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A comment on Night of the Guillotine: The Fall of Robespierre. Parent comment

Re:Night of the Guillotine: The Fall of Robespierre by vkou on Tuesday July 13, 2021 @05:48PM (#27826696)
> Then what would have happened?

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...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Day_of_Infamy_speech

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Re:Night of the Guillotine: The Fall of Robespierre by AlbertCory on Tuesday July 13, 2021 @05:55PM (#27826761)
It's so easy to pronounce the final outcome "inevitable" isn't it? There's no one to prove you wrong.

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.

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Re:Night of the Guillotine: The Fall of Robespierre by labster on Tuesday July 13, 2021 @06:10PM (#27826903)
It’s hard to imagine a world where the US in 1941 would not use its industrial power to assert hegemony over the Pacific after being attacked. The Japanese strategy was to neutralize the US fast enough to reduce morale for waging a losing war. But US morale remained high throughout, so it too is hard to imagine a world where the strategy would succeed even if the attack on Pearl was executed flawlessly.

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.

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Re:Night of the Guillotine: The Fall of Robespierre by HarryHirsch on Tuesday July 13, 2021 @09:08PM (#27828316)
Imagine that organometallic chemistry had developed quicker, and decent Ziegler-Natta catalysts had been discovered in 1935 instead of 1955. Would the Japanese have gone to war over the caoutchouc plantations in Southeast Asia instead of relying on synthetic rubber?
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Re:Night of the Guillotine: The Fall of Robespierre by scottLobster on Wednesday July 14, 2021 @12:16AM (#27829665)
To be fair, the Japanese strategy also relied on heavily fortifying the territory they took and then daring the Americans to take it back. With another 6-12 months they might have had time to build up much stronger defenses. If every island was as bad as Iwo Jima/Okinawa it's an open question how long the American public would have supported the war. We ended up using nukes for multiple reasons as it was, one of which was doubt that the American public would stomach the cost of an invasion of the Japanese home islands.
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Re:Night of the Guillotine: The Fall of Robespierre by fatbird on Wednesday July 14, 2021 @01:44AM (#27830049)
At the time, the U.S. Admirals recognized that clearing the occupied islands wasn't necessary and would be ruinously expensive. Their explicit goal was to create airstrips within bomber reach of the Japanese home islands. Even with 6-12 more months to fortify, it's not obvious that the outcome wouldn't be the same, with the U.S. grabbing a few key islands and ignoring the rest.
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Re:Night of the Guillotine: The Fall of Robespierre by pas on Wednesday July 14, 2021 @02:14AM (#27830200)
> It’s hard to imagine a world where the US in 1941 would not use its industrial power to assert hegemony over the Pacific after being attacked.

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.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZaKOOqXDnqA

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Re:Night of the Guillotine: The Fall of Robespierre by canjobear on Tuesday July 13, 2021 @08:41PM (#27828084)
It’s easy to wax philosophical about how we can’t predict things, and it’s true that you can never have certainty, but it really is relatively cut and dried here. There are many cases in history that could have gone the other way. But Japan was terribly outmatched in every way in 1941.
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Re:Night of the Guillotine: The Fall of Robespierre by AlbertCory on Wednesday July 14, 2021 @04:34PM (#27838086)
I don't dispute that and you're probably right, but I'd just ask:

What would you have said about England after Dunkirk? (With no hindsight allowed.)

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Re:Night of the Guillotine: The Fall of Robespierre by vkou on Wednesday July 14, 2021 @05:40PM (#27838779)
After Dunkirk, England was at the head of an empire that numbered over half a billion people - a quarter of the world's population, a similar industrial output to Germany, uncontested dominance of the seas, and a sympathetic United States that was supplying food, munitions, and warships.

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.

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Re:Night of the Guillotine: The Fall of Robespierre by random314 on Tuesday July 13, 2021 @06:20PM (#27826973)
If you have studied world war 2. We can make a more informed guess. The Japanese admiral considered the war doomed from the start, with the only hope being the destruction of all the 4 American aircraft carriers.

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.

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Re:Night of the Guillotine: The Fall of Robespierre by kaesar14 on Tuesday July 13, 2021 @06:01PM (#27826814)
Such comments totally ignore the human element of warfare, totally agreed with you.
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Re:Night of the Guillotine: The Fall of Robespierre by crubier on Tuesday July 13, 2021 @06:45PM (#27827161)
No one knows with certainty indeed. But we do know with high probability that the outcome would have been roughly similar given the massive unbalance of important metrics.
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Re:Night of the Guillotine: The Fall of Robespierre by CamperBob2 on Tuesday July 13, 2021 @06:28PM (#27827044)
There's no one to prove you wrong.

Dude named Oppenheimer begs to differ.

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Re:Night of the Guillotine: The Fall of Robespierre by xref on Wednesday July 14, 2021 @02:12AM (#27830194)
Remember Japan was angling for a peace where they got to keep a lot of their conquered territories, even if the US could manufacture more stuff eventually it doesn’t mean we wouldn’t have settled to end the war.

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.

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