@BobTheBarbarian The USA does not have to go to war with the USSR to "evict" them from Hokkaido, if the Russians should manage to land there (and I agree it would be a huge stretch). Stalin knows that he cannot have a war with the USA which would threaten his gains in Europe, and the USA could wipe the floor with the USSR in the Pacific. The Soviet Union was scraping the bottom of the barrel for manpower in 1945, and when LL stopped they were in the hurt locker for food and their agricultural and industrial capacities were going to take years to rebuild.
You still have to answer the questions of "how," "why," and "when." There would have been no action of any kind against any Soviet lodgement in Japan until after the latter's defeat; this is basic military and political common sense. Any future brinkmanship would thus be confined to the Cold War era, full stop.
[Laughter.] Stalin's promises were lies. Proxy wars in Greece, Korea, fighting in ME, IRAN, etc. 1946-1950 Plenty of wars while Stalin lived.
Are you incapable of discussing in good faith? Which of those involved direct confrontation between Soviet and Western armies while both were actively engaged against a mutual enemy, and a world power at that? Stop insulting everyone's intelligence with this nonsense.
Which was a proposal put forward by two guys (future Secretary of State Dean Rusk and Colonel Charles Bonesteel) with a NatGeo Magazine accepted by the Soviets on August 16, 1945, one day after the surrender of Japan. It had nothing to do with Yalta at all and if the Japanese didn't surrender would never have happened. No experts on Korea (or the Koreans themselves) were consulted whatsoever and it was just as ad-hoc as Churchill's infamous "Napkin Agreement" with Stalin over Eastern Europe.
Ahem
1. Truman did not know what FDR and Stalin cooked up at Yalta. Like the bomb he was not briefed. After the Turkey Shoot the desire was for a Russian army to bemuse the Japanese in Manchuria, and after Okinawa, even that was seen as unnecessary as the US had three ways to end the war without Russian (or British) help. Submarine blockade, aerial bombardment or amphibious assault.; All three horrendous, but certain by March *46 at the latest. The only calculation was in the total numbers of Japanese and American dead. It was likely MacArthur
would get Olympic and not need Coronet, if Lemay's city-killing was not enough. But in any event 5-10 million civilian deaths would have been the result.
Truman was a key figure in the terms of the Potsdam Conference, which was an extension of the previous talks at Yalta. Virtually all of his head-butting there had more to do with the treatment of the defeated Germans whom he sought to protect from getting another Versailles. The Russian attack in the Far East was still a central diplomatic objective for the US, and again Stalin affirmed his commitment to it.
One-line blurbs are not rebuttals.
That one is not mine, but it is a similar strategic overlay as to conditions existent.
Since the US was prepared to fully NBC the beaches to get ashore at Kyushu and reach its stop lines, the claim that the "6th army would be eviscerated" is errant nonsense as well. Casualties during Olympic were expected to be on the Normandy scale: bad on the US side, not excessive, nor army destroying. Japanese casualties were expected to go through the roof, however. Bamboo spears against American infantry at this stage? Not smart.
Hence, nonsense.
The losses on Kyushu would have been disastrous for the United States. The use of atomic weapons (which would have had trifling to minimal effect on the dug-in Japanese fortifications) would only have served to poison the ground the GIs and Marines would have fought over. In general, the Japanese, unlike the Germans in Normandy, correctly predicted the locations of all the major landing sites and had massed enormous forces to greet them; the landings themselves would have been preceded by a swarm of nearly 9,000 kamikazes and conventional craft which would have produced tens of thousands of casualties before any American boot even set foot in Japan. In the words of Major Mark P. Arens,
"If Operation Olympic had been executed, as planned, on 1 November 1945, it would have been the largest bloodbath in American history. Although American forces had superior fire power and were better trained and equipped than the Japanese soldier, the close-in, fanatical combat between infantrymen would have been devastating to both sides [...] The total casualty estimate of 328,000 equates to 57 percent of the U.S. ground forces slated for Olympic. On the Satsuma Peninsula, the V Amphibious Corps casualty estimate would have been 13,000 killed and 34,000 wounded, or approximately 54 percent of the Marine force. This casualty estimate for VAC is made without any additional Japanese forces moving into the 40th Army's zone. Add to these estimates the results of kamikaze attacks against transports, and the battle for Kyushu would have been devastating to the American people.
[T]he intelligence estimates of the Japanese forces and their capabilities on Kyushu, for Operation Olympic, were so inaccurate that an amphibious assault by the V Amphibious Corps would have failed."
Proving that Operations Olympic and Coronet would have produced shattering losses is like proving that taking a meat cleaver to a man's head will kill him - it's not really up for debate. The chilling reality of what Japan had in store for the invasion as revealed by SIGINT in July in August 1945 forced the US to accept large-scale support from the British/Commonwealth during Coronet, and for the first time since 1943 prompted the Navy to officially cast doubt on the prospect of invasion in its entirety.