If the Japanese had done it to New York City would you have surrendered?
We have more land, so I think we could have dispersed the population to the country to make the bombs or raids less effective. But at some threshold you do have to give up and fight another day.
Arguable, clearly. But plausible.
Hitler had no interest in expanding westward. His plan was a great German empire where the Volga would be what the Mississippi is in the US. If France & Britain had not attacked, Germany would very likely have left them alone.
In the east, it was a fight to the death, and both sides knew it. If the Russians surrendered, they faced extinction.
This is just one point among hundreds in this thread that I find fascinating for the same reason.
So many people here know exactly what they would've and what we should've done back then. Because we have the benefit of nearly a hundred years of analysis and hindsight.
Most of the disagreements here aren't actually about what happened, and why, but what the people in this thread would've done and why.
I find that fascinating.
They're basically the equivalent of "Ha! If I were Yamamoto, I would have...." because they know what happened and when and what would have turned events. But had they been in Yamamoto's (or Nimitz's or Patton's, or Rommel's) position, would have made much worse decisions. As you say they have complete benefit of decades of study of the war and tactics as well as limitations we are privileged to know only after the war.
99% of those bombs don't hit anything relevant for the war effort.
At the same time production of those rockets was far more costly then whatever they hit in Britain.
And sure, if they could magically have no limits then maybe. But in practice, Germany had mass starvation while huge amounts of bio-mass was converted into rocket fuel. Not to mention very inefficient uses other materials.
Even ignoring all that, the total payload deployed by German over Britain was laughably small compared to allied bombing raids.
I’m sure a part of the reason the Japanese refused surrender was because their reflection in the mirror was not pretty.
Even the Japanese military knew that at the time. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Attack_on_Pearl_Harbor#Strateg...:
Admiral Hara Tadaichi summed up the Japanese result by saying, "We won a great tactical victory at Pearl Harbor and thereby lost the war."
Historians are arguing that in a industrialized conflict, where the United States was committed to war, Japan had no shot at winning. And to some degree that's true. But it depended on political factors that were no means set in stone.
But was America truly that dedicated to war with Japan? Turns out yes - but it's not hard to see a world where Japan wasn't quite a closely allied to Germany and/or Midway had gone the other way, or after millions where dead in the home island where that commitment would be tested.
Or conversely - as Hitler hoped - Japan would hold off America just long enough for the Russians to be finished off by the Germans in the East and Britain would finally come to the table. In a "Germany First" Strategy, America could not have taken the offensive in 1942 in that scenario.
But it's also reflective of the dehumanization that Japan's leadership as - the West was soft, just as the Russians were soft, and Japan's greater fighting spirit would carry the day.
Pearl Harbor didn't predetermine history.
> In the first six to twelve months of a war with the United States and Great Britain I will run wild and win victory upon victory. But then, if the war continues after that, I have no expectation of success.
Isoruku Yamamoto, commander-in-chief of the Japanese Navy.
Once the US took Guam, the war was over (Guam was close enough to Japan to enable the US to enact a campaign of unlimited bombing). From that point forward, continued conflict was a matter of Japanese leaders sacrificing their own citizens for absolutely no gain