WI - no A bombs had been dropped, "Olympic" was postponed and the Soviets had tried to invade Japan?

There were starving Japanese on Sapian and Okinawa as well, but they threw themselves off cliffs or blew themselves up. We tried to reach them with megaphones, leaflets, even defector testimony, but it didn't work. There were some who surrendered to the Americans (unlike the Japanese soldiers), but there was not one major incident of actual resistance to the IJA. Even at the end of the war to act out against the Emperor was inconceivable to most (which is why the latter's individual intervention was so decisive in ending it). In all likelihood, choosing the "blockade" option would have meant two or more years of warfare ('patch work' famine would only have set in by 1946), functionally the same length of time required to complete Operation Downfall if not longer.

Worse, even this option would hardly have been bloodless. Even excluding the vast death toll in Japan proper such a strategy implies, an average of around 400,000 people were dying every month throughout Asia, most of them innocent civilians at the hands of the Japanese. The Japanese military, some 4,000,000 strong outside the Homeland, would have to be divided up and smashed bit by bit in a series of campaigns stretching from Manchuria to Malaya. With them would die millions more noncombatants and Allied soldiers. In a last, desperate act of barbarity the Japanese also planned to begin a systematic massacre of all Allied POWs and civilian internees under their control starting in August, something the Allied high command could not have known about until after the war.

It was a horrible situation, and I cannot think of any way short of Divine Intervention that Japan would have capitulated or stopped fighting without great loss of life.
 
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jahenders

Banned
Its seems a grim but accurate assessment that barring some unlikely miracle the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were the least bloodiest way to end the Pacific War.

Absolutely. Unless the Japanese just suddenly decided to surrender within a 1-2 months more people would have died than died in the blasts. These would have included civilians in Japanese held areas, Japanese troops trapped on the Asian mainland, Japanese troops and civilians subjected to frequent US bombing, allied POWs in Japan, Japanese civilians dying for shortages of food and medicine, some Russian troops facing Japanese on the mainland, some W Ally troops enforcing the quarantine, etc.
 
Absolutely. Unless the Japanese just suddenly decided to surrender within a 1-2 months more people would have died than died in the blasts. These would have included civilians in Japanese held areas, Japanese troops trapped on the Asian mainland, Japanese troops and civilians subjected to frequent US bombing, allied POWs in Japan, Japanese civilians dying for shortages of food and medicine, some Russian troops facing Japanese on the mainland, some W Ally troops enforcing the quarantine, etc.

There would also have been Operation Zipper- a British/Commonwealth amphibious assault on Malaya scheduled to begin shortly after the Japanese surrender. Postwar analysis of the proposed landing beaches suggest it would have been an out-and-out disaster.
 
If the bombs were not available, I fear that the US would have gone ahead with invasion plans, no matter how suicidal they might have been--because the invasion scheme was under the authority of Douglas MacArthur. His ego was all invested in it and even with the A-bombs as options he wanted to simply incorporate their nearly tactical use (to break resistance and pour US troops through the blasted zone:hushedface:).

So since the USA was in a position to launch an invasion first, and since MacArthur was all for the glory of it, and it would hardly do to end the war as it began with a Sitzkreig, the question of Soviet invasion is moot, unless we were to invite some Red Army units to join Americans on the boats we'd supply, supplying the transport to get them to the staging areas too.
 
It's possible that Japan would've surrender if the United States had done more of a perpetually long blockade. Could the Soviets even invade the mainland of Japan from Manchuria? They didn't seem to have the naval power.
 
The Russians were in a rotten situation, to pull off an invasion they needed the United States to supply the equipment. I have a feeling that once the Russian finished with Manchuria and Korea. The United States would have no incentive to give the Russians the equipment they needed to carry an invastion of Japan. So no invasion.
 
I've got the feeling a lot of people don't know what they're talking about - the Soviets DID carry out naval and airborne landings throughout the theater, including this one, where they had to sail for 21 hours to get to their target. Sure, they were no Overlord, but they didn't have to be against what Japan had on Hokkaido.

The Soviets had overwhelming numbers of aircraft, used OTL to great effect at supplying the forward elements of the advance into Manchuria, as well as lots of paratroopers, which were dropped as far south as Port Arthur.

Given that most Japanese assets where concentrated south to repel a US invasion, and would NOT (and really, could not even if they wanted to) moved north lest the Americans invade, there wasn't really anything the Japanese could do to stop a Soviet naval and air landing on Hokkaido. They had no navy, no fuel and not a whole lot of men on Hokkaido. The Soviets would launch several probing attacks (well within range of even their IL-2s), similarly to how they carried out opposed river crossings against the Germans, and support the ones with the most succes. Once they get their heavy armor across, there's no more stopping them, and only the rugged terrain of Hokkaido will slow them down.
 

Wallet

Banned
The longer the war is, the more likely the Soviets invade.

Say the coup works, and the fanatics take over completely. After a few months after the US invasion, the Soviets WILL invade. Stalin will want a piece of Japan
 
If the allies waited until 1946 I think Japan as a country would near cease to exist thanks to famine and bombing and we can assume there would be some civil unrest.

As terrible as it was, nuking Japan twice probably saved the country from itself and its leadership and I think saved the lives of hundreds of thousands if not millions of Japanese and Allied personnel.
 
I've got the feeling a lot of people don't know what they're talking about - the Soviets DID carry out naval and airborne landings throughout the theater, including this one, where they had to sail for 21 hours to get to their target. Sure, they were no Overlord, but they didn't have to be against what Japan had on Hokkaido.

The Soviets had overwhelming numbers of aircraft, used OTL to great effect at supplying the forward elements of the advance into Manchuria, as well as lots of paratroopers, which were dropped as far south as Port Arthur.

Given that most Japanese assets where concentrated south to repel a US invasion, and would NOT (and really, could not even if they wanted to) moved north lest the Americans invade, there wasn't really anything the Japanese could do to stop a Soviet naval and air landing on Hokkaido. They had no navy, no fuel and not a whole lot of men on Hokkaido. The Soviets would launch several probing attacks (well within range of even their IL-2s), similarly to how they carried out opposed river crossings against the Germans, and support the ones with the most succes. Once they get their heavy armor across, there's no more stopping them, and only the rugged terrain of Hokkaido will slow them down.

The video in post #2 debunks any notions of a Soviet invasion. It was completely impossible for them within any reasonable time frame.
 
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