If anything, the U.S. would have been in a similar position, i.e. at war with Japan with guaranteed victory, even if every single ship under the U.S. flag magically got sunk on December 7, 1941.
This is suspect. The U.S. had greater industrial capacities and population than Japan, but that doesn’t guarantee victory. Rebuilding the navy would take a lot of time which the Japanese could use to end their war in China. Also, it was far from clear in late 1941 whether the USSR would withstand the German assault and whether the British would not seek peace.
Even in the worst possible case, I still don’t see what could prevent the U.S. from simply cranking out a new huge Pacific navy and overwhelming Japan. Yes, the production would take a few years to ramp up to full capacity, as it did in reality—but once it did, I can’t imagine what could save Japan from being overwhelmed.
Ending the war in China wouldn’t have helped the Japanese at all, even if they linked with a victorious German army in the Far East. An additional land army at their disposal could not prevent the U.S. navy steamroller from eventually reaching their home islands, whereupon they would be bombed and starved into surrender. (If not for the atom bomb ending their agony even earlier.) The Japanese islands are so exposed and vulnerable to any superior naval power that they could be lost even as the world’s mightiest army is watching helplessly from the Asian mainland.
The only theoretical chance I see is if Germany somehow conquered both the U.S.S.R. and Britain, and then threw all its resources on a crash program to build up a huge navy of its own and help the Japanese. But I’m not sure if they’d be able to outproduce the U.S. even in that case. (And note that this would require a vanishingly improbable long continuation of the Germans’ lucky streak.)
In the context of this discussion the important thing is what could be reliably predicted in 1941, so we should ignore the possible effects of the atomic bomb.
Assume that the entire U.S. navy is destroyed in January 1942. A reasonable realistic scenario, if everything went really well for Japan, may be this:
Germans capture Leningrad and encircle Moscow in summer 1942, Stalin is arrested in the forthcoming chaos and the new Soviet government signs armistice with Germany, ceding large territories in the west.
German effort is now concentrated on expanding their naval power. Germany has half of Europe’s industrial capacity at her disposal. The production of U-boats increases and Britain alone has not enough destroyers to guard the convoys.
Starvation, threat of German invasion and heavy naval losses to German submarines, leading to inability to supply the Indian armies, make Britain accept Hitler’s peace offer. Britain surrenders Gibraltar, Malta, Channel islands and all interests in European mainland to Germany and Italy, Singapore and Malaya to Japan and backs from the war.
China now obtains no help, no arms, no aircraft and surrenders in 1944, becoming divided among several Japanese puppet states.
The U.S. are alone, still having no significant navy. Hawaii is lost to the Japanese. Germany is aggresively building new ships to improve their naval power and potentially help the Japanese in the Pacific. Roosevelt dies in early 1945, as he did historically. The Japanese offer peace that would secure them the leading position in East Asia, willing to give Hawaii back.
Now in this situation, being a U.S. general, what would be your advice given to Truman? Would it be “let’s continue in a low intensity war against both Germany and Japan until we have a strong enough navy, which may be in 1947 or 1948, and then start taking one island after another, which may take two more years, and then, from the island bases supplied through the U-boat infested Pacific start bombarding Japan, until the damned fanatics realise they have no other chance than to surrender”? Or would it rather be “let’s accept peace if it’s offered on honourable terms”?
Even in that scenario, Japanese victory is conditional on the political decision of the U.S. government to accept the peace. My comments considered only the strategic situation under the assumption that all sides were willing to fight on with determination. And I don’t think this assumption is so unrealistic: the American people were extremely unwilling to enter the war, but once they did, they would have been even less willing to accept a humiliating peace. Especially since the Pacific great naval offensive could be (and historically was) fought with very low casualties, and not to mention the U.S. government’s wartime control of the media that was in many ways even more effective than the crude and heavy-handed control in totalitarian states.
Now, in your scenario, the U.S. would presumably see immediately that its first priority was navy rebuilding. (An army is useless if you can’t get it off the mainland.) This means that by 1944, Americans would be cranking out even more ships than they did historically. I don’t think the Axis could match that output even if they were in control of the entire Eurasia.
