(02-24-2022, 03:20 PM)Sharmat Wrote: Also, could you elaborate on that last point? I've seen it on twitter a few times but no one has expanded on why they think so.
This is what I believe happened:
The German invasion of the USSR inflicted so much economic and demographic damage that, combined with the arms race, the USSR's collapse and Russia's fate as a second rate power were sealed.
The war in Asia and nationalist uprisings sponsored by Japan ended the British Empire and every other European empire in the Far East.
Japan's primary aim in China was to keep China out of the hands of any other major power. This meant securing Manchuria to prevent a Russian incursion from the north, and war with the Republic of China after it had been getting too cozy with the United States. Until the Japanese-sponsored Nanjing government put an end to it Britain and America still enjoyed extraterritorial privileges in China.
By 1945 the Japanese Army realized that the rift between the Chinese communists and Moscow was deep enough that a communist China was not the same thing as a China under Russian domination, so that the survival of the Chinese communists was not incompatible with Japan's aims.
Chiang never got the economic and technical support from the USA that he desired, and the support he did get was contingent on remaining in a war with Japan that he never really wanted (Chiang himself had been educated at a Japanese military academy). He threatened to make a separate peace with Japan multiple times, which resulted in the Cairo conference. Chiang didn't view Japan as the primary long term danger to China, but the Soviet Union. This, combined with the success of the cross-continent Operation Ichi-go, FDR's promise of Manchuria to Stalin, and the Dixie Mission, resulted in him reaching a secret understanding with Hirohito which lead to the 'virtue for malice' policy and Japanese support for the Nationalists after the war.
In early 1945 Japanese intelligence deduced that the USSR would invade Manchuria that summer. This lead to a new policy of 'turning darkness into brightness' whereby the USSR would be encouraged to invade Manchuria in order to lead it into a conflict with the USA. The best Japanese units in Manchuria were relocated to the Japanese mainland to defend against the American invasion, a troop drawdown that the Soviets themselves found puzzling. The Kwantung Army's mission was changed from the defense of Manchuria to the defense of Korea. After the USSR declared war on Japan they were allowed to take Manchuria but were held back from further gains by Japanese resistance in Inner Mongolia, North Korea (Japanese forces actually stopped the Red Army north of the 38th parallel), and Shumushu. Both the battles of Okinawa and Shumushu were strategic victories that demonstrated to the USA and USSR how costly an invasion of mainland Japan would be. Contra 'racing the enemy,' the USSR kept attacking Japan after the atomic bombs and only stopped once they had reached the limits of what they could accomplish.
(Chiang gave the commander of the Japanese forces in Inner Mongolia, Hiroshi Nemoto, who stopped the USSR from occupying China proper, the responsibility of commanding the defense of Taiwan and its islands in 1949, where he was also successful.)
The USA was faced with its own problems. It had expected to be able to prevent Japan from mobilizing new divisions for the defense of the homeland by crippling Japanese transportation infrastructure from the air. Instead, Japan mobilized new divisions in place in the Japanese countryside, where fertility rates had been very high before the war. Worse, Japan had predicted the location of the American invasion precisely. This meant that by August 1945 American intelligence had calculated that, where America had initially expected to outnumber Japanese forces by 3 to 1 in the battle over Kyushu, they now knew that by the time of the invasion they themselves would be outnumbered by 2 to 1.
The US aerial campaign had also failed to stop Japanese production of aircraft. The Strategic Bombing Survey concluded that the drop in Japanese aircraft production was the result of efforts to move the plants underground, and not bomb damage, which would be reversed when those plants came back online in late 1945.
The USA had been constrained in the total size of its armed forces by the decision to focus on industrial production in the '90 Division Gamble'. Additionally, political pressure mounted both from the troops themselves and their families that they be allowed to return home, and the demand for a reversion of war factories back to civilian production was also rising. The decision to focus on the European Theatre meant that most of the men and material the US Army needed for the invasion of Japan was still stuck on the wrong side of the Panama Canal. These soldiers, who had just defeated Germany, were none too keen about being sent over to fight another war with Japan that most expected to last for years to come ("Golden Gate in '48, bread line in '49"). The prospect of mutiny was deeply concerning to America's leadership. What compounded these problems is that the USA had adopted a points-based system for demobilization, which meant that units lost their most experienced and skilled personnel first, to be replaced by green recruits.
America expected to lose so many of these young men in the mountains and forests and beaches of Nippon, that an American soldier who is wounded overseas today, in 2022, will receive a purple heart that was originally produced for the invasion of Japan.
Popular editorials had suggested using gas to hasten the war against Japan, but the Allies had lost so much chemical warfare equipment in the German attack on Bari, that the realities of multi-thousand mile long lines of supply meant the US government knew it would be logistically impossible to launch a strategic chemical offensive against Japan until well into 1946.
The USA had hoped that Soviet entry to the war would resolve this dilemma, and to this end equipped the USSR specifically for this purpose via Operation Hula (which Japanese intelligence was aware of). It is the complete opposite of the fable that the USA dropped the atomic bombs to keep the USSR out of the Far East. In fact, none of America's leaders expected the war to end when it did, though they worked hard to obfuscate this fact after the war.
