Author Topic: What if Manhattan Project did not exist?  (Read 17619 times)

Offline ysi_maniac

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What if Manhattan Project did not exist?
« on: June 02, 2012, 02:23:49 AM »
How much would it cost to invade main Japan territory: Hokkaidō, Honshū, Shikoku and Kyūshū?

Which kind of war? Armored? ...

I know there were studies, but what is your opinion?

Offline deathjester

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Re: What if Manhattan Project did not exist?
« Reply #1 on: June 02, 2012, 05:20:56 AM »
In terms of lives?  Horrific.

Probably would have meant thousand bomber raids as the norm, and massed infantry assault with huge armoured support.  Every bit as gruelling as D-Day onwards.

Offline raafif

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Re: What if Manhattan Project did not exist?
« Reply #2 on: June 02, 2012, 06:44:03 AM »
much worse than D-Day !  A friends uncle was a Marine assigned to the third wave of US invasion troops in '45 when the bombs were dropped - he said they were told to expect 100% casualties in the first wave, 90% in the second wave & 80% in the third wave.
Even allowing for this pessimistic asumption, it would still be worse than D-Day.

The US had better & more weapons but Japan had many civilians (men, women & teenagers) prepared to die in battle using kitchen knives, molotovs etc.
« Last Edit: June 02, 2012, 06:46:40 AM by raafif »

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Re: What if Manhattan Project did not exist?
« Reply #3 on: June 02, 2012, 08:23:03 AM »
Regarding the bomber raids, Martin Cadin's book regarding the strategic bombing of Japan suggested that by war's end, the list of strategic targets had dwindled to fourth & fifth tier levels.  I'd suggest that an invasion would be a predominantly tactical affair from the point of view of airpower.

Casualty-wise, it would be beyond horrific as witnessed by the Okinawan invasion where an entire village jumped to their deaths rather than being captured by the Americans due to obviously negative propaganda by the Japanese.

Regards,

John
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John

Offline ed s

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Re: What if Manhattan Project did not exist?
« Reply #4 on: June 02, 2012, 09:35:36 AM »
I wonder if a full scale invasion would have been necessary. It might have been just as effective and taken a lot fewer casualties if the allies had just embargoed the whole country. They already had Okinawa to use as a major support base. Just keep bombing the military targets and factories to keep them from building up their military, sink all their shipping, shut down their air bases, and keep the fleet around the island and sink any ship coming or going. After all, at this point, they didn't have a lot of allies to try and help them.

Ed

Offline elmayerle

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Re: What if Manhattan Project did not exist?
« Reply #5 on: June 02, 2012, 12:23:07 PM »
Tighten the noose with on-going unrestricted submarine warfare such that they couldn't bring anything in.  Of course, this does assume that Japan didn't have an equivalent to the Manhattan Project and couldn't have developed a delivery method (cruise missiles launched from I400's perhaps?).   There is some evidence that Imperial Japan did have an equivalent program and there are some claims that they managed a test equal to Trinity before the surrender.

Offline dwg

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Re: What if Manhattan Project did not exist?
« Reply #6 on: June 03, 2012, 01:41:28 AM »
The Downfall ops-plans are a lot more than studies, units were fully assigned and troops were already being shifted for them, the only thing missing is their actual execution. Olympic was due to kick off in October with landings in Kyushu, followed by Coronet landing on the Kanto Plain in Spring '46. The only real variation likely is if the Russian Autumn Storm offensive caused a significant shift in the strategic situation.

As for cost, the assumptions vary greatly, but 0.5-1.5m seems to turn up more often than the lower figures quoted by several of the senior figures. Okinawa is probably the best model, and that cost 72,000 casualties for a fraction of the area that needed conquering. I find it difficult to take the estimates that actually run lower than Okinawa seriously.

As for the nature of the operations, the forces allocated were overwhelmingly infantry, with only 1 cavalry regiment out of 15 divisions for Olympic, and 1 armoured division out of 38 for Coronet.

