Apart from a thin coastal strip, all the naval artillery that the USN can muster matters nothing. I'm not sure how good the coastal artillery of the Home Islands was, though.
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Apart from a thin coastal strip, all the naval artillery that the USN can muster matters nothing. I'm not sure how good the coastal artillery of the Home Islands was, though.
Well the naval artillery would obviously help to establish a beachhead, after which conventional artillery and armour would be landed - and I would include ground attack aircraft as airborne artillery, whose reach is almost unlimited in this context. By contrast, the Japanese home army was (I believe) quite poorly equipped - and really only had numbers and willingness
I'm not sure I would accept your figures - well-researched and presented though they are. Military estimates tend towards the disastrous - see estimates for the Normandy landings - and many of the sources you cite were, I suspect, provided as justification for the use of nuclear weapons.
If it had come to an amphibious assault, you can be sure that the air assault preceding the invasion would have been brutal. The Americans had complete air supremacy and could have attacked with virtual impunity, for as long as it was deemed necessary. I have no doubt that casualties would have been extreme - especially on the Japanese side - but your assertion that 'casualties would have been too high for US to take' is just wrong, I'm afraid. Whatever the price would be, the Americans would have paid it militarily - because politically it had no choice but to secure an unconditional surrender.
So in other words you believe it's obvious that the U.S. would easily crush the Japanese military forces arrayed against them while taking light casualties? Because that's what happened in the Vietnam war. The U.S. didn't loose Vietnam because the Vietnamese fended off the US army via military means. The U.S. lost because given the geopolitical backdrop of the cold war, there was no way for the U.S. to achieve it's political objectives for the war via force of arms. With respect to Japan however, the political objectives clearly were achievable via military means, so it seems clear that the US invasion would have succeeded rather quickly and efficiently. Also lets not forget that the level of effort the US was about to make in Japan dwarfs the level of involvement it had in Vietnam. The US forces in Vietnam peaked at just over 500,000. US forces intended for the invasion of Japan were 2,000,000 for the initial landings, with more forces scheduled to be deployed after the initial landings were consolidated.
The invasions into Korea and Manchuria weren't done with hundreds of miles of frigid water betwixt the staging areas and the targets. Moreover, the USN, was not going to send hundreds of troopships through the Strait of Tartary to Vladivostok to assist with a Soviet invasion of Hokkaido or Honshu. Sorry, not going to happen.
One thing to consider would be the Volunteer Fighting Corps, which did have some 2 million armed civilians members:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Volunteer_Fighting_Corps
An organisation like that would have been extremely dangerous if the members of that organisation would have started to employ guerilla tactics. Even though the most of civilian population didn´t belong to that organisation the US military would have to deal with the hostile civilian population in addition to to the Japanese military.
I can easily imagine incidents like young US GIs meeting young and beautiful Japanese girls. Then suddenly one Japanese girl took a grenade from her clothes and threw it in the middle of the US soldiers. The result would be dead and wounded US soldiers and Japanese girls as well. From our point of view girls like that were brainwashed but from their point of view they did the greatest sacrifice to the country and to the emperor.
Incidents like that would have seriously strained relations between US forces and local population. One should remember that Japanese civilians made mass suicides in both Saipan and Okinawa rather than surrendered to US forces because they believed in Japanese war propaganda.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Volunteer_Fighting_Corps
An organisation like that would have been extremely dangerous if the members of that organisation would have started to employ guerilla tactics. Even though the most of civilian population didn´t belong to that organisation the US military would have to deal with the hostile civilian population in addition to to the Japanese military.
I can easily imagine incidents like young US GIs meeting young and beautiful Japanese girls. Then suddenly one Japanese girl took a grenade from her clothes and threw it in the middle of the US soldiers. The result would be dead and wounded US soldiers and Japanese girls as well. From our point of view girls like that were brainwashed but from their point of view they did the greatest sacrifice to the country and to the emperor.
Incidents like that would have seriously strained relations between US forces and local population. One should remember that Japanese civilians made mass suicides in both Saipan and Okinawa rather than surrendered to US forces because they believed in Japanese war propaganda.
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This would have resulted in quite extraordinary numbers of civilian/militia deaths, nothing more. The scenario you describe would have surprised no one by this stage of the war. American troops simply took no chances with anyone, no matter how harmless they might appear to be. Grenade attacks of this kind were already well known from Okinawa - and other places.
How much of this is you understanding Japanese culture in 1946 and how much of this is you projecting the extraordinary onto the unknown alien?
I'm not sure which part you disagree with; incidents similar to this were not unheard of, and indeed, stevieji points out the major issue with Finnish Dragon's hypothetical. It's not that such events would not happen, but rather, that the American GIs in question are already inured to this kind of situation due to Okinawa and would be more likely to react to the approach of a bunch of civilian women with their guns, grenades or no. Ironically, the same demonization that the IJA used to encourage this behaviour among the civilians likely helped ease the post-battle occupation in the near term; in spite of cases of battlefield rape that went unpunished or cases of indiscriminate treatment of civilians and military alike, short of making an open policy of murdering and consuming Okinawan babies, the behaviour of the GIs could not looked worse than the fears of the civilians.
