Unconditional surrender, November 1944

Zooey wrote:

Maybe we should have enlisted him to fight in the Korean war lol.

If we’d done that, the Chinese would have taken him prisoner during one of their “human wave” attacks. He would have been conscripted to fight in the Chinese Army. The Chinese would have used him in their invasion of India of 1962. Once he’d been taken prisoner/added to the Indian Army, he would have been used to help fight the Indo-Pakistani War of 1965. Upon being captured and conscripted by the Pakistanis, he would have been sent to fight in the Bangladesh Liberation War of 1971. After being captured by Bangladesh, he would have been forced to serve in the Bangladeshi Army, especially in the Chittagong Hills Tracts Conflict (which began in 1975). He would have been captured by the Shanti Bahini (Bangladesh’s opponent in that conflict). But once that conflict ended, he would have been allowed to retire; quietly living out the rest of his days in the Chittagong Hill Tracts of southeastern Bangladesh.

Imagine it’s the 1980s. An old man in the Chittagong Hill Tracts is cooking food by an outdoor fire. A child comes up to him and begins a conversation. “I served in the war,” the old man says. “Which war?” the child asks. “Now that is a complicated question!” answers the old man.

Thanks for the well informed post KG7. Nice to know that someone with your level of knowledge is able to support my ill-informed hypothesis!

We often forget that the conclusion of the war was not a known element.

As stated, Peleliu mattered little in the end, but if something had gone wrong somewhere else, it may have been the cornerstone of allied victory.

It most certainly caused Japan some level of strategic/logisitical grief, and it’s one more piece on the board the americans could seize to strengthen their offensive.

As for publicity stunts… PHI was a must. The U.S. said they would return, and everyone believed it.  If the U.S. had not returned… that would have been a costly political enterprise.

I voted for the Soviet invasion of Manchuria.

Prior to the dropping of the first atomic bomb, the Japanese were already willing to agree to a conditional surrender.

The Soviet Union was fundamentally hostile to the Western democracies. Some Japanese leaders hoped for an alliance between Japan and the Soviet Union–an alliance against the U.S. and Britain. Their hope was that the Soviet Union would enter the war on Japan’s side.

The Soviet invasion of Manchuria demonstrated that any kind of diplomatic arrangement with the Soviet Union was no longer an option. With its diplomatic options exhausted, Japan’s only way of avoiding the Americans’ demands was to achieve some kind of military victory. There was a shortage of Japanese military victories from '43 - '45, and the Soviet invasion of Manchuria only made things worse. That invasion was regarded by both sides as a prelude to the invasion of Japan itself. The quick collapse of Japan’s Manchurian forces inspired little hope that Japan would do well in a follow-up Soviet invasion of its home islands. Still less did it seem possible for Japan to defeat a combined invasion of American and Soviet forces. At that point, it was concluded that it was better to unconditionally surrender to the Americans, than to have unconditional surrender imposed anyway by a combined Soviet-American force.

Why wasn’t Stalin interested in joining Japan’s war against the U.S. and Britain? I see two main reasons: 1) He wasn’t yet ready for such a war, and 2) By 1945, Japan’s military had little left to offer. By the early '50s, Stalin may have felt himself ready or close to ready for war against NATO. Some historians feel that Stalin permitted the Korean War to proceed because he wanted to test American military readiness. The results in that war were such that Stalin felt comfortable moving forward with his plans for WWIII. However, he died before putting those plans into effect.

Thank you Toblerone. I mentioned it, as I was sure the British Army did something like that after WW1 and the horrific losses small villages suffered if a battle went badly. I know you can see memorials in little villages and the long lists make sad reading, without a list of names with the same surname.

George Tweed is buried at Eagle Point National Cemetery about 15 miles from my house and this time of the year the local press helps remind of his story. 2 links to his story.

http://www.guampedia.com/category/124-world-war-ii/entry/371-george-tweed

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Ray_Tweed

@ABWorsham:

My grandfather landed in France on D+4 with the U.S 2nd Inf.

I had the best memories listening to him discuss the War.

Man, tell me those stories! I would have loved to be there with you hearing them. Those poor guys in the first wave. Man. That’s what I’d call a sacrafice to our country.

@Zooey72:

Not counting the atomic bomb, this is the weapon.  Jets, rockets, and big tanks may be sexy; but at leasting doubling the combat capacity of every soldier is a war winner.  The USSR would have surrendered in 1941 IMO, and that would have pretty much ended the war.

If you seriously believe this then you have, at best, only an elementary understanding of why Germany lost the war. Having the STG44 in the hands of the Wehrhmacht in 1941 would have done nothing, absolutely nothing to address the problems Germany faced in her war with the Soviet Union. A more capable small arm would not have addressed the imbalance in wartime production between the Axis and Allied powers, would not have made Barbarossa any less of a disorganized or disjointed plan of attack, and certainly would not have rectified Germany’s crippling manpower problem that reared its head shortly after the war in the east began.

Germany was completely and totally outmatched by its adversaries, and no single innovation or change to the timeline is going to give them a chance at winning the war. Many of the problems that beset the Wehrhmacht were endemic to the Nazi regime itself, and you can’t really address those without putting someone else in charge. The problem is that you can’t really do that either, both on account of the fact that if Hitler wasn’t in charge there’s a good chance the war never would have happened and because taking him out of the picture puts leaves you with a tonne of variables that makes it impossible to sort out what could have or would have happened.