Offline raafif

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Re: What if Manhattan Project did not exist?
« Reply #7 on: June 03, 2012, 08:41:45 AM »
overwhelmingly infantry, with only 1 cavalry regiment out of 15 divisions for Olympic, and 1 armoured division out of 38 for Coronet.

That seems overwhelmingly dumb !  unless they exected to wipe out all humans in Japan first.

I'd keep up the bombing of strategic places & factories - but we know how England & Germany sub-contracted out to separate households & the Japanese were no slouches at that either - without destroying housing too, only final assembly would be affected -- but that would do & keep civilians busy instead of them training to fight.

Using Naval & air power, secure the beaches, send in the gun-Amtraks closely followed by LCTs with tanks (mainly flamers & bunker-busters), along with mech infantry (guess that means ½-traks).  Given the US's manufacturing strength, fully-enclosed up-armoured Kangaroos based on the Priest wouldn't have been too hard to do, particularly if they delayed the invasion by a few months which wouldn't have given Japan any time to regroup anyway.

If you're facing mainly civilian fighters you don't need big-gun tanks, just what we're using in Afghanistan now -- good IFVs that survive mines & bamboo-stick bombs.  The ability to fight mainly from the vehicle would be ideal, with demounted infantry for clean-up.  The IDF uses very simple devices to protect tanks from molotov cocktails too -- angled tin shields over the intakes & radiator exhausts.

I guess the "brains" of the Army were still fighting battles 1914 style tho :icon_nif:

Offline dwg

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Re: What if Manhattan Project did not exist?
« Reply #8 on: June 04, 2012, 01:20:37 AM »
overwhelmingly infantry, with only 1 cavalry regiment out of 15 divisions for Olympic, and 1 armoured division out of 38 for Coronet.

That seems overwhelmingly dumb ! 

I'd guess the driving factors were 1) availability of assault shipping - an armoured battalion takes far more shipping than an infantry battalion, both to land and to keep in action; 2) distance from assembly ports - with the exception of Torch, all the European amphibious operations were launched over comparatively short seas, allowing a rapid turn-around between dropping the assault wave on the beaches and getting back to the assembly ports to reload, which isn't so simple with the Japanese Home Islands. Okinawa can be used as an assembly area, but everything needs to be shipped to Okinawa, in the time between the landings there and the Olympic landings, not just the supplies for the troops, but the ordnance for the air forces planned to be based there, whereas we had a couple of years to assemble the supplies for Overlord; and 3) the fact that the Japanese had no significant armoured force to counter.

Nor for that matter are armoured forces a solution to an infantry heavy defence - you need only look at the Battle of Kursk to see that, or the First Battle of Grozny for a more recent example. Armoured forces need an infantry escort in any sort of close terrain, a lesson re-emphasized by both Iraq and Afghanistan.

Offline ysi_maniac

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Re: What if Manhattan Project did not exist?
« Reply #9 on: June 04, 2012, 10:43:35 PM »
Did japanese have credible armoured unit? IMO, no.
Would it have meaning to quickly develop a kind of japanese Sturmovik? My whiffer soul says yes.

Offline Alvis 3.1

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Re: What if Manhattan Project did not exist?
« Reply #10 on: June 04, 2012, 11:50:14 PM »
Vicious hand to hand combat, every inch of the way to Tokyo. Every child, every woman would become suspect, and horrific civilian casualties would mount. It would make some interesting moments at the Nuremburg War Crimes trials, with Nazi defendants pointing to the massacres in Japan and claiming they weren't any worse...Napalming villages and whole cities likely wouldn't have made the newsreels back home.

The Russians would have invaded the North islands, and it would have been as bloody there as well. Then we'd have faced a dividied Japan, much like Germany and Korea. Imagine fanatical Japanese Stalinists....yikes!

