The USSR-USA Front That Never Was: How Close Did We Come to a Joint WW2 Invasion of Japan?
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- Опубликовано: 2 июн 2024
- What could have been if Japan hadn't surrendered in 1945? Join us as we discuss Operation Downfall, the Yalta Conference agreement for the Soviet Union to enter the war against Japan, and examine a hypothetical joint USSR-USA invasion of Japan. Learn about the logistical and ideological challenges, potential political ramifications - including Japan's division, a race for Tokyo, and early Cold War impacts - and reflect on this near-miss scenario's significance
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Editors - Kshitiz, Shantanu koli
Researcher - Daniel
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Chapters:
0:00 Introduction
2:07 Soviet-American Relations, 1945
6:28 American-Soviet Invasion of Japan
11:37 Operation Downfall
18:49 Race to Tokyo
20:43 How Close Did We Come?
The Soviet and Americans weren’t able to do a joint offensive one because they were too suspicious of each other, also I don’t think that their political ideologies and military conduct would mesh.
Americans attack from the south. Soviets attack from the North.
Like how Soviets attacked from the east and Allies attacked from the west against Germany.
They did it in Europe. they could do it in japan.
The soviets would of wanted to just throw bodies, and be really confused when the Americans suggest air power, and then infantry to mop up.
Source?
@@cmedeir There were suspicions and distrust before WW2, during WW2 & Cold War, even to the modern day. Ask anyone over the age of 40 and the risk of nuclear war between the two was a real thought in people’s minds.
@@cmedeir source? All of world war 2, and there never being a joint mission.
It's impressive how quickly America turned Japan and Germany into staunch allies after the war.
That's because America took control instead of pussyfooting around like in the end of the previous war.
Woodrow Wilson allowed the UK and France to royally screw over Germany's economy and thus sow the seeds of the second war.
But by helping Germany and Japan regrow themselves instead of financially and economically ruining them, America was sowing the seeds of friendship with those two countries.
I think it was more Russia turning Germany and Japan into staunch allies of the US. Kinda like they are doing with Sweden and Finland now.
Aggressive reconstruction vs aggressive occupation. The US chooses the former, which typically gives the countries it occupies very good incentives to be an ally. Contrast that to every other major military force on the planet, where war crimes are the norm, and it's a wonder why people hate the US so much
"These negroes are my allies!" said the plantation owner. Lol
and how quickly they turned ussr and china into staunch enemies 😂😂
My grandfather told me of a time at the end of the war where he was helping to train Russians on the LCI ships needed to invade Japan in Alaska
Fun fact: Since the Soviets never signed the final peace treaty with Imperial Japan in 1945, both countries are still (legally) at war!
Fun fact, your wrong. They signed a joint declaration in 1956
@@BlueTrolllmfao
The Soviet Union doesn't exist anymore, so Japan and the Soviet Union can't be at war.
The same as nonaggression as Molotov pact between Russia and Germany. And still is on today
@@BlueTrollway to go to embarrass the commenter
The last known Kamakaze attack was on the Russians after the Japanese surrender, without the word surrender of course, when a Kamakaze took out a T34 in Japanese occupied China
According to the book
« Imperial Tragedy »
An account of the 1st Days & the last Days of the Pacific War
compressed together, from the
Japanese perspective, by Thomas Coffey (1971)
after the soviet declaration of war against Japan 🇯🇵, Captain
Minoru Genda who planned the
air attack on Pearl Harbour, was
preparing an attack on Vladivostok, when the Capitulation put an end to it.
@@minhthunguyendang9900 And Thank God for all parties there was an end to it
Had the Soviets decided to invade Hokkaido it would have ended in embarrassment for Stalin. They had no leverage over the US in the Pacific or Asia at that point, and their tugboat navy meant they would have been dependent on US support. In the event of an amphibious Soviet invasion in August 1945, the US and western allies could have gone ahead and made a separate peace with Japan while the Japanese turned their full attention north to buy time until the US occupation could take affect and repatriate any tenuous hold the Soviets had on the Japanese mainland.
For an idea of how difficult it would be for the Soviets, their Pacific Fleet was almost entirely comprised of soft vessels with only a handful of destroyers and cruisers to protect them. Whereas the Japanese had prepared about 7,000 kamikaze aircraft on the home islands: 800 of which would have been able to respond to a Soviet invasion on the first day.
