then they would have gone through the actual first plan for nukes; One city a day until they ran out of cities or they surrendered.
They probably would have just targeted the industrial centers then done a naval blockade and wait until Japan wanted to negotiate, unless they were going to go all out with fire bombing
>not even the holocaust killed all it's intended targets
Yeah, when you look at the census data across Europe israelites were less impacted than just about any other group. If I didn't know better I'd think was a post-hoc fabrication and this was like the 12th time they'd claimed 6 million were killed because that's a symbolic number to them. But luckily I know our greatest ally would never lie.
>still obsessing over the 6 millions when it's the upper end of reputable estimates for israeli deaths, and slightly outside the agreed upon range >still ignoring the 10+ millions non-israeli deaths
The brainlet caveman pic was supposed to be ironic, not played straight.
Far less Japanese died from the nukes than would have died in invasion you're comparing dollars and cents. Nevermind 0 Americans versus a million plus casualties. It was the more humane choice even for the Japanese. Also the pre-nuke firebombings were brutal so it's not like their civilians weren't already being fricked up.
>That feels like ad hoc cope to retroactively justify the nukes as a more humane option
this is a midwit take. there will always be speculation about casualties if allies actually had to invade mainland japan but I don't think there's remotely enough evidence to suggest that it would've definitely been less bloody, let alone more humane.
The real question about the tail end of ww2 that I think is a tougher question is about policy: what chips are on the table to negotiate peace? Everyone loves to talk about how terrible nukes are or how we're still handing out purple hearts that were made for an invasion, but if we threw Japan a bone the war could've ended in 1944, 90% of allied war goals would've still been achieved, and millions of lives would have been saved. But if you REALLY want unconditional surrender from a fanatical enemy you're going to get your hands dirty no matter how you do it. If you are pro-unconditional-surrender but AREN'T also pro-nuke, pro-invasion, pro-firebombing you're just virtue signalling wanker.
>if allies actually had to invade mainland japan
We didn't because Japan is an island. We could have just blockaded it until they eventually surrendered. They were already on the brink of starvation. The meme that it was either nuke 'em or invade 'em is a false dichotomy and retroactive ad hoc justification for Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
that's immaterial to the point i was making. it doesn't matter what strategy you use to force japan to surrender unconditionally, it's going to be inhumane and cause suffering no matter what, and people are going to debate how terrible it was no matter what. the only real way to reduce suffering would have been to not pursue the policy of unconditional surrender.
(starving japan into submission doesn't actually sound any better than nukes, for that matter)
That was the argument that the USN made: just blockade Japan and wait until they gave up.
The Army argued that there was no telling how many years that would take, and that the only way to be sure was to take Tokyo (nukes were not in the picture at that point). The Army won the debate, but it wasn't a clear victory; resources did go into an increasingly-effective blockade right up until the end of the war, and after Hokkaido, there might have been a re-evaluation (certainly, a blockade would have been much stronger with Hokkaido in American hands).
Funniest thing is they were willing to accept conditional surrender, the sole condition being letting the emperor live.
Then we killed a lot of people to get an unconditional surrender... and let the emperor live anyway.
Wouldn’t America just fire bomb the cities to ashes until every living thing is dead? After that you just need to wait till they starve and too weak to hold a weapon.
Anon, all of Tokyo was destroyed in a firebombing attack and the Japanese didn't surrender. The type of bombing campaign you're imagining would take far longer than just invading, cost more lives in total, and would arguably be a genocide.
Kamikazes were not particularly effective and by 1945 we had become pretty damned good at taking them out. Those little wooden toys with wings packed with explosives that they were planning to fly would have been absolutely shrecked before they got close enough to do any damage to our battleships and carriers.
They were also going to aim for the transports and had, correction, 10,000 of them lined up. At some point they would have gotten some through thanks to pure saturation.
Oh I'm sure they could have gotten a few hits, but the kamikazes were not going to halt the invasion or do much to slow it down. So what if we had lost a couple of ice cream barges?
As for the point about firebombing, we were absolutely engaging in the practice and constantly ramping up the intensity of it. By 1945 America was sick of the war and wanted it to be over with, so if we were willing to drop a couple of atom bombs with zero clue what the long-term consequences would have been to the environment and the Japanese people then you bet your ass we would have turned the entire landscape into a hellscape of firebomb-fueled cyclones to speed things along and finish the war in 1946.
>so if we were willing to drop a couple of atom bombs with zero clue what the long-term consequences would have been to the environment
Hey, come on now - the Manhattan Project guys explicitly checked to see if a nuclear explosion would ignite all the hydrogen and burn the entire Earth down.
1 year ago
Anonymous
>Our calculations show the risk of this new weapon igniting the atmosphere and annihilating the human race along with all life on earth are...low >Let's do this
My point is they would’ve just kept firebombing them until the cities aren’t viable for defending since the previous fire bombing campaign was very effective. The allies could’ve kept burning everything until they’re forced to move underground and then starve them out.
>genocide
I doubt anyone would’ve cared at the time.
More fire bombings. More leveled cities. Probably would have resorted to starving them out once it's realized how costly a ground occasion would be. Or maybe let the ruskies do it and watch them lose 2 million soldiers like it ain't no thing.
This. Basically everyone was trying to blockade the japs and it would’ve been hard for them just to keep their food and water since they had no control over the skies.
>acorn harvesting fails to offset poor rice harvests, widespread famine >internal unrest means not all troops can be dedicated to fighting Allies >conventional/fire/nuclear bombing inflicts mass civilian casualties >Soviets don't really do anything but frick around on the mainland
>Soviets don't really do anything but frick around on the mainland
If the US agreed to give Japan to Stalin, you can bet your bottom dollar the Soviets would have invaded the Japanese mainland. In fact the US was worried they would. They had proposed plans to land on Hokkaido, but Truman was adamantly opposed.
The US was never going to give Japan to Stalin you fumb Vatnik wienersucker. And the Soviets had no boats or way to get pass the US air and naval blockade of Japan without getting their asses torn.
civilians were commuting suicide en mass because they were convinced that the Americans were going to torture and humiliate them (probably not unlike what they did to others, japs used to be brutal). I can't imagine an actual invasion being anything other than a blood bath.
Daily reminder they had something like a thousand planes, were training pilots to be kamikazes, and had enough fuel to give every plane a one way trip. Considering battleships would have had to be a few dozen miles off the coast, I don't want to imagine the casualties.
Kamikazes were not particularly effective and by 1945 we had become pretty damned good at taking them out. Those little wooden toys with wings packed with explosives that they were planning to fly would have been absolutely shrecked before they got close enough to do any damage to our battleships and carriers.
Daily reminder they had something like a thousand planes, were training pilots to be kamikazes, and had enough fuel to give every plane a one way trip. Considering battleships would have had to be a few dozen miles off the coast, I don't want to imagine the casualties.
I vaguely remember that there was some plan for the first invasion wave to be a fake-out, it would actually be a mass of barges and shit loaded down with as much AAA as physically possible. I may have dreamt this though
Kamikaze squadrons in preparation for Downfall were trained to prioritize troopships at the beaches, and approach over land so there'd be no forward AA screens to overcome.
>training pilots to be kamikazes
they resorted to kamikaze because it barely required any training. just get the machine off the ground and point it towards the biggest target they could see.
they were sending literal children up in those planes with minimal instruction so it was already suicide if they tried anything complicated like dog fighting or flying into AA with a conventional bomb.
If you stop thinking of them as teenagers pressed into suicide attacks and more like early gen guided missiles, and pretend that killing dozens of young adults to maybe blow up a 6" turret is a good exchange, kamikazes make sense. A sick sort of sense. And it probably would have worked during the landings, remember even a single troop transport sunk could kill more American troops than several hours of land combat.
Oh I'm sure they could have gotten a few hits, but the kamikazes were not going to halt the invasion or do much to slow it down. So what if we had lost a couple of ice cream barges?
As for the point about firebombing, we were absolutely engaging in the practice and constantly ramping up the intensity of it. By 1945 America was sick of the war and wanted it to be over with, so if we were willing to drop a couple of atom bombs with zero clue what the long-term consequences would have been to the environment and the Japanese people then you bet your ass we would have turned the entire landscape into a hellscape of firebomb-fueled cyclones to speed things along and finish the war in 1946.
>but the kamikazes were not going to halt the invasion or do much to slow it down.
Oh of course not. The Americans would probably have been dissuaded by Olympic and made to cancel Coronet, and by that time they would have had a dozen nukes available. If you think the Japanese whinge about Hiroshima...
For what i read, the plan was to no longer use the kamikazes on battleships or carriers, but on landing ships and troop transports to maximize US casualties. Those ships also were closer to shore and had less AA weapons, so the attacks would heve been easier.
There were also plans / prototypes of cheap wooden planes only able to fly short distances to crash into landing zones, targeting groups of infantry or vehicles.
Prryhic victory for the Americans without the clearly defined "end" we actually got and Japan becomes NK tier on steroids that it never recovers from even if the USSR collapses.
My grandfather was attached to a group during the occupation that spent most of their time recovering, IDing, and burying Allied corpses from their POW camps. He rarely talked about it, but he hated the Japanese with a fury that I've never seen equalled.
My great grandmother was a nurse in the British Army in Burma and she was regularly treating recovered POWs. She also hated the Japanese until her dying day, she said the Japanese were completely inhuman.
Because of the betrayal, in a way the US liked the Japanese the most out of all the Asians, the US were the ones who got them to leave their shell, Japan adopted some of the same cultural hobbies and over all both countries were supposed to be good friends.
The US was the nation who got the closest to actually considering Japan a colony and there was a lot of respect there. And then Japan turns around and does all THAT to the Americans, the US were the ones who made them stop being isolationist fricksticks and that's how they repay the US?
There was also a bit of "We're the ones who unleashed these monsters on the world it's our job to put them down."
Pretty much imagine you befriended a very eccentric NEET, you dragged him out of the house, got him some nice clothes, taught him how to interact with the neghbors and realize that there's a larger world outside of their basement.
And then three years later they've become a gang lord, they murder your brother, and you find out they converted their basement into a rape dungeon for women they've been kidnapping.
> the US were the ones who got them to leave their shell >the US were the ones who made them stop being isolationist fricksticks
Lol, wow about just leaving people alone in the first place? But noooooo, Mr Goldbergstein needs new markets. "We come to bring you the gift of civilization" was a joke 200 years ago, and still is.
Europe wasn't going to leave Japan alone and if they got to Japan first it would have been Opium war this time with more Opium. The US really only did it because it was a challenge, and the US was tired of stranded sailors getting killed by the Japanese because "Muh Holy Island".
What the US didn't realize was that Japan decided to jump on board the Imperialism game just like Europe not realizing that they were late to the party and Imperialism wasn't as cool as it used to be.
Like all the shit Japan was doing in China, if they had done it 50 years earlier most of Europe would have simply laughed along with it and asked if they could join in for the next Chinese killing contest.
Japan just didn't understand that exterminating native people for land wasn't cool anymore.
Why are you changing the subject to bring up wars for oil? Again tell me why Japan was entitled to force the US to sell them Oil?
The US was hoping to get Japan to wise up and realize trying to conquer all of China was a stupid idea but Japan just was too dense.
1 year ago
Anonymous
The USA was just doing what we have always done by providing material support to China while they were at war with Japan, then feigning outrage when Japan finally struck back at us.
We couldn’t have so it’s immaterial.
But we could have gotten Japan to surrender without nuking them or invading them. Hirohito was ready to surrender after Okinawa, but the fanatics in the Japanese government and Roosevelt’s demand for “unconditional surrender” that was continued by Truman resulted in thousands of more deaths.
1 year ago
Anonymous
While the US could have better communicated what they viewed as an unconditional surrender, the fact that the hardliners still wanted to fight after the 2nd nuke demonstrated that it wasn't just a one off miracle makes it very clear that the Japanese government wouldn't have rolled over, and nukes or invasion were still more humanitarian then letting the entire population of Japan starve themselves to death as they were already starting to do.
1 year ago
Anonymous
I still believe we could have gotten 90% of the surrender terms we eventually did without nuking or invading Japan. iirc it was only something like six major officials in the Japanese government who were hardliners for continuing the war at all costs.
1 year ago
Anonymous
It's possible, but honestly, the nukes weren't that bad compared to even the normal bombing campaign. They were flashy and effective as a show of power, but the US could have leveled the towns conventionally with normal explosives and firebombing anyway, and that overwhelming supremacy hadn't made any significant inroads into getting the 11s to realize the war was over except for the kicking and screaming. The mass starvation that was a result of the naval blockade and mining efforts almost certainly killed far more civilians then the nukes, and would certainly have continued to do so but that wasn't enough for the Japanese government to get over their banzai spirit and glorious deaths.
I don't mind Nips but it's easy to like them in peace time. One of my great grandfathers was tortured by the c**ts, they really are uncivilized during warfare. If I ever had to fight them you bet I'd be as ruthless as frick cause unlike Germans you know those frickers aren't gonna play nice if they capture you
Imperial-era Japs were some twisted sons of b***hes.
Sure they're absolutely chill now, but it was only 80 years ago that they were doing some pretty fricked up shit all over east Asia. Though granted I think that any people can go feral under the right circumstances.
My grandpa said that when they were sitting around the breakfast table and heard about the bombing of Hiroshima, great grandpa got really excited at the prospect that we would just keeping bombing them and vaporize literally every living Japanese
My Grandfather was on Saipan and years later my sister was up late getting a snack in the kitchen when he woke up freaked out grabbed his shotgun and almost killed my older sister in his own kitchen because he thought she was a Jap. And this was like 45 years later. He never really got over his experiences in the Pacific I don’t think.
ez win for the attackers as most of the defenders are armed with bamboo spears
id be more worried about how long it takes to secure the island b4 the soviets start taking the north
>japanese slowly wiped out/commit suicide to the last man, woman and child >entire island lifeless >allies withdraw >years later, some japs stationed on random islands come back >news says "empire retakes japan" >history books written about how japan destroyed us in the war >"atomic bombs are shit, america has lost every war they used them in"
a reason the Americans were in such a rush in the first place is because the Soviet Union were on their way to take credit and a share of the land.
not to mention it would have been split like Germany and Korea, and they didn't turn out great to say the least.
It would’ve been way worst than the eastern front brutality wise. Almost every inch of ground would’ve been fought as hard, if not harder than on Okinawa. And the continued fire bombings would have made the atomic bombings look like nothing
Honestly, my questions is what was the thoughts of the marines/soldiers/sailors before the surrender. Did they think/know they were going to fight a war of extinction against the Japanese? And how did they feel after the peace talks concluded?
based on conversations I had with a few WW2 vets (Marine and Veteran) they fully expected Operation Downfall to be an existential fight to the death.
One army captain I knew was the tip of the spear in Europe and was one of the first to come across concentration camps. Said after VE day he got marching orders to redeploy for the invasion of Japan, and he was dreading being forced by suicidal japanese to recreate the carnage there he saw in Europe. Said he was incredibly glad the war ended earlier then he expected.
Really nice guy. Became a pacificist after. He was infertile so they adopted a lot of black kids and raised them very well
Also said they preferred fighting SS since they didn't have to worry about taking prisoners or committing other crimes
Enlighten me, /k/.