Just because we can easily figure out how to protect armoured vehicles from insurgents today, doesn't mean that it would have been easy to do then. Sure, the guys were just as smart, but getting material into Japan to fabricate the mesh and shields..that's harder. There's also the lag time between being attacked by kids with sticky bombs and women with satchel charges and figuring out how to prevent those attacks. The easier, on site method would be to shoot anything that moved. Then you get logistics kicking in...how much ammo can be shipped into Japan how fast? How long before orders come down to preserve ammo?

Japan had an active biowarfare unit, so I think biological/chemical weapons would have been fielded by them. All the old WW 1 poison gasses, and some new, not so nice stuff cooked up too. And even if they didn't have an atomic bomb, they might have been able to field an radiological bomb, a  "dirty" bomb. It wouldn't have killed anyone immediately, but after a while...Laying in wait, until large units had moved into an area, and poof! A whole army of fleet dusted with lingering death.

Sadly, the ability to nuke two cities in Japan is actually the better outcome. What a sad world we live in.

Alvis 3.1

Offline tsrjoe

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Re: What if Manhattan Project did not exist?
« Reply #11 on: June 05, 2012, 12:27:07 AM »
it was planned by the allied forces to extensively utilise chemical weapons to try offset expected casualties, any resulting invasion would have been horrific for all the combatanta as well as the Japanese population, as 'Alvis' mentions, maybe the nukes were the better decision, than a long drawn out invasion and occupation with literally millions of casualties  :icon_crap:

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Re: What if Manhattan Project did not exist?
« Reply #12 on: June 05, 2012, 12:55:09 AM »
One rarely considered outcome of not having a Manhattan Project would be the freeing up of resources:  The Manhattan Project employed more than 130,000 people and cost nearly US$2 billion (roughly equivalent to $25.8 billion as of 2012).  It would be interesting to also consider what other 'projects' some of these scientists etc might have worked upon if not on the development of nuclear weapons.  Also, would there be any resulting changes to the B-29?
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Offline tsrjoe

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Re: What if Manhattan Project did not exist?
« Reply #13 on: June 05, 2012, 03:38:10 PM »
One possible outcome would possibly be 'cleaner' or more efficient nuclear power stations, of the processes developed the one chosen to proceed produced the most plutonium, a legacy only recently being looked at by states such as China and Japan

Offline raafif

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Re: What if Manhattan Project did not exist?
« Reply #14 on: June 06, 2012, 07:55:34 PM »
outcome of not having a Manhattan Project

I don't think any other weapons would have been developed but maybe a few prototypes would have seen action rather than being sidelined or delayed until later.

One possible outcome would possibly be 'cleaner' or more efficient nuclear power stations, of the processes developed the one chosen to proceed produced the most plutonium, a legacy only recently being looked at by states such as China and Japan

Without the Manhatten Project we may not have nuclear power today.  The decision on what radio-active element to use for nuclear-power was made by politicians & commercial companies -- scientists at the time advocated fuel other than plutonium that would have resulted in less-radio-active waste but were frozen out of the debate & ignored as they have been until the current Japanese crisis.

Offline raafif

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Re: What if Manhattan Project did not exist?
« Reply #15 on: June 06, 2012, 08:03:37 PM »
paraphrased from the official history of the U.S. NSA ....

Secret radio intercepts in mid July '45 told the US that Japan was trying to get Stalin to negotiate a "conditional" surrender with the Allies - on no account did Japan want an un-conditional surrender -- unconditional surrender meant the Emperor lost his right to govern & therefore "loss of face" -- that was enough insult to continue the war till no Japanese citizen was left alive.
Japan also wanted to renew their 1942 non-aggression pact with Russia in '46 but Stalin wanted none of that -- Russia had still not declared war on Japan at this stage.  Japanese envoys who travelled across Manchuria to Moscow reported many trains of troops, tanks & aircraft etc heading east -- they estimated that Russia would have double the forces of Japan in that area by the end of July.
The Emperor said that if Russia attacked Japan, they would have to sue for peace under any circumstances to protect their "national infrastructure".

On August 8th Hiroshima was A-bombed, on August 9th Stalin declared war on Japan & launched an attack across a 2,000-mile front against Japanese forces in Manchuria & Soviet troops crossed 15kms into Japan's defensive frontier on Sakhalin Island.  On August 10th, at 11.00 am the Japanese PM asked the War Council for their thoughts on accepting the Potsdam Proclamation & Unconditional Surrender -- as the Potsdam Proclamation hadn't been delivered to any Japanese representative (its demands were simply published in newspapers & on public radio), Japan wasn't sure how to respond officially -- at 11.01am the second A-bomb fell on Nagasaki.

On August 14th the US Navy shelled factories in northern Honshu -- Japanese dithering continued until 9pm Washington time when a secret radio intercept confirmed Japan's acceptance of the surrender terms ((which the US confirmed included the continued right of the Emperor to govern)).  Sloppy diplomatic work on both sides caused several days delay -- better understanding & communicating could have meant a surrender a few days earlier avoiding the dropping of the A-bombs.
----------------------------------

There is no evidence that Stalin wanted to occupy Japan - just Manchuria (which included Sakhalin Island).  He could have waited a few weeks & occupied Manchuria with little effort after the surrender but distrusted the other Allies.  A  Russian invasion of northern China was much more of a possibility -- if there was no Chinese Communists to oppose the Chinese Nationalists this may have happened by 1948.  Even in 1939, authorities of the largely independent western provences of China (bordering the USSR) paid more attention to Moscow's dictates than those of their own government.

a different post-WW2 scenerio evolves .....

Offline Maverick

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Re: What if Manhattan Project did not exist?
« Reply #16 on: June 06, 2012, 11:02:44 PM »
Personally, I can't see the US as having wanted to not drop at least one weapon, if only to prove it's worth in an operational situation.  Martin Cadin wrote in his book about the strategic bombing of Japan that all of their tiers one to three strategic targets had been obliterated and further bombing was in effect not necessary to achieve strategic aims through the use of airpower.  I've been blasted about this previously, but I still stand by that opinion.

Regards,

John
Regards,

John

Offline raafif

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Re: What if Manhattan Project did not exist?
« Reply #17 on: June 07, 2012, 08:55:50 AM »
I totally agree, John.

Churchill, Roosevelt & Stalin (just like the Allied leaders at the end of the 1st Gulf War & now the UN) are all guilty of deliberately failing to end a war when they had the chance, costing many lives unecessarily.  That's what happens when you let politicians make common-sense or military decisions.

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Re: What if Manhattan Project did not exist?
« Reply #18 on: June 07, 2012, 05:48:48 PM »
Be careful of applying today's standards, values and povs to events that took place over half a century ago guys...when povs and values were different.
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Offline jcf

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Re: What if Manhattan Project did not exist?
« Reply #19 on: June 08, 2012, 05:08:29 AM »
Be careful of applying today's standards, values and povs to events that took place over half a century ago guys...when povs and values were different.

... which is exactly what people do when they apply the post-war study generated 'estimates' of potential
casualties of an invasion of Japan as a justification for the atomic bombs. No such justification was used at the
time, nor was one needed, and none is needed now.
If people feel a need to justify the bombings, here's a better one:
the reality of the effects of the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki are the only thing that 
prevented the later use of nuclear weapons in large numbers.

Anyhow the notion that an invasion of the mainland would be a repeat of Saipan and Okinawa on a large scale
has been disputed, and was based largely on wartime stereotypes, an overly broad extrapolation of specific
unique instances and a limited knowledge of Japanese history and culture.
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Offline ysi_maniac

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Re: What if Manhattan Project did not exist?
« Reply #20 on: June 13, 2012, 10:19:13 PM »
I may be wrong but I think that in real world, surrender was a personal decision of emperor. So he would feel similar after knowing the casualties and lack of results of resistance against ongoing invasion.

Offline Alvis 3.1

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Re: What if Manhattan Project did not exist?
« Reply #21 on: June 14, 2012, 01:50:36 PM »
Don't forget there was an attempted coupe after he'd made the decision to end the war, by some of the more fanatically minded military. Even if he'd made the choice to surrender, all that was needed was a removal of him to keep the fight going.

I've never thought of the decision to drop the two atomic bombs was anything more than a matter of logistics. There didn't seem to be any thinking of them as anything more than just an even bigger boom, nothing more. Considering that the idea of flattening the enemy by conventional bombing had been practiced for a couple years by this point, throwing in the nukes was just another, logical step. And yes, it may have saved us from an atomic exchange in the 50s or later by the East and the West, by showing what the real effects were.

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Re: What if Manhattan Project did not exist?
« Reply #22 on: June 14, 2012, 06:48:07 PM »
Don't forget there was an attempted coupe after he'd made the decision to end the war, by some of the more fanatically minded military. Even if he'd made the choice to surrender, all that was needed was a removal of him to keep the fight going.


There's a slightly different scenario:  the coup succeeds and Japan fights on despite the nukes.
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Offline dwg

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Re: What if Manhattan Project did not exist?
« Reply #23 on: June 15, 2012, 01:12:49 AM »
Be careful of applying today's standards, values and povs to events that took place over half a century ago guys...when povs and values were different.

... which is exactly what people do when they apply the post-war study generated 'estimates' of potential casualties of an invasion of Japan as a justification for the atomic bombs.

Actually the projected casualty figures are contemporary, with 500,000 US dead being projected in an informal estimate to Curtiss LeMay in January '45, 267,000 US dead being estimated in a study for the JCS in April '45, 268,000 casualties estimated by Admiral Leahy at a presidential conference in June, while a study for the Secretary of War estimated 400-800,000 US dead.

Quote
Anyhow the notion that an invasion of the mainland would be a repeat of Saipan and Okinawa on a large scale has been disputed, and was based largely on wartime stereotypes, an overly broad extrapolation of specific  unique instances and a limited knowledge of Japanese history and culture.

What's unique about the resistance of Japanese forces? That seems to have been pretty much a constant. The landings in Japan would have faced a large kamikaze threat, with 10,000 aircraft potentially available, along with 800 Shinyu explosive motorboats, 350 mini-submarines of the Koryu and Kairyu classes and 400 Kaiten manned torpedos. As a reminder the smaller kamikaze threat at Leyte Gulf, Iwo Jima and Okinawa sank 3 escort carriers, 23 destroyers, 4 troopships and another 25 smaller warships and auxiliaries, while damaging, in some cases severely enough to put them out of operations, or even out of the war, 30-odd carriers, 10+ BBs, a half dozen cruisers and scores of destroyers, lighter warships and auxiliaries.  Once ashore, the Japanese OOB still included 30 fully equipped divisions, another 10 with equipment but without full ammunition load and 25 more with troops but without equipment, who could have nevertheless been used as battle casualty reinforcements. Even if the idea of swarms of civilians fighting proved to be unrealistic, there was still a major campaign to be fought against a tough and resilient enemy dug in on his own terrain.

Offline raafif

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Re: What if Manhattan Project did not exist?
« Reply #24 on: June 15, 2012, 08:14:32 AM »
in reply to a Q on another site .....

apparently (unlike the UK) there was no "home guard" type civil force in Japan to repel invaders -- looks like everything would have been a local ad hoc organisation on the day.

Girl Guides were taught by military officers to commit suicide by disemboweling to preserve their honor from the Americans  -- one girl reports practising with a cardboard knife ... such is propaganda.

I still believe that if the Emperor had publically said anything then the populace (& most of the military troops) would have followed his decree.