"WWII What If - Storming Paradise" Topic

Picked this up at the comic shop today. Issue #2 just came out. Premise is that America's atom bomb program is set back when the first test kills all the scientists present. President Truman then orders an invasion of Japan.

link

I know that Canadian, British and Australian troops were included in Operation Olympic, my grand father being one of them. Everyone was gearing up for it.

If Olympic had gone as planned, I wouldn't be surprised if Japan would have gone done in History as another Carthage.

I'll check the comic shops next time I'm downtown.

Interesting, I might have to pick this up. I find the use of the term 'revisionist' a bit odd, though, in the description. I wonder if they realize the kind of freight that term carries in the realm of historical writing, especially World War 2?

Robert Conroy's "1945" is a good alt history featuring the invasion of Japan after the palace coup attempt to prevent the Emperor from surrendering succeeds.

I was going to wait for the TPB to come out. Looks interesting though.

Brian

I was thinking this was a discussion of storming Paradise Island, home of Wonder Woman. Didn't the old show (during its WWII-era days) have an episode where that happened?

Umm…back on topic…that's always an interesting (if potentially grim) "what if". I have to wonder, however, if our "Okinawa x 100" thinking is really accurate. The continued systematic bombing (combined with the US submarine strangulation) of Japan was already doing quite a number. Not really sure how much more the Japanese could (or were really willing to take). Not to mention, of course, Russian intervention, which was another factor in things. Fun stuff to pretend, though!

On a related note, there's a great sequence in the McNamara documentary "Fog of War" that illustrates the devastation of Japan by listing comparably-sized US cities. Really helpful (and chilling) way of making clear how widespread and complete the strategic bombing campaign of Japan was.

It always interests me how people go on about them fanatical Japs holding out to the end.

It was the Germans who were the Fanatics, who sent their kids and elderly to certain death with a grenade on a firework tied to their bike handlebars and called it a panzerjaeger. I wonder, if we had dropped nukes on Hamburg and Bremen, would the Germans have gone? 'Ah. The Gig is obviously up. We surrender.' like the Japanese did. I suspect not.

Pat

you know you always wonder if without the bomb that maybe the soviets would have kept on going after a short rest especiely with a shift in forces to the pacific..

They've confused "alternate history" with "revisionism" in the Issue #1 and series' description. And they ain't the same, folks. (Although it's a perfectly acceptable basis for an alternate history.)

"It always interests me how people go on about them fanatical Japs holding out to the end."

Here's my problem with suggesting Germans were more fanatical than the Japanese. In most battles, extremely few Japanese ever surrendered. Instead, they fought to the last man and would make suicidal attacks to try and kill just one more enemy rather than be taken prisoner. The Japanese viewed surrender as the ultimate dishonor, since honor meant everything to them. That's one of the reasons they treated Allied prisoners so bad, they viewed them as having no honor.

Germans may have in some cases fought to the last man but in no way did the vast majority ever do anything similar to the Japanese. Look at the hundreds of thousands of German POW's and compare that to the much smaller amount of Japanese POW's. Throughout most of the war the vast majority of Japanese soldiers would rather die than surrender, not so for most German soldiers. Again all you have to look at is the completely lopsided amount of POW's on each side.

Back on subject, I'll have to take a look at these comics. Might be worth getting. Thanks for the heads up.

I'd agree with you on that point as well DM. Allied soldiers fighting in the West observed that the Germans had a tendency to fight on until they either ran out of ammo or admitted that their situation was hopeless and they'd done all they could. Then for the most part, they surrendered, feeling they'd done all they could. Different rules on the Eastern Front though, where surrender was by no means a guaranteed alternative to death.

In the Pacific and the Far East, neither running out of ammo nor being completely surrounded with no hope of reinforcement was viewed by the Japanese as a reason to surrender. The ratio of Japanese dead to captured was, I'd suggest, astronomical compared to the German. And the great fear for the Western allies was that they'd be faced not only with the Japanese armed forces defending their Home Islands against the first invasion since the Mongols(?), but also that the civilian population would be mobilised against them as well, in a far more determined manner than the Volksturm ever was.

Gary

Why do they keep saying Operation Olympus? It was Olympic! ANd what about Operation Coronet? It was a two-part process!!

And Sane Max, you're wrong. The Japanese were more fanatic than the Germans ever were. If you read about the Japanese plans for fending off an invasion, there are a lot of stories involving young girls being told to corner allied soldiers and then stab them with an awl, and then use their firearm to gun down however many more enemy troops they could before they were gunned down. I used to have bookmarks to several sites with some particularly spine-tingling stories of expected methods of homeland defense, but I can't seem to find them.

The Germans, on the other hand, never really made much in the way of plans to fend off an invasion. They did have home guard units established (at some point during the war), and at least they had the courtesy to equip them some of them with firearms.

Thanks, Chaos, now I have the very confused mental image of a japanese schoolgirl brandishing a sewing awl shouting "They don't like it up 'em, sir!"

Darth

We actually played a game in which a German Navel task force invades Paradise Island. This gave us a chance to play with all my Foundry Nymphs. The Amazons beat the Hell outta the Germans. Can't win against naked chicks with the gods on their side.