How this would get any worse than the European Theater of war or even equal? To my knowledge, this would be easier and there would be no requirement for a full scale invasion. >Japan is surrounded in 4 different fronts, against resistance in China, Korea & south asia countries (allied reinforcements incoming); against USSR in the north; against US naval forces in the east and Commonwealth troops in the south >No real way to gain any reinforcements >No real way to get supplies, blockaded in every direction >Their best men is either dead or captured (mostly dead) >Only old people, invalids and children to block allied attacks >Supplies running low each day and remember, they're surrounded, they cannot sustain the war for long >Internal struggles could depose the emperor on some "mental issues" basis, forcing the new Japanese government to surrender (this was already being plotted by the time the first nuclear bombs fell on Japan)
Really, what the Americans could do is wait until Japan starves and there would be no need for a full scale invasion. Minor incursions, S&D AA equipments and strategic blockading is all they needed. They only forced this victory by using nukes to keep the USSR away and to show they're the new dominating global power.
That bullshit of an excuse to "spare valuable american lives" is getting old.
>how could an amphibious invasion against an enemy that expects your attack, has predicted your invasion sites and has incredibly defensible terrain go wrong?
Haha not like this had just happened or anything
>wait until Japan starves
So, umm, what was the magic technology possessed by the US that would prevent the japs from growing rice and catching fish like they always did? Firebombs don't do shit against rice paddies.
>people living with rice and fish only
They sperg out because fricking oil, they won't wait until they turn into a stone age country to surrender.
>they won't wait until they turn into a stone age country to surrender
what is the evidence for your assertion? there were japanese soldiers that refused to surrender for decades.
1 year ago
Anonymous
>what is the evidence for your assertion?
Common sense.
1 year ago
Anonymous
lol. lmao, even.
1 year ago
Anonymous
Funny, right? Common sense explains a lot.
1 year ago
Anonymous
"Common sense" is not a worldwide thing anon. What people refer to as common sense is primarily local knowledge, and in some cases values, that is assumed to be known/held by anyone, even if this varies wildly between regions. Common sense in the USA is not the same as that in Japan, let alone in this time period.
The difference being that Japan was defended by 2.5 million regular troops. Not 75k like Okinawa.
Also "32 million" militia >make what you will of that number.
In preparation for the invasion of Japan the US government minted 500 000 purple hearts. Of these 500K about 100K are still sitting in storage for use. So, basically, it would be bigger than every single American war since WW2 combined. >and remember, US planners had consistently under-estimated friendly casualties throughout the war in the pacific
With this in mind and considering that the Brits were fricking rekd by the war and on their last legs, the US had no other meaningful allies AND war wariness was starting to set in at home. There is a very real chance that the Japs could have ground the US down to a negotiated settlement.
>There is a very real chance that the Japs could have ground the US down to a negotiated settlement.
Oh no, not le heckin negotiated settlement. Perhaps the US should have thought of that before provoking Japan.
>war wariness was starting to set in at home
It wasn’t. American planners were worried that it would start to set in if the war dragged on, but in mid 1945 the home front was still committed to victory.
>wait until Japan starves
So, umm, what was the magic technology possessed by the US that would prevent the japs from growing rice and catching fish like they always did? Firebombs don't do shit against rice paddies.
>what was the magic technology possessed by the US that would prevent the japs from growing rice and catching fish like they always did?
The battleship.
The Japanese were already dependent on food imports long before the war started. A naval blockade would reduce the food supply 20-30% on its own.
Japan was already starving because the US had shut down all shipping and it turns out that if you have an industrial sized population, you can't support it with pre industrial food collection methods, much less if you've also got all the young men tied up in the military instead of fishing/farming.
Logistics. Japan is basically a series of valleys, divided by mountains, with limited land access between them. At the time, Japan was also somewhat dependent upon imports from Korea to feed its population.
The US blockade, especially with the advent of the B-29 mining campaign, was seriously disrupting the flow of food and supplies within Japan. After the surrender, the US had to rapidly move and distribute a massive amount of food just to prevent a famine in the winter of '45. Absent that, Japan would have been in a really bad shape come Spring '46 and the final invasion.
It still would have been a bloodbath, of course, and while Americans were made of sterner stuff back then, it might have stressed their willingness to continue. Japan's expectation that it could win most of what it wanted at the peace talks simply by threatening to keep fighting was almost delusional, though. If the invasion was postponed or cancelled, and there were no nukes, then the firebombings and blockade would have continued.
Also, people tend to forget that Japanese commanders were ordered to murder all POWs and local civilians the moment the Home Islands were invaded; such an action would have made the American people *very* willing to contemplate actions like firebombing or even gassing every Japanese city.
Did you think that after half a decade of war the world was tired of World War 2?
You're saying the US should waste potentially years besieging Japan in the hopes that they'll eventually give out before the entire population starves to death.
There was no possible way for Japan to win after 1944, so forcing the war to continue on and on, was just going to drain everyone for no reason.
Making Japan give up was better for everyone, including the Japanese.
If you have an enemy cornered and dying, why would you waste years and years torturing them when you can simply put them out of their misery, that's what I don't get about you "We should have just starved Japan." You're saying we should have spent years low grade torturing the Japanese people to death while claiming that was the moral high ground choice. It boggles the mind that you actually think that was the better choice.
That we should waste millions of dollars and years of soldiers and sailors lives, just to babysit a nation that's slowly starving to death because it's the moral choice. Where is the morals?
I don't know why you seem to think two nuclear weapons was a more cruel and unusual punishment of two years to three years of watching an entire nation starve to death.
You really think deep down Japan wanted to continue the war? At that point they wanted to surrender but their own culture made them incapable, for in their culture if you're losing you die in a glorious last stand while your castle burns around you.
The two nukes blueballed that last stand completely. You will not be the last Samuari holding the gates against the barbarians, the barbarians will sit 20 miles away and hit you with a cannon ball that destroys your entire castle and all you can do is stand there impotently holding your sword.
It's how the US always was able to out play Japan from the times of the Black Ships. The very first introduction Japan had with the US was always "In a war between your culture and our firepower, our firepower wins." It's how we got our Black Ships to open Japan, they knew we had better shit than them and in the end we'd always win. All the two nukes did was remind them of that fact.
Two very different subjects, as long as North Vietnam was able to exist as a supply route and safe haven then the US could have killed millions of Vietcong, the NVA would simply replace them.
Just like if the US had never bothered to attack Japan nor did anything to constrain Japan's ability to supply itself then the war could have gone on for another five years.
Besides the US was never good at Colonial wars, there was never a real justification to fight them.They had a bad enough time with the Philippines insurgency that the US gave up any idea of making their a permanent colony and gave them an "In X amount of years we'll give you Independence"
struggles could depose the emperor on some "mental issues" basis, forcing the new Japanese government to surrender
The most likely deposing of the Emperor would have been because he was too willing to surrender
>We are now prepared to obliterate more rapidly and completely every productive enterprise the Japanese have above ground in any city. We shall destroy their docks, their factories, and their communications. Let there be no mistake; we shall completely destroy Japan’s power to make war. >If they do not now accept our terms they may expect a rain of ruin from the air, the like of which has never been seen on this earth. Behind this air attack will follow sea and land forces in such numbers and power as they have not yet seen and with the fighting skill of which they are already well aware
>I don’t want to see that son of a b***h in this office ever again. He didn’t set that bomb off, I did. This kind of sniveling makes me sick.” At another point Truman referred to Oppenheimer as that “cry-baby scientist.”
I am autistic, but only a homosexual would b***h and moan about something they made, i.e. physicists. They pretend to be smarter even though if they were actually smart, they would be a mathematician or engineer
didn't he also help give us Israel and allow the red Chinese to take hold as well as shit talking McCarthy who was later vindicated? His personal life makes him seem like a corrupt hothead
didn't he also help give us Israel and allow the red Chinese to take hold as well as shit talking McCarthy who was later vindicated? His personal life makes him seem like a corrupt hothead
I'll never understand how Americans can shittalk Truman and Nixon.
There's a strong argument that the people who eventually won against Nixon were in fact what they'd always accused Nixon of being.
There's a clear pattern that Nixon actually abandoned a good number of his initiatives once he realized that "the other side had a point", and kept the good ones like slapping the shit out of Breznev.
Meanwhile we have the lawyer who'd won against Nixon at watergate continuing their legacy by virtue signaling their way to a presidential candidacy (thank the LORD she lost, having the secretary of state that started Arab Spring holding the presidency would've been historical in every wrong sense of the word), using the media to propagate every single stupid little jolt that comes inbetween their three neurons and suppressing everything that gets in the way, and generally being about as observant as monkeys in snow nigeria regarding the state of the country.
That these same people can have their ideas all but continuously implemented for 12 years (even during an opposition presidency as their methods of media propagation all but bypasses government authority in dictating the right and wrong ways to approach corporate entities), yet still have the galls to pretend that they're entirely non-responsible for the current state of the country, is baffling. That they might've been wrong at one point has been deemed high heresy in the post Nixon dogma - in a way that Reagan's republicans never did. Bush Jr and his band of traitors, audacious as they were, never argued that their war ended up being wrong, only that it was started with better intentions. Meanwhile you have the clowns on TV refusing to even acknowledge that Obama's resolution to the 2008 financial crisis has led to a worse America, and that the only silver lining is that America still exists despite the 2008 financial crisis.
He was the frontman for the resistance against the boomer liberalism that took over the west. He was also scandalously exposed for corruption in way that people weren't really accustomed to at the time.
Basically he represented a lot of what was hated, so it was only natural his legacy suffered for it.
Stalin already had Eastern Europe by the time Truman took office, tell everyone how he was going to make Stalin give it back.
>We should backstab the soviets that outnumber us in Europe after we just spent 3 years telling them they're our allies and the country is war weary.
Truman wasn't an idiot.
you know you guys aren't making the United States sound any better really than the Nazis or Japs in this hypothetical. Is this why people get so prickly about the Pacific Theatre 70+ years later?
oh no a bunch of GI's got kirred doing their jobs in WW2 after deliberately trying to frick with Japan prior to Pearl Harbor horrible won't someone please think of the Communist Chinese lol
>freedom
homosexual moron cope. >Gun laws >self defense means potentially years of hell in court >3-5 years jailtime for convicted pedophiles >Waco, Ruby ridge, Bundy farm >widespread homosexualry and degenerate behavior >cant conceivably own a single modern issue US firearm without it being altered/mutilated
You don't have freedom, you have perpetual hell.
1 year ago
Anonymous
>you have perpetual hell.
Yeah that’s what I call having to read your dumbass posts on this board
1 year ago
Anonymous
Under your definition of Freedom no one on the planet will ever be free unless we're in a mad max anarchy.
>genocide your way across the Pacific and Eastern Asia >prepare your country to fight until the very end >get a taste of the consequences of trying to hold out in a losing war (being nuked twice and your front against the Soviets collapsing in the same week) and pussy out >get mad whenever people discuss what would’ve happened if Japan didn’t pussy out
Nip sympathizers are truly moronic
You misunderstand. The United States tried to get the Japanese, both at a macro and micro scale, to surrender from the beginning to the end of the war. Civilian casualties on the islands weren’t so high because of American troops murderousness, but because of the population having high rates of suicide(or forced “suicide” in many grim cases). Japanese troops mostly decided to fight to the death or kill themselves.
The reason the expectation that an invasion of the home islands would end up genocidal is because the Japanese plan was to fight to the last person. Man, woman, and child.
The Jap population was already completely broken in terms of morale with the people openly disobeying the military government. In the last months of the war everyone who could was fleeing the cities and camping out in the countryside. An invasion of Japan would have been total anarchy for sure, with little actual coordinated resistance after the initial landing. The figures for expected casualty figures were completely over blown. Even if it did turn into a blood bath the US army was already planning on retaliating with liberal usage of poison gas to depopulate the rest of the cities.
What? That you think two nukes are better as well?
I’m waiting for
The Jap population was already completely broken in terms of morale with the people openly disobeying the military government. In the last months of the war everyone who could was fleeing the cities and camping out in the countryside. An invasion of Japan would have been total anarchy for sure, with little actual coordinated resistance after the initial landing. The figures for expected casualty figures were completely over blown. Even if it did turn into a blood bath the US army was already planning on retaliating with liberal usage of poison gas to depopulate the rest of the cities.
>That you think two nukes are better as well?
As any other option for a quick victory, which is not a shame don't get me wrong. But use it to "spare a gorillon of american lives" it wasn't necessary.
Nope, the Japs used poison gas against China, which under international law at that time meant China and it's allies (which included the US) were free to use poison gas against Japan carte blanche. This was a big factor in pushing for the usage of the atomic bomb, as it was thought to be more merciful than gassing. America's stockpiling of chemical weapons was also a big factor in convincing the Jap war cabinet to surrender.
This! But people here are not accustomed with hard to swallow truth and still thinks japs would murder like 500k americans like their coomer-fantasy animes.
Without access to the sea, japan has shit all for its own natural resources. There would be no way to challenge the naval and air superiority of their enemy. Firebombing would get more intense and, minus nukes, the yanks might be interested in instead field-testing the fancy new sarin gas the nazis invented.
I love weebs that use the "US provoked Japan" line. Japan's attempt at empire building was entirely reliant upon Western countries giving them everything needed to do so, and when the West decided that maybe funding a genocidal Japanese empire wasn't the greatest idea weebs cry about "aggression".
With men like Ugaki in charge for Japan, pretty much any aircraft or vessel which could move was going to be used for Kamikaze attacks. While they also had their best armor and AT weapons in reserve.
The Americans would have had more atomic bombs ready to drop plus all their chemical weapons ready to use. Combined naval blockade by the Americans and British would continue to strangle Japan. And the Soviets would be trying to make their own landings in the North (enjoy that postwar tension)
I think the most sobering fact about the potential for Downfall was that the Purple Hearts minted for the invasion were handed out for the next fifty years.
If the Japanese were absolutely serious about fighting to the bitter end and suiciding for their emperor the whole invasion would be tantamount to genocide. Luckily it never came to that because I don't think anyone could fathom the kinda horror that'd go down. I don't even want to think about it.
If they landed near Tokio the Japanese would have likely tried a massive last stand and after losing (like he did after seeing the nukes) the emperor, in order to save the capital, would likely would have negotiated similar peace terms.
If they invaded from the extremities it would likely have been a long bloodbath and Japan would look quite different with a lot of it's historical and cultural sites destroyed.
Ultimately the emperor had ultimately say on everything, Tojo was extremely loyal, however the emperor was shielded by the top brass from 80% of the negative news as they didn't want to commit suicide without fighting till the last men.
So as long as the emperor can perceive the situation being completely hopeless he would have likely have done the same as he did after receiving the nukes effect reports.
The worst case scenarios would be if the emperor ended up being killed before surrender, in that case the army generals would likely fight till the very end.
probably would have been better to just park the navy around the island and wait for them to get tired of being surrounded and see there's no point in resisting
>How would a mainland invasion of Japan have really gone?
I hear they're still handing out the purple hearts they made in anticipation of it to this day, so not well.
And that's assuming they didn't use nukes to establish a beachhead or anything.
The Jap civilians would have surrendered right away. Only zogbots still believe propaganda from 70 years ago that starving kindergartners and grannies would have fought American GIs to the death in hand-to-hand combat. It's obvious this was merely the justification given for dropping nukes on civilians to flex on the USSR since Germany had already surrendered. If we nuked the Germans instead, then morons today would be saying that the German grannies and kindergartners would have fought to the death for the honor of tiny mustache man. If you dehumanize your enemy to the point where you consider their civilians and military part of the same hivemind, then it becomes easy to justify any atrocity.
# >The Jap civilians would have surrendered right away
They didn’t on Saipan, or anywhere else American forces encountered them. >flex on the USSR
If the United States had that kind of foresight in mid 1945 the world would be a better place
>The Jap civilians would have surrendered right away
Japanese trained women and children to charge landing grounds armed with bamboo spears. Justifying it either as >They don't shoot, therefore we kill them
or >They do shoot, we photograph this and show it to the population on how barbaric they are
So no, they wouldn't have.