That said, it's also worth looking at how many (or how few) Okinawans actually followed through on the instructions of the IJA. I wonder if civilian resistance would have been as endemic as was feared by US Army planners. Unfortunately, I cannot say that extrapolations would be entirely unreasonable, especially since Okinawa really was tremendously costly for the size of the island.
While suicide attacks exist, we shouldn't generalize that to assume that the entire Japanese population, or even more then a tiny fraction of a percentage would engage in such things. The kamikaze were a tiny subset of those who voluntarily accepted military service. Suggesting that civilians voluntarily engaging in suicide bombings would become a significant military factor strikes me as very dubious.
reverse the roles.
what would you be willing to do if your town and neighborhood were being invaded? If you had been convinced that the invaders would commit war-crimes against your family.
It certainly happened, but mass suicides by civilians were much more likely - and extremely common on Okinawa. I see no reason to suppose that civilians who were enrolled in the civil defence organisations - and given access to grenades - would not have taken the opportunity to take some of the enemy with them. They would certainly not allow themselves to be take prisoner, given the treatment they had been told to expect.
Having said that, most of the incidents I can recall involved soldiers, who pretended to surrender before triggering concealed grenades. This was extremely common on many of the islands - surrender simply wasn't an option for most Japanese soldiers. This had nothing to do with kamikaze, which was specific to aviators.
A war is never only fought with military. I suspect we all agree that the US could have beaten the Japanese on a battlefield basically 10 times out of 10, but how much did the US public want that victory? Sooner or later they'll ask whether it's worth it, and while some suicide bombers might not do much in strategic value how will your soldiers feel in a country where at every moment some utterly innocent looking person can blow themselves up right in your face - potentially? How long could the US have stretched the campaign before they felt that a total victory had become too costly?
I'm not sure the Japanese "strategy" (if desperate resistance can be called that) would've worked, but I don't think it's completely impossible that it could've worked if their resistance held out for long enough. Unlike Germany/Central Europe it's a much more suitable terrain to make enemy advances very costly at every turn, overall.
I'm not sure the Japanese "strategy" (if desperate resistance can be called that) would've worked, but I don't think it's completely impossible that it could've worked if their resistance held out for long enough. Unlike Germany/Central Europe it's a much more suitable terrain to make enemy advances very costly at every turn, overall.
I don't know what on earth you mean by 'popular meme', but a quick search found this ...
"The first recorded suicide bombing came from Christian soldiers during the Crusades to free The Holy City of Jerusalem from the control of Muslim armies. During the Crusades, the Knights Templar destroyed one of their own ships with 140 Christians on board in order to kill 10 times as many Muslims in the opposing fleet."
and this ...
"An early example of suicide bombing occurred during the Belgian Revolution in 1831 - the war between the Dutch and the Belgians - when the Dutch Lt Jan van Speijk blew up his own ship in the harbour of Antwerp to prevent being captured by the Belgians.
He had been ordered to take down his Dutch flag but said: "I would rather blow myself up." He killed dozens of his enemies in the process."
Quite the opposite, the Japanese been hoarding weapons, guns,their most modern tanks (like the type 3 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Type_3_Chi-Nu) and generaly their best equipment for this scenario since the start of the war.
It might be worth remembering that by late-1945 the Japanese Home Islands were suffering from a major food shortage and that most of its' industries and cities were more or less wiped out by constant American bombings. Japanese society held together if only barely and a continuation of the war would have meant that Japan would have faced a full-scale famine. That's not an ideal situation for trying to instigate civilians into attacking the occupation forces.
Could they have repulsed an invasion? No. Was an invasion ever necessary? No. The American bombings and naval blockade were already depriving Japan of its' ability to continue to function as a society in the long term.
Could they have repulsed an invasion? No. Was an invasion ever necessary? No. The American bombings and naval blockade were already depriving Japan of its' ability to continue to function as a society in the long term.
The Japanese strategy was that in case the war gets wrong they retreat on the HIs and make any invasion so costly that they get a reasonable peace treaty.If you think about it than it was hardly a bad plan, at least they had one that wasnt pure fantasy.
They didnt foresee however the destructive power of modern aircraft and of course the atomic bomb which made their strategy questionable in the end.
That certainly looks impressive for a Japanese tank. I see it has a 75mm gun, so let's say it's the equal of the Sherman (just for the sake of argument) - but the page you directed me to says that a total of 166 were built. That's really not very many - the Americans had something like 35,000 Shermans in 1945. Not that they could have deployed them all in Japan, of course, but it would have been many thousands.
I'm now going to have to see if I can find a source of information on Japanese forces on the home islands in 1945 - if you insist they were 'hoarding' weapons.