There had been a 'human experimentation clique' operating in the military and medical establishment of Japan since the 1920s, studying the potentialities of chemical and biological warfare. Hirohito, himself a biologist, personally studied disease-causing organisms and sponsored the biological warfare program. After Japan secured control of Manchuria, an appendage of this clique formed Unit 731 (and there were several more such numbered Units) to expand its work to an industrial scale, far away from any scrutiny they might receive in Japan itself.
In Manchuria, the Japanese Army faced the problem of attempting to deter the largest army in the world, that of the USSR, with the limited budget allotted to them by the civilian government. To solve this problem, they built a network of fortifications along the border (like the Maginot line), developed Manchuria's own economy (which would form the Manchurian clique in Johnson's MITI and the Japanese Miracle), and pursued the development of a strategic biological capability. This last item would compensate for Japan's numerical inferiority to the USSR, like Eisenhower's 'New Look'.
As the war expanded, the Japanese Army established biological warfare units wherever it went, converting civilian facilities such as hospitals and pharmaceutical plants into centers for human experimentation and production of biological munitions. After Pearl Harbor, work shifted towards the development of agents specifically against American staple crops and livestock, and these were field tested against Chinese farms. To my knowledge, the Japanese Army is the only force in history to have ever fielded a biological artillery shell, having figured out how to deploy anthrax this way.
By the time the decision to attack Pearl Harbor was finalized, Japan had already been mass-producing germ bombs for years. The Japanese Army was well aware of the economic disparity that existed vis-a-vis the United States, having commissioned an internal think-tank to study just that. Japanese airpower theorists believed that this advantage could be nullified by bombing American production centers.
General Kanji Ishiwara held, according to a personal eschatological belief. that the wars of the future would be decided by advanced technology and the bombing of civilian populations from the air. He personally tutored Hirohito on this 'Final War Theory,' and Ishiwara supported research into flying wings and biological warfare. Admiral Takijiro Onishi believed that surface navies were obsolete, and fought to establish an independent air force. He had personally flown on airships Japan build based on imported Italian designs in the late '30s. One of Onishi's closest allies was Yoshio Kodama, who handled procurement of materials for the Naval Air Force from suppliers in China. Kodama's colleagues, Ryoichi Sasakawa, personally flew to Italy in Japan's first entirely domestically produced airplane to greet Mussolini, and sponsored the creation of a civilian volunteer air corps with his own private funds, whose airfield he later donated to the Army.
These four men established for Hirohito a private, covert air force. This was funded off-the-books using opium money (such as Hajime Satomi procured for Japanese intelligence) and war loot (Golden Lily). The Chinese nationalists had cobbled together their air force the same way, using the proceeds of triad opium smuggling in the US to buy airplanes from American companies, and employing 'civilian' volunteers to form the Flying Tigers. It was this secret air force which developed very large airships based on Italian concepts (such as Forlanini's Omnia Dir).
On November 3rd of 1944, Meiji's birthday, the Trans-Pacific balloon bomb operation began. The Japanese Navy developed rubberized-silk balloons with attached radiosondes that accompanied the Army's paper balloons across the Pacific ocean, and these balloons were used to gather data on weather conditions over North America. With the success of the balloon bomb program, it was shown that Lighter-Than-Air craft could reach as far inland as Kansas and Michigan without expending any fuel. In June of 1945, Japan publicly threatened to attack the USA using manned balloons, which could fly high enough to avoid any American air defenses.
Japan and Germany operated spy networks inside the USA via Mexico with the help of Spanish fascists. Japan was intensely interested in any intelligence that could be had regarding the American nuclear program, and by 1943 Japan's leadership knew that the USA was serious about producing an atomic bomb. In 1945, Japanese electronic intelligence had detected that a new unit, the 509th, with its own radio call sign, V600, had been deployed to Tinian island, and it was quickly deduced that this was a very unusual new development. Still, despite the fact that the 509th rehearsed the future atomic bombing by dropping 'pumpkin bombs' on Japanese cities, nothing was done about it until after the Hiroshima bombing, when the officer who figured out the radio callsign was decorated at a secret ceremony. And yet, knowing that a 509th mission was being flown towards Kitakyushu (the original target of the Nagasaki bomb), and despite there being interceptors on the ground, ready to be scrambled at a moment's notice, the Japanese Army still did nothing.
(German spies succeeded in poisoning Roosevelt, who had already been in steep mental and physical decline. This, along with conservative forces pressuring FDR to replace Wallace with Truman, made possible a peaceful settlement at the end of the war.)
Japan's leadership knew the a-bomb was coming, and they sacrificed hundreds of thousands of Japanese men and women so that they could have the perfect excuse to escalate the war to a level where they had the upper hand. On August 6th, once America initiated nuclear warfare, Hirohito sent some of his airships across the Pacific, to deliver a secret message to the United States. On the night of August 9th, they landed in Nevada, near Tonopah Army Air Field, where a secret test unit from Wright Field received them. This message demanded that the US would agree to a ceasefire or else Japan would retaliate with biological weapons. On August 10th, Truman decided that he would come to terms with Hirohito.