Had the atomic bomb not been used in Japan...

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ioweddie

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The 1945 Naval Armada Set to Invade Japan.

It was 1944 and these pictures were not
available during the war.

The US kept this place unknown to the citizens of the US.

An Armada of ships and airplanes poised for the invasion of Japan...
that never happened... because President Truman authorized the
dropping of "A" bombs at Nagasaki and Hiroshima that resulted in the
Japanese surrender.

There will never be
another assemblage of naval ships like this again.

Staging area for the invasion of Japan. Check out the carriers on
"Murderer's Row."


Click below:
Warbird Information Exchange ? View topic - ULITHI ...
 
Not sure where you're going with that.

The pictures were obviously available to those who took them, and no doubt shared them among present friends. Like all involved in war, they wouldn't be publishing them more widely.

The citizens of the US would not be generally informed of military, etc, arrangements for planned attacks - nor would the citizens of any other country, for their planned attacks.

There were lots of cases of planned operations that didn't go ahead when some other operation succeeded. There'd almost always be a "Plan B" (or even C ...).

So why the hoopla?
 
They were going to Japan Dave, that's were they were going!
 
It's the nature of the beast.... a large concentration of enlisted men spending idle time on a tropical island playing baseball and drinking beer while waiting to an invasion that never happened is just not news.... it may have been a secret at the time, but I am assuming that after the war the photos were not published because they were deemed as being of no interest. It's the Internet that allows these photos to find the few who would be interested in seeing them (i.e. us, and other like-minded people...)
 
Interesting that 3 out of the 4 aircraft carriers pictured were sunk in later battles.
Details of the Fate of the 12 US Aircraft Carriers Sunken in World War II - 12 Sad Images
There have been many arguements about their high attrition rates principally centred round the construction of their flight decks.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Armoured_flight_deck

This website offers a sort of revisionist view of the armoured carriers - though it's quite a long (and at times slightly repetitive) read:

Armoured Aircraft Carriers in World War II

There has been a tendency to overrate them and underate them. When I was younger the view was armoured carriers were 'good' and then through the 90s it seemed to shift to take the view that they were 'bad' in that they were still as susceptible to damage and carried fewer aircraft.
 
Hi,
I read the whole 5 pages of the thread ( Warbird Info Exchange) with great interest, perhaps more so as it was supposed to be a "hidden secret".
I found this part of a posting quite poignant, that the posters father was still concerned 70 years later about revealing details of the armada. From page 5.....

( Hopefully some of you can fill in the blanks as dad is excited about this now. He wasn't at first as, can you believe this guys, he was afraid to say anything to anyone but me for fear that the Navy would come after him for sharing secrets. Yes, after all these years he still fears spilling the beans. He even went so far as to go over to the VA to verify what I told him about having nothing to fear 70 plus years later. They told him he was probably safe to share whatever he knew. )

Sad that the thread seems to have died when there was the promise of more interesting material to be added.

Thanks for finding and posting this, made a change to car related ephemera.

Steve
 
The atomic bomb did not result in the surrender of the Japanese, all it did was kill a lot of civilians. The Russians had the biggest affect on the surrender of the Japanese.
 
The atomic bomb did not result in the surrender of the Japanese, all it did was kill a lot of civilians. The Russians had the biggest affect on the surrender of the Japanese.

Possibly. But war, like life itself, is an experiment without a control group.

So its anyone's guess how things might have turned out had events not been the way they were.
 
That's the revisionist view certainly. However its perhaps interesting to follow up the "What if they had never dropped the bombs" hypothesis. Two questions follow.
1.Would the act of JAPAN seeking to surrender have prevented Russia from invading anyway? Try asking the Eastern European Countries about Stalin's attitude to that one?
2. What prevented Russia from invading--- possibly the USA's demonstration of its major advantage in the nuclear arms race at the time.

Conclusion:-- while the dropping of the nuclear bombs may not have prompted the surrender of Japan per se , at the same time it may have actually saved Japan from invasion by the Russians. :dk:

The accepted view is of course that the war in the Pacific had taken an immense toll of American lives with every atoll and island fiercely contested by the Japanese. It was argued that an American invasion of the Japanese mainland would result in even greater loss of life to the extent that it would lose the domestic political impetus to continue- hence the decison to drop the big one and get it over with. :dk:
 
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The atomic bomb did not result in the surrender of the Japanese, all it did was kill a lot of civilians. The Russians had the biggest affect on the surrender of the Japanese.

You'd have to expand on the detail and justification of that theory substantially before I'd give you any credence.
 
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2. What prevented Russia from invading--- possibly the USA's demonstration of its major advantage in the nuclear arms race at the time.

The Russians didn't just steamroller continuously in the west - they took pauses. Apart from manpower their resources were significantly lower the US.

Even stretching across the Pacific there is no comparison between the resources that the US (or possibly even the UK in some circumstances) could bring to bear against Japan in 1945 compared with the Soviet Union which was on the same continent.
 
Conclusion:-- while the dropping of the nuclear bombs may not have prompted the surrender of Japan per se , at the same time it may have actually saved Japan from invasion by the Russians. :dk:

How would the Russians have invaded exactly? Using what? And when?

Also bear in mind that Russia's actual focus was China - and in the west we tend to often forget how much of the Japanese military was in China, and the nationalist vs communist struggles, and the Soviet invasion of China as the atomic bombs were being dropped.
 
You'd have to expand on the detail and justification of that theory substantially before I'd give you any credence.

I agree, but there's another layer, even, when you consider the logical problem: how can you actually prove a negative? If circumstances (a) and (b) occurred [the dropping of the second bomb and the declaration of war against Japan by Russia], and both were likely to have a similar effect, and then a week later circumstance (c) occurred [the Japanese surrendered] how could you possibly prove that (a) did not result in (c)?
 
Timeline:


26th July- Japan rejects surrender following the Potsdam Declaration and the ultimatum that if Japan did not surrender, it would face "prompt and utter destruction"

6th August - Hiroshima

9th August - Nagasaki

9th August - Soviet declaration of war and invasion of the Japanese state of Manchukuo

15th August - Japan announces its surrender to the Allies

2nd September - Japanese government signs the instrument of surrender, ending World War II


Draw your own conclusions....
 
9th August - Soviet declaration of war and invasion of the Japanese state of Manchukuo

The Soviets attacked Manchuria - not Japan (as in the actual country).

They did invade the Kurils ... oddly enough *after* the Japanese started their surrender. Nothing like the scale of the Allied landings at Siciliy, Normandy, the US forces that advanaced across the Pacific, let alone the invasion forces prepared for Japan. Maybe not even quite at the level of Operation Torch.

Draw your own conclusions....
The Soviets were hardly a threat to the Japanese mainland.

Their designs were on China and the communist forces there - and the Kurils were thrown in as a bit of limited opportunism.
 
It is worth remembering that the Soviet Union and Japan had already clashed.

In 1939, the poorly-led and badly-equipped Red Army met the fearless and highly-motivated Japanese Imperial Army in a brief but bloody border war.

The Japanese lost - badly.

The Forgotten Soviet-Japanese War of 1939 | The Diplomat
 

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