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What if the US just went public with the plans and described them in great detail to the world before the attack had a chance to take place? They might have averted the war altogether and forced the Japanese diplomats to cave in.

No one's posted the biggest one yet: Glendale, 30 June 1862. Stonewall Jackson is his usual aggressive self and completes the encirclement of McClellan's army with Longstreet, inflicting a second Cannae on the Union. With the Army of the Potomac crippled, the North has nothing with which to...

The Japanese Bombardment Force had this problem at Guadalcanal. On 14 October Kongo and Haruna actually used up their stocks of fragmentation and incendiary projectiles and had to resort to AP. Even though those two battleships fired nearly 1,000 main battery rounds between them - not to mention...

I'd assume, based on the results of the other carrier battles of 1942, that Japanese aircraft losses would have been comparable to those of the Americans (excluding planes lost on the 'sunken' US carriers or the Midway Island garrison). The Japanese claim on their wiki that they lost 110 aircrew...

This is different: the Soviets asked for the US Navy to provide them with assault shipping and supplies that would be siphoned off the buildup for Operation Downfall. King told them nothing could be spared.

If I recall correctly, the Japanese planned to send their landing craft through the gap in the reef at the northwest part of the Atoll in order to minimize the danger of scraping or falling victim to traps set up by the Americans. The gap itself is approximately three miles wide and between 2...

The Soviets would have required allied assistance to make any landings and consequently would have increased the logistical burden rather than lessened it. The US even denied the Soviets naval support in the Kurils during the run-up to the USSR's declaration of war on Japan on the grounds that...

The distance from the reef to the islands is 4 to 6 miles on the long side, and the reef is exposed at low tide. Base commander Col. Shannon placed special emphasis on booby trapping the coral barrier so that Japanese landing forces attempting to cross it would be blown sky high.

The allies had no intention of including the USSR in the invasion of mainland Japan, and the Soviets lacked the ability to offer a meaningful contribution in the near future.

That was my mistake, they were. Although these had been moved, the Midway gun positions were in general dug out of the ground and surrounded with heaps of sand or coconut log revetments, which weren't as effective as concrete bunkers. When the Japanese first bombarded the atoll on the same...

Thanks for the specifics, I thought the combat echelon alone was 5,000 and that Ichiki was in overall command; in that case it would have been an even greater disaster. The Japanese might just decide it's not worth it. Presumably after having effectively neutralized the US carrier force - at...

Ah, I see that now after having read further back. Even if they had somehow taken Midway it would have been worthless on its own unless the rest of the war also went miraculously well for Japan, and might well have ended up cut off and used for target practice like Wake.

It would have been far worse than that. According to Walter Lord, by 4 June 1942 the defending garrison on Eastern and Sand Islands amounted to three Marine Defense Battalions plus two Rifle Companies from another and a handful of Army and Navy personnel. These totalled about 3,500 men and were...

Kursk was the last reasonable chance Germany had to seize the initiative on the Eastern Front. Through its triumph in history's largest land battle, the Red Army shifted the direction of the theater from "in the balance" toward a Soviet victory, so it was a great turning point.

At minimum the prompt intervention of a great power into the Second-Sino Japanese War would have led to status-quo negotiations between the Japanese and CKS.

World population for most of the Roman period onward was around 300-500 million, so keeping it at that amount would have been more or less maintaining the status quo. A few thousand years before though, the middle Egyptian Empire, with its population of 10 million, represented a fifth of all...

Weren't the Rosicrucians some obscure religious order that aspired to keep the world population under 500 million? If I recall correctly they were mystics with more pagan influence than Christian.

I think the whole "ancient aliens" spiel only really became popular with the TV show, prior to that I had hardly ever heard of such a thing and even then it was unrelated to either von Daniken or his book.

Probably the only chance for a meaningful Chinese victory in the early period would have been as a pre-emptive strike on the small Japanese garrison in Shanghai prior to the outbreak of general war. At that time there were only around 4,000 IJN SNLF personnel in the city, as opposed to 50,000...