How bad would Operation Downfall - the invasion of Japan - have been? Casualty estimates for the Allies started at a quarter million and went up over a million. For the Japanese it started in the millions and went into tens of millions. Bear in mind the Japs knew where the invasion would come as there were very few suitable beaches. They would have had over 12,000 aircraft available, mostly kamikazes, and around one in six would be expected to score a hit due to mountainous terrain masking their approach. And that retard MacArthur was in charge whose fave pastimes were throwing Marines into the teeth of prepared defences and being wrong about everything. Should they have just blockaded, starved and bombed Japan instead?
>>65417515Aftermath: Japan still lost, Stalin controls everything north of Niigata, Japanese are an occupied state, Stalin instals some Kim Il Sung motherfucker to be the lord emperor of all of Honshu and he has aspirations to take the rest of the country with nuclear weapons.
By July the Allied planners realized the Japs knew where they were landing and had begun plans to start using gas, nukes as tactical weapons and so forth. There was evidently some plan to have a majority of the early invasion craft not actually carry troops but instead just be dedicated AAA platforms. Regardless, it would have totally sucked for everyone
>>65417515>Should they have just blockaded, starved and bombed Japan insteadYou mean like what they fucking did?
>>65417515Invasion would've broken the will of the japanese people. They were told from day 1 that they were winning uncontested. To then suddenly be invaded would be too much for them to bare. The humiliation of realizing they'd all been lied to the entire time and that their sons in china and the pacific were probably all dead and raped... It would be most shamefur.
>>65417720This is delusional, there's plenty of testimony that it was well understood that the war was not going well, to say nothing of months of American bombing of the Home Islands
>>65417547I can't imagine they'd even take Hokkaido; they needed our help to take Karafuto. More likely they'd control all of Korea and "liberate" China.>>65417515There'd be a lot less Japanese people today.
>>65417812>There'd be a lot less Japanese people today.There was a propaganda campaign calling for "one hundred million glorious dead" or something. Every woman and child would be armed with a bamboo spear or knife.
That fucking idiot MacArthur dismissed reports that the Japs knew the plan and were concentrating their forces in Kyushu. There would have been at least 650,000 troops waiting there, including elite divisions pulled from the Kwantung Army. Plus over sixty conventional subs, four hundred mini-subs, Kaiten manned torpedoes, hundreds of suicide speedboats, thousands of frogmen with mines, all ordered to target troopships first. Plus mines everywhere. Plus 6000 kamikazes with an expected hit rate of one in six so a thousand ships hit, mostly transports. It would have been carnage like nothing ever seen before.
It’s questionable it ever would’ve been launched. All the important Navy brass were pretty opposed to it, with that opposition growing as the date got closer. War Department casualty estimates were also growing, and the various campaigns to collapse and strangle the Japanese economy were also bearing fruit at a growing rate. Granted you still have to account for Truman, but it’s very possible without the nukes things look largely the same as they did in reality, just a few months later and with greater Japanese civilian deaths to deprivation
>>65417898There were plans to use bio-weapons like anthrax on their crops so there would have been millions of civilian deaths, maybe tens of millions.
Just read Hell to Pay by Giangrecco, it got you covered
worth getting?
>>65417720watch world at war
>>65417515Not as bad as people doom about, but the casualties would have been high relative to D-Day.
>>65417812Stalin would demand Hokkaido just like he demanded Hokkaido and his troops weren't even in Japan
>>65418064>Not as bad as people doom aboutwhat makes you say that? A quarter million was the low-ball public estimate of casualties by Allied planners, in private they knew it would be far, far worse. And that's before they knew of Japanese preparations.
>>65417975From what I’ve heard they were on track for that if the war went more than another month or two without changing what was being done. Even with the war ending when it did massive amounts of food aid were required to prevent catastrophic famine, and things didn’t stabilize for quite a while after the peace began.
>>65417515The declassified invasion plans read like something out of wh40k, like, "1000 B-29s will bomb 5km of beach, cross the moonscape and dispatch anything still breathing with your flamethrower, marine" absurd. It would have gone very very bad for all involved, which is why the entire island was treated like a medieval castle and besieged instead.
Doing a combined arms amphibious invasion with the addition of nukes seems nuts to me. Keep in mind they knew very little about the bombs by that point so even in operational safety guidance it was recommend that troops not try to occupy a position within 48 hours after it was nuked.Imagine being some 18 year old GI from bumfuck nowhere and your first taste of combat turns is occupying a hill with ant people crawling around.>>65417720Your wrong about what they believed by that point but I agree that the heroic martyrdom probably wouldn't have matched what the hardliners in the military believed. The fact is that the government was afraid that the people themselves might rise up in 1945 which motivated the surrender.
>>65418128They were assuming well-armed and trained defenders, worst case scenario. Despite stockpiling lots of suicide aircraft Japan had very little fuel left, it's questionable they could have used all of them. Japan itself is not the same as a tiny volcanic island, there's room for maneuver and deep fortifications were not in place and would not be as effective. US armor, air and naval bombardment would have been much more effective than during the island hopping campaign. It would have been much more similar to the US invasion of the Philippines than any of the fortress islands. Olympic would have been bloody because Japan concentrated their remaining forces in Kyushu, but Coronet probably would have been close to a walk over.
>>65417515Should have just dropped both bombs in Tokyo. Little boy on the Palace and Fat man on the General Headquarters.
>>65418193They couldn't because there would be no one to negotiate with
>>65418193We’d ruined Tokyo during Meetinghouse, and the major reason the occupation went so smoothly was because there was almost complete continuity of government. If we did what you wanted it just turns into a much messier Iraq
>>65417515depends how many civvies they could brainwash to kamikaze charge/arm
>>65417720they were getting their flat asses burned in firebombings everyother week
>>65418128the instant theyd see civillians with bambooswe're not invading and holding anymorethe US would have had to make a shit ton napalm for a cleansing
>>65418178>Despite stockpiling lots of suicide aircraft Japan had very little fuel left, it's questionable they could have used all of them.Another angle to consider is that, because the Imperial Japanesr army and navy were having a pissing contest throughout the entire thing, they'd end up splitting said stockpile. So either side may have only ended up getting half of what they need, if the other side didn't convince the ranking officer to hand it over to them, if not just steal from them as a personal 'fuck you for letting the Americans get this close.'>"I need it more than he does! We can outmaneuver the landing parties by flanking them from this beach!">"Nuh-uh! They've already taken the beaches, baka! We need the fuel for our tanks and supply trucks!">"No you baka! They've got planes and they're gonna destroy your supply trucks from the air!">"Well, they'll just bomb your ships from the air, too!">"I don't see a way we can win this, can't we just surrender and get this over with?">"Emperor-sama, shut the fuck up!"
>>65417812>less peoplefewer people
>>65418204We ruined a single, poor, densely-populated, working-class ward of Tokyo well east of anybody important. The Operations Room made a a great video where you can see what part of Tokyo was targeted it was absolutely not all of the city or even most of it. It was a concentrated strike. Not wanton high altitude bombs left to the wind
>>65418210>every other weekTry every other day, the 6th Bombardment Group alone was generating a ~30 bomber sortie every 2-3 days by March 1945 and that was just one superfortress unit out of 13 in the XXI Bomber Command (rising to 17 by April and 21 active by June).
>>65417515The IJA staff almost perfectly predicted the landing beaches for Olympic, so this operation would end up asa cross between Okinawa and Omaha Beach, with kamikaze attacks taht actually get through because there is literally no time to shoot them all down or blow them all out of teh water.HOWEVER:By November most Japanese would be close to starving due to the blockade and mining operations. And the firebombing would have destroyed dozens of cities, we're talking a rate of one or two per week.Not nukes, just the actual firebombing. The RAF will also turn up.The landing will be extremely costly, and reaching the various estimated advance lines will be even more costly, but ultimately the US has the firepower to get to the lines they intend to hold.The Soviets might take all of Korea, which would turn into a vassal to China again. They are not able to actually land in Japan proper, there will not be a Soviet occupation zone. They will get the Kurils and Sachalin, of course.I doubt Coronet would happen, though.After this winter, by March Japan would have so little food that there would be millions dead from starvation, no fuel to move anything anywhere. Hirohito may have been an ignorant racist aristocrat, but he did actually care about his nation, and he would take steps to end such pointless, one-sided slaughter as he did historically.
Not as bad as people thought.
>>65418301Now we zoom out to get an entire base in frame. Tinian was no longer an island, it was B-29 nest.
>>65417880that makes me wonder how milquetoast america has become, since no comparable resistance awaits a land invasion of iran. all because of domestic politics.
>>65418401yes, because Iran totally did a pearl harbor
>>65418330>TinianIsn't that one being refurbished?
>>65418414besides the point
>>65417880>elite divisions pulled from the Kwantung ArmyIt was elite at one point in time.>four hundred mini-subs>Kaiten manned torpedoesThey don't have a great reputation.>suicide speedboats>thousands of frogmen with minesHara mentioned those in his memoir>The suicide boats were given the poetic name Shinyo, which means literally “Ocean Shaker.” The frogmen were called Fukuryu, which has the literal meaning of “Crawling Dragon.”>Considering their aggressive purpose, the “Ocean Shakers” were not an effective craft. Shortly after the three boats arrived at Kawatana I asked the nearby Naval Air Station at Omura to send a fighter plane over for a practice encounter. An instructor manned the boat into open water but he jumped overboard when the plane swooped low directly over the craft. On the next pass the fighter sprayed machine-gun bullets into the flimsy shell, smashing it to bits. >The “crawling dragon” equipment was even more useless. The 50 men, all expert swimmers, had trouble with it throughout the course. Even the tanked oxygen supplied to the school was no good. Several student divers fell sick from it on the very first day.
>You will never mow down hundreds of starving civilians armed with pointy foliage with an M2
>>65417850So…the literal extinction of the Japanese people?
>>65418489Yep. Already been used as part of an exercise I believe I read
>>65418202All the better. Eradication of a people sometimes is a needed thing.
Downfall would never have happened. Japan was already preparing to surrender in early July, but the Americans had to delay and make unreasonable demands to test their new bombs.
>>65422388go snack on a bat ching chong
>>65422399>ready to surrenderlol no. A couple guys were making more or less independent overtures, but the hardline faction under Anami was still dominant. His response to the first nuke was more or less “They can’t possibly do this twice, we need to keep fighting” btw
I think the kamikaze attacks would have been bad although I wonder if any sort of small ship literally armed with nothing but Bofors 40mm and .50cal could have acted as floating AA defenses to protect any landings?Either way, once the beachheads are secured I don't actually foresee much unseen difficulties in the land battle. Is it gonna suck? Probably, yeah. But looking at Saipan, Okinawa, and retaking Manila, with a bit of Iwo Jima, and I think we generally had the Japanese strategy figured out. By this point there wasn't gonna be the same fight there was after France. No concern over protecting historic sites >[EDIT: Actually I have 0 idea, WERE there specific sites and monuments and shit we had planned to try and avoid to preserve?]like the Aachen Cathedral. With how much propaganda Japan put out on weaponizing their civilian population, I don't think much humanitarian evacuation would have been allowed, not that Japan would have tried to radio and set up humanitarian evacuation corridors anyways. Japan didn't even have much in the way of concrete or durable buildings like Europe. I think once we began moving into the cities, until the city or nation unconditionally surrendered, anything moving was going to be shot, any cave or bunker or fortified building was going to have napalm and satchel charges stuffed in it like a mukbang, and artillery was going to flatten entire grid squares. Reading accounts after Manila and Okinawa and the combat arms guys were not fucking around anymore, after kamikazes and faking surrender/death, weaponizing civvies or coercing them into suicide, there was no desire to do anything other than destroy them. All those schoolgirls with the anti tank lances would have been considered fair game literally walking to elementary school. In the long run, either Japan has 0 people left or it takes a few hundred thousand to a couple million of some cities to let the Emperor surrender in a move to save his people.
>>65422647Replying to myself and thinking out loud, I wonder what would have happened in China though? Not even fighting the Japanese but more in transferring more of our literally-the-biggest-force-ever-in-the-history-of-the-world industrial monster over East for the invasion. Would more eyes & equipment in China or near China have stabilized the KMT a bit more? Maybe we stay in China with more force/longer directly? Like I don't even know what but now I am genuinely curious how operation Downfall would have affected the Chinese Civil War and internal stability.
>>65422658I don’t know to what degree we were staging anything there. I will say though that potentially the most geopolitically impactful small change you could make in the Pacific theatre would for the Navy to win the Formosa/Philippines argument and succeed in Operation Causeway. In that case it’s very possible Taiwan today would resemble a larger Okinawa, and we probably would’ve paid much closer attention to the goings on of the mainland.
