Of course, a lot of Japanese thought they were going to win, or at least it was preferable to caving into what they considered unthinkable demands made in '41 by the US. Before Midway, they were already planning how to spend their summer holidays. But we don’t really put too much stock in delusional people.
Please provide a cite that the Allies were “scared.” I’m not talking about the man on the street. Show me one of the key leaders who seriously believed it was possible for the Japanese to “win.”
Imperial Japan could not militarily defeat America. Simply no way. All they ever hoped for was that the US would decide it wasn’t worth it any longer and go home. After PH, that would not have happened.
The US had 10 times the industrial capacity even prior to the war. Much larger population and considerable natural resources. With the relative positions of the two countries, even without the addition of the other Allies, there simply wasn’t anyway for Japan to win.
With the Two Oceans Act, the US had many more ships coming. What’s more, anytime the fight went against us, we just had to drop back and regroup.
Cite for any leader showing a concern that we would lose.
I think Germany could have benefitted from having those shorter lines to defend, if not for Hitler’s general reluctance to tactically retreat or pull back to more defendable positions.
At the very least, such an approach could have prolonged the war until Berlin was nuked.
As late as February 1, 1945 Germany held about as much ground as it did in the peak years of World War I (with some losses around Aachen and Alsace-Lorraine), with an added empire of Norway, Denmark, the Netherlands, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Austria, and northern Italy. But after extending from Brittany to the Volga, holding this reduced empire had little psychological benefit to German morale.
This is not a logical argument. Let’s look at what you said:
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Well, both the Allies and the Japanese questioned that, so I guess there had been a question. Mind you yes, there were apparently a small group of Japanese leaders who thought they couldn’t win- but didnt say anything.
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Please provide a cite for where the Allies questioned if victory were possible.
No-one with half a clue is ever 100% certain of anything in a war, because you never know if the other guys are gonna pull a rabbit out of the hat. But I think from the moment the US were fully engaged I think they expected to win barring the Axis producing some sort of miracle.
The sort of thing that might have qualified would have been an Axis A-Bomb, hence the massive effort put into making sure the Allies got there first. In terms of bombers, tanks, battleships, divisions etc. it was a foregone conclusion.
As early as 1943 the plans for the US army were scaled back to 90 divisions from the original 185, in order to free up more men for industry and the other services. They weren’t worried about beating the Axis, just about how to do it most efficiently. In fact they cut it rather fine and there were some army manpower shortages after the Ardennes offensive, but the point is that they were planning very carefully against what they believed was needed, not the maximum achievable if they put the US economy through the wringer.
Japan is a fairly small set of islands with little in the way of natural resources. Since their nearest neighbour (China) was not on their side, they would have been totally blockaded by the combined navies of the allies.
They pretty much already were, U.S. submarines achieved a stranglehold on the home islands. The Japanese had few anti-submarine capabilities and the U.S. Navy punished them heavily for it. It came up in the trial of Admiral Karl Donitz, when the legality of unrestricted submarine warfare was questioned.
On Japanese ‘victory’, I’d always read that their strategy was never a complete defeat of the U.S., which everyone knew was impossible, but to make continued war so costly that a favourable peace could be negotiated; keep their possessions in China, deal with their own war criminals etc. In this regard the Soviet declaration of war and bombs were a double-whammy; Stalin would be completely undeterred by casualties and there was no way to extract blood from a-bomb runs.
As well as the mining by the strategic bombers. Dissonance has an excellent post on the thread in GB.
Yes, (except for the part about dealing with war criminals, that only came up at the end, when they saw what was happening in Germany). They expected that the war wouldn’t be that long and that the Allies would be so much in awe of their fighting spirit that the US would roll over and give them a blank check.
Yes and no.
It was a double whammy and the historians who argue that it took both events seem to make more sense to me.
However, it was not that they were afraid of an invasion by the Soviets, and hence that was not a question concerning casualties from them. As I wrote in the other thread,