I'm not saying there wouldn't have been any civilian casualties, but the idea that the entire country was so fanatical that they were going to banzai charge us with pointy sticks until we genocided them all, but somehow dropping two big boombooms and a radio broadcast from the emperor magically made them docile is fairy tale stuff. Milgays in every country of that era were so detached from reality that they all assumed their civilians were master of gorilla warfare who would fight invaders to the death instead of just rolling over and accepting the new status quo like people always have in human history. The Nazis also did it when they sent little kids and grandpas to defend Berlin from the Russians and tried to implement "Operation Werewolf." If the Axis was winning the war and got nukes first, the Germans might have justified using them instead of invading Britain because of Dad's Army, and the Japs might have justified using them instead of invading the USA because of the anecdotal "Americans have rifles behind every blade of grass."
They were fanatically obedient. While all of the other nations had some form of civil defense, none of them had the mass suicidal attacks/suicides. Uncle Adolf and some of the other true believers wished that the German people were like that, but they had only been in power a relatively short time and there were enough separate cultural traditions that were separate from them in Germany .
No it wasn’t. Despite the memes and Stalin’s orders large parts of the red army surrendered or ran away.
1 year ago
Anonymous
>large parts of the red army surrendered or ran away >but 5' tall Japanese grannies with sticks would have fought American muhreens to the death because muh samurai honor or some shit
Do you see why I'm calling BS on the whole Operation Downfall narrative?
1 year ago
Anonymous
>Do you see why I'm calling BS on the whole Operation Downfall narrative?
You don’t understand that different populations have different cultures, traditions, and societal structures that will cause them to behave differently? You are ignorant of the Japanese civilians who killed their own children and then themselves on the order of their emperor?
>The Jap civilians would have surrendered right away
Japanese trained women and children to charge landing grounds armed with bamboo spears. Justifying it either as >They don't shoot, therefore we kill them
or >They do shoot, we photograph this and show it to the population on how barbaric they are
So no, they wouldn't have.
Bloodbath. A lot of dead Americans and most of the adult Japanese killed and many of the kids also dead. The Japanese government would have thrown the entirety of the Japanese population against the Americans.
I read an article where data showed that Japan run out of fuel and was near capitulation before nuclear strikes. So bombing was just a quick test before the war ends.
1/ the non-moronic part of the Japanese government knew that it was all ogre but they needed an 'honorable' way out - it's pointless to keep fighting if you're just going to get vaporized from a distance, so this gave them the 'we fought well, but we should surrender now' argument they needed (even then they still had to fight off a coup from smoothbrains who wanted to keep fighting 'til the very last nip)
2/ the US was hell-bent on containing the USSR (same reason why they bothered invading Europe in the first place, to prevent a commie empire from Dublin to Tokyo) so it was imperative they took over the whole of Japan as soon as possible. See North/South Korea for what would probably have happened otherwise.
3/ the nukes needed field testing, so might as well do it then. In addition it let the USSR know that they shouldn't get any funny ideas of suddenly moving forward toward the Atlantic.
In retrospect, they should have just blockaded Japan until they surrendered from boredom and spent the nukes on the Russians instead. But hindsight is 20/20.
The Americans were also moronic by demanding "unconditional surrender" when the Japs tried to petition for surrender much earlier. To them, "unconditional surrender" implied that we would take their empire, divide and colonize Japan, execute the Emperor, ban Japanese culture, genocide the Japanese people, etc. Literally anything would have been on the table. Then we started nuking them, and the Japanese government said, "Frick they are gonna kill us all with their new weapon, so we might as well surrender anyway." Then the Americans were like, "lol jk about that unconditional thing," and we let them keep the Emperor, Hokkaido, Okinawa, gave them humanitarian aid, etc. in exchange for letting us build some bases and nominally disarming them. If we had told them that we just wanted to force them to be our new allies before the commies could take half their country like they did to Germany, then Japan would have surrendered months earlier.
The Japanese terms of surrender involved keeping their empire, their military, their government, no occupation of Japan, no war crimes trials, literally everything they wanted at the beginning of the war except maybe china. It would have been a surrender in name only and would have never been acceptable to the Americans.
Those terms were of course unreasonable, but my point is that we let them keep most of that stuff anyway. We didn't even try the Emperor for war crimes and let him stay on the throne. That's pretty much the equivalent of trying the Nazi high command for war crimes, but allowing Hitler to nominally remain dictator for life. We treated Japan with kiddie gloves after the surrender, which makes the nukes seem that much more pointless and excessive. Obviously the nukes were intended for Germany with Japan being an afterthought.
1 year ago
Anonymous
>my point is that we let them keep most of that stuff anyway.
We dismantled their empire, broke up their military, and restructured practically their entire society. >We didn't even try the Emperor for war crimes and let him stay on the throne.
While more recent historical work has certainly revealed Hirohito’s involvement, he certainly wasn’t the driving force behind Japanese militarism.
1 year ago
Anonymous
>We dismantled their empire,
We let them keep everything they acquired prior to 1880 in exchange for letting us build some cozy bases. >broke up their military,
In name only. They just call it JSDF now, and they just outsourced most of their defense to us anyway. >and restructured practically their entire society.
We wrote a new constitution, but still allowed them to keep the Emperor on the throne. >While more recent historical work has certainly revealed Hirohito’s involvement, he certainly wasn’t the driving force behind Japanese militarism.
The reason for Japanese militarism was because the IJA and IJN both acted as independent entities that reported directly to the Emperor rather than the civilian government of Japan. So our response to that was letting them keep the Emperor and military after we nuked civilians and restructured their government.
1 year ago
Anonymous
>We let them keep everything they acquired prior to 1880 in exchange for letting us build some cozy bases.
Which was an absolutely unacceptable proposition before the nukes. >In name only. They just call it JSDF now, and they just outsourced most of their defense to us anyway.
Firstly, it took a decade for us to even allow them to form the sdf. Secondly, the JSDF isn’t even in the same realm as the military of Imperial Japan. It’d be like if you disbanded the us navy and replaced it with the coast guard. >We wrote a new constitution, but still allowed them to keep the Emperor on the throne.
Pre and post war Japan are radically different countries, the Emperor remaining is minor. >The reason for Japanese militarism was because the IJA and IJN both acted as independent entities that reported directly to the Emperor rather than the civilian government of Japan. So our response to that was letting them keep the Emperor and military after we nuked civilians and restructured their government.
We very much did not let them keep their military and the Emperor was reduced to a purely ceremonial role.
1 year ago
Anonymous
But you do realize that you would probably be saying the same thing about Germany today if we had dropped the nukes on them instead? We'd be talking about how Hitler wasn't actually that bad, and Hermann Goering was the real mastermind since Hitler was reduced to a ceremonial role after the war. All I'm saying is that the "unconditional surrender" justification for using nukes on Japan turned out to be bullshit.
Terror bombing was bad and should not happen again. But given the horrific nature of WW2, the only thing the Allies were guilty of was being more effective in their bombing campaigns. Arthur Harris is psychotic in some ways but he was entirely correct in saying Germany should not escape unscathed when it bombed many others.
Let that cruelty be a reminder of how far humanity can sink and let us hope we never hit that low again.
I can accept that no country is perfect and all have a myriad of sin to their name. That does not render them all morally equivalent in my eyes, nor does it prevent me from believing that one side was just or at the very least more just.
>two wrongs make a right
Nah
1 year ago
Anonymous
Hirohito didn't have his own version of Mein Kampfe nor did he have as direct involvement in the Japanese government and war machine that did Hitler did. No, we wouldn't be sprouting what you're claiming here.
1 year ago
Anonymous
>Hirohito didn't have his own version of Mein Kampfe
That would have been the Shinto religion >nor did he have as direct involvement in the Japanese government and war machine that did Hitler did.
He was literally the head of state as well as the commander of the IJA and IJN.
1 year ago
Anonymous
>That would have been the Shinto religion
Not sure if serious. State Shinto well predates Hirohito nor was it "let's go kill X" like Hitler's writings. >He was literally the head of state as well as the commander of the IJA and IJN.
Hirohito wasn't directly intervening in military orders like Hitler nor was he involved in actual "attack Y" politics as Hitler. On paper he had a lot of power but in practice he had even less involvement than the POTUS does.
1 year ago
Anonymous
>"let's go kill X" like Hitler's writings.
I'm pretty sure Mein Kampf didn't actually tell Germans to go out and kill israelites. >On paper he had a lot of power but in practice he had even less involvement than the POTUS does.
So were Japs fanatically loyal to the Emperor, or was he just a powerless figurehead with no influence?
1 year ago
Anonymous
>So were Japs fanatically loyal to the Emperor, or was he just a powerless figurehead with no influence?
Both and neither. The Japanese were fanatically loyal to the idea of the emperor, as opposed to the emperor himself. What I mean by that is that Hirohito was not a particularly captivating, inspiring, or charismatic figure in and of himself. >powerless figurehead with no influence
There is a difference between power and influence. Hirohito had very little power but extreme amounts of influence. He couldn’t force the people running the army or navy to do anything* but his opinion still mattered to them as long as it didn’t contrast too much with their own. This was convenient because he mostly just agreed with whatever they told him. Right up until the decision to surrender.
*how a pre-war power struggle would have turned out is debated
1 year ago
Anonymous
Your entire post is an oxymoron and proves the mental gymnastics required to justify everything the USA did to Japan before, during, and after the war.
1 year ago
Anonymous
what did the US do to japan after the war other than rebuild it and shower it in mercy?
1 year ago
Anonymous
>We had to nuke tens of thousands of women, children, and elderly people because they were so fanatically loyal to the Emperor that they would have fought to the death anyway. >That Emperor though? He's pretty cool guy who dindu nuffins. We should let bygones be bygones so he can keep his job lol
1 year ago
Anonymous
you're just exposing how little you know about anything as it relates to the pacific war
I am left to conclude that you serve no purpose in this thread by posting
1 year ago
Anonymous
I called out your mental gymnastics and your response is to just claim that I'm stupid. My homie how hard is it to just say that the nukes were excessive and Hirohito should have at least been forced to abdicate? You're sitting here defending some dumbass shit that happened in a war that ended over 70 years ago.
1 year ago
Anonymous
nta but I disagree that the nukes were excessive- look at North Korea, THAT was bombing in excess.
Actually frick it, I wish they were hydrogen nukes instead because imo they are prettier to view from afar.
1 year ago
Anonymous
Alright and if the nukes were absolutely necessary then we should have made Hirohito bear responsibility for them. Instead we now have this moronic political relationship where Japan is the USA's client state, but the President still bows to their Emperor. Bush Sr. even called Hirohito a "friend and ally" at his funeral lmao
1 year ago
Anonymous
Welcome to international relations.
1 year ago
Anonymous
You're dumb, and I see no reason not to insult you for being dumb.
1 year ago
Anonymous
What about my post is an oxymoron? There are differences between hard and soft power, as well as between institution and individual.
>We had to nuke tens of thousands of women, children, and elderly people because they were so fanatically loyal to the Emperor that they would have fought to the death anyway. >That Emperor though? He's pretty cool guy who dindu nuffins. We should let bygones be bygones so he can keep his job lol
>We had to nuke tens of thousands of women, children, and elderly people because they were so fanatically loyal to the Emperor that they would have fought to the death anyway.
Correct. >That Emperor though? He's pretty cool guy who dindu nuffins. We should let bygones be bygones so he can keep his job lol
When did I, or anyone else in this thread for that matter, say that Hirohito was blameless? I said that >Hirohito’s involvement was certainly minimized for political reasons
Not that he was not involved. I also pointed out that there are disputes as to what Hirohito could have done pre-war but we’ll never know because he chose to do nothing.
https://i.imgur.com/ogg8PfF.png
I called out your mental gymnastics and your response is to just claim that I'm stupid. My homie how hard is it to just say that the nukes were excessive and Hirohito should have at least been forced to abdicate? You're sitting here defending some dumbass shit that happened in a war that ended over 70 years ago.
There are multiple people arguing with you. >My homie how hard is it to just say that the nukes were excessive
They were not excessive >Hirohito should have at least been forced to abdicate
He probably should have been, and the numerous Japanese war criminals who managed to slink away with American help should have been hanged.
1 year ago
Anonymous
If the nukes weren't excessive then we should have also used them in Korea. Heck we should have used them in Afghanistan instead of staying there for 20 years.
1 year ago
Anonymous
>If the nukes weren't excessive then we should have also used them in Korea
The only reason they weren’t was due to fears that it would kick off World War III. >Heck we should have used them in Afghanistan instead of staying there for 20 years
There would be no target to use them on. It would turn the United States into a global pariah. Even after 2 nukes and more firebombings it took an occupation lasting longer than 20 years.
1 year ago
Anonymous
>It would turn the United States into a global pariah.
So you're saying that nukes were good then but bad now? Why are Afghan civilians more human than Japanese civilians?
1 year ago
Anonymous
>So you're saying that nukes were good then but bad now? Why are Afghan civilians more human than Japanese civilians?
I never said either of those things.
1 year ago
Anonymous
You said the USA would become a global pariah if we used nukes in war today. If nuking civilians is such a bad thing to do now, why wasn't it bad back then?
1 year ago
Anonymous
Any nation that used a nuclear weapon on any target today would become a global pariah. Be that a city, a military base, a enemy fleet, or even an air burst over open ocean to serve as a threat. Nuclear proliferation has changed the stakes.
1 year ago
Anonymous
So basically we only decided it's morally wrong now because we don't want someone else to do it to us.
1 year ago
Anonymous
What does morality have to do with this? The nations of the world don’t want a large thermonuclear exchange, and fear any sort of use will break the seal.
1 year ago
Anonymous
Afghanistan doesn’t have nukes though. Do you really think China or Russia would have retaliated against the USA for nuking Afghanistan?
1 year ago
Anonymous
>any country is willing to tolerate and accept the use of nuclear weapons in a war of aggression
Ukraine doesn't have nukes either, and yet king monke understands that using them would be a very bad idea despite losing the conventional war. America steam rolled the conventional war and could have done literally everything that a nuke would do short of complete genocide with conventional explosives.
1 year ago
Anonymous
>putting an end to the most destructive war in human history >playing world police
One of these might justify more heavy handed measures.
1 year ago
Anonymous
>implying the war wouldn't have ended unless we used nukes
We could have ended the Afghan War in 2001 if we used nukes.
1 year ago
Anonymous
you are some kind of moronic russian tier motherfuker
1 year ago
Anonymous
>But you do realize that you would probably be saying the same thing about Germany today if we had dropped the nukes on them instead?
I wouldn’t be because the circumstances would be entirely different. Unless you’re arguing that everything we know about the governments of Imperial Japan and Nazi Germany is fiction. >We'd be talking about how Hitler wasn't actually that bad, and Hermann Goering was the real mastermind since Hitler was reduced to a ceremonial role after the war.
Your seem to be implying that Hirohito held the sort of control over Japan that Hitler held over Germany. This is not the case. While Hirohito’s involvement was certainly minimized for political reasons, none of the revisionist work since his death indicates him having any sort of totalitarian control. >All I'm saying is that the "unconditional surrender" justification for using nukes on Japan turned out to be bullshit.
All I’m saying is that you’re wrong and it didn’t.