(The U-boats would have been a complicating factor. Their effectiveness changed dramatically with unpredictable innovations in technology and tactics. In actual history, they became useless by mid-1943, although Germans were arguably on the verge of introducing dramatically superior ones at the time of their capitulation. But in any case, the U-boat factor cuts both ways: Americans could swamp the Pacific with even greater numbers of U-boats and wreck the entire Japanese logistics, as they actually did.)
Even assuming a plausible scenario in which the US couldn’t defeat Germany, that doesn’t have anything to do with whether we could have defeated Japan standing alone.
Historically, we know it wasn’t that hard for the US—despite Japan attacking first, the US adopted a “Europe First” strategy that committed approx. 2⁄3 of capacity to fighting Germany. Despite this, the US defeated Japan easily—there are no major victories for Japan against the US after Pearl Harbor, and Midway was less than a year after Pearl Harbor. If the US strategy is “Japan First” (doing things like transferring the Atlantic Fleet to the Pacific), why should we expect the Pacific war would last long enough that Germany would be able to consolidate a victory in the east into driving the UK into peace and be able to intervene in the Pacific?
Also, why do you think an invasion of Hawaii was possible? The surprise strike was at the end of Japanese logistical capacity—I think the US wins if Japan tries a land invasion.
If the US strategy is “Japan First” (doing things like transferring the Atlantic Fleet to the Pacific), why should we expect the Pacific war would last long enough that Germany would be able to consolidate a victory in the east into driving the UK into peace and be able to intervene in the Pacific?
Remember the context: we are in the hypothetical where all US ships (Atlantic fleet included) were magically anihilated in the end of 1941.
I’m a big believer in not fighting the hypothetical, but there is no historically plausible account leading to the destruction of the Atlantic fleet. At that point, we aren’t discussing facts relevant to whether FDR knew of the Pearl Harbor attack ahead of time.
The hypothetical of Pearl Harbor as the most resounding success it could possibly be (US Pacific fleet reduced to irrelevance) and Germany winning the Battle of Moscow strongly enough that it has leverage to force the UK out of the war is reasonable for discussing FDR’s decision process. That’s all he could reasonably have thought he was risking by allowing Pearl Harbor. As I stated elsewhere, I think FDR gets his political goals with Japan firing the first shot—there’s no need for him to court a military disaster.
At that point, we aren’t discussing facts relevant to whether FDR knew of the Pearl Harbor attack ahead of time.
True, but I have joined this part of discussion reacting to this Vladimir_M’s comment:
If anything, the U.S. would have been in a similar position, i.e. at war with Japan with guaranteed victory, even if every single ship under the U.S. flag magically got sunk on December 7, 1941.
This is suspect. The U.S. had greater industrial capacities and population than Japan, but that doesn’t guarantee victory. Rebuilding the navy would take a lot of time which the Japanese could use to end their war in China. Also, it was far from clear in late 1941 whether the USSR would withstand the German assault and whether the British would not seek peace.
Even in the worst possible case, I still don’t see what could prevent the U.S. from simply cranking out a new huge Pacific navy and overwhelming Japan. Yes, the production would take a few years to ramp up to full capacity, as it did in reality—but once it did, I can’t imagine what could save Japan from being overwhelmed.
Ending the war in China wouldn’t have helped the Japanese at all, even if they linked with a victorious German army in the Far East. An additional land army at their disposal could not prevent the U.S. navy steamroller from eventually reaching their home islands, whereupon they would be bombed and starved into surrender. (If not for the atom bomb ending their agony even earlier.) The Japanese islands are so exposed and vulnerable to any superior naval power that they could be lost even as the world’s mightiest army is watching helplessly from the Asian mainland.
The only theoretical chance I see is if Germany somehow conquered both the U.S.S.R. and Britain, and then threw all its resources on a crash program to build up a huge navy of its own and help the Japanese. But I’m not sure if they’d be able to outproduce the U.S. even in that case. (And note that this would require a vanishingly improbable long continuation of the Germans’ lucky streak.)
In the context of this discussion the important thing is what could be reliably predicted in 1941, so we should ignore the possible effects of the atomic bomb.
Assume that the entire U.S. navy is destroyed in January 1942. A reasonable realistic scenario, if everything went really well for Japan, may be this:
Germans capture Leningrad and encircle Moscow in summer 1942, Stalin is arrested in the forthcoming chaos and the new Soviet government signs armistice with Germany, ceding large territories in the west.
