Failed in the sense that they would have killed a lot of the Allied soldiers? Probably. Failed in the sense that the Allies would reconsider the invasion, and negotiated terms more favorable to the Japanese military government. I doubt that very much.
As mentioned, all the Allied plans for the invasion included estimates of Allied casualties in the hundreds of thousands. Yet they were still planning on going ahead with the invasion. I don’t think they would have been surprised if their estimates were correct. Certainly not surprised enough to be discouraged.
The Normandy campaign cost over 220,000 Allied lives. But the Allies didn’t stop until they were in Paris.
As mentioned in the cite, the Japanese had committed almost everything they had in the defense of Kyushu. Once Kyushu was accomplished, the Japanese had nothing in reserve. It would certainly have been a bloodbath. But after the bloodbath, even if the Japanese populace (of starving old men, women, and children) had been inspired to fight to the death for the Emperor, how were they going to do it? Bamboo spears, against heavily armed GIs, who had learned that there were no non-combatants?
Which was expected.
If the Japanese die at three or four or five times the rate that Allies die, it is not going to take months before they run out of defenders.
WADR, this sounds like a repetition of one of the basic mistakes made by Imperial Japan even before they started the war.
They thought that America was weak and soft, and could be intimidated. That was the basis for their strategy for the war in Pacific - grab as much as they could, and count on the Americans to back down. It didn’t work.
A victory where you lose five or ten times as many soldiers and aircraft and ships as the enemy is not much of a victory. If the idea is a war of attrition, the Japanese were going to lose, sooner rather than later.
The advantage of the A-bombs was that it made an invasion unnecessary. Assuming you are correct, and the Allies had six more bombs.
Six more Japanese cities cease to exist. Next month, another city disappears from the Japanese map. The month after that, another city.
I’ll nitpick Wikipedia there. Radio proximity aka VT fuses for 5" guns were introduced to combat by the USN in early 1943. By the time organized ‘special attack’ operations by the Japanese started in late 1944 they were standard. They weren’t used exclusively but that was on purpose. Doctrine was to fire some time fused shells, 1 in 4 was a rule of thumb, to give feedback on the fire control solution, at least in longer range fire controlled by ships main AA directors capable of generating time fuze settings. That is, if the time fuse shells were going off far from the target that showed that the fire control solution was wrong and the VT fuse shells are also far off. Sometimes by 1945 individual 5"mounts were directed in short range fire by 40mm gun directors, which had no ability to calculate time fuze settings, then they’d fire just VT.
VT fuzes for hand loaded 3" AA guns and light cruiser 6" main guns were available in 1945 and not much earlier but those were smaller in number compared to 5", also lacked sophisticated AA fire control in both cases. 40mm proximity fuzes only appeared in the 1970’s. The USN’s rush project was to replace the 40mm with an autoloading version of the 3" firing VT only, the first production ones weren’t complete till late 1947 (that’s an error in wiki article on the 3"/50 saying introduced from 1946), might have been accelerated if war continued but not a major factor.
So, there wasn’t much technological advancement in USN AA gunnery between the appearance of widespread kamikaze tactics in late 1944 and a prospective invasion of Japan in late 1945. There were more 40mm mounts per ship though, in particular special programs sacrificing 20mm and removing some or all torpedo tubes from destroyers to free up space/weight for more 40mm mounts.
And by late 1945 the carrier based TBM-3W airborne early warning a/c would have been available, by early '46 in actual history landbased PB-1W’s (B-17’s) became operational, which might have been accelerated. Their APS-20 radar was ahead of its time, the British used it in the AEW version of the Shackleton until 1991.
But generally the likely qualitative difference in kamikaze threat by November 1945 would have been decline on Japanese side. A larger % of the available ca. 10,000 operational Japanese a/c at the end of the war were non-combat types, most of the ~2500 special attack sorties before that were using combat types, sometimes even modern ones*, though also some non-combat types. Pilot resources also worse, a lot the actual special attack missions were by pilots at least partly trained for conventional operations, sometimes fairly experienced men. It’s a myth that they all minimally trained. But the larger number in invasion of Japan would mostly have been minimally trained. Too little fuel for anything else; the fuel shortage could even have limited suicide operations directly.
On land aspect I’d note that the size of Kyushu as a target cut both ways. It held a large IJA force bigger on paper than US attacking force would have been, but large area also meant the defending force had to be more dispersed to defend all avenues of attack and the attacking force had more room for maneuver than in cases like Okinawa or particularly Iwo Jima where every square foot had to be seized. Also we’d have to consider the execrable performance of the Kwantung Army in Manchuria/Korea against the Soviets in Aug 1945. It was a hollow force in equipment and training, belying its large manpower strength on paper, and put forth an effort arguably well below previous fanatical IJA resistance in the island campaigns. In some cases IJA units fought to the last man v the Soviets, but in others they withdrew in the face of Soviet attacks, even prior to Aug 15.
In general one has to consider the very real possibility of a diminution of Japanese morale. It’s worst case and not necessarily realistic to assume absolute across the board sustained fanatical resistance by the Japanese, especially when anachronistically superimposing later Korea/Vietnam era war weariness onto the US side. Maybe the US public would have eventually turned against heavy losses in a Japan invasion, possibly even US military morale collapsed. But that was not in sight pre A bomb, where the universal assumption was a still long and bloody road ahead to defeating Japan. Nobody was happy about that, but no real public opposition to it as a policy in principal.
*detailed special attack mission lists in Japanese sources show that over half of JNAF special attack sorties were Type 0 Fighters (obsolescent as a fighter but still fast for an attack a/c) or Suisei (‘Judy’) divebombers (modern). About half of JAAF suicide sorties were Type 1 (‘Oscar’), Type 3 (‘Tony’) or Type 4 (‘Frank’) fighters, again ranging from obsolescent but not easy to intercept to modern. Big fleets of trainers would been more of a mainstay in post Aug 1945 special attack.
I maintain that the US fleet would have been so battered by a November 1945 OLYMPIC that it could not have mounted a March 1946 CORONET. Further, I doubt that the Americans could have secured one third of Kyushu in the time allotted. The Japanese army on that island would have remained capable of maneuver and attack. Finally, I see nothing magic about capturing Tokyo. If the Japanese wanted to they could have done to us what the Chinese did to them.
I was reading someone’s note to someone else about projected conscription numbers. He said the Americans had to be ready to take losses on a scale not seen since the American Civil War. Imagine that.
All in all, the world was very lucky this war was shortened by the blows of the atomic weapons and Soviet invasion. Other scenarios would have been much worse.
The Japanese military would have little to no fuel
The Japanese military woiuld have little to no food
The Japanese military didnt have the industry nor transport to supply regular army units
The US would carpet bomb and lay down massive artillery barrages against any forces they confronted. The Japanese would crumble faster than the Germans did against the USSR
The UK wasn’t neutral on the subject of the conflict between Germany and the Soviet Union. They were already at war with Germany; if the Germans had beaten the Soviets, it would have made Germany stronger for their ongoing war against Britain.
So while Britain was no friend of the Soviet Union, they didn’t want them to lose a war against Germany. So it was in Britain’s interest to assist the Soviets as much as they could.
A couple of things right off. First, the Chinese had a lot more ability to trade space for time, which the Japanese simply didn’t have. I’m sure they wanted to prolong the campaign and bleed the US and other allies as much as they could, hoping against hope to gain concessions that would allow them a more limited surrender. The problem was, they simply didn’t have the space to trade for time, and they didn’t have enough of the right kinds of weapons or systems to simply throw back an allied invasion of both the northern and southern armies, which is what would be happening. They also didn’t have the logistics to be able to shift forces around in any sorts of meaningful numbers, nor the medical stockpiles to be able to treat the massive amounts of wounded they would be incurring.
Basically, by this stage of the war the allies had total air superiority and could and more importantly did raid all over the home islands. What this means, in practical terms, is that any sort of large scale logistics system was simply not going to function. A large majority of rail traffic could be interdicted from the air, making it very difficult for Japan to shift troops and supplies around, especially once the invasion started. Also, most of the Japanese navy was combat ineffective by this time, meaning it would be very difficult for them to even move supplies and troops by coastal shipping. For all intents and purposes the US and allies would have had near total sea superiority as well.
On the invasion front, it’s true that the Japanese had pretty much figured out all the places the allies could or would land, and had turned them into death traps. This goes for but the US as well as Soviet landings. It would have been bloody. The problem was, they didn’t have anything to back it up after the initial fighting. They couldn’t follow up with troops and tanks covered by artillery to counter attack because they didn’t have the ability to do that by this stage. They would have been running into exactly the same issue the German’s did after Normandy, which was they couldn’t get their nodal deployed and dispersed divisions into the combat zone without taking heavy losses from constant air attack. In addition, the Japanese lacked good armor or even good logistics transport (jeeps and trucks and the like) to mobilize their infantry. They relied heavily on rail transport for stuff like that, as well as naval transport, both of which would have been highly problematic due to allied air and naval superiority.
The US had planned on this scale of causalities however. As for numerical advantage, I think you are missing a key point. At the point of entry, the attacker would STILL have an advantage. The Japanese, after all, had to cover all of the possible invasion options, while the attacker knew exactly which they would use. That’s why Normandy wasn’t an instant failure, despite the fact that the Germans had many times as many troops in the region than the allies did. The trouble, for the Germans and for the Japanese in this case was getting those dispersed echelons to the combat theater. Sure, Japan had a lot more soldiers, but they didn’t have a good way to get them from where they were staging (and hiding) to where they were needed. They did have tunnel systems, and could move troops and supplies that way, but not enough to overwhelm and throw back the invasion.
In the end this is the key point you are missing. The Japanese didn’t nor could they gain back air superiority. That means that any attempt to move large scale forces into the invasion battle space to either throw back the invasion or reinforce embattled forces would be seriously hampered, with the result being those forces getting whittled away. And, though you didn’t mention them, the plan called for the Soviets to be hitting the Northern islands at the same time. This means that Japan would have been in a vice, caught between two forces.
All the while, the allies would have been bombing and shelling literally ever target out there that was left. We had, by this stage, already bombed most Japanese cities and all identified manufacturing targets, but at some point we’d have been going after secondary, tertiary and even just targets of opportunity…just like in Germany. Every attack would have whittled down the finite resources that Japan had left at this point in the war, some of which were just irreplaceable due to the fact that the allied fleet and air force were between them and their access to getting more of it.
The Japanese could hope for a lot of things, but it was and is unrealistic that they could possibly get 20% of the troop ships, especially after it became apparent that’s what they were going for. The reason it worked initially is because it was a surprise and a change. This wouldn’t have been the case later on, however. Also, the Japanese ability to sustain those sorts of raids was rapidly narrowing. Oh, they still had some capability in that direction, but that’s because the allies hadn’t gone into full interdiction mode at that point. By the time of an invasion, however, it would have been very difficult for Japan to mount these sorts of raids, as there would be almost constant air sorties from allied air and naval forces bombing anything that looked like a target.
No doubt the US and the allies would have suffered serious causalities taking the beachheads, despite the air and naval superiority. But it wouldn’t have stopped the US or the Soviets or thrown them back. It would have just made the final victory cost a lot more for everyone, especially when you consider how the allied troops would have felt after this level of causalities inflicted on them.
No, we wouldn’t have if Japan was still fighting on. Not sure where you got this from, but the plan was to continue to drop atomic bombs on Japan, and several of the additional bombs were already earmarked for several other potential industrial cities or logistics hubs. We wouldn’t have been dropping them on the landing zones, we’d have been destroying, further, the Japanese ability to resupply, reinforce or build new, as well as any stockpiles of material or strongholds. You can bet that the capital and palace would have been subsequent targets, despite the fact that a lot of Tokyo was already in ashes due to firebombing raids. Those wouldn’t have stopped either.
I think the kamikaze problem was self limiting. The Japanese only had so many aircraft left, limited ability to build more due to material shortages as well as the manufacturing centers being under attack, and if a full on air interdiction was happening would have had limited ability to mount large raids that could have done real damage. Again, look at Germany as an example, but in Japan it would have been even more extreme, as Japan lacked a lot of the Germany capabilities and resources, and also was constrained by their own more limited terrain. Japan didn’t have Western or Eastern Europe as a buffer. While it’s terrain favored defenders, it didn’t help the Japanese with respect to logistics, especially in the conditions that would have been extent during an invasion.
In short, whether it took months or even a year or so, the Japanese were ultimately doomed. They didn’t have the ability to stop and throw back an allied invasion. They didn’t have the ability to really push back the navy, or to stop or even seriously slow the allied air forces that would have had complete air superiority. Their supplies of critical material, including medicine was limited. Even their food supplies were low…hell, even with the atomic bombs dropped and the war ending quickly there were serious issues with food supplies, and this was with the allies bringing in food and medicine for them, not them being completely self reliant.
The atomic bombs would have just sped things up. Basically, every major Japanese city, especially those used for logistics and manufacturing would have been destroyed, either conventionally or through atomic bombs, as would all identified strong points and stock piles.
With that many US losses, I doubt that the occupation of Japan would have been mush more harsh. Russia would never let go of any territory it captured. The future economic greatness of post war Japan would never have occurred.
I agree with most of that just a few additions and things I don’t totally agree with.
Yes, a US campaign in Japan and Japanese ones in China is completely apples and oranges. As you say, the key to China’s non-defeat in the 1937-45 war with Japan, until the US beat Japan and put China on the winning side, was ‘strategic depth’. They had a big enough country relative to the size of the IJA to just withdraw to where the Japanese couldn’t expand the front any further. Most of the fighting in China 1938-45 was along western and southern edges of the perimeter around the Yangtze the Japanese gained by '38. Even in 1944-45 the Japanese made more territorial gains (in the Ichi-go offensive seeking to link their holdings in North China to Indochina by land to use railways to get around US interdiction of sea lanes) but same formula of driving organized Chinese armies out of ever larger area the Japanese had to hold, but the Chinese armies just withdrew further. Japan was just not big enough relative to the scale of forces involved to do that.
OTOH it’s possible there would have fanatical civilian resistance in areas of Japan the US seized whereas occupied China was mainly pacified and partisan operations were a limited nuisance to the Japanese in some places only. But also again assuming uniform fanatical resistance at every level of Japanese society is just an assumption. Japan then as now was a human society, it had a breaking point.
2/3. I agree on the point of defense against over-beach landing defenses having to be spread out unless there are very few beaches. So the most of the dug in defense force won’t be able to engage the attackers and its total number relative to the attacker is less important than in a contest between two maneuvering forces. But in the later Pacific War the Japanese had adopted a defense doctrine different from the Germans in Europe. The Germans went with a ‘classic’ doctrine of thin immobile beach defense forces (generally lower quality) which would delay the development of a beachhead until mobile (generally higher quality) reserves could concentrate to crush it. That failed in Normandy because Allied air superiority delayed movement of the mobile reserves too much, and they were arguably not numerous enough anyway.
The IJA in the most infamously bloody late smaller island campaigns (Iwo Jima and particularly Okinawa) neither seriously tried to defend beaches, because beach defenses had proved too vulnerable to naval gunfire in previous cases, nor placed any hope in mobile counterattacks to defeat the beachhead (the signature last gasp doomed-to-defeat infantry charges of defeated IJA formations were generally eschewed in the final campaigns). Rather they spread out their forces in deep defensive zones inland to try to extract maximum casualties. There was no reserve to defeat the weakened landing force in counterattacks, the idea was just to force the attacker through defensive zone after defensive zone to inflict casualties, hoping to deter subsequent invasions.
Part of the Okinawa model would probably have again been the method of defense of Kyushu. But again the size of that island was not necessarily advantageous for that kind of defense. The island was big enough for the attacker to have more latitude maneuvering around and isolating particularly difficult defensive positions, while not big enough for the entirely different Chinese defensive doctrine of relying on depth. And to the extent the IJA considered the size of Kyushu called for more of a coast defense/mobile reserves approach, the low quality of IJA mobile forces and US air superiority would have been big problems. Again the Soviet campaign in Manchuria or US one on Luzon in 1945 might be an alternative model rather than just projecting the land aspects of the Okinawa campaign, though admittedly with the big difference of local population friendly to the US invasion of Luzon and Manchurian/Korean population mixed between pro/anti Japanese but mainly indifferent.
