If the Japanese won World War 2 how would the United States be changed?

[archer]

2 hours ago, dsatow said:

 

Japan is a very group think sort of culture compared to the US.  People who act out of place are more ostracized and changes happen slower if it goes against what is considered normal.  

 

So, if the nation believes and perceives all corporate business should have people wearing suits, then a company which wears jeans and a polo shirt would be considered unprofessional and unreliable in matters of business.  That company would find it easy to be in the news as the strange and the odd but would have a hard time getting deals with other businesses.

 

This extends to most facets of life, political, economic, social, etc.  Its less an exact stance on certain issues than a resistance to go against society as a whole.  And the resistance is less about active measures but more a treatment of being odd and being pushed out of society.  The closest thing to this would be the treatment of the extremely obese in society or the LGBT community in say the 50s.

 

Thank you for the explanation.

[RDU Neil]

A couple of questions to all the theorists...

 

1) How close to their own development of the atomic bomb, were the Germans before they were defeated? What is the likelihood of their development if say, the invasion of Normandy went much worse, the war ground to a halt in France with Allies unable to push further, and say Hitler decided not to over extend into Russia? Were they close to getting the bomb?

 

2) What is the likelihood that, if the Axis had won in Europe, Hitler would have turned on the Italians, and would that have been effective?

[archer]

51 minutes ago, RDU Neil said:

A couple of questions to all the theorists...

 

1) How close to their own development of the atomic bomb, were the Germans before they were defeated? What is the likelihood of their development if say, the invasion of Normandy went much worse, the war ground to a halt in France with Allies unable to push further, and say Hitler decided not to over extend into Russia? Were they close to getting the bomb?

 

2) What is the likelihood that, if the Axis had won in Europe, Hitler would have turned on the Italians, and would that have been effective?

 

I used to be a WWII buff in the era before the internet and have watched the History Channel a lot back when it effectively used to be the WWII Channel.

 

From what I understand, the Allies were fully aware that the Nazis were trying to develop the atom bomb and devoted significant resources to spy out research locations and then sabotage or raid them.

 

Once the Allies finally developed fighters which had the range to escort bombers all the way to the target and back, there wasn't really any place for the Nazis to put research facilities where their atomic scientists could work unmolested. At every point in the war, the Allies were closer to developing long range fighters (so that bombing campaigns would be effective) than the Germans were to developing the bomb.

 

The Germans tried spreading out their research facilities like putting their heavy water operation in Norway rather than in Germany. But it was only a short while before the Allies found it and started trying to take it out. Much the same with other facilities from what I gather.

 

The thing I think might have worked would have been if the Russian campaign had been highly successful, the Germans pushed the remaining Russians back into the Ural mountains, and the Germans had moved their atomic research into the former Russian territory. That would have been out of range of Allied air power and seaborne raids, and it would have been extremely difficult to sneak in spies because the Germans tended to leave no civilians in Russian areas for Allied spies to hide behind. 

 

As for Germany turning on the Italians, for the most part the Italians weren't competing for the same things Germany was. There were ethnic Italians in the Yugoslavian area and some seaports along that coast which had at some points in history been under Italian control. And Italy wanted some African colonies but not necessarily in the same areas the Germans were interested in. I think Italy might have been interested in Cypress, Crete, and controlling access to the Black Sea which would mean at least owning parts of modern day Turkey and Bulgaria. Hitler was pretty crazy so anything could have happened but I don't think it's a given that Germany was going to turn on Italy.

[Christopher R Taylor]

Eventually Germany would have either absorbed or just taken over the Italian Empire (such as it was).  Hitler had a pretty low opinion of Mussolini and Italians in general and obviously felt that Germany should run everything so I can't see him coexisting with the Nazi empire.  The only nation he seemed to respect was England.

[Cancer]

2 hours ago, RDU Neil said:

A couple of questions to all the theorists...

 

1) How close to their own development of the atomic bomb, were the Germans before they were defeated? What is the likelihood of their development if say, the invasion of Normandy went much worse, the war ground to a halt in France with Allies unable to push further, and say Hitler decided not to over extend into Russia? Were they close to getting the bomb?

