Charles2222
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Joined: 3/12/2001
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Have a book I'll make a quote from called "Excerpts of The History of the Second World War" regarding Olympic.
quote:
The regular Japanese troops facing the 'Olympic' invasion vastly outnumbered the assault force; and in addition to their regular forces the Japanese hoped to mobilise a huge volunteer army, armed mostly with bamboo spears. The US and British task forces had no direct opposite numbers at all, for the once-powerful Japanese fleet had been whittles down to vanishing point in the Battles of the Phillipine Sea, of Leyte Gulf, and of Okinawa. But the Japanese fleet of kamikaze vessels-each of them intended to eliminate an enemy ship-could theoretically wipe out the entire invasion fleet; and this was only the naval element of Japan's suicide defense force-exactly half the remaining Japanese aircraft were kamikaze machines. And this was only the battle for Kyushu....
On a diagram they showed what Olympic would've tallied. The Japanese had only 19 destroyers compared to 131 Allied surface ships. The Japanese did have the aforementioned kamikaze craft which were 3,300 strong. The Allies wold have had 20 carriers carrying some 9,000 planes, while the Japanese would sport 10,700 planes, hald as mentioned being set aside for kamikaze. The Allies expected to field 650,000 troops. The Japanese on the other hand would field 2,300,000 with another 28,000,000 possible addition of local volunteers.
quote:
The plans relied primarily on the kamikaze (suicide) air units for the defense of Kyushu. The Japanese expected to throw upwards of 10,500 planes (50% of them kamikazes) into attacks in the American transports. Although Japanese experts disagreed among themselves as to the ratio of planes expended to vessels sunk, many confidently expected to destroy at least half of the American troop ships in the first ten days. This, combined with a tenacious beach defense, they hoped would beat back the initial assault and convince America that the cost of subduing Japan was so high that a negotiated peace would be preferable. Actually, the Japanese encountered such difficulty in providing the Kyushu defenders with adequate weapons that it imperilled their ability to resist a landing.
My little guess is that since Japan was always trying to play the losses game with the people she attacked intitially (USA/Britian), that when the USSR attacked they could no longer play such a game. Given time, and probably not much time at that, the USSR would have conquered them. The USSR wasn't afraid of the losses and the USSR also didn't sign the Geneva Convention.
To make matters worse, with the A-bombs dropping, they were then faced with the issue that the US might not be willing to invade, but might be fascinated with their new toy and not invade at all, with little if any cost to the US.
I'm not sure if the entry of a country that wasn't too concerned about losses scared them more, or the usual loss-conscience US/Britain with a weapon that would enable them to fight from afar, but to have a strategy bent on trying to at least stalemate, by how many losses you could inflict, suddenly backfire by virtue of A-bombs and the entry of the USSR (and their success in China) must've been a massive blow. The fact that the Japanese army in China was surrendering in droves to the USSR might've also told them that the nation wasn't as willing to fight to the death as they expected.
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Necessity of Hiroshima and Nagasaki - 
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