I agree the idea of ‘special attack’ units shifting dramatically to troopships as targets is speculative at best. One of the basic problems with special attack as referred to in earlier post was inability to learn and refine tactics based on first hand knowledge…the men who completed their missions were dead. I don’t see why to believe that a follow on wave of special attack, even less experienced pilots, no direct feedback of knowledge from previous ones, less support from conventional fighter units (which was a factor at Okinawa), generally slower a/c (lots of combat types over Okinawa more trainers in late 1945) would have jumped up in effectiveness, whether being drawn like moths to a flame to picket destroyers, or in general.
Another factor indirectly referred to is the severe famine that would have struck Japan over the winter of 1945-46, mass starvation deaths were only avoided in actual history by emergency shipments of food by the US.
I agree with some of your additions, and disagree with others, but I think the crux is nothing you brought up makes for a US/allied defeat in an invasion. Simply put, the Japanese couldn’t win, and had they tried to fight it out they would have just made things worse once they were forced to surrender.
I’ll just comment, briefly, on a couple of things from your post:
Absolutely the Japanese would have, especially initially, resisted fanatically. They also wouldn’t have been hampered by the ongoing civil war happening in China, or by a CCP stabbing the government in the back as often as they assisted in fighting the Japanese. But I don’t think it would have made that much of a difference except in terms of civilian deaths. At some point, the allies would have just taken a zero trust stance, which would have been very bad for the population. Simply put, the Japanese civilians could be as fanatic as they wanted, but they were poorly armed and equipped, and almost completely unsupported (they were short on rations and basic necessities BEFORE the invasion). What they would accomplish is to kill a few allied soldiers at some fairly horrific cost to themselves going forward.
I also agree with you that it’s an assumption that Japan, or really any society can be that fanatic across the board. You could see in other cases a mixed bag of fanaticism, with German and Russian examples really underscoring this. But looking at Vietnam, you can see that this fanaticism was pretty great, but there were breaking points. The Tet offensive, for instance, pretty much broke the Viet Cong in South Vietnam to the point that they weren’t a major factor again in the war. North Vietnam was able to keep fighting mainly because of external, outside support that Japan wouldn’t have had.
Yes, I agree that the Japanese planned a completely different battle from the German’s. Sorry about that. I used Germany as an example because for Japan to actually throw off the invasion they would need to be able to mobilize and counter attack, and, simply put, they didn’t have the force structure to do that. Sure, their battle was designed to cost lives, but, again, using earlier battles where they didn’t really oppose the landing but planned to fight it out in well prepared defenses is something we’d already seen and had experience with. While we lost quite a few troops, the Japanese invariably lost a lot more…and that’s something they simply couldn’t afford. They needed to kill many allied soldiers for each of their soldiers killed, not the other way around.
The whole thought process that if you can just hurt the enemy enough that they will go away is something they were counting on, but I’ve seen no indication that they could have ramped things up on their own to that threshold.
Exactly. And it wasn’t just food. Japan just wasn’t positioned well for this sort of fight, had it happened. They could and certainly would have hurt the allies…but they would have been destroyed doing it. As bad as the atomic bombs were, an invasion would have been orders of magnitude worse, and I seriously doubt that Japan would be anywhere close to where it is today had it happened.
I think one thing that Paul in Qatar is missing is how tight the noose had become. We were able to stage air force assets out of some of the near island conquests, including Okinawa, as well as carrier based ones, which would have further tightened the noose. We had total air superiority over the island, and were raiding at will. We hadn’t really ramped up, fully, the interdiction part of that raid system, mainly we were still in the heavy bomber stage, but we were gearing up for allowing fighter escorts to basically freelance as we had in Germany. They could escort the bombers (though that was increasingly becoming irrelevant as Japanese air support evaporated) then basically attack any targets of opportunity. This would have made it very difficult for the Japanese to try large raids with their kamikaze attacks. As you also noted, the best trained and capable crews were pretty much dead as a feature of this tactic, and they weren’t exactly getting back good tactical data on what worked and what didn’t They had already started to strip their cadre earlier, and so they weren’t able to train very well. They were running out of material for building more planes as well, but those they had would have been under increasing attack from fighters and smaller bombers as that phase of the air war got rolling.
Or it might have had the opposite effect. Politics can dictate economics.
