Land invasion of Japan

bamboo spear armed high school girls

OP here, something I'm curious about that no one's mentioned yet is what the Soviets would be doing. Are they busy chewing up Manchuria, or would we have seen a northern invasion of Japan resulting in a modern North/South Japan division?

muh dick

Soviets didn't have any navy whatsoever so it would have taken them years to get to the stage of doing an amphibious invasion.

Please slap me down if this is stupid, but let's say they, in typical Soviet fashion, requisitioned a whole bunch of civilian fishing boats or something, or essentially crafted some last-minute rafts and slapped motors on them to tow behind what ships they did have. As I understand, they don't have very far to go (although I don't know what that area of Russia is like in terms of acting as a staging area, or what the sea conditions are). The IJN was pretty much ineffective at this point wasn't it?

Could the Japs have spared the troops to oppose their landing? Or would the Soviets have been happy to have left it to the Americans while they turned on Manchuria?

But why not just one bomb instead of two?

Also, just for clarification, I don't mean literal rafts - I mean some rushed, cheaply mass-produced landing craft. Though I'm guessing with a navy supplying your land forces is pretty difficult.

>Should the emperor have decided to surrender (I'm guessing he would've in the case of a land invasion of japan) there would've been a military coup, with the emperor being made a puppet.
That actually did happen, their Emperor recorded himself ordering the unconditional surrender of Japan. The military got wind, took the record and locked him under house arrest.

In my autistic inner fantasies there is a moe high school sol anime series about an ordinary high school girl and her friends conscripted to fight a hopeless guerrilla campaign against GIs on Honshu

I call it Downfaru no Banzai

They never found the recording, and it was some junior officers - they didn't manage to convince anyone in high command (one of the people involved in the coupe, the commander of one of the battalions of the Imperial Guard I think, only took part because they told him higher ranking officers were in on it, and he ejected them from the palace once he found out they'd tricked him).

It's not just a matter of physical sealift capacity. Amphibious warfare is extremely complex. The USMC were just about the only force which practiced it seriously in the interwar, and there was still a steep learning curve in practice. The USSR had zero experience doing it.

Even if you deliver strelki to a beach successfully, they need either specialized craft to offload equipment or a harbor. Supplying men without these is nearly impossible (the Japanese tried to do it on Guadalcanal by drifting crates over to the shore). Add to this the extremely limited number of landable beaches in Japan and it would be trivial to defend against such an invasion even if the bulk of IJA forces were in action against the US.

The Soviets would be trying to land in difficult terrain with no specialized landing craft, minimal naval fire support and air support, and zero doctrine or training. They would then have to fight through mountain passes with minimal supplies and probably no armor or artillery because there is no way to offload that without a harbor. The IJA might not even have to show up.

>Was Japan in a state to put up as much resistance as the Germans had in France? How long might they have been able to hold out?
Germany didn't actually put up much resistance in France. I think you mean to say Germany.

Japanese resistance would have been far more fanatical than that showed by the Germans in 1945. Most Germans knew they would be treated well enough by the Anglo-American forces and surrendered in large numbers
Civilian resistance after the fall of the German government was nowhere near as bad as they expected it to be

Japanese people viewed the Americans and British as subhumans who would torture and rape them and kill their children if they were captured. Women and children were armed with anything they could find like bamboo spears

To illustrate how hard modern amphibious warfare can be: there are a pair of tiny islands within 5km of the Chinese coastline called Quemoy and Matsu. These islands are under ROC control. Even though they are within artillery range of the mainland, far inside the PLAAF's air defense envelope, the PLA was never able to capture either island.

Quemoy and Matsu were bombarded so heavily in the 50s that there is a modern industry there based on making cutlery out of shrapnel. On a good day you can see mainland China from the islands. But crossing that gap without a well-developed navy and practice in amphibious operations was simply not possible.

>what would a D-day style invasion of Japan have looked like?

Absolute carnage that would've put Stalingrad to shame.

The worst thing possible would have happened, the Soviets invading from the north and not leaving, causing another split state.

With that navy they don't have.

Soviet operations against Japan if the war had continued would have involved attacking Korea and China, not the Japanese home islands. It would have had significant effects on the Chinese civil war and how east Asia turns out, but not so much for Japan proper.

We could

A. Nuke 2 cities and end the war leaving their wartime industry and economy intact and breaking their backwards fucking "YOU MUST NOT DISHONOR YOUR FAMRY" mentality. This would allow them to become one of the most prosperous and safe nations in the world and allow them to heavily impact the entertainment industry and culture.