Yeah the Soviets would not have stood a chance against the Japanese home fleet
They needed US ships just to invade the Sakhlin Islands, which weren't really that defended. Their capabilities of building up stockpiles of men and resources on that end of the USSR were abysmal. They couldn't have feasibly supplied their forces from their factories in the west.
They got fucked during the Russo Japanese war
US would have helped the USSR because we really need them to lessen our causalities
@@kidd32888 Not if the Japanese were open to the terms of surrender with the US, which they were by the time of the proposed Soviet invasion. At that point, it's an easy decision of preventing a Soviet landgrab.
Love your vids bro keep up the good work
Nicely done video
The British Commonwealth and Chinese would have played a part as well.
The key would have been logistics Primarily Soviet Naval Logistics in the Far East. Soviets clearly could get their men out too the Far Eastern Russian overland. Could they have gotten the numbers across the Sea of Japan to land and maintain a force on the Japanese home Islands on their own, that is another question. In short if the US wanted to shut the Soviets down they had Naval Supiority and could have cut them off from maintaining elements on the Japanese home Islands if they wanted too. It would have been interesting that is for sure.
Thank you for your hard work. I think the invasion of Japan would have been catastrophic for both the allies and the Japanese. Millions would had been dead and war would dragged on for years to come.
The civilian causalities would be horrendous.
@thorpeaaron1110 I did count the potential civilian casualties, and it could have been in the tens of millions.
While it was morally wrong to drop the atom bombs in Hiroshima and Nakasaki in a way, it did stop an even worse consequence of invading Japan.
I recall hearing that Roosevelt had plans to split Japan with the Soviets. Thank goodness Truman and the Bomb came along.
I wish FDR lived through his term and presidency.
If the invasion happened, we would never have anime. That said, it's a relief the invasion never happened because the amount of blood shed and the causalities on both sides would be horrifying.
The language barrier during operations would be extremely difficult. How many radio men spoke Russian?
2:34 joke is on the fact people still believe in the concept of right/left politics. Nazis were Racial Socialist, they were opposed to Marxist Class Socialism. But they had a common enemy which was Capitalism. If you know your history on the concept of "The Capitalist" it's deeply rooted in antisemitism. The concept of The Capitalism has it's origins with "The Jew." The Nazis viewed the "Jew" as the source of the Selfishness that rots society, the concept of the Self Seeker and Money Changer, Capitalist etc wouldn't be possible if the "Jews" were removed from Society. That was the Nazi's solution to Capitalism's evils. Marxism is built on Class Socialism, which came after the Conservative/Utopian Socialist views on how a Socialist society should be.
So like Marx before him Hitler came along and redefined his own variation of Socialism built around Races instead of Classes, just like how Marx redefined Socialism with his Class theories. The elephant in the room is, they all believe in the same enemy, the Capitalist. The Nazis just viewed the Jews as the source of the Capitalist, something Marx also claimed at times. Which is ironically why "Das Kapital" The Capital is titled with a "The" it's a derogatory dehumanizing way of saying it, and it's exactly how antisemites refer to Jews as "The Jews."
To be blunt, even if you used the Right/Left of the political spectrum which is broken entirely anyways, the Nazis DIDN'T consider themselves right wing, they viewed themselves as 3rd Positionist. They rejected the Right and left entirely. They saw the Right as Capitalist, and the Left as Communist. So anyone who says the Nazis are right wing are either lying or know nothing of what they're talking about.
So to sum it up. The Nazis are not right or left. They're something different. They took what they liked about Socialism and threw out the rest and created their own ideas built around a Racial Community instead of a Class (Working Class) Community. That is the fundamental difference between Marxism and Nazism, as a result it has a pretty big impact on society. As in Marxism all Private Property is Bad because owning property means you're not the working class apparently... Nazism however owning property was tolerated as long as it's owned by the "Race" and wasn't being used to exploit the community, which is why F.G. Farben's Swiss Cofounder was forced off the board by the Nazi Party. The Race is the Community so the concept of Social Ownership is a bit different as a result.
This is drivel. The National Socialism were a nihilistic humanist messianic political movement which sought to destroy all enemies foriegn and domestic according to its basic principles. It was a gnostic philosophy as explained by the Eastern Orthodox. It was a liberal political movement as are all Enlightenment and humanist political movements.
There is no "right wing" in Enlightenment based philosophies. It's a non sequitur. Any European should know by now there is only Monarchy and oligarchy as evident by the masonic revolutions which destoryed the divine rite of kings and ushered in the age of "reason" and "liberty."
Good shit man
Yeah no I’ll listen to it every serious long crackpot scholar has to say on the matter, not you.
By the way, I’m sorry to hear your parents had no children that lived.
Who ever thought political compass or whatever other things called is valid is pretty stupid, politic is complex stuff you can't just simplified it by 4 boxes. You can be socialist and be conservative, and they don't even take account of other countries or culture.
It is a really entertaining video on an interesting counterfactual.
However, I am quite surprised to hear this channel talk as if the US and USSR were not working together before the US actually entered the war. Granted, actual supplies from the US did not start arriving until mid to late 1942 with the 2nd Protocol of the Lend Lease system, but the US began working to arrange supplies for the USSR as soon as Barbarossa happened and even before the Soviets were added to the Lend Lease law, and then paid for the British to start sending aid as soon as the convoys could be arranged. I am not gonna claim that Allied aid "saved" the USSR in 1941, but at the same time it is not correct to ignore the over 350 thousand tons of aid that the UK AND the US sent to the USSR in 1941.
The Lend Lease did save the USSR, it freed up millions of men from farms and factories, and gave countless desperatly needed logistics vehicles.
The Lend Lease did save the USSR, it freed up millions of men from farms and factories, and gave countless desperatly needed logistics vehicles.
@@thegooddoctor2009 I tend to agree with you, but if I had said that I would have gotten a bunch of comments and flak from the "Stalin was perfect" crowd. 😂
The Soviets lost one third of their landing ships in the Pacific in the invasion of Shumshu in the Kuriles which was defended by a single battalion even though Japan had already surrendered. It's hard to imagine them invading Hokkaido which was much farther away and better defended without being transported by the US Navy.
After watching this, I realize that the Soviet Union declaring war may have been even more of a cause of the surrender than the atomic bomb. The thought of soldiers wanting to avenge the Russo-Japanese war of 1905 would have weighed on the Emperor’s mind.
Until reading this, I've never considered revenge for that war
That and Japan was frightened of the USSR. Japan tried very early on into the war to knock out the Soviet Union, believing that it was the same Russia they had fought previously. The aftermath was a Japanese defeat that made Japan realize that the Soviet Union was a whole other beast that they didn't want to mess with
Thr Kwantung army still dont know what hit them in 1945
There are many historians who theorize this and many videos with different views on it. I lean more on the side of the Atomic Bomb ending the war, but it's worth doing the research.
Actually no, by the time the emperor learned of the Soviets declaration he had already decided to surrender to the Americans.
Could you make a video on the SASR and/or the NZSAS?
i need a music list this suff sounds good
A test of this would have been if the USA had sent some divisions to help support the Soviet Union invasion force of Manchuria. The USA also could have sent some invasion forces to the Soviet front, to help push into Poland, Germany, Hungary and stuff. However, I doubt that they would have been able to get along with each other, the closest thing that really happened was the Allies landing on Soviet Airbases.
It was great work. Goings-on on....an excellent ( the front channel) ...Soviets had not such planning for invading north Japan.. the USA 🇺🇸 was not seriousness prohibit it by all means
Is this DJ from DJ's Aviation channel? Sounds like him.
Harry dexter white, Jacob Schiff, Paul Warburg.
America and the soviet union were never enemies.
it would have been a disaster would have made the cold war much worse. The U.S. wouldn't have been alone either way had the whole British Empire to land if a invasion had to be taken
Imagine if there wod ahve been North and South Japan?
The Russian zero amphibious landing capabilities especially at scale. They would have been more trouble than they were worth. With the early reports coming in from Germany of Russian behavior toward civilians, I doubt the U.S. military would want to have their troops witnessing the behavior of the Russians against Japanese civilians and having to support that behavior.
Americans didn't care about japanese. They only cared about the Germans.
Dude Us killed Japanese civilians
@@bigty390 The u.s. killed Japanese civilians. The Soviets brutalized the civilian populations, especially women.
Huge difference.
22:41 / 22:41
There is no way that the USSR would have been able to invade Honshu before the Allies secured it because they simply didn't have the amphibious ability. It is possible though if the invasion of Kyushu resulted in massive massive Allied casualties, no doubt there would be regular old massive, that the USSR would be asked to supply divisions for the attack on Honshu.
I am curious though about what this video said about the USSR's plan for an invasion of Hokkaido. No doubt if Japan hadn't have surrender when it did the USSR would have invaded it, probably in 1945. But the plan that was articulated in this video was that the USSR would have started with only two divisions? Obviously not being the island the US was likely to invade it would be a lot less defended and reinforcements could be prevented from reaching it from Honshu, though no doubt someone in Washington would have argued that the US Navy should not interfere with any efforts by Japan to reinforce Hokkaido to pull some forces off of Honshu, but would such a small Soviet landing force really have been able to establish a beach head?
I recall how funny it was watching "Mission to Moscow", a World War II propaganda film that was pro Soviet, as the child of a US service member during the height of the Cold War. It was certainly weird.😉
Nuclear Bombs im sure gave the U.S.S.R. pause.
No. The cold war was a farce. The USSR was supported by American grain and technology transfer throughout its existence. The USSR was a vassal state as Carroll Quigley wrote.
Theres probably a parallel universe where downfall happened
maybe more of a similar case to korea grab as much territory as possible before the japanese surrender.
Japan would have split at the 38°th instead of Korea.It would have been split today.
Imagine how crazy anime would be if Japan had been split; and the capitalist Japan had to create lots anti-communist propaganda.
yea, about as close as the north pole is from the south pole
i doubt they would have come to conflict but maybe lots of espionage.
This honestly would have been preferable compared to the atomic bombing
Video title seems like click bait compared with the content of the video.
hell nah Japan would have been a Korean War during the Cold War instead of Korea and Japan would have literally been divided up like Germany during the Cold War cause the Soviets took the north near Hokkaido and the US taking over Okinawa
Easy there red coat, you pronounce Roosevelt like that again, and itll be your tea in your harbor
The “Soviyettes”
I think that Japanese culture would have been obliterated as a nation with all the sheer power of both Allied nations bearing on the Japanese home islands
By 1945 Soviet were more battle hardened than any other army they could have certainly taken Hokkaido and parts of mainland Japan
No, the Soviets don't have the capability in conducting amphibious operations. They have neither the ships nor the experience like US Marines. The Soviet Pacific Fleet was way smaller than the entire Imperial Japanese Navy and they don't have aircraft carriers.
I beg to differ. Sure, Russian had a large land army but they had no experience moving troops across large bodies of water. Nor did they have the Ships to do it and no way was the USA going to let the Soviet Union use their ships to do it.
Let's just be honest here. Stalin would have been the enemy of the West had Hitler not existed. Enemy of my enemy you know? If Hitler hadn't been such a menace, the allies may have rather let Germany stay under Nazi rule. A way to keep the Soviets at bay.
But the Nazis became so hated, and they wouldn't have stopped if let alone. Churchill knew that from the start.
I thought u meant on the eastern front LOL were the west invades Greece and links up with the soviets in the Balkans and together march into germany :P ... france comes last :P
You said ussa
United Sovereign States of America - renamed after almost fighting a civil war in 1861.
@@Grenadier311is that really true..
@@mikeypiros6647 Nope. Just joking around.
@@Grenadier311 Thanks, you got me good.. I joke about a lot also...(I might use that one day)
@@mikeypiros6647 ;) I thought the name apropos as an alternative to the CSA; giving the states more sovereignty.
A lot of stories were either covered up or were lost to time 🤷♂️
Do Russia vs America ww1
Would have rather seen the Western Allies re-equip the Wehrmacht and together push the Soviets back to their pre-1939 borders.
the soviet union didnt work together lol, the soviet union just didnt want war because they were under equipped to fight in a large scale war.
Let me ask and please don’t trip out but take the us out of the war only Britain and Russia does Germany still lose or dies the war rage on longer by a couple years or dies Germany win with sum super type weapon bc from what I understand the us bombed German factories and other things like that so with out that and all the troops planes and tanks pulled over there put into the Russian war I understand Russia had a pretty good production system with better tanks as the war went on and better troops
USSA
As informative as your videos are, you’re grossly mistaken by referring the fascist ideology as “far right.” Nonetheless I love your videos.
Right? Also, I like how the Soviets talked of being "anti-fascist" while essentially a fascist political structure and employed the same fascistic mechanics of terror against civilian populations.
When talking about policies, for example, both the the Third Riech and USSR took step to censor speech and abolished all other political parties.
@@weirdshibainu
I look a facial and communism the same way I look at different groups of Islamists. Both represent the same religion, but the varying differences from each group can put them at odds with other groups. Kind of like a few short years ago when Hezbollah and ISIS were at war with each other. Or I like to compare a crocodile to a Komodo dragon, both are cold-blooded monsters that will end you and devour you. They just go about it in different barbaric ways.
