Re:Night of the Guillotine: The Fall of Robespierre
by AlbertCory on Wednesday July 14, 2021 @04:31PM
(#27838071)
That's a good analysis.
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.
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.