 

The (secretly recorded and subsequently transcribed and published) discussions among the captured German physicists imprisoned in Britain after the US atomic bomb attacks on Japan make it clear they were not close to a working bomb either in terms of theory or in terms resources needed to assemble a critical mass of fissile metal.  In the days following the announcement of the Hiroshima bomb many, perhaps most, of their conversations were on the topic of the bomb they never succeeded in making, based on the telling but still really vague information about the bomb's yield (~10 kT of TNT) and that it was delivered from a B-29 (which gives you useful information about the bomb's size and weight).  For a while they could not see how it had been done.  That was about the theory, and it left out any consideration of the needed industrial base for making the thing.

 

I think they would have been more astonished to learn that the US took two more or less independent routes toward building nuclear weapons. 

 

One was the gaseous enrichment method, isolating the fissile U-235 from the less useful U-238; this plant was at Oak Ridge, Tennessee.  The uranium bomb was theoretically easier, but it required resources in quantities that Germany had no hope of assembling from the areas under their control.  Gaseous diffusion of uranium more or less requires you to work with uranium hexafluoride, an exceedingly nasty substance, which required a vast quantity of nickel in the diffusion filters, and the valuable alloy elements (like, specifically, nickel) were among the critical "shorts" in wartime German industry.  I once read a passage to the effect, "Gaseous diffusion is easy to understand, but the only possible option for the gas is UF6.  The Germans looked at UF6 and its properties and shuddered, and spent the rest of the war half-heartedly casting about for a different gaseous uranium compound."

 

The other was transforming the more common U-238 into plutonium-239, which was done at the Hanford works in Washington.  That requires a remarkably complex chemical processing plant (complex because once it starts operations you can't send a human in there).  But plutonium is "hotter" (it's a more potent neutron source) and the actual bomb requires a more sophisticated design so that (1) it won't fizzle in your face as you build it, (2) it will explode when you want it to, and (3) it will survive intercontinental transport intact enough to do (2).  That was rather difficult, and it was the plutonium bomb that was tested at White Sands (they were confident enough in the uranium bomb that no test was deemed necessary).

 

Both manufacturing facilities required very large amounts of electric power, also; Hanford being only a modest distance from Grand Coulee Dam was important factor in the selection of that site.  Germany wasn't particularly short of electric power, but they didn't have the the almost limitless reserves of it the US did.

 

The Soviets succeeded in building their own atomic bomb in 1949 because (1) the Soviet Union and its empire is big enough they could assemble the resources to make the components, which the Germans did not, and (2) Klaus Fuchs gave the Soviets the information about how to produce the fissile metal and how the Americans were building their bombs.  There is debate about exactly how much of Fuchs's reports actually were directly used in the Soviet bomb projects, they did provide the huge benefit of the knowledge that someone else had done it and the general approaches used in their work.

 

There's also the issue that Germany had no plane (or rocket) that could deliver the bomb; Fat Man weighed more than 4 and half metric tons, and the V-2's payload was 1 ton.  Probably they could have reworked the FW-200 (the only four-engine bomber they had) into something that could deliver it, but it would have taken another nontrivial R&D program.  That would not stop them from putting it in a U-Boat and blowing up harbors with one, but you don't nuke Moscow, Manchester, or Magnitogorsk with that (let alone anything in North America), and they would have needed needed to do that to win.

[unclevlad]

On the subject of possibly Japan using chemical and biological weapons...

 

It's not reasonable they can "win" this way.  They can stop the advance, but they can't win.  The plagues aren't going to make it back to the US coast;  they'll be noted long before then, and isolated.  Even if it does, it's a major leap to say that this creates a Mad Max, post-Holocaustal situation.  Bioweapons are very tricky at best.

 

If Japan uses a bioweapon...well, when?  Against what?  Bioweapons and chemical weapons are both better used against ground forces.  OK, so...during the island hopping?  It gets reported, and almost certainly, the affected Marines are monitored closely and in isolation on the island.

 

Plus, if Japan does use a bioweapon, well forget ANY chance of peace.  Ever.  Even if the Manhattan Project hadn't really kicked off...it would be now.  And I really, really doubt it would be used with the restraint shown historically.  Good bye Tokyo FIRST, is my guess.  Hiroshima and Nagasaki were as much about forcing the Japanese to surrender to *save* lives...on both sides...from the radical, fundamentally insane component that was all Death Before Dishonor.  That was totally established during the island hopping.  Well, if they're willing to drop a bioweapon....????  That's No Quarter time.

