Japan doesn't surrender and US ops to starve and bomb. How long does the war last

Well, first, if they had the requisite points, they weren't "forced."

That being said, in the US mobilization for WW II, the term of service was "the duration plus six months. "The duration" was of the war, not a given campaign, front, or theater; lessons dating back to WW I and the Civil War had made that abundantly clear.

He had the points, but there was a proviso that personnel with "specialized knowledge/skills" would be retained. My uncle fell under that category even though he had more than enough points, thus he would have been retained.
 
The chemical campaign to destroy the crops would take at bare minimum at least a year to be put into operation. These things can't happen quickly. And there would be pushback from a lot of sources. The air force would object to using the VT (proximity fuse) in the bombs (which would be needed for an airburst which would be the most effective) because that would guarantee the Japanese capturing some intact. And eventually someone would ask: "What happens if we use these things and destroy the Japanese crops and then they do surrender? How are we going to feed all those people?" Because once they surrendered it WOULD be our responsibility to feed them. This is a lot harder than you think.

Continuous firebombing of settlement of all sizes and worsening food shortage would reduce the no. of post-war population that needs to be feed.
 
The rice crop of 1945 failed. Distribution of food was utterly disrupted. Atomic weapons were coming on line - 1 more in August, the infamous "third shot", yhree or four more in September, and three per month from October onwards.

http://blog.nuclearsecrecy.com/2012/04/25/weekly-document-the-third-shot-and-beyond-1945/

Downfall was likely to be put off if not outright canceled. A Soviet invasion of Hokkaido is entirely possible, but not until 1946. They'll consolidate and spend the winter getting ready for a Spring offensive.

So, taking larger famines from roughly the same time period, and going with upper fatality rates, a minimum of 15% of the population dies of food insecurity - ten million - over the winter of 1945/6. And that's without targeting agricultural production with chemical or biological attacks.

Going by the OP's assumption that the invasions are off - a good assumption, BTW - bombing fatalities is a little trickier. Back of the envelope type figuring...
The fatality rate of the actual bombing campaign varoes from source to source, but the 3-350,000 neighborhood is a good solid estimate. Most of those occurred between January and August of 1945. The firebombing of major cities in March, 1945 alone caused roughly 100,000 fatalities. The raids are going to become routine and effective, but the urban populations are going to drop due to evacuations and famine. Call it 50,000 per month from conventional fire bombing raids. 250,000 fatalities in 1945, 500,000 in the first six months of 1946, 750,000 total through June 1946.

For atomic bombings, I'm going with a lowered estimate from the first two for thr same reasons above for the conventional bombings. Call it 50,000 per bomb, three bombs per month. That gives us 600,000 in 1945, 900,000 in the first six months of 1946, 1,500,000 through June 1946.

So far, that's more than twelve million or 17% of the population dead by June 1946. At least another 7-10 million deaths before the end of 1946, if the country hasn't collapsed yet. And this is all before taking into account that there was starting to be actual serious resistance to the war and the military government in 1945.

Either the place falls apart entirely somewhere in the Spring of 1946 and there's no organized government to surrender or someone manages to displace the coup junta around the same time. In either case, tens of millions of civilian deaths and the country is utterly ruined, a wasteland with every city either burned to ashes or radioactive dust, industrial and transportation infrastructure absolutely gone, population starving, and no ability to to feed itself.

The knock on effects on the USAmerican psyche and the cold war are going to significant. The atomic genie is out of the bottle after the use of 30+ bombs on Japan. Stalin is going to be even more nuts. And he'll probably have all of Korea. China probably ends up divided, or worse an atomic battlefield...
 

Dave Shoup

Banned
He had the points, but there was a proviso that personnel with "specialized knowledge/skills" would be retained. My uncle fell under that category even though he had more than enough points, thus he would have been retained.

What were his "specialized knowledge/skills"?

Once you took the oath - whether recalled, volunteer, or conscript - you were GI until the other poor bastard died (for his country). USN, USCG, USMS, and USMM personnel were sent from one "front" to the "other" routinely from 1941-45, even when the enemy in a given theater surrendered, whether that was in 1943 or 1945. One of my relatives enlisted in 1941 and didn't make it back to the US for good until three years after VJ Day ... talk about "Golden Gate in '48."

BOHICA is nothing new.
 
Starvation isn't going to do the job. It's not like there wasn't any food. Just not enough for everyone without imports (like England, say). The food will be given to the army, the factory workers, and anyone else important enough. The old, the very young, and non-productive poor will be allowed to starve and thus sacrifice themselves for their emperor. Eventually a stable, feedable population will be reached and the war will still go on.

Sure! The problem with this is that this never happens without social upheaval.

And don't believe the Japanese, because of their fanatical devotion to the Emperor, will face this without batting an eye. Maybe a few will. But we know from the historical record of that time that the Japanese were entirely capable of thinking with their own heads. We have anonymous letters pleading authorities to stop the war. Heck, we have the military conspiration to murder generals and detain the Emperor! Sure, that was in order to continue with the war - but if the guys that should have been the most loyal to the emperor were willing to detain him and prevent him from pushing ahead with the surrender, what do you think the former members of the Japanese Communist party would be willing to do? The 70,000 people who over the previous two decades had been arrested and jailed for violation of the Public Security Law?

The usual, historical way out for Japan would be civil war, with both sides claiming, of course, that they were loyal to the emperor but that the other side was not.
You would be looking at the rice riots of 1918, though with a touch of the political riots of 1905, only on a grand scale and happening everywhere; plus a sprinkling of attempts of military coups (I think there were half a dozen such events between 1930 and 1940), in this situation not by the pro-war but by the pro-peace faction. An attempt of secession of Hokkaido, like that attempted in 1869, is not to be excluded. This gives you an idea of how fragile the apparently monolithical Japan was.

Oh, naturally, the police, the secret police and the army would have very good chances of stomping anything like that out - but not without significant bloodshed, waste of resources and the destruction or dispersal of food stockpiles, and a loss of legitimation of the imperial rule that would bring about further "incidents", as the Japanese like to call these events, in a spiral of chaos and anarchy exacerbated by the famine and epidemics.
 
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