Another alternate history post:

[underlankers.livejournal.com]

This one asks but a simple question: what would happen if the United States did not drop Fat Man and Little Boy in August 1945? A delay might be simpler by simply moving the start of the Manhattan Project down a year to 1942 so that the USA is required to invade Japan in 1945 where it did not in the real world.

The way I see it is that the Japanese leadership was not at all likely to surrender, and without the atomic bomb the USA will be hitting the Imperial Japanese in an Allied version of Operation Citadel: the landing zones are known for both sides and they've both made extensive preparations for it. I do think in the event of such a scenario that the Soviets would have done a lot more in Manchuria, probably gained all of Sakhalin and started blitzing through Hokkaido at the same time as the USA's punching through the Kanto Plain.

One thing that's always been an interesting hypothetical is what would happen assuming the IJA tries banzai charges right into the Soviet army of 1945 where it had enough firepower and callousness about human life to make good sport out of that kind of tactics. I see absolutely no reason that banzai charges right at the Soviet military are going to work any better than they did at the US military. The USA at the time was quite peachy keen on Axis civilian deaths, and the Soviets after 4 brutal years of warfare against Nazi Germany are hardly inclined to fight and die any more than they have to. If anything the situation might well end up reversed, the US Army making headlong attacks without real sense to and the Soviets accepting surrenders of cities that allow for it, using firepower to annihilate any that refuse.

Your thoughts? In this case the A-Bomb would probably be available by 1946 and for a real nightmare might have been used by both sides in whatever happens in the Korean peninsula.

Comments

[malasadas.livejournal.com]

That's a lovely philosophical stance to take from a comfy airchair 65 years after the fact.

But I doubt it makes a strong case for prolonging the war by relying solely on conventional weapons as a more moral stance than using the bomb to shock the Japanese leadership into consensus for surrender.

[underlankers.livejournal.com]

Not to mention that Imperial Japan was going to try the same Festungen tactics that had led to one German defeat after another at the hands of an army that was a lot better equipped than they were and unlike its US counterpart was quite willing to consider a few million dead Axis soldiers a fair exchange.

As above, there's a perverse irony in that the Soviet military would probably move a lot faster than the US one did because Japan would be trying the tactics that failed Nazi Germany's better-equipped troops against an enemy that already mopped the floor with them in Manchuria and in fact had done so in 1939.

The question would be how much the Soviets expand before Japan decides unconditional surrender is the lesser evil, while the USA is in the position the Soviets usually were in the European War: making the bloodiest attacks against the strongest enemy forces.

[malasadas.livejournal.com]

Well, sure, but that's consequentialism....

[underlankers.livejournal.com]

Which as you've noted is very much armchair moralism 65 years after the fact when the Soviet Union has safely collapsed and the reality of what it was at the time can be obscured by that fact.

[kgbman.livejournal.com]

And everyone knows that you must become a monster to fight monsters, amirite?

[underlankers.livejournal.com]

Worked well for the Allies in World War II. The first power to actually inflict a major defeat on the Germans, after all, was the Soviet Union. Unless you mean to tell me Stalin was not a monster. He was a lesser evil than Hitler and less murderous, but it was the Soviet monster that destroyed its Nazi rival, not anything the Allies did.

Albeit without all those trucks the Soviets would have had a stalemate, not a victory.

[debergerac.livejournal.com]

you must become a monster to fight monsters, amirite?

of course. haven't you ever seen a japanese monster movie?

[malasadas.livejournal.com]

When you are selecting among horrid options, you select the least horrid that acheives the aim of ending the war.

Unless you are suggesting that just walking away was an option -- in which case all of Japan ends up under Soviet rule. I'm not seeing how your critique means anything less monstrous would have ended up happening.

[underlankers.livejournal.com]

Especially since the consistent approach to this would mean that the choice to re-supply Fort Sumter with provisions was the worst of all possible options to take in 1860 as it guaranteed ruinous warfare instead of peaceable breakup of the country. I don't think this fellow's one to take his idea that consistently, though you never know.

[telemann.livejournal.com]

As a sidebar, wasn't Kyoto a primary target, until someone stepped in and had that changed, due to the historical and cultural significance of that ancient city?

[underlankers.livejournal.com]

Pretty much. Though as I remember it the change was more due to Hiroshima and Nagasaki being virtually the only cities overlooked in the strategic bombing campaigns of 1944-5. There was a feeling Japan would be a lot more aware of the dangers it posed if it wiped out a standing city as opposed to shifting rubble. Given that there was a near-coup in real life, that feeling was quite justified.

[telemann.livejournal.com]

I can't remember it, or who changed it, but they insisted Kyoto be removed from the primary target list for cultural reasons.

[light-over-me.livejournal.com]

You're thinking of Henry Stimson I believe, who was Secretary of War at the time-- he wanted Kyoto taken off the hit list for cultural reasons. In large part because he was concerned about how badly that would reflect on us Post War.

[kgbman.livejournal.com]

Similarly, it's easy to sit in one's air conditioned office and assert that while dropping nuclear weapons on civilians is sad and all, it is nevertheless a decision that only a naif would struggle with when it is ostensibly the lesser of two evils.

I admit there is logic to it: "If we do not willfully commit ourselves to evil act X, then evil consequences Y might follow." It is, however, the logic of hell. I don't deny Truman faced a terrible dilemma. But he chose wrongly.

[underlankers.livejournal.com]

And in the real world, Japan would have been either in a civil war or asked for immediate unconditional surrender the very moment the Soviets bring their usual means of waging war to the Home Islands. They'd be using the exact same tactics the Soviets had curbstomped over and over again from 1941 onwards with the same lack of mobility that hamstrung the Wehrmacht toward the end of the war and a completely unequal level of firepower heavily biased in favor of the Soviet Union.

If Truman decides not to use the Bomb and instead you've got 500,000 dead Americans then the question will be how far and fast the Soviets drive South before Japan decides the jig's up. It would actually be a mirror of the European campaign with the United States fighting the majority of the best troops left, the Soviets moving rapidly against an inferior number of troops commanded by idiots.

[underlankers.livejournal.com]

Again, the US plans without the Bomb were made with full expectation of Soviet help, and this was why the USA yielded so much at Yalta. In this case what precisely is keeping the Soviets from overunning Japan with much faster and less effort than it ever took to do that to the Germans? At its worst the Soviet military could inflict curbstomps on Japan, with it at its peak of skill and firepower of the war there's nothing at all Japan can do to stop it.

So what is going to stop Japan from becoming an insular Korea analogue here? What for that matter would cause the USA to alter the original plans for the Soviets to contribute without the Bomb? Why are the Soviets going to somehow be nicey-nice with the people that tried to attack them before World War II even started?

[malasadas.livejournal.com]

So...Truman chose wrongly.

His other choice was to commit 100s of 1000s of Americans to death, millions of Japanese to death and 10s of millions more to decades of life under Soviet rule.

That'd have been pretty wrong too. How does the use of the bomb, shocking as it was but with as many casualities as conventional strategic bombing campaigns, come off as a worse choice?