All that would have happened was that the war in the pacific would have been extended by another six to twelve months.
Japan had constant oil shortages[0], had over a million men tied up in a land war in China, and its naval capacity was outproduced five-to-one by the United States. [1] The outcome of the War in the Pacific was inevitable, as of December 8th, 1941. [2]
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Military_production_during_Wor...
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Military_production_during_Wor...
The great imponderable of war is the population's willingness to keep waging it. I don't know what would have happened and neither does Wikipedia.
The anime Zipang brings up a more interesting point: had oil been discovered ten years earlier in Manchuria, would Japan have attacked the US and Dutch at all? Possibly yes: the question of “how do we defeat America?” eclipsed the more important “should we defeat America?” in Imperial Japan.
The policy of isolationism was very strong in the continental US. It's quite easy to imagine that the US gets bogged down in internal politics for years before stepping up.
What would you have said about England after Dunkirk? (With no hindsight allowed.)
It was a far closer fight than the United States and Japan. An invasion of the isles would have been impossible to pull off, and the war would almost certainly had gone the same way that it did - years of fighting over African colonies.
The battle of midway instead knocked out of all Japanese aircraft carriers. Unbeknownst to Japan, the United states was already pumping out several aircraft carriers per month and was also developing the nuclear bomb. The only possible change could have been surrendering to the Soviet union instead of United states. However, even that seems unlikely given the N bomb.
Dude named Oppenheimer begs to differ.
America still takes a lot of flack for demanding unconditional surrender which led us to drop two nukes on Japan. “The US could have just accepted peace terms with some concessions to Japan, then they wouldn’t have had to drop the bombs” is the line of argument.
Once the US had nuclear weapons, the result was not in doubt.
Putting aside nuclear arms as your comment seems to do, the question is not nearly as open as you make it out to be: Japan was heavily outmatched in resources, facing an array of enemies while having no significant allies of its own in the Pacific theater. So, even on a non-nuclear basis, they were in deep trouble. The best they could have hoped for was a stalemate: the Allies reclaim all lost ground, but don't invade the Japanese mainland.
There is a nice video somewhere on YouTube that shows the production of US naval ships vs Japanese naval ships in scaled time.
It is shocking the amount of ships that that US was producing starting near the middle of the war. A new destroyer or cruiser rolled out every couple of days. Japan wasn't even close.
I imagine that staffing the ships at some point was going to become a problem.
That's why using atomic bomb had no real military justification, it was just a very powerful political demonstration and USA retaliation on Japanese people.
That's the official pretext / party line of the US, to self-justify the nuclear bombings (as if they ever could be justified).
The reality is the Japanese were dead scared (also of the incoming Soviets) and were looking to surrender. They just didn't want an unconditional surrender, but to save some face/dignity.
Anytime one hears the "the Japanese were looking to surrender" narrative, it should be understood that, even being generous, it's a half-truth that isn't borne out by a closer examination of the historical record, which even Japanese historians interviewing wartime Japanese officials, who had every possible reason to want to save face for their country, don't contradict.
The reality is that while, yes, there was a peace faction in the Japanese government who did want to surrender but the ultranationalistic Japanese military was quite firmly in control and was very much _not_ interested in surrendering, even at the cost of millions of Japanese military and civilian casualties involved in continuing the war. The aim (and preference of all factions) would have been a peace treaty that let Japan keep its ill-gotten gains in Asia. It took a direct order from the Emperor to initiate the surrender, over the objections of the military, and even then a coup attempt was made by fanatics willing to defy even the Emperor in an attempt to prevent the surrender proclamation from being broadcast (the Kyuujou incident).
Just how widespread was this sentiment at that time? Reading the accounts of the Kyūjō incident starting from the Wikipedia entry and branching from there [1], I got the sense that some of the Imperial Japanese Army leadership prevarication in the very early phases of the incident up to Kawabe's organizing of the agreement was this history's knife's edge playing out again. I just lack the cultural referents to even understand how significant was the fact that after the emperor's stiffly formal announcement, there was a broadcast immediately following to confirm in lay language that indeed it was a surrender announcement.
If specialist historians with the appropriate cross-cultural training can confirm it was that opaque to the Japanese themselves, then I wouldn't be surprised that the Americans misread the cues that Japanese were giving in their attempts to surrender, not helped by their selection of the Soviet Union as an intermediary that turned out to be an unreliable partner. This is all on top of the usual chaotic swirl of the fog of war.
There are criticisms against the narrative the Japanese were trying to surrender but the US ignored those attempts because the US wanted to use the nuclear bombs [2]. And there are narratives that the nuclear bombs were not decisive, but the Soviets opening another front was [3]. This account gives some useful color background to the decisions' context [4].