Brian

The thing that the "Japan was on its last legs" argument fails to consider is not how bad off the Japanese were, but rather how determined the Allies were to finish the war. By 1945 the Allied war machine was exactly that: a machine. It had momentum and a timetable and nothing was going to alter that short of a Japanese surrender. Operations Olympic and Coronet were planned and scheduled and they were going to be implemented--period. No 'peace feelers' or rumors of Japanese wavering was going to have the slightest affect. Only unconditional surrender could stop them. It was the shock factor of the atomic bombings that made unconditional surrender possible. I doubt that anything else would have done the trick in the short time remaining before Olympic took place.

…a German Navel task force …

Now there's something you don't often see…

"Now there's something you don't often see…"

Nope, pretty rare.

I'm just wondering whether that last sentence from Brian's post has ever been said ever before in history, and if so, where…

:>

Only in Weird War II.

Brian

Also there is the Soviet angle--they actually landed troops unopposed in Hokkaido and had huge potential resources to throw at an attack…
if for whatever reason The Bomb hadn't worked (or the B29s got shot down!!) it would have been highly unlikely that an invasion would have been carried out by Britain and USA in 1945…We would have stood off and leveled Japan before even attacking…Famine would have done the rest. With Japans infrastructure destroyed and no way of transporting what little food there was..

David Douglas Duncan, famous photographer and WWII USMC Lt,
went ashore in Yokosuka just before the formal surrender. He and another Marine oficer got hold of a Japanese motorcycle and rode into town. They roared up to a traffic cop and asked about the next train into Tokyo. The cop did not speak English, but the next cop up the street came up gave them directions and said they had 10 minutes to make the train. On the train, Duncan said the Japanese all stared at the floor seemingly embarrassed. The train ran on time, only the windows were gone. The two of them checked into the Imperial hotel and were eventually run out by MacArthur's staff who took the place over.

awsome comic I loved the putting john wayne joining up.HOO RAAH

Having known in my day some of the planners for Operation Olympic, and some of them who were supposed to take part…

It's revisionism and naivete in the extreme to assume that Operation Olympic would have been some sort of bloodless mass surrender of Japanese forces. The Japanese had been marshaling all of their best troops, equipment, and remaining supply stores for one last effort in slaughtering the Allied invaders.

We may have a different perspective some sixty three odd years on, but I will never forget a very dear friend who's brother was an intelligence officer planning Olympic (not Coronet, not sure what role if any he would have played in that, I only know about the Olympic part). At any rate, his brother assured us that Okinawa only convinced the Allies that it would take something along the level of an atomic bomb to stop the Japanese from fighting on until they had all but been destroyed.

As an interesting side note, to show you just how determined they were, when the Emperor signed the formal surrender order, the surrender orders had to be taken to a special bunker which was then locked, buried, and surrounded by a crack team of the Imperial Guard. When the Emperor's officials arrived to retrieve the documents when they were needed, they found that all of the guards had been killed and that several attempts had been made to find said documents. This was -after- the Atomic bomb blasts.

There were fanatics who intended to keep the fight going, either way, and only the Emperor's personal admonition to lay down arms saved the Japanese people from those militants prolonging the war indefinitely.

-A.

Germany would have fought to the last Hitler, or maybe to the last Himmler, which ever survived the longest.

Maybe not the last Himmler, given that he surrendered!

Archstanton – Olympic was scheduled for November 1945.

Recently read Max Hastings "Retribution" covers the war against Japan in 1944-45. Recommend it as a source for the decisions mentioned above. He does an excellent job of explaining thought processes of the period. Since my father was a combat engineer in Europe and identified for transfer to the Pacific, he always felt that things worked out as they should have.

Another factor is the experience with Japanese civilians that had been moved to the islands the Americans ended up taking back. There were a couple of instances of mass suicide iirc. I imagine that would have happened on a much grander scale in Japan itself.

-Will

Heard that there was a big typhoon in November '45 at Okinawa, which wrecked the camps and sunk some shipping. If Olympic had been necessary this would have been about the date of the invasion – 'Divine Wind'??

Another little factoid is that the USA is still using the stock of Purple Hearts that they made in preparation for the invasion of Japan.

"Heard that there was a big typhoon in November '45 at Okinawa, which wrecked the camps and sunk some shipping. If Olympic had been necessary this would have been about the date of the invasion – 'Divine Wind'??"

Yep. The typhoon hit in October. Operation Olympic was set for EXACTLY the same time that the largest typhoon seen in a hundred years smashed through the area. The typhoon sank 12 ships, crippled 32, and damaged hundreds of smaller craft, landing ships, etc. Smashed up scores of planes on the ground as well. And that was with fore-warning AFTER the war had ended. The armada for Olympic, larger than used at D-Day, would have been devastated if caught at see in the midst of attempting a landing. And any soldiers who made it ashore would have been isolated, without support, and butchered by the Japanese.

The Japanese would also most certainly have taken heart at this, considering the typhoon to have been a Divine Wind sent by the gods to smash the Americans as it had done with the Mongols centuries before. Given Japanese culture of the day, after such an event, I'm not sure that even nuking more cities than we did would have forced a surrender.