Or

B. Have a costly invasion losing american lives, causing suffering throughout the entire island of Japan, and allowing the Soviets to invade from the north, uniting Korea as a communist regime and creating a North Japan communist state. There would also be intense rebellion and ritual suicides as well as kamikaze galore to resist occupation.

Overall, people who whine about the nukes being dropped are a bunch of crybabies who don't understand economics. An invasion of Japan would have been worse than Normandy, and an occupation would be hell.

Imagine the might of the Eternal Anglo Harris being targeted on the entire Island of Japan, rather than just 2 cities.

tl;dr:
Nukes are great, the invasion would have been massive casualties on both sides.

>pic somewhat related

nigga, I didn't ask for a new fetish.

The Soviets would have invaded Japan from the north, as they had planned to do irl, Stalin said to the Allies that he would have taken only the Kurili islands after the war, but he would have rushed an invasion of Hokkaido to claim it by occupation as he did with all of eastern Europe

Americans were too afriad to invade Japan

As much as I didn't want this thread to be derailed by discussion of whether the bombs should be dropped, I feel like the original question's been answered pretty well, and I'm curious anyway.

Why were population centers the targets? I'm sure the US wasn't out to be mustache twirlingly evil, but could they have demonstrated the power of the bombs on purely military targets, or were cities simply the only option to showcase the destructive capabilities of the atom bomb?

Hiroshima and Nagasaki both had heavy industry directly contributing to the war effort.Of course there were bustling cities of civilians around these industrial sites, but by that point in the war, firebombing Japanese (and German) civilians was a regular practice for us

To kill as many people as possible. When Truman announced the bombs had been dropped he claimed Horishima and Nagasaki were military bases in the same breath.

By the time we dropped the nukes on them a lot of the populated parts of the country had already been reduced to a smoking ruin due to the strategic bombing campaign. The point of strategic bombing is total war from the air, you want to destroy all of their economic and industrial infrastructure and demoralize and kill as many people as possible. Le May literally picked bombing targets in Japan based on a list of the most populous cities in a world almanac, the point was to kill civilians.

Everyone worries about this, but what's going to stop the Soviets from marching to Beijing or Shanghai?

Even better, with Manchuria cut off, and the naval blockade in effect, how is Japan going to supply the bulk of it's army still tied down in China?

Also, the defenses of Japan were not up to the epic to the death imaginings of the Americans. They based those on Okinawa. But the Japanese literally did not plan for the fall of Okinawa. They picked that as their last stand, and put all their efforts constructing fortifications and their best troops there. On top of that, the Japanese plans estimated the invasion would have been half the size it actually was, and they required the navy to destroy half the American army in transit to be able to mount a coherent defense.

Contrary to popular myth, the Japanese did not prepare their population for mass resistance. Everyone cites the girls with spears, but in Germany, they'd have panzerfausts. It's a testimony to how half hearted preparations for a perpetual resistance were: they didn't even want to give the populace guns (because they largely feared them and suspected their loyalty)

Another user in this thread linked me to the Dept. of Defence archives, which had a document that seemed to indicate that the Japanese High Command had been preparing for heavy fighting in Honshu. Do you have any sources that they didn't?

...

The Japanese believed that being brutal in China would crush the Chinese will to resist. Same rationale as dropping nukes.

It is a matter of a willingness to fight and geography. Lets talk about Italy and how the invasion of it during WWII.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Italian_Campaign_(World_War_II)

Over the course of fighting in earlier campaigns the Italians had lost much of their will to fight before allied forces ever put a boot on their mainland. Many of their people, especially in the south, hated their government. They gave the invaders aid and intelligence. A number of them even rose in armed revolt against the Fascists.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Italian_resistance_movement

Allied forces would find non of that in Japan and they knew it. They would face a large volume of suicide attacks.

As for geography it would of been moderately more in favor of the defender then it was in Italy.

The Soviets did attempt several amphibious operations in the Black Sea during WW2 (both Kerch landings and landings at Mt. Myskhako/Novorossiysk) using tactics like you described, but those are a far cry from the kind of landings required for the invasion of mainland Japan.

The Kerch landings crossed straits less than two miles wide in a docile inland sea. Even in the dead of winter with hilariously terrible coordination and execution of the operation, the Soviets managed to gain a bridgehead in 1942 using rowboats, barges, and the occasional destroyer. Their longest-range landing, at Yevpatoria, involved loading soldiers onto destroyers and beaching them.

The landings during the Myskhako operation were a bit more complicated (pic related), as they had to sail around the city instead of across a strait, but even those were comparatively simple. Small ships dumped men across multiple landing zones, and only the bridgehead at Myskhako stuck, as it was closest to the front.