General consensus of casual discussions (as opposed to scholarly studies, which I couldn't find) of why the US didn't use the nuclear bomb on Tokyo seems to converge upon the US leadership emerging a strategy that desires a negotiated peace with some Japanese power structure intact. So any narrative that the US "just wants to use the bombs" takes place within the framework of the demonstrated and carried out desire for a negotiated conclusion. It might not have been as simple as "we want to use The Bomb, and by God, we'll use it", it might have been used as an instrument to achieving the strategic objective.
And there is definitely room to strenuously object to that use even within that framework, but for me to be convinced it was objectively black-and-white "wrong", I'd have to know more about the information and context the decision-makers on both sides operated upon, not the hindsight information we are privy to. Would appreciate any pointers to material along those lines.
What I took away from that pivot point in history is war is indeed, hell.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ky%C5%ABj%C5%8D_incident
[2] https://historynewsnetwork.org/article/52502
[3] https://www.carnegiecouncil.org/education/008/expertclips/01...
[4] https://www.nationalww2museum.org/war/articles/japans-surren...
The short version is that the Japanese did not have the merchant tonnage available to support operations already in progress at that point in the war. An invasion of Japan would've required landing several infantry divisions, across thousands of miles of open water, too far from any airstrips for land-based aircraft to support them. The Hawaiian islands are small, but Oahu, Maui, and Hawaii are big enough for maneuver warfare.
An American loss at Midway would've been a huge setback, especially had all three carriers been lost. The rate of commissioning of new Essex-class ships, not to mention the light and escort carriers, however, would've more than made up for the loss by mid-1943, and the Japanese simply did not have the industrial capacity to sustain a long naval war of attrition.
An American victory was not inevitable, but there's a fairly strong case to be made that the means by which the war was begun, by a sneak attack, had incensed the American populace sufficiently that even further serious naval defeats wouldn't've sapped their willingness to fight on. Indeed, several more American carriers were lost throughout 1942 (Hornet and Wasp), as well as the calamitous loss of four cruisers at Savo Island.
I don't actually think they would have "won" the war. I think their aims were really to dominate Asia and have the U.S. accept that, if grudgingly. There was certainly no desire to do a Man in the High Castle thing.
If forced into an existential conflict by a string of Axis victories on all major fronts, we would've turned most of the planet into a smoking crater, and there would have been nothing Japan, Germany, Russia, or anyone else could have done about it.
Everything leading up to August 6 was just so much posturing.
Look at the dates: Aug. 9 was Nagasaki. It wasn't until the 15th that they surrendered. Up until then, the war councils actually thought Stalin would intervene and force a better peace than the "unconditional surrender" the Allies demanded.
I know everyone believes the A-bomb ended the war. Unfortunately even that wasn't enough. If it was, the Japanese would have surrendered on Aug. 10.
That's not to contradict CamperBob2 about the US would have done. We could only produce about one bomb per month, though, IIRC.
Tip to HN users: "This is indisputably true but I don't like it" isn't a good reason to downvote people.
1: https://socratic.org/questions/why-did-germans-forces-surren...
That's because Wehrmacht soldiers and their pals have warred on USSR, and took millions of lives and caused untold suffering there.
The Japanese, at that point, not so much.
So, angry retribution against Wehrmacht soldier scum was to be expected...
This didn't really matter for the Soviets. Though the Manchurian invasion was too rapid and short-lived to really escalate to European-level Soviet brutality, the Red Army engaged in plenty of the same random massacres, mass rapes, brutalities and mass deportations after they entered and occupied Manchuria.
Many of these soldiers had already long since been brutalized by their campaigns in eastern and central Europe (from which they had been shipped in massive trainloads shortly after VE Day) and the basic nature of the Soviet leadership hardly fostered a spirit of good military conduct to civilians at any time.
Some deeper reading about the Soviet Manchurian campaign reveals quite a few of the uglier details.
Also, none of this in the least bit excuses the grotesque behavior of the Japanese Army in the same region during its long occupation. Regardless of how the Japanese are perceived today, their army's habits during the 2nd World War were completely beyond justification in their genocidal viciousness.
And would the US be so magnanimous in victory had the toll been higher due to Axis victories on all major fronts (meaning that the human losses of the Axis were transfered to the Allies) up to the Atomic bombs use?
About 2.5 times as many people in Asia were killed by the Japanese as died in the German Holocaust. Let that sink in.
Anything the US did would have been seen as negligible in comparison.
My own favorite (no disrespect to the others) is C. Wade McClusky, the hero of the Battle of Midway in WW II. He just happened to find the Japanese carriers, where no one else would have thought to look, and sink them.
Had the US lost, it might have lost Hawaii as well. Then what would have happened? I can't say and neither can anyone else.