It is far right. It’s the extreme opposite end of the spectrum from communism. One is a far right authoritarianism and the other a far left.
Why do you think communists and fascists have always considered each other their worst enemies? Why do you think fascists like Hitler, Franco, and Mussolini’s first targets for persecution were communists. It’s because they’re the complete opposite end of the spectrum.
The poem about the Nazis completely proves my point. “First they came for the communists, and I did not speak out because I was not a communist”. If the Nazis were communist, why did they go for the communists first?
@@weirdshibainufascists and communists are the extreme opposite ends of each other. One is a far right authoritarianism and the other is a far left one.
The poem about the Nazis literally goes “first they came for the communists, and I did not speak out because I was not a communist”.
Thank God it didn't happen.
What if an American invasion of Japan failed, because Truman pulled the American troops out? Think about this, what if Truman was more concerned about the war being in the public’s favor than conquering Japan? What if Japan used similar counter-propaganda tactics (sort of similar to a Vietnam situation) to show the American public that their soldiers were teaming up with the “evil red army”, and were “massacring Japanese civilians” after dropping two nukes?
It is an interesting counterfactual, but I don't believe that the Japanese had any ability to impact American public opinion. There simply was no way for Japan to communicate with the people of the USA that the US government could not prevent with almost complete efficiency. Plus, the huge majority of the US people were very very angry at the Japanese, and had been pretty well whipped into a bloodthirsty rage by US government anti-Japan propaganda ever since Pearl Harbor...even before that, really.
Americans never cared about the japonese. They cared about the Germans - their relatives in Europe.
It wouldn't have worked. In fact, throughout the war Roosevelt was more worried about how casualties in the European War would play with the American public, not the Pacific War.
The reason is simple - Pearl Harbor. Germany only made a declaration of war, Japan sucker punched the US. There wouldn't have been much sympathy for Japanese civilians suffering from Soviet soldiers. Germans (fellow white people) went through the same. It's not an issue.
BTW, in Viet Nam it wasn't the Vietnamese who showed the suffering to the American people. It was the press - that was the first televised war. Fighting monolithic communism is also a vague, undefined idea. Forcing the surrender of an enemy that started a war by attacking you is not. In WWII there were definitive gains. In Vietnam there was just more killing. The same strategy does not work for several reasons, but they are also different situations.
@@iKvetch558 I agree with you to a large extent, however, remember that GIs, whether they were fighting in Europe or the Pacific, wrote letters home to their families and loved ones. The Japanese plan to use Civilians to fight to the last Japanese Citizen was meant to deter and demoralize the Americans, and maybe not so much the Soviets. I think moral would have decreased by some amount on the American invasion front, before the letters were opened at home. Keep in mind rations and war fatigue, minor factors against the Japanese I know but still a factor.
@@streetsoldierhood9796 One thing about those letters home...the US Office of Censorship censored a lot of mail during the war, including a lot of letters home from GIs to their families. For example, I am pretty sure that the Censors would open all the letters that came from particular locations or battles in the Pacific, if anything they did not want folks to talk about at home had happened there. So when the Japanese started using Kamikaze attacks, the censors would open the letters from all the ships in the groups that had been attacked by Kamikazes, and would either black out any mention of the attack or just hold the letter for however long they had the authority to keep it.
nazis were far left not far right.......
They were far right nationalists.
Socialism is a far left ideology. communism is a far right ideology. The Nazis were far left and socialists. @@jameslegrand848
A joint operation would never happen. Both countries had too much suspicion of the other and the Soviets had limited naval power to be of assistance.
Also the Soviet invasions of Japanese held islands were embarrassing bad amd they only succeeded because majority of Japanese soldiers accepted the Emperors call of surrender.
PSA: The nazis and fascists were socialists. They were just as far left as the communists.
No lol
Yeah yeah yeah north korea is very democratic too
@@nicqolisstanton6784 Yup. lol
@@Fred_the_1996 It is under the socialist view of democratic.
Almost
Expect totalitarianism is far right
Nazism is left wing, not right wing😅
Nope.
Is this a joke? Nazis are fascist, that is far right. Everyone else knows that.
Did you say the far right nazis?
Ummm... “National SOCIALISTS party”
Lost all credibility in the beginning 🤦🏻♂️
No sorry never would have been a nuke dropped on Tokyo there was absolutely nothing left in Tokyo after the fire bombings period everything was gone so yeah that’s been known since 1945