1 year ago
Anonymous
>two wrongs make a right
Neither
Terror bombing was bad and should not happen again. But given the horrific nature of WW2, the only thing the Allies were guilty of was being more effective in their bombing campaigns. Arthur Harris is psychotic in some ways but he was entirely correct in saying Germany should not escape unscathed when it bombed many others.
Let that cruelty be a reminder of how far humanity can sink and let us hope we never hit that low again.
or
I can accept that no country is perfect and all have a myriad of sin to their name. That does not render them all morally equivalent in my eyes, nor does it prevent me from believing that one side was just or at the very least more just.
make that argument.
1 year ago
Anonymous
Keeping Hirohito was a necessary evil. You see, throughout the entire war, no Japanese unit had ever surrendered en masse; individuals had surrendered or were incapacitated and captured, but no officer had ever ordered his men to lay down their arms.
It was believed (probably correctly) that the only person on the planet who could issue an order to the IJA and IJN to cease fighting and surrender... was Hirohito himself. Anyone else would likely be ignored, at least by most commanders.
So, regardless of stated war aims and whatever the US and its allies might really want, quietly offering Hirohito a secret "golden parachute" for himself as the Emperor was the best deal the US could make. And even then, Hirohito wasn't interested in surrender until Nagasaki bluffed him into believing US propaganda that there were hundreds of nukes ready to go, and that there was a good chance that so many Japanese would die in atomic fire that the remainder would rise up and overthrow him. And whether it was from fear for his own skin, his son's life, or being the guy who lost the family dynasty, that was enough to make him fold.
I found it funny how mind broken everyone was on okinawa when they realized the americans weren’t going to eat them, hours after they smashed their family members with a rock.
Honestly I think a big factor in how bloody Operation Downfall would have been is how effectively Japan's government could keep civilians believing all the propaganda about cruel "American devils". Saipan and Okinawa are indeed full of tragic suicides by terrified civilians, but there's also tons of accounts that show that most Japanese civilians were more than willing to surrender if they could be convinced that they wouldn't be harmed. And most US soldiers were far from the savages as claimed by the propaganda; the Japanese army was the pot calling the kettle black there.
Wasn't there a particularly sad story where a sister drowned her baby brother, but couldn't kill herself so she tried to get killed by the Americans only for her to get evacuated then broke down when she saw a bunch of kids eating chocolate the americans gave them.
>“There is a man alone, without family, without children, without God....He builds legions but he doesn’t build a nation. A nation is created by families, a religion, tradition: it is made up out of the hearts of mothers, the wisdom of fathers, the joy and the exuberance of children. An all-swallowing State, disdainful of human dignities and the ancient structure of our race, sets itself up in place of everything else. And the man who, alone, incorporates in himself this whole State, has neither a God to honour nor a dynasty to conserve, nor a past to consult."
The war was already pretty much over by the time Churchill became prime minister. He was just the one who chose to unnecessarily prolong it and drag the USA into it at all costs.
Roosevelt was a commie, but Churchill was a bloodthirsty drunkard who was hellbent on destroying Germany. I'm not saying Hitler did nothing wrong, but Hitler obviously didn't want to prolong the war with Britain if he allowed them to retreat from Dunkirk. The war would have ended in June 1940 if Churchill didn't insist on defeating Germany.
[...]
I like how the partnership between Germany and the Soviet Union always gets ignored by those saying Germany were some "defenders of Europe". If not for Barbarossa, Britain not have allied with the Soviets. They would have been bombing them.
The entire reason for the war was that Germany invaded Poland, but the USSR invaded Poland at the same time. At the end of the war, Poland was completely under control of the USSR. So basically Churchill exchanged two empires (Germany and USSR) controlling yurop for two empires (USA and USSR) controlling half the world at the cost of his own empire because of Poland which actually didn't matter in the end.
Had Hitler not been a fool, and just settled for the gains already made, his own empire could have survived. Perhaps even found way to gain outside support as a counter to Stalin.
Instead he chose to go back on his every word. Then get upset when no one wanted to hear anything else, instead focusing on crushing him. Then he just kept opening new fronts and making more people pissed at him.
I wouldn't say Stalin was a genius, but he knew when to keep his mouth shut.
Invading Poland solidified Britian & France against him. And it gave the USSR a direct border with German territory. Even though Poland had been staunchly anti-Communist. It put Germany in a rough position.
Then losses at Norway wrote off any possibility of a successful invasion of Britian. Meaning that despite impressive success in France, Germany had an enemy it could not defeat...then it went ahead and brought the Soviets and Americans in on things. Which was just doubling and tripling down on bad decisions.
1 year ago
Anonymous
germany already agreed to that border, since the USSR was in a partnership to invade and conquer eastern europe between them
to be frank, hitler was an idiot on all fronts
1 year ago
Anonymous
Stalin and Hitler were always going to betray each other. It was just a question of who stabbed whom in the back *first*. Stalin thought that he had plenty of time for the Brits to wear him down first.
He was wrong; they were *both* as foolish as they were monstrous.
Shitler did some dumb shit, but all countries that engaged in terror bombing were morally wrong anyway. I don't understand why people are still trying to justify one side vs the other 70 years later. People act like you're pissing on grandpa's grave if you dare say that incinerating civilians who were already living under oppressive dictatorial governments wasn't a very cash money.
Terror bombing was bad and should not happen again. But given the horrific nature of WW2, the only thing the Allies were guilty of was being more effective in their bombing campaigns. Arthur Harris is psychotic in some ways but he was entirely correct in saying Germany should not escape unscathed when it bombed many others.
Let that cruelty be a reminder of how far humanity can sink and let us hope we never hit that low again.
1 year ago
Anonymous
remember this when people start shit about the allies striking military production with bombing
>Nazis killed civilians so we're going to teach them a lesson by killing civilians too
The Allies often used the excuse of destroying war production or train yards as a reason to drop large numbers of bombs on civilian cities knowing that many innocent people would be killed. Obviously Germany did the same thing, but it's asinine to say that it's not morally reprehensible just because Germany did it first.
1 year ago
Anonymous
you're simply not reachable, this must be what it's like for an animal to witness a mutated offspring that won't survive
1 year ago
Anonymous
>killing civilians is a good thing because... IT JUST IS, OK?! >but not when Germany does it just so we're absolutely clear here
1 year ago
Anonymous
>attempts to bomb industrial facilities that were surrounded by civilian targets were messy due to the relative inaccuracies of the time >this is the same as intentionally targeting civilian populaces
1 year ago
Anonymous
Anon you do know that those "industrial facilities" were full of civilians, don't you? When you equate the civilian population of a country with their military, then anything becomes morally justifiable in war.
1 year ago
Anonymous
>targeting a bomb factory that has people working there is the same as blowing up someone's house and hoping he was working the bomb factory and not the bread factory
1 year ago
Anonymous
And that bomb factory is right next to the bread factory and people's houses, so dropping 4k lbs of bombs in the general vicinity of the bomb factory has the same result anyway.
1 year ago
Anonymous
Shouldn't build your bomb factory downtown then, but that's still not intentionally targeting civilians.
1 year ago
Anonymous
Actually, you're even dumber then I thought. It's not even about morals, it's about efficiency. Killing a random dude is a waste of a bomb since even if he was working in wartime production, which is pretty low odds to begin with, he's easily replaced by the start of the next shift. Blowing up an factory means that production is stopped until it's rebuilt.
>implying the war wouldn't have ended unless we used nukes
We could have ended the Afghan War in 2001 if we used nukes.
Do tell what target the US could have blown up with a nuke that would have put a stop to an insurgency, and no copping out with "just glass the entire country".
1 year ago
Anonymous
>Killing a random dude is a waste of a bomb since even if he was working in wartime production, which is pretty low odds to begin with, he's easily replaced by the start of the next shift. Blowing up an factory means that production is stopped until it's rebuilt.
Obviously but don't act like killing civilians is only bad when the Germans did it if you're going to justify bombing cities. >and no copping out with "just glass the entire country".
Of course not. There's no need to nuke the countryside. Just glass all the cities since that was apparently ok to do to Japan and Germany. Why shouldn't it be ok to do now?
1 year ago
Anonymous
>Just glass all the cities
What strategic targets were within these Afghan cities?
1 year ago
Anonymous
The people of course. The same targets that were in Hiroshima, Nagasaki, Tokyo, Dresden. etc. If it would have saved just one American life then who gives a frick?
1 year ago
Anonymous
>Hiroshima: headquarters of the southern army >Nagasaki: The four largest companies in the city were Mitsubishi Shipyards, Electrical Shipyards, Arms Plant, and Steel and Arms Works, which employed about 90 percent of the city's labor force, and accounted for 90 percent of the city's industry. >Tokyo: capital of Japan, headquarters of its military, large amount of arms manufacturing >Dresden: communications and logistics hub for the eastern front
No Afghan city held anything close.
1 year ago
Anonymous
Yeah but if we could have achieved our goals without invading by using nukes then it would have been worth it. :^)
1 year ago
Anonymous
We couldn’t have so it’s immaterial.
1 year ago
Anonymous
>Obviously but don't act like killing civilians is only bad when the Germans did it if you're going to justify bombing cities.
Your inability to understand the difference between civilians dying as a result of a strike on a military target and intentionally trying to kill civilians is impressively autistic. Terror bombing is frowned upon it's both pointless and morally indefensible. Targeting production facilities can lead to the end of hostilities which saves lives in the long term by ending the war quicker even if it sucks for the recipient who was dumb enough to build a home next door to the bomb factory and hasn't surrendered yet.
>Just glass all the cities since that was apparently ok to do to Japan and Germany. Why shouldn't it be ok to do now?
The US could have glassed every Afghan city with conventional weapons without any real effort. You have yet to explain why this would have done anything to change the course of the conflict since the US won literally every military engagement in a rather decisive manner.
1 year ago
Anonymous
>military target
A factory isn't staffed by the military. >You have yet to explain why this would have done anything to change the course of the conflict since the US won literally every military engagement in a rather decisive manner.
And here comes the cope lol
1 year ago
Anonymous
>the US should have nuked Afghanistan >why? >BECAUSE THEY DID IT IN JAPAN
Seethe.
1 year ago
Anonymous
>you can't target tanks until they roll off the production line, but then it's okay because a soldier's life is worth less then a civilian who made it
Strong argument, champ.
1 year ago
Anonymous
Is a tank that's 50% complete a military target? How about 80%? Are there are military ATF guidelines about at what percent I'm allowed to drop a bomb on a tank or not?
1 year ago
Anonymous
>targeting a bomb factory that has people working there is the same as blowing up someone's house and hoping he was working the bomb factory and not the bread factory
And that bomb factory is right next to the bread factory and people's houses, so dropping 4k lbs of bombs in the general vicinity of the bomb factory has the same result anyway.
This doesn’t have to do with you all really but the funniest take on this is from the breadtube left. Where the population of fascist regimes are active participants who can’t be whitewashed , except in regards to allied strategic bombing. Then they’re just poor innocents trying to survive.
1 year ago
Anonymous
Wasn’t that retaliation/reprisal for the French burning a captured German alive as a show?
I can accept that no country is perfect and all have a myriad of sin to their name. That does not render them all morally equivalent in my eyes, nor does it prevent me from believing that one side was just or at the very least more just.
Not really. Socialist governments eventually run out of money, and the Nazis wrecked their economy with their foolishness by 1938 (e.g., they had a coal shortage in cities at the same time that coal mines were running out of places on-site to store coal). They *had* to keep conquering countries and looting them in order to keep the shiny facade that was their industrial and military might going. They were like an addict, always justifying whatever it took to get the next high.
I like how the partnership between Germany and the Soviet Union always gets ignored by those saying Germany were some "defenders of Europe". If not for Barbarossa, Britain not have allied with the Soviets. They would have been bombing them.
1 million American dead, at least 5 million dead Japanese. Soviets probably invading through Hokkaido leading to Japan being divided like Korea while all of Korea would be controlled by the Kim's. Probably no post war economic boom, smaller baby boom generation because less vet's returning home to father them. Less resources for the Marshall plan so poorer Europe post war.
>How would a mainland invasion of Japan have really gone?
The Chinese would have airdropped plague infected bugs on Japanese cities first, and then they would send in their troops, rape the women and little boys, force the men and little girls into slavery, and commit war crimes
Why didn't the japs ass frick Russia when they had the backs turned fighting Germany? They could have secured some valuable land and resources if it went well
What happened to the families of convicted Japanese war criminals? I know Shinzo Abe became PM and recently died, but what about the brothers and sisters, the sons and daughters of the Army minister and Navy minister? Also, kind of surprised that some of the higher ranked IJN people got out or were never prosecuted, like Admiral Kirito who lost his entire fleet in Leyte Gulf and was fired.
God, I wish there'd been a nip sniper on the beach to put one into McArthur's dome on that photo op. Would have made Korea so much less of a clusterfrick.
Tons of American losses but the japs would likely have been completely genocided when we were done.
not even the holocaust killed all it's intended targets. That feels like ad hoc cope to retroactively justify the nukes as a more humane option
>he thinks the "holocaust" actually happened
>he was told to believe it didn't
Nobody is told to believe holocaust didnt happen moron
You clearly were
>he was told to believe it did
that goes both ways moron
>not even the holocaust killed all it's intended targets
lol that's for fricking sure
It means that millions of Japanese would have been killed. So many that Japanese people would be a small minority. Not because the Allies would systematically try to wipe them out, but because the casualties of a mainland invasion would just be that high for the Japanese side.
Japan is an island and had been stripped bare of anything that could sustain the population a year before the Allies would have landed. The starvation and disease would be extreme. The amount of fricks that the troops making landfall in Japan would have after the first few days would also be minimal to a degree similar to the Eastern theater in Europe. The double whammy of there being no food and any organized aid efforts looking exactly like what the civilian population had been told would be the Allies trying to round them up for genocide would make it an incredible shit show.
Even if the exact goal was not "directly kill every Japanese" the net result would be them being effectively wiped out as a society.
Say it after me folks America is the Good Guys just like in GI Joe!
George Washington didn't chop down Hitler's Cherry Tree at Okinawa for you fricking commies to say otherwise!
Don't forget the bbc
are you japanese or a troll? I can't tell.
Lots of these guys on NK art look like Dwayne from Goldeneye.
this but unironically, frick imperial japs, frick nazis, frick commies, and god bless america
but if I had to be friends with one it’d be the nazis
I frick cats btw
>not even the holocaust killed all it's intended targets
And look at the world now.
Why do you think everyone is trying to kill them?
>not even the holocaust killed all it's intended targets
Unfrickingfortunately.
Yeah well the israelites weren't going "oh no the nazis are coming for us! Better kill ourselves first!"
Look at what happened in Okinawa
That's because germs are impossibly autistic, even Black folk that can't sharpen a blade have genocided more effectively.
Nah, invasion would have irrevocably fricked the Japanese civilian population:
>widespread malnutrition worsens as food requisitioned for soldiers
>large bodies of civilians forcibly used as cannon fodder or replacements
>other civvies shot out of hand by the japs because they weren't enthusiastic enough about dying for muh honoraburu emperor
>saipan-style mass suicide but on a vastly higher scale
>japanese units turning to simple banditry and brutality to support themselves like they did everywhere they went
And let's not even get started on Allied massed fires being used on urban areas. The Allied had zero sympathy for the Japanese at this point in the war and would probably have treated any Japanese not in a concentration camp behind the lines as potentially hostile. Cue massed air, naval and land bombardments of any kind of defended area with huge losses.
>not even the holocaust killed all it's intended targets
That usually happens when it's a bullshit lie
I don't think it was, given firebombing was much more effective as a terror/destruction tactic and the nukes were effectively plan D or some shit. Friendly reminder that the VT fuse and its implementation was not only more expensive than the entire Manhattan project, but the VT fuse and its implementation into just about every gun with a bursting charge and the ability to elevate above 40 degrees from the waterline won the entire fricking war in the pacific.
Military strategy counts on having the best air force in the world? Sure would be a shame if it turned into a cloud of fricking shrapnel and your raping/pillaging campaign in china starts going south.
Have fun watching your country get reduced to ashes by way of some incendiary bombs and some clever application of the weather forecast. Nippon honor and shit is great but you don't have the ability to feed a 30 million hungry mouths with bushido bullshit, and you're not going to get the chance either way because every rice paddy between here and Korea gets to turn into a lovely crater. I genuinely think the actual plan was to just flatten the entire island chain and then blockade it while constantly bombing/shelling until what was left of the government signed whatever they shat out onto paper. Short of a soviet invasion turning your potential new ally into a communist puppet, I don't think the allies even needed to do landings in mainland japan, let alone nuke it, but it sure did speed shit up by at least two years.
My only regret is how slow and inefficient the delivery process of the bombs were, had they cleaned that shit up then they would have gone through the actual first plan for nukes; One city a day until they ran out of cities or they surrendered.
They probably would have just targeted the industrial centers then done a naval blockade and wait until Japan wanted to negotiate, unless they were going to go all out with fire bombing
>not even the holocaust killed all it's intended targets
Yeah, when you look at the census data across Europe israelites were less impacted than just about any other group. If I didn't know better I'd think was a post-hoc fabrication and this was like the 12th time they'd claimed 6 million were killed because that's a symbolic number to them. But luckily I know our greatest ally would never lie.
>still obsessing over the 6 millions when it's the upper end of reputable estimates for israeli deaths, and slightly outside the agreed upon range
>still ignoring the 10+ millions non-israeli deaths
The brainlet caveman pic was supposed to be ironic, not played straight.
Pipe down israelite we are talking about japan.
Far less Japanese died from the nukes than would have died in invasion you're comparing dollars and cents. Nevermind 0 Americans versus a million plus casualties. It was the more humane choice even for the Japanese. Also the pre-nuke firebombings were brutal so it's not like their civilians weren't already being fricked up.
the japanese were litearlly training school children to run at allies with pikes and landmines
>That feels like ad hoc cope to retroactively justify the nukes as a more humane option
this is a midwit take. there will always be speculation about casualties if allies actually had to invade mainland japan but I don't think there's remotely enough evidence to suggest that it would've definitely been less bloody, let alone more humane.
The real question about the tail end of ww2 that I think is a tougher question is about policy: what chips are on the table to negotiate peace? Everyone loves to talk about how terrible nukes are or how we're still handing out purple hearts that were made for an invasion, but if we threw Japan a bone the war could've ended in 1944, 90% of allied war goals would've still been achieved, and millions of lives would have been saved. But if you REALLY want unconditional surrender from a fanatical enemy you're going to get your hands dirty no matter how you do it. If you are pro-unconditional-surrender but AREN'T also pro-nuke, pro-invasion, pro-firebombing you're just virtue signalling wanker.
>if allies actually had to invade mainland japan
We didn't because Japan is an island. We could have just blockaded it until they eventually surrendered. They were already on the brink of starvation. The meme that it was either nuke 'em or invade 'em is a false dichotomy and retroactive ad hoc justification for Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
that's immaterial to the point i was making. it doesn't matter what strategy you use to force japan to surrender unconditionally, it's going to be inhumane and cause suffering no matter what, and people are going to debate how terrible it was no matter what. the only real way to reduce suffering would have been to not pursue the policy of unconditional surrender.
(starving japan into submission doesn't actually sound any better than nukes, for that matter)
That was the argument that the USN made: just blockade Japan and wait until they gave up.
The Army argued that there was no telling how many years that would take, and that the only way to be sure was to take Tokyo (nukes were not in the picture at that point). The Army won the debate, but it wasn't a clear victory; resources did go into an increasingly-effective blockade right up until the end of the war, and after Hokkaido, there might have been a re-evaluation (certainly, a blockade would have been much stronger with Hokkaido in American hands).
probably more would have died from blockade than nukes
Almost certainly.
Funniest thing is they were willing to accept conditional surrender, the sole condition being letting the emperor live.
Then we killed a lot of people to get an unconditional surrender... and let the emperor live anyway.
>they were willing to accept conditional surrender, the sole condition being letting the emperor live.
They weren’t. This is a post war fiction.
If it helps you sleep at night, then feel free to persist in your delusions.
Find me any evidence. Show me anything from the hardliners that states a willingness to surrender if only the emperor is preserved.
Don't forget where you are!
>not even the holocaust killed all it's intended targets
There is still time
Okinawa x 10
try x20 or x30
Okinawa didn't have any big cities and barely any of the regular Japanese soldiers were defending their hometowns
Wouldn’t America just fire bomb the cities to ashes until every living thing is dead? After that you just need to wait till they starve and too weak to hold a weapon.
Anon, all of Tokyo was destroyed in a firebombing attack and the Japanese didn't surrender. The type of bombing campaign you're imagining would take far longer than just invading, cost more lives in total, and would arguably be a genocide.
They were also going to aim for the transports and had, correction, 10,000 of them lined up. At some point they would have gotten some through thanks to pure saturation.
Oh I'm sure they could have gotten a few hits, but the kamikazes were not going to halt the invasion or do much to slow it down. So what if we had lost a couple of ice cream barges?
As for the point about firebombing, we were absolutely engaging in the practice and constantly ramping up the intensity of it. By 1945 America was sick of the war and wanted it to be over with, so if we were willing to drop a couple of atom bombs with zero clue what the long-term consequences would have been to the environment and the Japanese people then you bet your ass we would have turned the entire landscape into a hellscape of firebomb-fueled cyclones to speed things along and finish the war in 1946.
>so if we were willing to drop a couple of atom bombs with zero clue what the long-term consequences would have been to the environment
Hey, come on now - the Manhattan Project guys explicitly checked to see if a nuclear explosion would ignite all the hydrogen and burn the entire Earth down.
>Our calculations show the risk of this new weapon igniting the atmosphere and annihilating the human race along with all life on earth are...low
>Let's do this
My point is they would’ve just kept firebombing them until the cities aren’t viable for defending since the previous fire bombing campaign was very effective. The allies could’ve kept burning everything until they’re forced to move underground and then starve them out.
>genocide
I doubt anyone would’ve cared at the time.
According to the plans for Operation Downfall, it would have cost us half a million casualties, killed 20 million Japs, and lasted six months.
Didn't we estimate more casualties than that? We made like 1.5 million purple hearts in preparation for it.
Sounds pretty optimistic for fanactically loyal people in a very mountanous country.
More fire bombings. More leveled cities. Probably would have resorted to starving them out once it's realized how costly a ground occasion would be. Or maybe let the ruskies do it and watch them lose 2 million soldiers like it ain't no thing.
This. Basically everyone was trying to blockade the japs and it would’ve been hard for them just to keep their food and water since they had no control over the skies.
>acorn harvesting fails to offset poor rice harvests, widespread famine
>internal unrest means not all troops can be dedicated to fighting Allies
>conventional/fire/nuclear bombing inflicts mass civilian casualties
>Soviets don't really do anything but frick around on the mainland
>Soviets don't really do anything but frick around on the mainland
If the US agreed to give Japan to Stalin, you can bet your bottom dollar the Soviets would have invaded the Japanese mainland. In fact the US was worried they would. They had proposed plans to land on Hokkaido, but Truman was adamantly opposed.
The US was never going to give Japan to Stalin you fumb Vatnik wienersucker. And the Soviets had no boats or way to get pass the US air and naval blockade of Japan without getting their asses torn.
learn to read spastic
civilians were commuting suicide en mass because they were convinced that the Americans were going to torture and humiliate them (probably not unlike what they did to others, japs used to be brutal). I can't imagine an actual invasion being anything other than a blood bath.
Daily reminder they had something like a thousand planes, were training pilots to be kamikazes, and had enough fuel to give every plane a one way trip. Considering battleships would have had to be a few dozen miles off the coast, I don't want to imagine the casualties.
Kamikazes were not particularly effective and by 1945 we had become pretty damned good at taking them out. Those little wooden toys with wings packed with explosives that they were planning to fly would have been absolutely shrecked before they got close enough to do any damage to our battleships and carriers.
>would have been absolutely shrecked before they got close enough to do any damage to our battleships and carriers.
not when they're literally a stones throw away from the coast.
Sortie rate from land > Sortie rate from carriers
I vaguely remember that there was some plan for the first invasion wave to be a fake-out, it would actually be a mass of barges and shit loaded down with as much AAA as physically possible. I may have dreamt this though
>Kamikazes were not particularly effective
That was wartime propaganda. Their k/d ratio was pretty impressive for barely trained pilots.
At first. Then the USN adjusted.
>little wooden toys
Try 10,000+ airplanes.
>battleships and carriers
Kamikaze squadrons in preparation for Downfall were trained to prioritize troopships at the beaches, and approach over land so there'd be no forward AA screens to overcome.
>training pilots to be kamikazes
they resorted to kamikaze because it barely required any training. just get the machine off the ground and point it towards the biggest target they could see.
they were sending literal children up in those planes with minimal instruction so it was already suicide if they tried anything complicated like dog fighting or flying into AA with a conventional bomb.
If you stop thinking of them as teenagers pressed into suicide attacks and more like early gen guided missiles, and pretend that killing dozens of young adults to maybe blow up a 6" turret is a good exchange, kamikazes make sense. A sick sort of sense. And it probably would have worked during the landings, remember even a single troop transport sunk could kill more American troops than several hours of land combat.
>but the kamikazes were not going to halt the invasion or do much to slow it down.
Oh of course not. The Americans would probably have been dissuaded by Olympic and made to cancel Coronet, and by that time they would have had a dozen nukes available. If you think the Japanese whinge about Hiroshima...
>even a Kamikaze Pilot requires at least a month of training
Taking off is hard
For what i read, the plan was to no longer use the kamikazes on battleships or carriers, but on landing ships and troop transports to maximize US casualties. Those ships also were closer to shore and had less AA weapons, so the attacks would heve been easier.
There were also plans / prototypes of cheap wooden planes only able to fly short distances to crash into landing zones, targeting groups of infantry or vehicles.
With or without the Vatnik hordes getting involved? they were willing and able once they took Manchuria
>able
With what sea lift capabilities?
Prryhic victory for the Americans without the clearly defined "end" we actually got and Japan becomes NK tier on steroids that it never recovers from even if the USSR collapses.
>300k American casualties
>Japanese only spoken in hell
It’s kind of wild how much Americans hated the Japanese. My grandfather was a marine even after 70 years he still burned with hate for them.
weirddd yeahh. out of all the asians, they're the least worst
who are the worst?
My grandfather was attached to a group during the occupation that spent most of their time recovering, IDing, and burying Allied corpses from their POW camps. He rarely talked about it, but he hated the Japanese with a fury that I've never seen equalled.
My great grandmother was a nurse in the British Army in Burma and she was regularly treating recovered POWs. She also hated the Japanese until her dying day, she said the Japanese were completely inhuman.
If you think that is hatred, imagine the Chinese, who still think that Japan didn't get nuked enough.
because they were so cruel. my grandfather was pow in changi for 3 years, he hated japs til the day he died
Because of the betrayal, in a way the US liked the Japanese the most out of all the Asians, the US were the ones who got them to leave their shell, Japan adopted some of the same cultural hobbies and over all both countries were supposed to be good friends.
The US was the nation who got the closest to actually considering Japan a colony and there was a lot of respect there. And then Japan turns around and does all THAT to the Americans, the US were the ones who made them stop being isolationist fricksticks and that's how they repay the US?
There was also a bit of "We're the ones who unleashed these monsters on the world it's our job to put them down."
Pretty much imagine you befriended a very eccentric NEET, you dragged him out of the house, got him some nice clothes, taught him how to interact with the neghbors and realize that there's a larger world outside of their basement.
And then three years later they've become a gang lord, they murder your brother, and you find out they converted their basement into a rape dungeon for women they've been kidnapping.
> the US were the ones who got them to leave their shell
>the US were the ones who made them stop being isolationist fricksticks
Lol, wow about just leaving people alone in the first place? But noooooo, Mr Goldbergstein needs new markets. "We come to bring you the gift of civilization" was a joke 200 years ago, and still is.
Europe wasn't going to leave Japan alone and if they got to Japan first it would have been Opium war this time with more Opium. The US really only did it because it was a challenge, and the US was tired of stranded sailors getting killed by the Japanese because "Muh Holy Island".
What the US didn't realize was that Japan decided to jump on board the Imperialism game just like Europe not realizing that they were late to the party and Imperialism wasn't as cool as it used to be.
Like all the shit Japan was doing in China, if they had done it 50 years earlier most of Europe would have simply laughed along with it and asked if they could join in for the next Chinese killing contest.
Japan just didn't understand that exterminating native people for land wasn't cool anymore.
Only chinks and norks are mentally moronic and socially stagnant enough to genuinely believe total isolationism strengthens a country
You missed the part where the USA enacted an embargo on Japan because only White people should be allowed to have colonies.
No you missed the part where for some reason Japan is entitled to US oil
>the USA never started wars for oil
Anon…
Why are you changing the subject to bring up wars for oil? Again tell me why Japan was entitled to force the US to sell them Oil?
The US was hoping to get Japan to wise up and realize trying to conquer all of China was a stupid idea but Japan just was too dense.
The USA was just doing what we have always done by providing material support to China while they were at war with Japan, then feigning outrage when Japan finally struck back at us.
But we could have gotten Japan to surrender without nuking them or invading them. Hirohito was ready to surrender after Okinawa, but the fanatics in the Japanese government and Roosevelt’s demand for “unconditional surrender” that was continued by Truman resulted in thousands of more deaths.
While the US could have better communicated what they viewed as an unconditional surrender, the fact that the hardliners still wanted to fight after the 2nd nuke demonstrated that it wasn't just a one off miracle makes it very clear that the Japanese government wouldn't have rolled over, and nukes or invasion were still more humanitarian then letting the entire population of Japan starve themselves to death as they were already starting to do.
I still believe we could have gotten 90% of the surrender terms we eventually did without nuking or invading Japan. iirc it was only something like six major officials in the Japanese government who were hardliners for continuing the war at all costs.
It's possible, but honestly, the nukes weren't that bad compared to even the normal bombing campaign. They were flashy and effective as a show of power, but the US could have leveled the towns conventionally with normal explosives and firebombing anyway, and that overwhelming supremacy hadn't made any significant inroads into getting the 11s to realize the war was over except for the kicking and screaming. The mass starvation that was a result of the naval blockade and mining efforts almost certainly killed far more civilians then the nukes, and would certainly have continued to do so but that wasn't enough for the Japanese government to get over their banzai spirit and glorious deaths.
I don't mind Nips but it's easy to like them in peace time. One of my great grandfathers was tortured by the c**ts, they really are uncivilized during warfare. If I ever had to fight them you bet I'd be as ruthless as frick cause unlike Germans you know those frickers aren't gonna play nice if they capture you
>It’s kind of wild how much Americans hated the Japanese.
Not when you know how they operated.
you rape dogs
Imperial-era Japs were some twisted sons of b***hes.
Sure they're absolutely chill now, but it was only 80 years ago that they were doing some pretty fricked up shit all over east Asia. Though granted I think that any people can go feral under the right circumstances.
>Jap military was doing fricked up shit in China
>so therefore Americans were justified in nuking Japanese civilians
huh?
Yes.
My grandpa said that when they were sitting around the breakfast table and heard about the bombing of Hiroshima, great grandpa got really excited at the prospect that we would just keeping bombing them and vaporize literally every living Japanese
My Grandfather was on Saipan and years later my sister was up late getting a snack in the kitchen when he woke up freaked out grabbed his shotgun and almost killed my older sister in his own kitchen because he thought she was a Jap. And this was like 45 years later. He never really got over his experiences in the Pacific I don’t think.
ez win for the attackers as most of the defenders are armed with bamboo spears
id be more worried about how long it takes to secure the island b4 the soviets start taking the north
>178,097–186,680 machine guns
>2,232,505–2,468,665 rifles
>375,141 artillery pieces under 40mm
>4,742 artillery pieces 100mm and over
>japanese slowly wiped out/commit suicide to the last man, woman and child
>entire island lifeless
>allies withdraw
>years later, some japs stationed on random islands come back
>news says "empire retakes japan"
>history books written about how japan destroyed us in the war
>"atomic bombs are shit, america has lost every war they used them in"
> a country of no-gunz
they're literally moronic and proud of it.
a reason the Americans were in such a rush in the first place is because the Soviet Union were on their way to take credit and a share of the land.
not to mention it would have been split like Germany and Korea, and they didn't turn out great to say the least.
It would’ve been way worst than the eastern front brutality wise. Almost every inch of ground would’ve been fought as hard, if not harder than on Okinawa. And the continued fire bombings would have made the atomic bombings look like nothing
Honestly, my questions is what was the thoughts of the marines/soldiers/sailors before the surrender. Did they think/know they were going to fight a war of extinction against the Japanese? And how did they feel after the peace talks concluded?
>continue fighting in the malaria ridden hellhole called the western pacific against an enemy that would rather die than surrender
>or go home
based on conversations I had with a few WW2 vets (Marine and Veteran) they fully expected Operation Downfall to be an existential fight to the death.
One army captain I knew was the tip of the spear in Europe and was one of the first to come across concentration camps. Said after VE day he got marching orders to redeploy for the invasion of Japan, and he was dreading being forced by suicidal japanese to recreate the carnage there he saw in Europe. Said he was incredibly glad the war ended earlier then he expected.
Really nice guy. Became a pacificist after. He was infertile so they adopted a lot of black kids and raised them very well
Also said they preferred fighting SS since they didn't have to worry about taking prisoners or committing other crimes
He passed away in 2022. Love ya Capt Simpson
holy reddit
he landed at D-Day and fought across Normandy. what have you done?
Not dedicate my life to raising pickaninnies for one.
Enlighten me, /k/.
How this would get any worse than the European Theater of war or even equal? To my knowledge, this would be easier and there would be no requirement for a full scale invasion.
>Japan is surrounded in 4 different fronts, against resistance in China, Korea & south asia countries (allied reinforcements incoming); against USSR in the north; against US naval forces in the east and Commonwealth troops in the south
>No real way to gain any reinforcements
>No real way to get supplies, blockaded in every direction
>Their best men is either dead or captured (mostly dead)
>Only old people, invalids and children to block allied attacks
>Supplies running low each day and remember, they're surrounded, they cannot sustain the war for long
>Internal struggles could depose the emperor on some "mental issues" basis, forcing the new Japanese government to surrender (this was already being plotted by the time the first nuclear bombs fell on Japan)
Really, what the Americans could do is wait until Japan starves and there would be no need for a full scale invasion. Minor incursions, S&D AA equipments and strategic blockading is all they needed. They only forced this victory by using nukes to keep the USSR away and to show they're the new dominating global power.
That bullshit of an excuse to "spare valuable american lives" is getting old.
its almost like there's a natural chokepoint preventing a wide envelopment of superior numerical attacker
>how could an amphibious invasion against an enemy that expects your attack, has predicted your invasion sites and has incredibly defensible terrain go wrong?
Haha not like this had just happened or anything
>amphibious invasion
Never said that, but yeah, that's one of the unecessary actions.
>amphibious invasion of an island is unnecessary
The way the US planned? Yes, it was.
>people living with rice and fish only
They sperg out because fricking oil, they won't wait until they turn into a stone age country to surrender.
Your suggestion?
>they won't wait until they turn into a stone age country to surrender
what is the evidence for your assertion? there were japanese soldiers that refused to surrender for decades.
>what is the evidence for your assertion?
Common sense.
lol. lmao, even.
Funny, right? Common sense explains a lot.
"Common sense" is not a worldwide thing anon. What people refer to as common sense is primarily local knowledge, and in some cases values, that is assumed to be known/held by anyone, even if this varies wildly between regions. Common sense in the USA is not the same as that in Japan, let alone in this time period.
How would you plan amphibious assault?
>your suggestion?
Exactly what the US did
Basically Okinawa, but bigger.
The difference being that Japan was defended by 2.5 million regular troops. Not 75k like Okinawa.
Also "32 million" militia
>make what you will of that number.
In preparation for the invasion of Japan the US government minted 500 000 purple hearts. Of these 500K about 100K are still sitting in storage for use. So, basically, it would be bigger than every single American war since WW2 combined.
>and remember, US planners had consistently under-estimated friendly casualties throughout the war in the pacific
With this in mind and considering that the Brits were fricking rekd by the war and on their last legs, the US had no other meaningful allies AND war wariness was starting to set in at home. There is a very real chance that the Japs could have ground the US down to a negotiated settlement.
>There is a very real chance that the Japs could have ground the US down to a negotiated settlement.
Oh no, not le heckin negotiated settlement. Perhaps the US should have thought of that before provoking Japan.
>Perhaps the US should have thought of that before provoking Japan.
Anon...
>negotiated settlement
yeahh, i'm pretty sure stalin was starting to invade Japan and would've genocided them all if we didn't nuke them first
>war wariness was starting to set in at home
It wasn’t. American planners were worried that it would start to set in if the war dragged on, but in mid 1945 the home front was still committed to victory.
Idiotic take
>wait until Japan starves
So, umm, what was the magic technology possessed by the US that would prevent the japs from growing rice and catching fish like they always did? Firebombs don't do shit against rice paddies.
What makes you think we wouldn't have used chemical weapons?
The US hadn't used chemical weapons up until that point. What makes you think they would have used them?
Yeah, two nukes are way better I figure
The defoliant tech wasn't really rolled until the 50's in Malaya.
>what was the magic technology possessed by the US that would prevent the japs from growing rice and catching fish like they always did?
The battleship.
The Japanese were already dependent on food imports long before the war started. A naval blockade would reduce the food supply 20-30% on its own.
Japan was already starving because the US had shut down all shipping and it turns out that if you have an industrial sized population, you can't support it with pre industrial food collection methods, much less if you've also got all the young men tied up in the military instead of fishing/farming.
Logistics. Japan is basically a series of valleys, divided by mountains, with limited land access between them. At the time, Japan was also somewhat dependent upon imports from Korea to feed its population.
The US blockade, especially with the advent of the B-29 mining campaign, was seriously disrupting the flow of food and supplies within Japan. After the surrender, the US had to rapidly move and distribute a massive amount of food just to prevent a famine in the winter of '45. Absent that, Japan would have been in a really bad shape come Spring '46 and the final invasion.
It still would have been a bloodbath, of course, and while Americans were made of sterner stuff back then, it might have stressed their willingness to continue. Japan's expectation that it could win most of what it wanted at the peace talks simply by threatening to keep fighting was almost delusional, though. If the invasion was postponed or cancelled, and there were no nukes, then the firebombings and blockade would have continued.
Also, people tend to forget that Japanese commanders were ordered to murder all POWs and local civilians the moment the Home Islands were invaded; such an action would have made the American people *very* willing to contemplate actions like firebombing or even gassing every Japanese city.
Did you think that after half a decade of war the world was tired of World War 2?
You're saying the US should waste potentially years besieging Japan in the hopes that they'll eventually give out before the entire population starves to death.
There was no possible way for Japan to win after 1944, so forcing the war to continue on and on, was just going to drain everyone for no reason.
Making Japan give up was better for everyone, including the Japanese.
So you think their approach with two nuclear weapons was justified just because "they were tired"?
If you have an enemy cornered and dying, why would you waste years and years torturing them when you can simply put them out of their misery, that's what I don't get about you "We should have just starved Japan." You're saying we should have spent years low grade torturing the Japanese people to death while claiming that was the moral high ground choice. It boggles the mind that you actually think that was the better choice.
That we should waste millions of dollars and years of soldiers and sailors lives, just to babysit a nation that's slowly starving to death because it's the moral choice. Where is the morals?
I don't know why you seem to think two nuclear weapons was a more cruel and unusual punishment of two years to three years of watching an entire nation starve to death.
You really think deep down Japan wanted to continue the war? At that point they wanted to surrender but their own culture made them incapable, for in their culture if you're losing you die in a glorious last stand while your castle burns around you.
The two nukes blueballed that last stand completely. You will not be the last Samuari holding the gates against the barbarians, the barbarians will sit 20 miles away and hit you with a cannon ball that destroys your entire castle and all you can do is stand there impotently holding your sword.
It's how the US always was able to out play Japan from the times of the Black Ships. The very first introduction Japan had with the US was always "In a war between your culture and our firepower, our firepower wins." It's how we got our Black Ships to open Japan, they knew we had better shit than them and in the end we'd always win. All the two nukes did was remind them of that fact.
>they knew we had better shit than them and in the end we'd always win
insert laughing Vietcong here.
Two very different subjects, as long as North Vietnam was able to exist as a supply route and safe haven then the US could have killed millions of Vietcong, the NVA would simply replace them.
Just like if the US had never bothered to attack Japan nor did anything to constrain Japan's ability to supply itself then the war could have gone on for another five years.
Besides the US was never good at Colonial wars, there was never a real justification to fight them.They had a bad enough time with the Philippines insurgency that the US gave up any idea of making their a permanent colony and gave them an "In X amount of years we'll give you Independence"
It was justified because every other option would have seen more people die.
And before you go
>but muh civilians
That means more civilians, too, frickwit.
struggles could depose the emperor on some "mental issues" basis, forcing the new Japanese government to surrender
The most likely deposing of the Emperor would have been because he was too willing to surrender
How good do you reckon you could eat fruit loops with that spoon on top of the machine gun?
>We are now prepared to obliterate more rapidly and completely every productive enterprise the Japanese have above ground in any city. We shall destroy their docks, their factories, and their communications. Let there be no mistake; we shall completely destroy Japan’s power to make war.
>If they do not now accept our terms they may expect a rain of ruin from the air, the like of which has never been seen on this earth. Behind this air attack will follow sea and land forces in such numbers and power as they have not yet seen and with the fighting skill of which they are already well aware
truman was based
>I don’t want to see that son of a b***h in this office ever again. He didn’t set that bomb off, I did. This kind of sniveling makes me sick.” At another point Truman referred to Oppenheimer as that “cry-baby scientist.”
Physicist and physic majors are the biggest pussies to deal with
>mech engineering moron
that's because your autistic and truman was the kind of high functioning sociopath that all politicians are.
I am autistic, but only a homosexual would b***h and moan about something they made, i.e. physicists. They pretend to be smarter even though if they were actually smart, they would be a mathematician or engineer
oh so you've got an inferiority complex in addition to being autistic. Okay
>truman was based
Truman gave stalin eastern europe, that c**t can rot for all I care
didn't he also help give us Israel and allow the red Chinese to take hold as well as shit talking McCarthy who was later vindicated? His personal life makes him seem like a corrupt hothead
I'll never understand how Americans can shittalk Truman and Nixon.
Liberal media. I shit you not. People think Nixon is some ultimate evil as opposed to one of the better presidents of the past 100 years.
There's a strong argument that the people who eventually won against Nixon were in fact what they'd always accused Nixon of being.
There's a clear pattern that Nixon actually abandoned a good number of his initiatives once he realized that "the other side had a point", and kept the good ones like slapping the shit out of Breznev.
Meanwhile we have the lawyer who'd won against Nixon at watergate continuing their legacy by virtue signaling their way to a presidential candidacy (thank the LORD she lost, having the secretary of state that started Arab Spring holding the presidency would've been historical in every wrong sense of the word), using the media to propagate every single stupid little jolt that comes inbetween their three neurons and suppressing everything that gets in the way, and generally being about as observant as monkeys in snow nigeria regarding the state of the country.
That these same people can have their ideas all but continuously implemented for 12 years (even during an opposition presidency as their methods of media propagation all but bypasses government authority in dictating the right and wrong ways to approach corporate entities), yet still have the galls to pretend that they're entirely non-responsible for the current state of the country, is baffling. That they might've been wrong at one point has been deemed high heresy in the post Nixon dogma - in a way that Reagan's republicans never did. Bush Jr and his band of traitors, audacious as they were, never argued that their war ended up being wrong, only that it was started with better intentions. Meanwhile you have the clowns on TV refusing to even acknowledge that Obama's resolution to the 2008 financial crisis has led to a worse America, and that the only silver lining is that America still exists despite the 2008 financial crisis.
He was the frontman for the resistance against the boomer liberalism that took over the west. He was also scandalously exposed for corruption in way that people weren't really accustomed to at the time.
Basically he represented a lot of what was hated, so it was only natural his legacy suffered for it.
not big surprise
Stalin already had Eastern Europe by the time Truman took office, tell everyone how he was going to make Stalin give it back.
>We should backstab the soviets that outnumber us in Europe after we just spent 3 years telling them they're our allies and the country is war weary.
Truman wasn't an idiot.
We really should have though. We had nukes and the soviets had dick all
you know you guys aren't making the United States sound any better really than the Nazis or Japs in this hypothetical. Is this why people get so prickly about the Pacific Theatre 70+ years later?
Is this whole thread so some weaboo can b***h about Americans?
>55 posts
>28 IDs
Very likely.
glory to the emperor
Dipshit argument. The US was just fine in the European theater. Its kinda like, if you behave like a savage you get treated like a savage.
oh no a bunch of GI's got kirred doing their jobs in WW2 after deliberately trying to frick with Japan prior to Pearl Harbor horrible won't someone please think of the Communist Chinese lol
>behave like animal
>get treated like animal
Well well well, if it isnt the consequences of my own actions.
>consequences
Fitting really
>consequence: freedom
Yes, fitting indeed.
>freedom
homosexual moron cope.
>Gun laws
>self defense means potentially years of hell in court
>3-5 years jailtime for convicted pedophiles
>Waco, Ruby ridge, Bundy farm
>widespread homosexualry and degenerate behavior
>cant conceivably own a single modern issue US firearm without it being altered/mutilated
You don't have freedom, you have perpetual hell.
>you have perpetual hell.
Yeah that’s what I call having to read your dumbass posts on this board
Under your definition of Freedom no one on the planet will ever be free unless we're in a mad max anarchy.
>genocide your way across the Pacific and Eastern Asia
>prepare your country to fight until the very end
>get a taste of the consequences of trying to hold out in a losing war (being nuked twice and your front against the Soviets collapsing in the same week) and pussy out
>get mad whenever people discuss what would’ve happened if Japan didn’t pussy out
Nip sympathizers are truly moronic
You misunderstand. The United States tried to get the Japanese, both at a macro and micro scale, to surrender from the beginning to the end of the war. Civilian casualties on the islands weren’t so high because of American troops murderousness, but because of the population having high rates of suicide(or forced “suicide” in many grim cases). Japanese troops mostly decided to fight to the death or kill themselves.
The reason the expectation that an invasion of the home islands would end up genocidal is because the Japanese plan was to fight to the last person. Man, woman, and child.
Extremely bloody, Japs were willing to fight with sharpened sticks if it was needed. it would be like Vietnam but 10 times worse.
Downfall would have been crazy, but it would have produced two based outcomes
>hirohito would have been executed
>anime would have never happened
Never get involved in a land war in Asia.
The Jap population was already completely broken in terms of morale with the people openly disobeying the military government. In the last months of the war everyone who could was fleeing the cities and camping out in the countryside. An invasion of Japan would have been total anarchy for sure, with little actual coordinated resistance after the initial landing. The figures for expected casualty figures were completely over blown. Even if it did turn into a blood bath the US army was already planning on retaliating with liberal usage of poison gas to depopulate the rest of the cities.
>US army was already planning on retaliating with liberal usage of poison gas to depopulate the rest of the cities.
Bullshit.
>Bullshit
What? That you think two nukes are better as well?
I’m waiting for
to provide any evidence at all of his claim.
>That you think two nukes are better as well?
As any other option for a quick victory, which is not a shame don't get me wrong. But use it to "spare a gorillon of american lives" it wasn't necessary.
Nope, the Japs used poison gas against China, which under international law at that time meant China and it's allies (which included the US) were free to use poison gas against Japan carte blanche. This was a big factor in pushing for the usage of the atomic bomb, as it was thought to be more merciful than gassing. America's stockpiling of chemical weapons was also a big factor in convincing the Jap war cabinet to surrender.
This! But people here are not accustomed with hard to swallow truth and still thinks japs would murder like 500k americans like their coomer-fantasy animes.
yeah firebombing tokyo was pretty bad for everyone
Poorly. One might even say FDR was assassinated for inviting this moral hazard. The partition of Europe was too much already.
Without access to the sea, japan has shit all for its own natural resources. There would be no way to challenge the naval and air superiority of their enemy. Firebombing would get more intense and, minus nukes, the yanks might be interested in instead field-testing the fancy new sarin gas the nazis invented.
I love weebs that use the "US provoked Japan" line. Japan's attempt at empire building was entirely reliant upon Western countries giving them everything needed to do so, and when the West decided that maybe funding a genocidal Japanese empire wasn't the greatest idea weebs cry about "aggression".
With men like Ugaki in charge for Japan, pretty much any aircraft or vessel which could move was going to be used for Kamikaze attacks. While they also had their best armor and AT weapons in reserve.
The Americans would have had more atomic bombs ready to drop plus all their chemical weapons ready to use. Combined naval blockade by the Americans and British would continue to strangle Japan. And the Soviets would be trying to make their own landings in the North (enjoy that postwar tension)
I think the most sobering fact about the potential for Downfall was that the Purple Hearts minted for the invasion were handed out for the next fifty years.
Whatever happend, if it prevented the anime adaptation of Hoshi no Samidare it would have been worth it.
250k mutts dead
Bad. For everyone involved.
There would not be enough talent for AV, and for that we'll all be like Death to America
If the Japanese were absolutely serious about fighting to the bitter end and suiciding for their emperor the whole invasion would be tantamount to genocide. Luckily it never came to that because I don't think anyone could fathom the kinda horror that'd go down. I don't even want to think about it.
Do you think them Japs would've re-start their Operation PX plan should the Americans invade Honshu?
With that kind on defensive set up I'd assume there would have been a lot of rape.
Depends where they landed.
If they landed near Tokio the Japanese would have likely tried a massive last stand and after losing (like he did after seeing the nukes) the emperor, in order to save the capital, would likely would have negotiated similar peace terms.
If they invaded from the extremities it would likely have been a long bloodbath and Japan would look quite different with a lot of it's historical and cultural sites destroyed.
Ultimately the emperor had ultimately say on everything, Tojo was extremely loyal, however the emperor was shielded by the top brass from 80% of the negative news as they didn't want to commit suicide without fighting till the last men.
So as long as the emperor can perceive the situation being completely hopeless he would have likely have done the same as he did after receiving the nukes effect reports.
The worst case scenarios would be if the emperor ended up being killed before surrender, in that case the army generals would likely fight till the very end.
I am surprised Tojo didn't commit suicide.
considering the mainland invasion of a bombed out Germany took over a year and the mutts still dropped like flies to S mines? not well.
>Using anything but tac bombers
Shamefur dispray
Nukes being dropped over and over and over, while troops slowly advance through a sludge of Japanese homeland defenders.
Troops advancing through a nuclear wasteland?
Nuclear radiation only lasts for 2 days, doofus.
Well, that was the idea at the time atleast
imagine the war piccies we could have gotten of shermans rolling up on a mushroom cloud
That was the plan.
probably would have been better to just park the navy around the island and wait for them to get tired of being surrounded and see there's no point in resisting
>How would a mainland invasion of Japan have really gone?
I hear they're still handing out the purple hearts they made in anticipation of it to this day, so not well.
And that's assuming they didn't use nukes to establish a beachhead or anything.
I just think the nukes were a kino way to end the whole epic era
>type 11
nice
The Jap civilians would have surrendered right away. Only zogbots still believe propaganda from 70 years ago that starving kindergartners and grannies would have fought American GIs to the death in hand-to-hand combat. It's obvious this was merely the justification given for dropping nukes on civilians to flex on the USSR since Germany had already surrendered. If we nuked the Germans instead, then morons today would be saying that the German grannies and kindergartners would have fought to the death for the honor of tiny mustache man. If you dehumanize your enemy to the point where you consider their civilians and military part of the same hivemind, then it becomes easy to justify any atrocity.
#
>The Jap civilians would have surrendered right away
They didn’t on Saipan, or anywhere else American forces encountered them.
>flex on the USSR
If the United States had that kind of foresight in mid 1945 the world would be a better place
I'm not saying there wouldn't have been any civilian casualties, but the idea that the entire country was so fanatical that they were going to banzai charge us with pointy sticks until we genocided them all, but somehow dropping two big boombooms and a radio broadcast from the emperor magically made them docile is fairy tale stuff. Milgays in every country of that era were so detached from reality that they all assumed their civilians were master of gorilla warfare who would fight invaders to the death instead of just rolling over and accepting the new status quo like people always have in human history. The Nazis also did it when they sent little kids and grandpas to defend Berlin from the Russians and tried to implement "Operation Werewolf." If the Axis was winning the war and got nukes first, the Germans might have justified using them instead of invading Britain because of Dad's Army, and the Japs might have justified using them instead of invading the USA because of the anecdotal "Americans have rifles behind every blade of grass."
They were fanatically obedient. While all of the other nations had some form of civil defense, none of them had the mass suicidal attacks/suicides. Uncle Adolf and some of the other true believers wished that the German people were like that, but they had only been in power a relatively short time and there were enough separate cultural traditions that were separate from them in Germany .
>none of them had the mass suicidal attacks/suicides.
That was the USSR's entire strategy for repelling Germany.
No it wasn’t. Despite the memes and Stalin’s orders large parts of the red army surrendered or ran away.
>large parts of the red army surrendered or ran away
>but 5' tall Japanese grannies with sticks would have fought American muhreens to the death because muh samurai honor or some shit
Do you see why I'm calling BS on the whole Operation Downfall narrative?
>Do you see why I'm calling BS on the whole Operation Downfall narrative?
You don’t understand that different populations have different cultures, traditions, and societal structures that will cause them to behave differently? You are ignorant of the Japanese civilians who killed their own children and then themselves on the order of their emperor?
>The Jap civilians would have surrendered right away
Japanese trained women and children to charge landing grounds armed with bamboo spears. Justifying it either as
>They don't shoot, therefore we kill them
or
>They do shoot, we photograph this and show it to the population on how barbaric they are
So no, they wouldn't have.
Bloodbath. A lot of dead Americans and most of the adult Japanese killed and many of the kids also dead. The Japanese government would have thrown the entirety of the Japanese population against the Americans.
picrel
I read an article where data showed that Japan run out of fuel and was near capitulation before nuclear strikes. So bombing was just a quick test before the war ends.
It's several things at once, but yes:
1/ the non-moronic part of the Japanese government knew that it was all ogre but they needed an 'honorable' way out - it's pointless to keep fighting if you're just going to get vaporized from a distance, so this gave them the 'we fought well, but we should surrender now' argument they needed (even then they still had to fight off a coup from smoothbrains who wanted to keep fighting 'til the very last nip)
2/ the US was hell-bent on containing the USSR (same reason why they bothered invading Europe in the first place, to prevent a commie empire from Dublin to Tokyo) so it was imperative they took over the whole of Japan as soon as possible. See North/South Korea for what would probably have happened otherwise.
3/ the nukes needed field testing, so might as well do it then. In addition it let the USSR know that they shouldn't get any funny ideas of suddenly moving forward toward the Atlantic.
In retrospect, they should have just blockaded Japan until they surrendered from boredom and spent the nukes on the Russians instead. But hindsight is 20/20.
The Americans were also moronic by demanding "unconditional surrender" when the Japs tried to petition for surrender much earlier. To them, "unconditional surrender" implied that we would take their empire, divide and colonize Japan, execute the Emperor, ban Japanese culture, genocide the Japanese people, etc. Literally anything would have been on the table. Then we started nuking them, and the Japanese government said, "Frick they are gonna kill us all with their new weapon, so we might as well surrender anyway." Then the Americans were like, "lol jk about that unconditional thing," and we let them keep the Emperor, Hokkaido, Okinawa, gave them humanitarian aid, etc. in exchange for letting us build some bases and nominally disarming them. If we had told them that we just wanted to force them to be our new allies before the commies could take half their country like they did to Germany, then Japan would have surrendered months earlier.
The Japanese terms of surrender involved keeping their empire, their military, their government, no occupation of Japan, no war crimes trials, literally everything they wanted at the beginning of the war except maybe china. It would have been a surrender in name only and would have never been acceptable to the Americans.
Those terms were of course unreasonable, but my point is that we let them keep most of that stuff anyway. We didn't even try the Emperor for war crimes and let him stay on the throne. That's pretty much the equivalent of trying the Nazi high command for war crimes, but allowing Hitler to nominally remain dictator for life. We treated Japan with kiddie gloves after the surrender, which makes the nukes seem that much more pointless and excessive. Obviously the nukes were intended for Germany with Japan being an afterthought.
>my point is that we let them keep most of that stuff anyway.
We dismantled their empire, broke up their military, and restructured practically their entire society.
>We didn't even try the Emperor for war crimes and let him stay on the throne.
While more recent historical work has certainly revealed Hirohito’s involvement, he certainly wasn’t the driving force behind Japanese militarism.
>We dismantled their empire,
We let them keep everything they acquired prior to 1880 in exchange for letting us build some cozy bases.
>broke up their military,
In name only. They just call it JSDF now, and they just outsourced most of their defense to us anyway.
>and restructured practically their entire society.
We wrote a new constitution, but still allowed them to keep the Emperor on the throne.
>While more recent historical work has certainly revealed Hirohito’s involvement, he certainly wasn’t the driving force behind Japanese militarism.
The reason for Japanese militarism was because the IJA and IJN both acted as independent entities that reported directly to the Emperor rather than the civilian government of Japan. So our response to that was letting them keep the Emperor and military after we nuked civilians and restructured their government.
>We let them keep everything they acquired prior to 1880 in exchange for letting us build some cozy bases.
Which was an absolutely unacceptable proposition before the nukes.
>In name only. They just call it JSDF now, and they just outsourced most of their defense to us anyway.
Firstly, it took a decade for us to even allow them to form the sdf. Secondly, the JSDF isn’t even in the same realm as the military of Imperial Japan. It’d be like if you disbanded the us navy and replaced it with the coast guard.
>We wrote a new constitution, but still allowed them to keep the Emperor on the throne.
Pre and post war Japan are radically different countries, the Emperor remaining is minor.
>The reason for Japanese militarism was because the IJA and IJN both acted as independent entities that reported directly to the Emperor rather than the civilian government of Japan. So our response to that was letting them keep the Emperor and military after we nuked civilians and restructured their government.
We very much did not let them keep their military and the Emperor was reduced to a purely ceremonial role.
But you do realize that you would probably be saying the same thing about Germany today if we had dropped the nukes on them instead? We'd be talking about how Hitler wasn't actually that bad, and Hermann Goering was the real mastermind since Hitler was reduced to a ceremonial role after the war. All I'm saying is that the "unconditional surrender" justification for using nukes on Japan turned out to be bullshit.
>two wrongs make a right
Nah
Hirohito didn't have his own version of Mein Kampfe nor did he have as direct involvement in the Japanese government and war machine that did Hitler did. No, we wouldn't be sprouting what you're claiming here.
>Hirohito didn't have his own version of Mein Kampfe
That would have been the Shinto religion
>nor did he have as direct involvement in the Japanese government and war machine that did Hitler did.
He was literally the head of state as well as the commander of the IJA and IJN.
>That would have been the Shinto religion
Not sure if serious. State Shinto well predates Hirohito nor was it "let's go kill X" like Hitler's writings.
>He was literally the head of state as well as the commander of the IJA and IJN.
Hirohito wasn't directly intervening in military orders like Hitler nor was he involved in actual "attack Y" politics as Hitler. On paper he had a lot of power but in practice he had even less involvement than the POTUS does.
>"let's go kill X" like Hitler's writings.
I'm pretty sure Mein Kampf didn't actually tell Germans to go out and kill israelites.
>On paper he had a lot of power but in practice he had even less involvement than the POTUS does.
So were Japs fanatically loyal to the Emperor, or was he just a powerless figurehead with no influence?
>So were Japs fanatically loyal to the Emperor, or was he just a powerless figurehead with no influence?
Both and neither. The Japanese were fanatically loyal to the idea of the emperor, as opposed to the emperor himself. What I mean by that is that Hirohito was not a particularly captivating, inspiring, or charismatic figure in and of himself.
>powerless figurehead with no influence
There is a difference between power and influence. Hirohito had very little power but extreme amounts of influence. He couldn’t force the people running the army or navy to do anything* but his opinion still mattered to them as long as it didn’t contrast too much with their own. This was convenient because he mostly just agreed with whatever they told him. Right up until the decision to surrender.
*how a pre-war power struggle would have turned out is debated
Your entire post is an oxymoron and proves the mental gymnastics required to justify everything the USA did to Japan before, during, and after the war.
what did the US do to japan after the war other than rebuild it and shower it in mercy?
>We had to nuke tens of thousands of women, children, and elderly people because they were so fanatically loyal to the Emperor that they would have fought to the death anyway.
>That Emperor though? He's pretty cool guy who dindu nuffins. We should let bygones be bygones so he can keep his job lol
you're just exposing how little you know about anything as it relates to the pacific war
I am left to conclude that you serve no purpose in this thread by posting
I called out your mental gymnastics and your response is to just claim that I'm stupid. My homie how hard is it to just say that the nukes were excessive and Hirohito should have at least been forced to abdicate? You're sitting here defending some dumbass shit that happened in a war that ended over 70 years ago.
nta but I disagree that the nukes were excessive- look at North Korea, THAT was bombing in excess.
Actually frick it, I wish they were hydrogen nukes instead because imo they are prettier to view from afar.
Alright and if the nukes were absolutely necessary then we should have made Hirohito bear responsibility for them. Instead we now have this moronic political relationship where Japan is the USA's client state, but the President still bows to their Emperor. Bush Sr. even called Hirohito a "friend and ally" at his funeral lmao
Welcome to international relations.
You're dumb, and I see no reason not to insult you for being dumb.
What about my post is an oxymoron? There are differences between hard and soft power, as well as between institution and individual.