In Europe, America and the Soviet Union were facing off against other directly in Germany. So both sides ended up encouraging a quick recovery for Germany so their half could function as a viable ally.
We didn’t feel a similar pressure in Japan. We had no incentive to see Japan rebuilt as a military power. And we didn’t encourage Japanese economic recovery until we needed a logistic base for our wars in Korea and Vietnam.
But if history had been different and there had been a Soviet garrison in northern Japan, we probably would have followed the German example and pushed Japan to rebuild and rearm quickly.
The breaking point was the fact that there was little food on the home islands. Im not sure how people think the Japanese could fight, march, reposition without food. This would affect the military the most, and along with a lack of transport on land and sea, would make it damn nearly impossible to move masses of men. war and social upheaval: World War II Japan 1945 situation food
IF the Japanese had resisted, a systematic campaign of bombing and embargoing would have starved the Japanese out with a minimal loss of American lives.
I doubt the Soviets could have launched an attack on Hokkaido for months if not years. They had neither the navy, the landing craft nor the practical experience to launch a massive naval invasion.
Luckily there were nukes that greatly reduced the human suffering on all sides of the war.
The Soviets did anything but encourage a quick German recovery. They looted and transfered whole factories back to the USSR. They pillaged and burned all German settlements they came across in late 44 and 45. Then they peeled off Upper Silesia and gave it to Poland. The Soviets were also busy imprisoning and killing all segments in both occupied Germany and Eastern Europe who could remotely challenge them politically. This meant industrialists, intellectuals and landowners. They just didnt care about economics at that time. They also turned down an opportunity to receive Marshall Plan aid.
The Japanese government, which was mostly controlled by the military at this point, had made some harsh contingency plans. Their first priority was to keep feeding the troops. Then they wanted to keep feeding the civilians who supported military logistics. After that, they started creating categories of people who were seen as surplus. It wasn’t clear if the plans were to directly kill these people or just cut off their food and let them starve to death. But either way, it was planned for these people to die.
The first group was POW’s. Japan had decided to kill all of them to save on food. This obviously would have produced a strong desire for retribution after the war.
The second group was the elderly; people who could no longer work in factories and help the war effort. The third group, if conditions got bad enough, was children; Japan considered sacrificing them if food was too scarce. As I noted, it wasn’t clear whether they planned on killing children and the elderly or just letting them starve to death. But either possibility is horrifying.
So imagine what Japan would have been like if we had gone with the blockade strategy and starved them into surrender. The country we would have been occupying would have been filled with half-dead people who had murdered their parents and children to stay alive. A lot of them probably would have killed themselves when a surrender was signed and they realized their sacrifices had been meaningless. And the occupiers would have had no interest in mitigating the terrible conditions they found. Japan would have ceased to exist as a society.
The Soviets were certainly willing to take from Germany to help their own country. But after that, they wanted to see East Germany recover. They didn’t try to force East Germany to remain an agricultural country (which it had largely been when Germany was united) and they had no problems with building up an East German army.
And while the Red Army did attack a lot of civilians in the final months of the war, it’s notable that the official Soviet policy had changed. The word had come down to tone down the anti-German rhetoric. Soldiers were being told to see the Germans and other Eastern Europeans as victims of the Nazi regime that they were liberating. But that message didn’t filter all the way down and most soldiers saw the people in the countries they were capturing as targets for rape and pillaging.
The Soviets rejected the Marshall Plan because they saw it as an American attempt to sneak into power in Eastern Europe not because they didn’t like the economic advantages that were offered. If their only desire had been to see Germans suffer, they could have rejected Marshall Plan aid for Germany while accepting it elsewhere.
Again, we’re overlooking what the Soviets brought to the war. Not only did they run roughshod over Japanese forces in Manchuria, they also had a robust plan to invade Hokkaido, the northern Japanese home island.
Capturing Hokkaido means the Japanese forces would have had to contend with THREE separate home island invasions. And unlike Kyushu and Honshu, Hokkaido was poorly defended and would have fallen (or let’s say “been controlled”) quickly. That would have left the Soviet Army a literal ferry ride across the That would have brought the Soviet army within a literal ferry ride across the Tsugaru Strait from the northern end of Honshu.