You most likely need the war being accelerated to a point where the US storms Okinawa in late 1943 or something so the invasion is given the go ahead *before* the first bomb test goes off in early 1945, or somehow the bombs being delayed by months or even an year. Are any of these scenarios even remotely possible?
How close was operation downfall from happening?
- Thread starter Roon von Bismarck
- Start date
The Delayed bomb is the most likly way to get an Invasion of Japan.
If the bombs get finished on time and in numbers you wont get an invasion
And there is no practical way to spead up the war by any drastic degree.
Alternativly…. You can just go with a slow production rate and a Japanese government that wont give up. But you need a drastic slow dow, something like 1 bomb every 6 months or something,
Because if you have a reasonable production rate then I think the US would have just sat back and bombed Japan into a moonscape instead of attempting to invade. So you need both a Japanese government that does not surrender after the bomb gets dropped and then very slow production of bombs. If you want an invasion.
If the bombs get finished on time and in numbers you wont get an invasion
And there is no practical way to spead up the war by any drastic degree.
Alternativly…. You can just go with a slow production rate and a Japanese government that wont give up. But you need a drastic slow dow, something like 1 bomb every 6 months or something,
Because if you have a reasonable production rate then I think the US would have just sat back and bombed Japan into a moonscape instead of attempting to invade. So you need both a Japanese government that does not surrender after the bomb gets dropped and then very slow production of bombs. If you want an invasion.
The invasion plan and schedule wasn't affected by the availability of nukes - the main question was whether bombing cities should continue or whether to hold them back to use in support of the landings. If the coup had suceeded and prevented the surrender, then the invasion would have gone ahead.
Giant Man Eating Rabbits
Banned
Would bypassing Iwo Jima and going straight for Okinawa and it's chain of islands as in OTL do it? That's three months off the total already.
Karl der Große
Banned
Since it's a basic question with little to go on, why not post the question in the miscellaneous thread:
Miscellaneous >1900 (Alternate) History Thread
It is often the case that people on this forum have miscellaneous or frivolous questions that could be easily answered by the many experts on this forum but are difficult to find the answer to on Google Scholar/Books or Wikipedia because they don't often deal in alternatives. There are other...
www.alternatehistory.com
So in order for this to happen I think atomic bombs have to be a complete failure. So invasion was set for November 1st 1945. If you look at the timeline between august 15, 1945-November 1st 1945, you probably have 2 million more civilians killed in fire bombings on top of probably another 5 million killed from famine. You have the entire Japanese army on mainland China obliterated by the Red Army and the Soviets having all of Manchuria and Korea and maybe some smaller Japanese islands. Would the combined fire bombing, blockade, and red army blitz in Manchuria be enough to force a Japanese surrender by November 1st 1945? Honestly, based off Japanese interval documents and its behavior on Saipan, Iwo Jima, Okinawa etc, I don’t think they do. I think outside of a freak event like the atomic bombs downfall is going to happen. Japan at the end of the day surrendered to science.
If the gas centrifuge cascades had been much slower, and/or first desert nuke test had fizzled rather than fissioned, setting everything back, the Japanese city fire-bombing would become town, then village fire-bombing.
IIRC, several cities lost more people to 'traditional' incendiary bombing's fire-storms than later died in the nuclear attacks...
In fact, nothing would be safe beyond the Imperial Palace and, perhaps, Mt. Fuji...
Hey, these are Japanese, not Italian, a town near Vesuvius famously surrendering after USAAF dropped a few bombs into crater. which threw up some ash mistaken for worse...
No, the Japanese were prepared to starve their civilians so enough soldiers would be fit enough to oppose landings...
Meanwhile, the US were building mega-tank / assault guns --The T-95 / T-28, of which one (1) working prototype survives-- to storm those beach defences.
en.wikipedia.org
This Beast missed Normandy, was too late to crush the Siegfried Line, never had to stomp a King Tiger or duel a Maus, but Japan awaited...
As the above post mentioned, Russians were rolling up the rump of the Japanese mainland army, biting off the Northern islands...
The IJN could not evacuate, reinforce or supply anywhere reliably: they'd just had the singular Yamato brought low, and her damaged sister-ship was stuck in harbour. Coastal shipping was being decimated by air attack and submarines, who now had torpedo fuses that worked...
Japan would fall. Could be argued that the nukes, followed by Russia's declaration of war, made the hopeless situation sufficiently obvious that the remaining hyper-fanatical warmongers could be over-ruled, any attempted coup thwarted...
Cruelly, the blood-price for saving countless civilians, soldiers and POWs across the Japanese islands and beaches was those two 'nuclear' cities...
IIRC, several cities lost more people to 'traditional' incendiary bombing's fire-storms than later died in the nuclear attacks...
In fact, nothing would be safe beyond the Imperial Palace and, perhaps, Mt. Fuji...
Hey, these are Japanese, not Italian, a town near Vesuvius famously surrendering after USAAF dropped a few bombs into crater. which threw up some ash mistaken for worse...
No, the Japanese were prepared to starve their civilians so enough soldiers would be fit enough to oppose landings...
Meanwhile, the US were building mega-tank / assault guns --The T-95 / T-28, of which one (1) working prototype survives-- to storm those beach defences.
T28 super-heavy tank - Wikipedia
As the above post mentioned, Russians were rolling up the rump of the Japanese mainland army, biting off the Northern islands...
The IJN could not evacuate, reinforce or supply anywhere reliably: they'd just had the singular Yamato brought low, and her damaged sister-ship was stuck in harbour. Coastal shipping was being decimated by air attack and submarines, who now had torpedo fuses that worked...
Japan would fall. Could be argued that the nukes, followed by Russia's declaration of war, made the hopeless situation sufficiently obvious that the remaining hyper-fanatical warmongers could be over-ruled, any attempted coup thwarted...
Cruelly, the blood-price for saving countless civilians, soldiers and POWs across the Japanese islands and beaches was those two 'nuclear' cities...