German effort is now concentrated on expanding their naval power. Germany has half of Europe’s industrial capacity at her disposal. The production of U-boats increases and Britain alone has not enough destroyers to guard the convoys.
Starvation, threat of German invasion and heavy naval losses to German submarines, leading to inability to supply the Indian armies, make Britain accept Hitler’s peace offer. Britain surrenders Gibraltar, Malta, Channel islands and all interests in European mainland to Germany and Italy, Singapore and Malaya to Japan and backs from the war.
China now obtains no help, no arms, no aircraft and surrenders in 1944, becoming divided among several Japanese puppet states.
The U.S. are alone, still having no significant navy. Hawaii is lost to the Japanese. Germany is aggresively building new ships to improve their naval power and potentially help the Japanese in the Pacific. Roosevelt dies in early 1945, as he did historically. The Japanese offer peace that would secure them the leading position in East Asia, willing to give Hawaii back.
Now in this situation, being a U.S. general, what would be your advice given to Truman? Would it be “let’s continue in a low intensity war against both Germany and Japan until we have a strong enough navy, which may be in 1947 or 1948, and then start taking one island after another, which may take two more years, and then, from the island bases supplied through the U-boat infested Pacific start bombarding Japan, until the damned fanatics realise they have no other chance than to surrender”? Or would it rather be “let’s accept peace if it’s offered on honourable terms”?
Even in that scenario, Japanese victory is conditional on the political decision of the U.S. government to accept the peace. My comments considered only the strategic situation under the assumption that all sides were willing to fight on with determination. And I don’t think this assumption is so unrealistic: the American people were extremely unwilling to enter the war, but once they did, they would have been even less willing to accept a humiliating peace. Especially since the Pacific great naval offensive could be (and historically was) fought with very low casualties, and not to mention the U.S. government’s wartime control of the media that was in many ways even more effective than the crude and heavy-handed control in totalitarian states.
Now, in your scenario, the U.S. would presumably see immediately that its first priority was navy rebuilding. (An army is useless if you can’t get it off the mainland.) This means that by 1944, Americans would be cranking out even more ships than they did historically. I don’t think the Axis could match that output even if they were in control of the entire Eurasia.
(The U-boats would have been a complicating factor. Their effectiveness changed dramatically with unpredictable innovations in technology and tactics. In actual history, they became useless by mid-1943, although Germans were arguably on the verge of introducing dramatically superior ones at the time of their capitulation. But in any case, the U-boat factor cuts both ways: Americans could swamp the Pacific with even greater numbers of U-boats and wreck the entire Japanese logistics, as they actually did.)
Even assuming a plausible scenario in which the US couldn’t defeat Germany, that doesn’t have anything to do with whether we could have defeated Japan standing alone.
Historically, we know it wasn’t that hard for the US—despite Japan attacking first, the US adopted a “Europe First” strategy that committed approx. 2⁄3 of capacity to fighting Germany. Despite this, the US defeated Japan easily—there are no major victories for Japan against the US after Pearl Harbor, and Midway was less than a year after Pearl Harbor. If the US strategy is “Japan First” (doing things like transferring the Atlantic Fleet to the Pacific), why should we expect the Pacific war would last long enough that Germany would be able to consolidate a victory in the east into driving the UK into peace and be able to intervene in the Pacific?
Also, why do you think an invasion of Hawaii was possible? The surprise strike was at the end of Japanese logistical capacity—I think the US wins if Japan tries a land invasion.
Remember the context: we are in the hypothetical where all US ships (Atlantic fleet included) were magically anihilated in the end of 1941.
I’m a big believer in not fighting the hypothetical, but there is no historically plausible account leading to the destruction of the Atlantic fleet. At that point, we aren’t discussing facts relevant to whether FDR knew of the Pearl Harbor attack ahead of time.
The hypothetical of Pearl Harbor as the most resounding success it could possibly be (US Pacific fleet reduced to irrelevance) and Germany winning the Battle of Moscow strongly enough that it has leverage to force the UK out of the war is reasonable for discussing FDR’s decision process. That’s all he could reasonably have thought he was risking by allowing Pearl Harbor. As I stated elsewhere, I think FDR gets his political goals with Japan firing the first shot—there’s no need for him to court a military disaster.
True, but I have joined this part of discussion reacting to this Vladimir_M’s comment: