When the 2,800-vessel American invasion fleet finally appears off the coast of Kyushu, it is beset by another typhoon of sorts. (A typhoon packing 140 mph winds actually did occur, on October 9, 1945.) The typhoon strongly echoes the famous storms-“divine winds”-that swept away two Mongol invasion fleets in 1274 and again in 1281, and creates a propaganda coup for the Japanese militarists that further cements their authority. The invasion, scheduled for November 1, 1945, is postponed until December 10 after a major typhoon ravages the American fleet in October. The Americans have little choice but to continue with Operation Olympic, their plan for the invasion of Kyushu, the southern most of the Japanese home islands.
In Giangreco’s account, the abortive military coup by aggrieved Japanese staff officers on August 15, 1945, succeeds, and-despite the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, as well as two other nuclear attacks on unnamed cities- the Japanese military fights on. Giangreco, a former editor at Military Review who has written extensively on American plans to invade Japan-in which a military dis aster has forced the United States to conclude an armistice with Japan. Of these, perhaps the most intriguing is the volume’s final essay-“Victory Rides the Divine Wind: The Kamikaze and the Invasion of Kyushu,” by D. The four alternate histories that do lead to victory actually yield only compromise settlements with the United States. (One contributor notes that even if the United States had lacked bases from which B-29s could carry the bomb to Japan, it still could have relied upon a crash program to produce the Northrop XB-35 Flying Wing, a heavy bomber with a range of over 8,000 miles.) And of course, nothing the Japanese could have done would have had any effect on the development of the atomic bomb. Japanese triumphs in the battles of the Coral Sea, Midway, and Guadalcanal, for example, provide only temporary respites before American shipyards and aircraft factories produce new armadas with which to resume the contest. But six postulate merely operational, not strategic, success. Judging by its title, one would suppose that the 10 contributors to Rising Sun Victorious offer 10 distinct avenues to Japanese victory. The difficulty of imagining a Japanese victory extends even to Rising Sun Victorious: The Alternate History of How the Japanese Won the Pacific War, a volume of essays edited by Peter G. These comments are quoted in nearly all histories of the Pacific war because they encapsulate the unlikelihood of any plausible scenario in which Japan could prevail against the military and economic might of the United States-or undercut American will sufficiently to achieve a negotiated peace settlement. “To make victory certain,” he warned, “we would have to march into Washington and dictate the terms of peace in the White House.”
Isoroku Yamamoto, commander in chief of the Imperial Japanese Navy, predicted that if war broke out with the United States, “I shall run wild considerably for the first six months or a year but I have utterly no confidence for the second and third years.” He knew it wouldn’t be enough to seize the American possessions of Guam, the Philippines, and Hawaii, or even a main land city like San Francisco. What If the United States Had Invaded a Japanese Home Island? | HistoryNet Close
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