Wow. That’s a lot of nukes.
Having read Downfall by Richard Frank a few years ago, I remembered that there were more bombs in the pipeline, but I thought it was just 2 or 3. Amazing how blasé they were about nuking a nation that was already on the brink of mass starvation, and whose cities were largely burned out with conventional bombing.
Wow.
Nukes at that point weren’t terror weapons. They were just really big bombs.
And the alternative to using them would mean sending in our own troops. Japan may have been suffering a bit with starvation and some of their cities had certainly been firebombed, but the Japanese had also fought to the bitter end over every little inch of land in the Pacific, and showed absolutely no signs of letting up. Estimates varied a bit, but generally the expectation was that a conventional attack on Japan would have resulted in at least 500,000 and maybe up to a million dead U.S. soldiers.
In other words, your choice is to use your really big bombs or you can lose over twice as many soldiers attacking Japan as you did during the entire European side of the war.
You think saving the lives of a million men is a blasé choice?
Anxiety over the use of nuclear weapons didn’t really start until the Cold War really kicked into gear in the 1950s.
“Blasé” better describes Japanese military leaders who looked forward to “100 million smashed jewels” (death of the entire civilian population*) defending the homeland.
*the actual population at that time was around 70 million.
The Japanese military was also developing plans on how it would deal with the growing food shortages. Those plans basically involved mass murder. Enemy POW’s would be the first to be killed off. After that, priority would be given to feeding people who contributed to the war effort; troops and workers. When food got short, everyone too old to fight or work would be asked to kill themselves (or killed if they didn’t). So would wounded troops and anyone else who was disabled. The next group to be sacrificed would be Japan’s children.
When people talk about the alternative of ending the war via a blockade, this is what that alternative would have led to.
The failure to make England submit was the turning point very early on. After taking over so much territory quickly Germany left itself with a logistical nightmare and the Battle of Britain showed they weren’t able to focus resources on an obtainable goal. I’m not sure there was any chance of German victory or long term success while needing to defend so much territory. Perhaps if they made the right deal with England they could have maintained a political stalemate.
That’s true, but in my opinion, as was mentioned upthread, the only real chance to make such a deal was with the capture of the BEF at Dunkirk.
The Germans failed in doing that, and there was then a straight line to the BoB and an ongoing second front.
I think from that point on, Hitler’s vision of sweeping Europe before him was fatally compromised.
Sure, he could have had better outcomes than what happened but I see no real way that things play out in line with his grand design. I don’t think his big victory was ever going to be possible.
Yeah I remember reading ANY idea of Nazi prolonging WW2 to give them more time to win was a moot point since the fact the American atomic bomb was eventually going to exist out a ticking countdown clock to the eventual atomic destruction of Germany.
Even if there was a scenario where England fell but Germany still decided to declare war on the USA when Japan attacked Pearl Harbor, by 1946 the United States would still not only have the atomic bomb, but now the ability to drop it from bases in New York/Canada via the B-36 Peacemaker.
When Germany conquered France they took the V3 plans from them. Of all the vengeance weapons it was the only one easily constructed and defended in the early years. Germany had the fighters to defend against bombers early on so it would have fallen to the Mosquito for precision bombing and that entered the war in late 1941. Had they focused on that weapon It’s highly likely they could have forced the UK to sue for peace.
If the UK withdraws from the war there is no practical location for US and Canada to leverage production capacity. It may have also delayed or prevented the Tizard Mission which takes out the major advantage of airborne radar in 1942 as well as the computer used to process encoded Enigma messages.
This puts all the war production facilities of Europe under German control. Hitler can do away with all the other vengeance weapons and focus their vastly superior aircraft and tanks on Russia.
Those just didn’t exist, and in no plausible world could they. Their tanks were worse than the Russians’, and their aircraft were only suitable for ground support and local superiority, not strategic purposes (as shown in the BoB). They have no way of getting to the Russian industrial base in the Urals.
Tooze estimates the Germans had about 1/3 of the resources necessary to defeat the Soviets; that’s men, weapons, minerals, oil - everything. Generously allow them a 50% increase in those (except for men) in your scenario, and they still lose.
Germany entered the war in tank deficit due to WW-1 war restrictions and quickly upgraded to very credible machines. They upgraded significantly on the fly.
The tanks were part of a fighting technique that did significant damage to Russia and that was in a 2 front war. If England is removed then the US has no base of operation or way of supplying Russia with the equipment they needed to survive. This makes it a 1 front war.
Considering the fact that Russia lost 15% of it’s population to a multi-front German war it would have gone badly if it was a 1 front war. Germany only needed to stop Russia from moving it’s tank factory and it would have cut the legs out from under them. Without the UK they would not have had the support of the allies which was a considerable amount of hard assets.
Oh yes? How do they do that?
I think we’ve already talk about the pros and cons for this and I just don’t see how that works at all.
There’s just no way Germany could have recovered from its two massive own goals: 1) invading the Soviet Union, and 2) declaring war on the U.S. after Pearl Harbor, a wholly unnecessary decision that made defeat of the Axis inevitable.
The actual quote is usually translated as “100 million shattered jewels.”
Historians have two thoughts about the actual number.
First, in Japanese, 100 million is 一億, ichi oku. They don’t go thousand, millions, billions, they have a diffent way of counting.
Ichi oku, is often used for “a very large amount” or “everything”, so one thought is that it just means “all the Japanese.”
The other thought is that the population of Japan + Korea + Taiwan in 1940 was pretty close to 100 million and the intent of the original speech was to include everyone. Around that period was when they were really pushing Korea, especially, and Taiwan were part of Japan. That’s a huge other topic.
Well, that makes all the difference. 
One of the Japanese slogans during the war was “100 million advancing like a ball of flame”.
Their subjugated populations would probably have preferred not to be included in that number.
They were expecting to use up the lives of occupied Koreans and Taiwanese too
I simply can’t imagine a scenario where Germany manages to conquer and occupy the Soviet Union.
In a one front war, maybe Germany could have caused enough damage to the Soviet Union to disrupt Stalin’s regime, leading to the collapse of the USSR and even territorial gains in former Soviet states. But even with Germany’s full focus to the East, I can’t imagine them being much more successful than Japan was in China. The bigger the bite of the USSR they manage to take, the sooner they’ll choke on it.
I don’t know enough about the situation around Dunkirk to disagree with your assessment that it was the earliest event that ended the chances of German victory. It may have been the start of the pattern I see of a Germany’s failure to form and execute plans that integrate and focus their resources against forces prepared to fight back. I can’t break down every detail involved, hubris was involved, and on both sides it was a different type of war that would lead to many mistakes, but the lack of understanding of their own resource limitations made a German victory a long term impossibility if they remained at war.
Do you have a cite for that?
It’s been a while since I looked specifically at the planning for the way, and I don’t recall this.
My impression was that the POWs were to be killed as retribution. Many times, Japanese leaders ordered atrocities to be committed against Allied soldiers to make it impossible for their own to consider surrendering.
The Japanese military was already simply taking the necessary food for their own and allowing the civilians to starve, so I don’t know if they needed to kill the civilians who were pressured to commit suicide rather than surrender anyway.
And the millions and millions of civilians in the lands occupied by Japan who were dying of starvation and disease.
I think your additional point there is spot on. The German forces that swept across Europe had time and means to capture the British forces had the high command planning been better. It was an open goal.
The fact that they didn’t handed a precarious Churchill and the wounded British public a story that could be spun as a victory of sorts and so give them a reason to fight on.
Of course such a counterfactual relies on a lot of other elements playing out but seeing as Hitler never really had a hope of winning the BoB or invading Britain, once Britain has the will to fight on it ensures a second front that he can’t ignore.
Hard to say that it is the one thing that definitely sealed his fate but for me it was the earliest concrete moment that ensured Hitler couldn’t “win” in the way that he intended.
Though, to your point, it is possible that even with the capture of the BEF the Nazi military planning deficiencies may have tripped them up anyway and had they eliminated such screw-ups then potentially, even with Britain fighting on, they could have got much closer to the type of victory Hitler desired.
Isn’t there a saying about wars often being won by the side making the least mistakes? If there isn’t, there should be.