>We had to nuke tens of thousands of women, children, and elderly people because they were so fanatically loyal to the Emperor that they would have fought to the death anyway.
Correct.
>That Emperor though? He's pretty cool guy who dindu nuffins. We should let bygones be bygones so he can keep his job lol
When did I, or anyone else in this thread for that matter, say that Hirohito was blameless? I said that >Hirohito’s involvement was certainly minimized for political reasons
Not that he was not involved. I also pointed out that there are disputes as to what Hirohito could have done pre-war but we’ll never know because he chose to do nothing.
There are multiple people arguing with you.
>My homie how hard is it to just say that the nukes were excessive
They were not excessive
>Hirohito should have at least been forced to abdicate
He probably should have been, and the numerous Japanese war criminals who managed to slink away with American help should have been hanged.
If the nukes weren't excessive then we should have also used them in Korea. Heck we should have used them in Afghanistan instead of staying there for 20 years.
>If the nukes weren't excessive then we should have also used them in Korea
The only reason they weren’t was due to fears that it would kick off World War III.
>Heck we should have used them in Afghanistan instead of staying there for 20 years
There would be no target to use them on. It would turn the United States into a global pariah. Even after 2 nukes and more firebombings it took an occupation lasting longer than 20 years.
>It would turn the United States into a global pariah.
So you're saying that nukes were good then but bad now? Why are Afghan civilians more human than Japanese civilians?
>So you're saying that nukes were good then but bad now? Why are Afghan civilians more human than Japanese civilians?
I never said either of those things.
You said the USA would become a global pariah if we used nukes in war today. If nuking civilians is such a bad thing to do now, why wasn't it bad back then?
Any nation that used a nuclear weapon on any target today would become a global pariah. Be that a city, a military base, a enemy fleet, or even an air burst over open ocean to serve as a threat. Nuclear proliferation has changed the stakes.
So basically we only decided it's morally wrong now because we don't want someone else to do it to us.
What does morality have to do with this? The nations of the world don’t want a large thermonuclear exchange, and fear any sort of use will break the seal.
Afghanistan doesn’t have nukes though. Do you really think China or Russia would have retaliated against the USA for nuking Afghanistan?
>any country is willing to tolerate and accept the use of nuclear weapons in a war of aggression
Ukraine doesn't have nukes either, and yet king monke understands that using them would be a very bad idea despite losing the conventional war. America steam rolled the conventional war and could have done literally everything that a nuke would do short of complete genocide with conventional explosives.
>putting an end to the most destructive war in human history
>playing world police
One of these might justify more heavy handed measures.
>implying the war wouldn't have ended unless we used nukes
We could have ended the Afghan War in 2001 if we used nukes.
you are some kind of moronic russian tier motherfuker
>But you do realize that you would probably be saying the same thing about Germany today if we had dropped the nukes on them instead?
I wouldn’t be because the circumstances would be entirely different. Unless you’re arguing that everything we know about the governments of Imperial Japan and Nazi Germany is fiction.
>We'd be talking about how Hitler wasn't actually that bad, and Hermann Goering was the real mastermind since Hitler was reduced to a ceremonial role after the war.
Your seem to be implying that Hirohito held the sort of control over Japan that Hitler held over Germany. This is not the case. While Hirohito’s involvement was certainly minimized for political reasons, none of the revisionist work since his death indicates him having any sort of totalitarian control.
>All I'm saying is that the "unconditional surrender" justification for using nukes on Japan turned out to be bullshit.
All I’m saying is that you’re wrong and it didn’t.
>two wrongs make a right
Neither
or
make that argument.
Keeping Hirohito was a necessary evil. You see, throughout the entire war, no Japanese unit had ever surrendered en masse; individuals had surrendered or were incapacitated and captured, but no officer had ever ordered his men to lay down their arms.
It was believed (probably correctly) that the only person on the planet who could issue an order to the IJA and IJN to cease fighting and surrender... was Hirohito himself. Anyone else would likely be ignored, at least by most commanders.
So, regardless of stated war aims and whatever the US and its allies might really want, quietly offering Hirohito a secret "golden parachute" for himself as the Emperor was the best deal the US could make. And even then, Hirohito wasn't interested in surrender until Nagasaki bluffed him into believing US propaganda that there were hundreds of nukes ready to go, and that there was a good chance that so many Japanese would die in atomic fire that the remainder would rise up and overthrow him. And whether it was from fear for his own skin, his son's life, or being the guy who lost the family dynasty, that was enough to make him fold.
I found it funny how mind broken everyone was on okinawa when they realized the americans weren’t going to eat them, hours after they smashed their family members with a rock.
Honestly I think a big factor in how bloody Operation Downfall would have been is how effectively Japan's government could keep civilians believing all the propaganda about cruel "American devils". Saipan and Okinawa are indeed full of tragic suicides by terrified civilians, but there's also tons of accounts that show that most Japanese civilians were more than willing to surrender if they could be convinced that they wouldn't be harmed. And most US soldiers were far from the savages as claimed by the propaganda; the Japanese army was the pot calling the kettle black there.
Wasn't there a particularly sad story where a sister drowned her baby brother, but couldn't kill herself so she tried to get killed by the Americans only for her to get evacuated then broke down when she saw a bunch of kids eating chocolate the americans gave them.
Millions upon millions of american ejaculations.
56572020
Okay you lying homosexual you got your (you)s now you’re just spamming.
>“There is a man alone, without family, without children, without God....He builds legions but he doesn’t build a nation. A nation is created by families, a religion, tradition: it is made up out of the hearts of mothers, the wisdom of fathers, the joy and the exuberance of children. An all-swallowing State, disdainful of human dignities and the ancient structure of our race, sets itself up in place of everything else. And the man who, alone, incorporates in himself this whole State, has neither a God to honour nor a dynasty to conserve, nor a past to consult."
But enough about Churchill...
>Churchill
>Start war
Nah, that was Chamberlain. The worst of the appeasers, and even *he* reached a point of getting fed up with Hitler's shit.
The war was already pretty much over by the time Churchill became prime minister. He was just the one who chose to unnecessarily prolong it and drag the USA into it at all costs.
If by that you mean he convinced the USA to supply the USSR with enough gibs to zerg rush Germany at the cost of half of yurop then sure.
Churchill was incredibly worried about the Soviets and tried to get Roosevelt to take a harder line with them. Unfortunately Roosevelt didn’t listen.
Roosevelt was a commie, but Churchill was a bloodthirsty drunkard who was hellbent on destroying Germany. I'm not saying Hitler did nothing wrong, but Hitler obviously didn't want to prolong the war with Britain if he allowed them to retreat from Dunkirk. The war would have ended in June 1940 if Churchill didn't insist on defeating Germany.
The entire reason for the war was that Germany invaded Poland, but the USSR invaded Poland at the same time. At the end of the war, Poland was completely under control of the USSR. So basically Churchill exchanged two empires (Germany and USSR) controlling yurop for two empires (USA and USSR) controlling half the world at the cost of his own empire because of Poland which actually didn't matter in the end.
Had Hitler not been a fool, and just settled for the gains already made, his own empire could have survived. Perhaps even found way to gain outside support as a counter to Stalin.
Instead he chose to go back on his every word. Then get upset when no one wanted to hear anything else, instead focusing on crushing him. Then he just kept opening new fronts and making more people pissed at him.
I wouldn't say Stalin was a genius, but he knew when to keep his mouth shut.
nah, he was fricked the instant he declared war on the USSR and the US in the same fricking year
Invading Poland solidified Britian & France against him. And it gave the USSR a direct border with German territory. Even though Poland had been staunchly anti-Communist. It put Germany in a rough position.
Then losses at Norway wrote off any possibility of a successful invasion of Britian. Meaning that despite impressive success in France, Germany had an enemy it could not defeat...then it went ahead and brought the Soviets and Americans in on things. Which was just doubling and tripling down on bad decisions.
germany already agreed to that border, since the USSR was in a partnership to invade and conquer eastern europe between them
to be frank, hitler was an idiot on all fronts
Stalin and Hitler were always going to betray each other. It was just a question of who stabbed whom in the back *first*. Stalin thought that he had plenty of time for the Brits to wear him down first.
He was wrong; they were *both* as foolish as they were monstrous.
Shitler did some dumb shit, but all countries that engaged in terror bombing were morally wrong anyway. I don't understand why people are still trying to justify one side vs the other 70 years later. People act like you're pissing on grandpa's grave if you dare say that incinerating civilians who were already living under oppressive dictatorial governments wasn't a very cash money.
Terror bombing was bad and should not happen again. But given the horrific nature of WW2, the only thing the Allies were guilty of was being more effective in their bombing campaigns. Arthur Harris is psychotic in some ways but he was entirely correct in saying Germany should not escape unscathed when it bombed many others.
Let that cruelty be a reminder of how far humanity can sink and let us hope we never hit that low again.
remember this when people start shit about the allies striking military production with bombing
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oradour-sur-Glane_massacre
>Nazis killed civilians so we're going to teach them a lesson by killing civilians too
The Allies often used the excuse of destroying war production or train yards as a reason to drop large numbers of bombs on civilian cities knowing that many innocent people would be killed. Obviously Germany did the same thing, but it's asinine to say that it's not morally reprehensible just because Germany did it first.
you're simply not reachable, this must be what it's like for an animal to witness a mutated offspring that won't survive
>killing civilians is a good thing because... IT JUST IS, OK?!
>but not when Germany does it just so we're absolutely clear here
>attempts to bomb industrial facilities that were surrounded by civilian targets were messy due to the relative inaccuracies of the time
>this is the same as intentionally targeting civilian populaces
Anon you do know that those "industrial facilities" were full of civilians, don't you? When you equate the civilian population of a country with their military, then anything becomes morally justifiable in war.
>targeting a bomb factory that has people working there is the same as blowing up someone's house and hoping he was working the bomb factory and not the bread factory
And that bomb factory is right next to the bread factory and people's houses, so dropping 4k lbs of bombs in the general vicinity of the bomb factory has the same result anyway.
Shouldn't build your bomb factory downtown then, but that's still not intentionally targeting civilians.
Actually, you're even dumber then I thought. It's not even about morals, it's about efficiency. Killing a random dude is a waste of a bomb since even if he was working in wartime production, which is pretty low odds to begin with, he's easily replaced by the start of the next shift. Blowing up an factory means that production is stopped until it's rebuilt.
Do tell what target the US could have blown up with a nuke that would have put a stop to an insurgency, and no copping out with "just glass the entire country".
>Killing a random dude is a waste of a bomb since even if he was working in wartime production, which is pretty low odds to begin with, he's easily replaced by the start of the next shift. Blowing up an factory means that production is stopped until it's rebuilt.
Obviously but don't act like killing civilians is only bad when the Germans did it if you're going to justify bombing cities.
>and no copping out with "just glass the entire country".
Of course not. There's no need to nuke the countryside. Just glass all the cities since that was apparently ok to do to Japan and Germany. Why shouldn't it be ok to do now?
>Just glass all the cities
What strategic targets were within these Afghan cities?
The people of course. The same targets that were in Hiroshima, Nagasaki, Tokyo, Dresden. etc. If it would have saved just one American life then who gives a frick?
>Hiroshima: headquarters of the southern army
>Nagasaki: The four largest companies in the city were Mitsubishi Shipyards, Electrical Shipyards, Arms Plant, and Steel and Arms Works, which employed about 90 percent of the city's labor force, and accounted for 90 percent of the city's industry.
>Tokyo: capital of Japan, headquarters of its military, large amount of arms manufacturing
>Dresden: communications and logistics hub for the eastern front
No Afghan city held anything close.
Yeah but if we could have achieved our goals without invading by using nukes then it would have been worth it. :^)
We couldn’t have so it’s immaterial.
>Obviously but don't act like killing civilians is only bad when the Germans did it if you're going to justify bombing cities.
Your inability to understand the difference between civilians dying as a result of a strike on a military target and intentionally trying to kill civilians is impressively autistic. Terror bombing is frowned upon it's both pointless and morally indefensible. Targeting production facilities can lead to the end of hostilities which saves lives in the long term by ending the war quicker even if it sucks for the recipient who was dumb enough to build a home next door to the bomb factory and hasn't surrendered yet.
>Just glass all the cities since that was apparently ok to do to Japan and Germany. Why shouldn't it be ok to do now?
The US could have glassed every Afghan city with conventional weapons without any real effort. You have yet to explain why this would have done anything to change the course of the conflict since the US won literally every military engagement in a rather decisive manner.
>military target
A factory isn't staffed by the military.
>You have yet to explain why this would have done anything to change the course of the conflict since the US won literally every military engagement in a rather decisive manner.
And here comes the cope lol
>the US should have nuked Afghanistan
>why?
>BECAUSE THEY DID IT IN JAPAN
Seethe.
>you can't target tanks until they roll off the production line, but then it's okay because a soldier's life is worth less then a civilian who made it
Strong argument, champ.
Is a tank that's 50% complete a military target? How about 80%? Are there are military ATF guidelines about at what percent I'm allowed to drop a bomb on a tank or not?
This doesn’t have to do with you all really but the funniest take on this is from the breadtube left. Where the population of fascist regimes are active participants who can’t be whitewashed , except in regards to allied strategic bombing. Then they’re just poor innocents trying to survive.
Wasn’t that retaliation/reprisal for the French burning a captured German alive as a show?
I can accept that no country is perfect and all have a myriad of sin to their name. That does not render them all morally equivalent in my eyes, nor does it prevent me from believing that one side was just or at the very least more just.
Not really. Socialist governments eventually run out of money, and the Nazis wrecked their economy with their foolishness by 1938 (e.g., they had a coal shortage in cities at the same time that coal mines were running out of places on-site to store coal). They *had* to keep conquering countries and looting them in order to keep the shiny facade that was their industrial and military might going. They were like an addict, always justifying whatever it took to get the next high.
in typical socialist fashion you need more of other peoples' things to keep working
I like how the partnership between Germany and the Soviet Union always gets ignored by those saying Germany were some "defenders of Europe". If not for Barbarossa, Britain not have allied with the Soviets. They would have been bombing them.
tikkabytes - vishnu
1 million American dead, at least 5 million dead Japanese. Soviets probably invading through Hokkaido leading to Japan being divided like Korea while all of Korea would be controlled by the Kim's. Probably no post war economic boom, smaller baby boom generation because less vet's returning home to father them. Less resources for the Marshall plan so poorer Europe post war.
~1 million allied causalities projected, I would think that includes british and australians as well as americans
I'm not sure. he was a farm kid from Minnesota born in the 20s so I would assume he was racist before
>How would a mainland invasion of Japan have really gone?
The Chinese would have airdropped plague infected bugs on Japanese cities first, and then they would send in their troops, rape the women and little boys, force the men and little girls into slavery, and commit war crimes
Why didn't the japs ass frick Russia when they had the backs turned fighting Germany? They could have secured some valuable land and resources if it went well
What happened to the families of convicted Japanese war criminals? I know Shinzo Abe became PM and recently died, but what about the brothers and sisters, the sons and daughters of the Army minister and Navy minister? Also, kind of surprised that some of the higher ranked IJN people got out or were never prosecuted, like Admiral Kirito who lost his entire fleet in Leyte Gulf and was fired.
God, I wish there'd been a nip sniper on the beach to put one into McArthur's dome on that photo op. Would have made Korea so much less of a clusterfrick.
>Muh McArthur failed korea
It was Truman's fault
>yfw you ask what kind of MG you get to defend your prefecture with and they tell you it's "stripper clip fed"
i was born long after WW2 and i still despise those dirty nips