During the war, the only amphibious operations the Soviets had launched were small littoral operations where the landing zones were so close to the front that the Soviets were able to use just about anything that could float to ferry men and materiel in. They did invade the Kuril islands at the end of the war using the same tactics (dumping men on beaches with trawlers, minelayers, and other auxiliary vessels), but the Soviets ended up with 10% of their 15,000 strong force being casualties even against a backwater garrison in Japan. An amphibious invasion of mainland Japan would have been impossible

>hypothetical situation, discuss
>I have a hypothesis.
>How did you come to this hypothesis?
>Here's how I came to my hypothesis.
>Here's some direct sources for hypothetical situation

This is a good thread, I'm proud of you Veeky Forums

He wanted to break their backs and their spirits, by crippling their industry and killing their populace, to put it simply.

Thanks man, that's actually all very interesting - and I had no idea about any of it.
Despite the inevitable shitposting, Veeky Forums is still one of the best boards for actually being able to discuss a topic, find out interesting new stuff, and getting actual answers to your question without too much derailing.

Have a variant

Imagine Mai Lai times 10,000.

From reading the primary documents it seems the American high command did not actually expect to win in an invasion of Japan due to the casualties.

I believe the history threads are some of the best on the site due to being fairly factual, especially contemporary history. It's when you get into the humanities bit, where opinions are wildly varied, that the shitflinging starts.

That said historical "What-if's" are my favorite type of discussion, hands down.

In this particular case, I'd like to bring up the civilian populace of Japan, and how exactly they would have reacted to an invasion. I don't believe that they would assist the Allies in any capacity, but would every citizen pick up a rifle or sharp stick to defend their home like the old propaganda would have us believe? Or would they just try to stay out of the way and survive? Or would there be more of a middle ground, where they would hide and aid guerilla fighters, similar to how the VC operated in Vietnam, and Al-Queada in Iraq, attacking and then melting back into the civilian populace. How war weary was your average Japanese citizen during 1945, and how far would be go to protect his home from invasion?

They were so brainwashed they believed the emperor was a living god and to die for him was the greatest thing you could do.
On Okinawa you had thousands of civilians jumping off cliffs rather than be captured, and women and children doing suicide attacks with grenades on American soldiers, so it would be like that or even worse.

The main problem with alt-his is that a lot of the posters here can't separate their wank from realistic appraisal of cause and effect. There are so many

>If only Germany had done [tiny tactical change X] THEN EVERYTHING WOULD HAVE WORKED OUT PERFECTLY AND THEY WOULD HAVE WON THE WAR!!!!!!ONE!

I've had people literally claiming that giving Rommel more troops would have won Stalingrad. It's insane.

A big part of them diving off the cliffs was that they thought the Americans were going to torture and rape them, wasn't it? They'd been told that the Marines were monstrous, brutal savages that ate babies and collected scalps and shit.

Which still means you're most likely correct, that they'd die before letting Americans set foot on their land.

Yes, Japanese army made them kill themselves too

That is true, coupled with the stuborness native to this site in general makes it a chore sometimes.
>I think X would have affected Y, leading to Z
>That's wrong, because X wasn't significant enough to affect Y in any capacity
>FUCK YOU, YOU FUCK lick my balls I'm right and you're wrong!
I see that a lot. It's comfy when we get threads like this one where everyone seems happy to have actual discussion about an interesting hypothetical.

You learn things that way too, for instance
It had never occured to me to consider the Soviets amphibious capacity, but now I know that they basically didn't have any, which is cool. These types of discussions bring up interesting facts and knowledge that otherwise might not have been looked at.

I have an old aunt that lives in Japan. She says that Japan was ready to surrender before the two nukes, because they feared imminent threat of invasion by the Russians.

Now that is interesting, why were they so afraid of Russian invasion?

I see these anecdotes all the time, is this a new meme?

They thought they were going to be invaded, and would rather be invaded by Americans than Soviets because they thought Americans would treat them better. Japanese-American relations had been warm in the past, whereas Japan spanked Russia in a war.

Soviet leader Joseph Stalin had already promised Washington and London that he would attack Japan within three months of Germany's defeat. He thus ignored Tokyo's plea and mobilized more than a million troops along Manchuria's border. But, America dropped the bombs so the Soviets stopped just 30 miles from Japan's main northern island, Hokkaido.

Here's a quote from the Japanese wartime prime minister

>If we miss [the chance] today, the Soviet Union will take not only Manchuria, Korea and Sakhalin, but also Hokkaido. We must end the war while we can deal with the United States.

>Projected to last until '47
>400,000 serious casualties in the first 120 days
>1.7 milllion + casualties for the US, 5-10 million Japanese

I've an old aunt that lives in Japan, she says that these anecdotes have been around for ages and aren't a new meme, because they fear imminent threat of invasion by the russians

I have read (but don't remember where so tell me if I'm memeing or not) that those numbers were deliberately blown up to help justify the use of the atomic bombs. I do know that Truman himself started the "Saved a million American lives," meme during a speech, so I don't know if it would be much of a stretch to say that they were very liberal with their casualty estimates. Again, I may be misinformed, please inform me.

Because that seems like a fucking metric shit ton of dead people.

The civilian population was in many cases ready for the war to end since everything they had was already ashes. The Kempeitai and the Army didn't care what the civilians wanted.

>what's going to stop the Soviets from marching to Beijing or Shanghai
the soviets never had much interest in China, even after ww2 when the US pledged $40billion in military aid to the GMD the soviets did very little.

I'll admit that it is from wikipedia (oddly enough its sourced from Downfall, which is next to me unread), so I can't really talk about that. Talking of Downfall,I did find this passage flicking through just now.

>"At this same time [September 1944], sobering thoughts about the prospects for the final defeat of Japan emerged in a paper by the Joint Strategic Survey Committee of the Joint Chiefs of staff

>""Our great superiority over the Japanese rests in our capacity to produce and to employ...primarily naval vessels and aircraft. Enemy strength rests in his land forces, some 3,500,000 strong. In our Saipan operation it cost approximately one American killed and seven wounded to exterminate seven Japanese soldiers . On this basis it might cost us half a million American lives and many times that number in wounded to exterminate the Japanese ground forces that conceivably could be deployed against us""

This is from people who can't even consider the bomb. Add in things like how the Japanese had a pretty good guess of where the invasion was going, and how many suicide attacks they were planning. It was going to be horrific and they knew it

>Those containers of underwater suicide bombers
And Japan wonders why they got nuked.

Wouldn't it be easier to enforce a complete naval and aerial blockade and wait for them to run out of oil and other essential materials?

The war drags on bloodlessly for another year or two I guess.

>Blockade
>Bloodlessly.
Do you have any idea what mass starvation is like? Or the fact that fighting is not likely to die down in outlying Japanese holdouts in places like China, Malaya, the Solomons, the DEI, etc?

>Bloodlessly
Bloodlessly for Americans. If they want to stop starving they can surrender.

Their ports were already full of mines, surface ships converted to submarines courtesy of the USN and the USAAF, and American Submarines.

How much stocks of ammunition and weapons did the Japanese have to continue fighting? If you come to the point where you're using bamboo spears against the most powerful military in the world, instinct would make it hard to continue fighting no matter how brainwashed you are.

It is unlikely. The naval blockade might seem the 'cleaner' option than the nuclear option, but it too had its costs.

Japanese leaders were well aware of their worsening situation in 1945.

The rice harvest of 1945 was predicted to be bad. The Allied naval blockade had eliminated ocean traffic and was making great inroads into coastal shipping traffic. Since the Imperial Japanese Navy had been immobilzed for lack of fuel or sunk, American carriers were launching raids on the Japanese Home Islands targeting land transportation links: railroad marshalling yards, bridges, tunnels and roads. The rice harvest and the worsening transport situation led Japanese officials to predict widespread famine in fall 1945. This foreknowledge did not have any apparent impact on government policy up to August 1945 and it didn't explicitly figure in the surrender debate either.

The naval blockade had cut off the Imperial Japanese Army from its overseas forces. The Kwantung Army in China had been mined for its best units and these were directed to the defense of Kyushu. The IJA was feverishly raising hundreds of thousands of new troops to defend Tokyo and the Kanto plain. The troops would have been poorly trained and poorly equipped but Japanese strategy aimed not for a military victory but imposing high casualties on the Allies.

Continuing the naval blockade had costs for the Allies as well.

Further amphibious invasions would have been launched. Taiwan (then Formosa) was well defended and was being considered as a target. Other smaller islands would have been attacked. The Allied drive in Burma would have continued into Malaya. More islands in the Philippine archipelago awaited liberation (and MacArthur knew he was just the man to do it). China was still were most of the fighting and dying by civilians and combatants was being done. The intense combat would have gone on in spite of the naval blockade.

Gideon Rose, the editor of the journal Foreign Affairs, estimated that during every month of 1945 in which the war continued, Japanese forces were causing the deaths of between 100,000 and 250,000 noncombatants.

This: Also, desu, they dropped them on Hiroshima and Nagasaki as an experiment. They had a control variable by testing them in the middle of the desert, and now, they used them on big, populated cities, just like ones in the US, to see what the impact would be.

That's why they dropped 2

tl;dr: SCIENCE AND STRATEGY

pic related is of the Enola Gay taking off for it's infamous flight

There was never going to "be" a land invasion. If the Atomic Bombs failed, then we would have borrowed churchill's anthrax and thrown that down, along with the dozen or so nukes we'd have that would have been ready by that time. The world was too done for Japan's shit at the time to go for an extremely bloody land invasion.

he already was a puppet

In this future alternate timeline, some butthurt web novel author, a veteran of JIDF, would write something chuuni like that just to spite at the invader countries.

They were also really the only two major cities that had up to that point escaped bonmbing.

What about airlifting though?

You can't airlift in heavy equipment, tanks, or a lot of supplies. Having paratroopers only works if the amphibious component can link up with them quickly enough to stop them from getting overwhelmed, which wouldn't have happened considering the russians weren't exactly on the same level as US marines

>You can't airilift tanks
Nothing is impossible for Mother Russia.

>what is Kyoto?

Our codebreakers actually figured out that kyoto was just a sneaky jap anagram for tokyo, and that kyoto actually never existed.

I remember reading something about that and only Tokyo Plains were suitable for massed tank maneuvers

that prototype could only carry a really shitty T 72, and it was abandoned anyways

When did they start having them wear those weebshit uniforms? Would they be fighting in those?

You mean the Seifuku? Yes

Really? They were wearing those in 1940's japan? When did they start wearing them?

The 1920s because an Angloboo liked the British naval uniform

One wasn't enough. They had 3 days after Hiroshima but before Nagasaki during which they could have surrendered.

Also, it is proof that Hiroshima was not just a one-off lucky strike; that more atom bombs were being built and would continue falling.

Because the japanese high command was literally autistic

>have a costly invasion losing american lives
The brits would have been there to help the americans with that one

>instinct would make it hard to continue fighting no matter how brainwashed you are.
That's where suicide comes in. You're still looking at millions of deaths.

90% of Japanese, including civilians, on Okinawa died. That figure raises to something absurd like 98% if you exclude civilians.

And lets not forget the Russians were planning for an invasion of the Home Islands. The Americans needed to end the pacific campaign quickly or Japan may have ended up like Germany did in 44, or the Korea's did later on. Divided in half as the Russians turned their part of the islands, likely the northern part, into a communist state. hence the need to end the war quickly and decidedly.

>battle of okinawa
>1,206.98 km^2
>battle length: 80 days
>1206.98 km^2 / 80 days = 15 km^2 per day
>kyushu is 36,782 km^2
>terrain is the same as okinawa
>36,782 km^2 / 15 km/day = 2452 days
>75k american casualties / 1206.98 km = 62 casualties/km
>62 casualties/km * 36782 = 2.280,484 casualties
>kyushu is 9.73% of the total surface area of japan
Gee, I wonder why we didn't want to invade

The largest concentration of artillery ever assembled by Naval barrage
Its gonna make Moscow look like a goddamn M80 explosion
1000 bomber raids except with B29
Every square inch in Kyushu will be bombed or artyed
The Usaf will bomb by day and RAF by night
New weapons will be introduced by then,we couldve seen the first generation of MBT like the Centurion and T54 roaming around supporting infantry,with zippo Sherman burning stronghold
Any formation movement will be impossible due to CAS strafing anything in daylight,deployment only possible at night
The level of American GI brutality would reach unimaginable height,Those Vet in Nam would puke in disgust as Soldiers burn out civilian house with flamethrowers or coordinate long toms into barraging some villages into oblivion
Fukuoka will be the most destroyed city in the world like Grozny
Wh*teys and black would probably fight in mixed units for the first time due to casualty

>The Soviets will invade with no fleet.
I swear, this point has been raised and trashed like 3 times in this fucking thread. Why do people keep bringing it up?

>its been trashed
I've never seen it be debunked before, user

fas.org/irp/eprint/arens/chap4.htm

This gives a pretty good insight on the Japanese defenses built on home soil; they were basically planning to go full Iwo Jima. It's pretty safe to assume it'd have been a bloodbath of epic proportions.

Soviets would try to invade Hokkaido
and the assumption that they dont have any assault craft is correct but you forgot the US provided it to them in Project Hula
If they ever got a foothold than its very likely that they would annexe Hokkaido since the J*ps gambitted everything in the South but they wouldnt expect to go any further

see

I think you're replying to the wrong person, user

It doesn't matter what their capabilities were, it matters what the Japanese THOUGHT they were capable of. Even after getting nuked twice the government didn't panic, only when the soviets broke non-aggression did they freak out and sue for peace with America.