>>65418326>Not nukes, just the actual firebombing. The RAF will also turn up.Would British forces have been allowed to participate in a land invasion of Japan? Admiral King was a notorious Anglophobe who hated the Brits, but even apart from him US war planners in general wanted the war in the East to be an exclusively American affair and only took British naval help returning in 1945 under sufferance. The Pacific belonged to America and they didn't want the Brits to be regaining any prestige or influence in the region by having a material role in the final victory. Maybe British forces would have been permitted a few token missions so they could say me-too for political reasons but I can't see them being given anything of strategic significance.
>>65417515Considering how fucking insane a lot of imperial japan was it was pretty plausible to assume mass suicide amongst civilian populations would've been a thing. Even if it was won, the aftermath would've been horrendous.
>>65417515Short answer: Bad. Longer answer: Very bad. America would probably have struggled to justify the casualties it would have caused. The operation probably ends with the bulk of Japanese territory declaring itself to be the 'Soviet Socialist Republic of Nippon'. >>65422786I doubt it. Most Brits saw the Pacific as 'someone elses problem', especially once Japanese attacks on British Imperial territory in the region stopped. By the end of the war in Europe most Brits were just glad that it was over, and far more interested in rebuilding their country than keeping the war going.
>>65417720Getting a straight fight against squishy infantry is exactly what they would have wanted. There was honour to be found in a real fight, getting burned from the air by planes they could barely even touch was what really hurt their soul.
>>65418401>since no comparable resistance awaits a land invasion of iranThat's what they were saying last time.
>>65422820>comparableis the operating word there.>Covering only the U.S. Army, the Army Service Forces (ASF) planning document of January 15, 1945, "Redeployment of the United States Army after the Defeat of Germany," expected that an average of 43,000 replacements for "dead and evacuated wounded" would be needed each month between June 1945 and December 1946
>>65418128This is literally just propaganda to justify the Jewish science experiment known as the nuclear bomb
>>65422786Yes King, Nimitz and MacArthur were all Anglophobes but aside from that there was political reasons for having no British or Empire troops involved with the invasion; if British or Australians weren’t involved then neither could have claim to any post-war stake in Japan. As it was IRL MacArthur did all he could to excluded them anyway, and apart from a few battalions British Empire troops were barely involved in the post-war occupation of Japan. Popular history of the War against Japan also completely forgets Australian in New Guinea, the British 14th Army in Burma or the involvement of the British Pacific Fleet. Even though of course the numbers for these were bigly outnumbered by American forces they are basically forgotten for political reasons, same as why every American history of the War in Europe shits on Montgomery and tries to mention the British and Canadians as little as possible, and MacArthur shat on the Aussies in New Guinea. British Pacific Fleet were going to make up 25% of the carrier-borne forces for the invasion of Japan, and they were already there (involved with Okinawa and attacks on Japanese in the East Indies), and IIRC the plan for Bomber Command to be based on Okinawa for attacks on the Japanese mainland were basically underway. The big area of contention was with ground troops and MacArthur was dead against any Brit or ANZAC troops landing on Japan - to say nothing about Indians.
>>65422844Fair enough that it's not 1-1, but the whole reason people are so adverse to an invasion of Iran is because 23 years ago they thought Iraq would be an easy win.
>>65422846>This is literally just propagandaJapanese had actual military discipline, you wouldn't know what it looked like unless you're from a culture that has it or you read a lot
>>65417720How could you think you're winning if the enemy freely bombs your cities?
>>65423514It was an easy win. The Iraqi military was demolished in months. The Insurgency was weak.
>>65417515>They would have had over 12,000 aircraft availableWith what fuel
>>65423514It was extremely easy and bloodless, the problem was thinking that dumping heaps of money onto towelheads while dealing with their corrupt tyrants for them would magically turn them into a functional democratic nation with actual civilized people rather than a loose coalition of resentful tribal dimwits.
>>65423601With regards to their Kamikaze plains, they had plenty of fuel for the intended use during Olympic. The regular air force was pretty much at zero.
>>65423601All fuel was being stockpiled to be used by the Kamikaze. It gave the impression that Japan had 0 fuel left. It's the same faulty assumption intelligence was using for most of the build up.
>>65423666Ngl, reading the meeting notes/transcripts from the US as signal intel went from identifying about 200k to like 500-700k japs defending Kyushu is kinda entertaining.
>>65423677I like to imagine that the cigarette consumption of the intel officers increased commensurate to the Japanese troop counts.
>>65422793>If it wasn’t for those damn Yanks, we could have kept the war going another 10 years!