 

EDIT:  if you don't have the Manhattan Project kick back in, then SEVERAL fire bomb raids would be another option.  I'm just saying that the US would feel justified in getting MUCH uglier in their actions.

[dsatow]

Japan used chemical weapons against China during WWII. 

 

Both the Germans and the US had huge stockpiles of chemical weapons during WWII.  They didn't use them against each other really probably due to MAD reasoning.  The same reasoning would probably be the restraint between Japan and the US.

 

Japan did have a unit doing biological warfare in China.  I think they not only tested on prisoners in China but dropped plague bombs there and plans were in place to do the same to the US.

 

Of more interesting Champions note is the Ku-Go death ray development.  It supposedly could kill a rabbit at a 1000 yards if it held perfectly still for 5 minutes.  I believed it used microwaves.  Might not have worked out in reality but who knows in a comic book world.

 

neat page I just googled has more info when I was looking up the death ray name :  https://io9.gizmodo.com/11-secret-weapons-developed-by-japan-during-world-war-2-1669775923

[death tribble]

For possible German work on nuclear weapons see the film The Heroes of Telemark and the Wikipedia link below

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norwegian_heavy_water_sabotage

 

It seems that a majority of us are agreed about Midway and what happens to the American carriers.

But what about the anti-war movement and how that could slow down or sabotage any military build up which in turn could affect what Japan does. If they get the idea that America will not fight because of what Congress and the Senate are doing they might use a different approach. For example they might not attack Peal Harbor but would attack French, Dutch and British possessions in the Far East.

[dsatow]

To be honest, if Japan had held to the treaty that was signed right before Pearl Harbor, I think Imperial Japan would still be around though they probably wouldn't have invaded the US.  

 

[RDU Neil]

33 minutes ago, dsatow said:

To be honest, if Japan had held to the treaty that was signed right before Pearl Harbor, I think Imperial Japan would still be around though they probably wouldn't have invaded the US.  

 

 

What treaty are you talking about? There were negotiations with the U.S. that didn't pan out, and the gov't in Japan fell apart. Was something actually signed?

 

[unclevlad]

Yeah, I don't remember any such treaty, and checking wikipedia doesn't show anything.  US-Japan relations were very poor;  the US was sending material support to aid China, and in 1940 cut oil and steel to Japan...which was critical, because Japan lacks those.  And in summer 1941, the US, Great Britain, and the Netherlands (Dutch East Indies) froze ALL oil exports to Japan.  That is not an environment for friendly talks.

 

 

[Christopher R Taylor]

Quote

Both the Germans and the US had huge stockpiles of chemical weapons during WWII.  They didn't use them against each other really probably due to MAD reasoning.

 

After WWI nobody really wanted to use them, Hitler in particular after suffering from a chemical weapon attack in the war personally did not like them. Probably one of the very few decent or at least not-evil things he did during the war.

[st barbara]

Whether Japan would have invaded Australia is debatable (and has been debated). I also can't see them invading the coast of the U S A, they simply didn't have the manpower to take the country. What IS more possible is that they would have turned West with India as the glittering prize. Possibly the U S A could have been forced to negotiate with the Axis powers had Germany got the bomb first and Japan could have kept its Asian possessions while Germany controlled Europe and Africa, leading to a cold war between a Germanic Europe and a Japanese dominated Asia, with the Americas as a neutral (and Neutered) "third power" and trading partner for the two great powers.

[dsatow]

10 hours ago, RDU Neil said:

 

What treaty are you talking about? There were negotiations with the U.S. that didn't pan out, and the gov't in Japan fell apart. Was something actually signed?

 

 

I had remembered seeing something on the history channel about it, saying that the Japanese ambassador had gotten an agreement signed and sent to the Emperor before Pearl Harbor.  it was spun as a possible last ditch effort to avert the war and maintain peace.  Either I remembered the program wrong or the show spun the peace initiative over too much for drama sakes.  The link https://adst.org/2013/11/the-failed-attempts-to-avert-war-with-japan-1941/ has a better explanation of the real events, so I'll take the blame on the error.

[Christopher R Taylor]

Yeah I don't see Japan taking the USA until the 60s or so.  A weakened, isolationist USA might be a fairly possible target with all the manpower of China and India in the hands of the Japanese.

[unclevlad]

21 hours ago, st barbara said:

Whether Japan would have invaded Australia is debatable (and has been debated). I also can't see them invading the coast of the U S A, they simply didn't have the manpower to take the country. What IS more possible is that they would have turned West with India as the glittering prize. Possibly the U S A could have been forced to negotiate with the Axis powers had Germany got the bomb first and Japan could have kept its Asian possessions while Germany controlled Europe and Africa, leading to a cold war between a Germanic Europe and a Japanese dominated Asia, with the Americas as a neutral (and Neutered) "third power" and trading partner for the two great powers.

 

I can see skipping Australia too, but...why would India be a big prize?  The islands were for oil.  Going after India...steel?  Maybe but you're stretching further and further away.  They've already got a TON of hostile territory to control in eastern China.  I can see them going after the Philippines, but getting to India would probably mean controlling Indochina and Thailand.  UGLY, as we found out, to fight in those jungles.  At least at first, I think they'd just go with political pressure and have them be a puppet state as a buffer.  Granted, these are the Imperial Japanese nutjobs, so they may not, but going after India would, I think, lead to long-term failure as they overextend.

 

One thing to remember about Japan ever trying to attack the US is sheer distance.  The greatest asset for the US has been geographic isolation;  it's why the Cuban Missile Crisis caused such a major panic.  It's 5100 miles from Tokyo to San Francisco, with very darn little in between.  Even if you can establish a toehold on the West Coast, you still have great difficulty supplying, whereas the US can construct, supply, and stage fairly easily.  The Sierras are a logistical problem for ground forces, but that also works against the Japanese.  Similarly, ok, concede the Germans have the bomb.  They still have to cover massive territory, and they have to retain forces to keep their occupied territories pacified.  In military mission language, there are 2 words that might sound similar, but are *totally* different:  Clear and Secure.  Clear means you go through and take out all hostile forces.  Secure means you neutralize them....and KEEP THEM that way.  At least for a time.  Clear is to move troops through;  it's often a prelude to Secure, which is a prelude to Occupy.

 

The US geographic isolation is much like the sheer immensity of Russia in terms of the difficulties implicit in conquering either.

[archer]

1 hour ago, unclevlad said:

 

I can see skipping Australia too, but...why would India be a big prize?  The islands were for oil.  Going after India...steel?  Maybe but you're stretching further and further away.  They've already got a TON of hostile territory to control in eastern China.  I can see them going after the Philippines, but getting to India would probably mean controlling Indochina and Thailand.  UGLY, as we found out, to fight in those jungles.  At least at first, I think they'd just go with political pressure and have them be a puppet state as a buffer.  Granted, these are the Imperial Japanese nutjobs, so they may not, but going after India would, I think, lead to long-term failure as they overextend.

 

 

India has vast amounts of croplands and the population to farm it. If the Japanese assisted with transitioning them into mechanized farming, there's no reason the area couldn't be exporting huge amounts of rice and wheat just as it does in the real world. The Japanese would be basically replacing pre-war the food imports from the US with importing food from India.

 

In order to take India though, I'd guess the Japanese would have to appeal to various independence groups in Ceylon, India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh. Promise each of the groups autonomy in their region and alliance in exchange for assistance in kicking the British out;

 

You'd end up with the region being a patchwork quilt of Rajas controlling small regions. But frankly, I could see Japan being quite content with that in exchange for naval bases in the Indian Ocean and no British presence. The British would have a hell of a time retaining control of their colonies in the Persian Gulf region with the Japanese having fleets in the Indian Ocean and offering assistance to independence groups in other British-controlled areas.

[death tribble]

One thing that would be true is that America would not have as much debt as it currently does.

[Hugh Neilson]

If all we are after is the Japanese keeping America out of the war, the possible scenarios seem to become a lot easier.  I seem to recall records unearthed which show Yamamoto's report that he could deliver successive victories against the US for as long as 30 months, after which the US would overwhelm Japan.  He recognized that Japan enjoyed naval superiority at the outset, which could be capitalized on to weaken existing US forces, but that once the US could bring its full industrial power to war production, Japan would be unable to compete.

 

Pearl Harbour was intended to accomplish a few things which could have gone better.

 

Reduce the US' existing naval power, especially aircraft carriers, as Yamamoto was among the first to recognize naval battles would be won or lost in the air.  Had more carriers been in harbour, they could have done a lot more damage.  Had they been able to block the harbour (which they very nearly did), they could have rendered Hawaii a much less useful base.  They also pulled back a third wave when they discovered the expected fleet was not in harbour.  Had that wave proceeded, its targets included fuel supplies and repair facilities, the destruction of which would have set back the ability to restore naval power in the Pacific.

 

Perhaps the bigger one - the PR experts contributed greatly to winning the war.  Yamamoto hoped a serious loss in Pearl Harbour would break US morale so they would pull back to isolationist thinking.  Had "Remember Pearl Harbour" come to mean "remember what we lost - let the Japanese have what they want - it is half a world away and not worth the cost to the US of a war" instead of "They started this - we will finish it", he would have won that morale victory.  Instead, that gamble failed, as the attack was leveraged to strengthen, rather than weaken, US resolve to fight the war.  Those are the same PR guys who made Stalin into "Uncle Joe", and maintained the secret of FDR's medical history - virtually no one knew he was crippled  by polio.

 

So imagine that the PR went the other way, the US people did  not back the war, but opposed it, so politically, the US was forced into signing a truce (basically "you leave us alone and we will stay out of the war").  The Japanese get what they want, and the US reverts to isolationism, not growing into the world power it did historically.  So today, perhaps we have a much more military Japan which conquered much of Asia-Pacific, a much reduced US presence on the world stage, perhaps the Yen rather than the $US the major world currency, a very different Europe dominated by Germany, with no intervening Communist China or USSR.

 

But we also have almost 75 years of post-war history.  What if Japanese youth in the '60s respond to their warrior culture similarly to the US youth culture of the '60s?  Maybe the Beatles go to Japan instead of Ed Sullivan in 1964.  You could take an alternate history in pretty much any direction you want, but the question starts with "how did WW II end in this alternate history?"

[unclevlad]

34 minutes ago, Hugh Neilson said:

Perhaps the bigger one - the PR experts contributed greatly to winning the war.  Yamamoto hoped a serious loss in Pearl Harbour would break US morale so they would pull back to isolationist thinking.  Had "Remember Pearl Harbour" come to mean "remember what we lost - let the Japanese have what they want - it is half a world away and not worth the cost to the US of a war" instead of "They started this - we will finish it", he would have won that morale victory.  Instead, that gamble failed, as the attack was leveraged to strengthen, rather than weaken, US resolve to fight the war.  Those are the same PR guys who made Stalin into "Uncle Joe", and maintained the secret of FDR's medical history - virtually no one knew he was crippled  by polio.

 

So imagine that the PR went the other way, the US people did  not back the war, but opposed it, so politically, the US was forced into signing a truce (basically "you leave us alone and we will stay out of the war").  The Japanese get what they want, and the US reverts to isolationism, not growing into the world power it did historically.  So today, perhaps we have a much more military Japan which conquered much of Asia-Pacific, a much reduced US presence on the world stage, perhaps the Yen rather than the $US the major world currency, a very different Europe dominated by Germany, with no intervening Communist China or USSR.

 

But we also have almost 75 years of post-war history.  What if Japanese youth in the '60s respond to their warrior culture similarly to the US youth culture of the '60s?  Maybe the Beatles go to Japan instead of Ed Sullivan in 1964.  You could take an alternate history in pretty much any direction you want, but the question starts with "how did WW II end in this alternate history?"

 

That kind of capitulation is rare, I think.  The French didn't fold from lack of resolve in 1940, but from awful planning and overconfidence.  Britain never cracked despite the Blitz.  9/11.  My understanding is that Bush expected the Iranians to welcome the US as they overthrew Hussein...forget it.  Not gonna happen.

 

9/11 was.........I was literally in emotional shock for 3 or 4 days.  Seeing the 2nd tower collapse...LIVE...was indescribable, even more, I think, than seeing the video of the 2nd plane impacting because I believe I didn't see that live.  And seeing it live, KNOWING IT'S REAL!!!  Now, ok, video is POWERFUL.  We're learning that, albeit slowly.  Still...remember that in 1940, military service was still a point of considerable pride.  We haven't had Korea or Viet Nam, which were messes.  "Only" 2200 killed, but it darn sure looked and sounded worse.  But the ship losses......attacking the battleships was sound enough given that the carriers weren't there, but....the Arizona, the Oklahoma, the West Virginia, and the California were all sunk.  Note the significance of the names.  

 

If the goal for our exercise is to envision a world where Japan holds a great deal more sway, then the best trigger is that Hitler triggers another Lusitania incident, so the US goes east with fervor, but there's no such emotional investment to cross the Pacific.  Whether the US would still have done so, when Japan goes after the Philippines...that might be a matter of timing, but the Philippines could've waited.  (The attack there started the day after Pearl Harbor.)  But if the US is building up the Atlantic fleet.......it feels plausible that Japan could've taken over the Philippines  while the US was stuck in the bloody, bloody Italian effort.  Maybe.  

 

But all of this talks about successful initial actions.  Long-term occupation is much, much harder...ask the Soviets about Afghanistan.  The Germans had big problems with the French resistance.  Actually holding China and the Philippines would not be easy *at all* and was probably a major overrreach, as Hitler's move on Russia was.  Japan may have succeeded in holding them long-term by co-opting the locals, if that was possible;  the Germans did as well as they did in France because of that.  I don't think that was possible given the Japanese mindset, the race relations in play, or the geographic dispersion.

 

But, ok, say it was working for at least a while.  As Hugh noted, we get wildly hypothetical very quickly, but it's definitely true that we have to establish the preliminaries...not just how the war ends, but how we go from the tensions of summer 1941 (in the Pacific) to the fall of Germany.  Or if Hitler had half a brain, a Germany that controlled most of central Europe...much of France, the Low Countries, Austria, and the Balkans.  That world is probably not stable, tho.

[Christopher R Taylor]

A few minor things changing could have really made a huge difference in the overall events of the war.

Hitler keeping the attack going in the Battle of Britain just a little while longer would have revealed that the Brits were basically out of airplane fuel.  They could have taken England, which means ZERO staging ground for the USA to join the war from.

Hitler not attacking Russia would have meant he could focus on solidifying his grasp of Europe and taking England.

Japan not attacking Pearl Harbor would have meant no US involvement in the war perhaps ever.

Huey Long not being mysteriously assassinated by his own bodyguards could have meant Roosevelt removed from office and a total shift in US policy to isolationism and cutting off England.

 

Its just the little things that usually are the turning points, but they're rarely obvious when you're going through it.

[RDU Neil]

1 hour ago, Christopher R Taylor said:

Huey Long not being mysteriously assassinated by his own bodyguards could have meant Roosevelt removed from office and a total shift in US policy to isolationism and cutting off England.

 

What is your basis for this statement? Even in the various portrayals (some direct, most indirect) of Long in fiction, don't have him assassinated by his body guards, and the official story is that Carl (Karl?) Weiss shot him.

Just interested in this particular theory. Where does it come from?

[unclevlad]

It's also not clear Roosevelt would've lost in 1936.  And if we assume Landon won...Long would have had to run as a 3rd party candidate, and that means Fat Chance...what I'm reading about him is a mixed bag on intervention/engagement vs. isolation.

 

It is interesting to read the articles about the 1936 and 1940 elections.  Landon was apparently a terrible campaigner, and he got his butt whupped.  WORSE than Mondale vs. Reagan, or McGovern vs. Nixon, in terms of the electoral college.  In 1940, Wilkie apparently didn't have a message beyond "don't break 2 terms" and had the taint of Big Business and how it brought about the Depression.  

 

At either point, if a stronger, more isolationist Republican could have won......that probably changes everything.

[Christopher R Taylor]

Huey Long was enormously popular as a populist, and growing rapidly in popularity.  Think of him as a Bernie Sanders type candidate, who died conveniently before he became too significant.

[massey]

Huey Long was a scary dude.