>>65423933'Mad' Jack Churchill is absolutely an inspiration who earned his legendary status. He is also an entirely different species to the normies who make up the bulk of the population in the UK and anywhere else.
>>65422465What will you do when America is gone?
>>65423677Link?
>>65424441No link, sorry. Im just going of what i remember from reading Downfall by R.B. Frank and Hell To Pay by Giangreco. Both do a god job of retelling the intel getting to US leadership leading up to the nukes dropping, two really good books
>>65418401When you see the Iranian protests in January and then assume that represents the entire population, this is like the Europeans backing Mexico (Let's just imagine that acronym leftist guy was president at the time in Mexico) thinking they could invade the US in 2020 and we'd all support them because "Look at those floyd protests, clearly it's a majority". If upwards of 3 million Iranians were protesting that'd be like 3% of the population.I'm sure more than 3 million Iranians don't like the regime, but you get the point. And when you inrtoduce the variable of US soldiers having to interact with Iranians and thus points of tension arising, the number of "get the fuck out" Iranians grows and grows.>>65418493Not really, no. America is 'milquetoast' because we have no reason to want to invade the way we had a reason to invade Japan. If no pearl harbor existed, no Bataan, then the American public would be livid at the idea of invading Japan and having to deal with upwards of a million dead. And>All because of domestic politicsYeah of course it would. We're a democracy, that's how it should be. You're thinking war exists for wars sake. This isn't 40k, tail don't wag the dog. >>65423599Our occupation was weak enough in terms of manpower until the surge that we fell into the peacekeeper snafu of sitting in the middle of a civil war and trying to not take sides. Well and good no reason to take a side in durka vs hurka but again, military success not translating into political success makes it a failure for anything but bragging rights
>>65423612Don't forget firing the entire bureaucratic core of the government and military and preventing them from ever de jure holding positions again. Then wondering why a bunch of new insurgent groups had really good organizational leadership and logistics. FFS was it really untenable to find the rational people in the government and do as smooth a transition as possible? We pretty much just found the least awful and most sensible Nazis and gave them Germany, banning anyone with Baathist party affiliation in a country where it was pretty much required to be at any decent position was so fucking stupid.>A more cynical part of me wonders if Iran might be easier only because our own military and media state seems much more willing to accept graphic civilian casualties as long as they are the Enemy these days, interpreted broadly of course. If anything, Trump and Hegseth actually seem like the kind to give less of a fuck about making it about spreading Democracy and more about fucking up Iran and frankly I can see it working. Maybe thats what is needed to win a war of conquest, but I'd say there's still a difference between the hearts and minds approach we tried in Iraq.
>>65422846Da Joos faked all those Allied war plans!!!
>>65425003>was it really untenable to find the rational people in the government and do as smooth a transition as possible?Finding people was unrealistic enough, let alone rational ones. Towelheads are just like that. There's no fixing their tribal mindset.
>>65417980His interview with MHV is really good, too, although the audio is flaky.
>>65418175I've seen suggestions that MacArthur's people had located the field HQs on Kyushu through radio-snooping operations and were planning to nuke the snot out of those HQs just prior to the landings. Would it have disrupted command and control enough to make the initial landings a cakewalk? No idea.
>>65425168Tve US were absolutely looking at the concept of tactical nukes attacking staging areas, rear areas and even main defence lines during the invation. This was back when nobody had any firm idea of what would happen to the GI going through the area a few hours later
>>65425158MHV?
>>65425003need an edit of that>girls with a time machine>boys with a time machineimage where he's going back to kill paul bremer
>>65422647Supposedly there were plans to ferry several PT Boat squadrons to Kyushu, after it was recognized that they would have been really useful at Okinawa. Their main task would have been to deal with floating kamikazes.
>>65425245Military History Visualized.
>>65418401>since no comparable resistance awaits a land invasion of iran.Iran has million kamikaze drones.
EasyAmerica is thinking of sending their own boys first, which they shouldn'tInstead they should collect every angry man, woman and child all across Asia who have a beef with Japan, arm them and send them in one massive wave where they can commit warcrimes and burn the remaining of Japan's ammunitionEye for an eye, a burned village in Burma = a burned village in Japan, 800k raped women across China = 800k raped women across Japan, 250k US and Filipino troops force marched for miles = 250k Japanese troops walking from southern Japan to northern Japan, etc.Only after then a combined Bong + US taskforce will start moving in, the Asians who survive the first wave gets recollected and sent back to their home countries with as many loot as they can physically grab
