> ‘Only by getting “up close” and drilling down into the “infinitely small” details of the revolutionary process’, its author insists, can the day’s course and outcome be understood.
Sometimes history is inevitable, and small details do not matter. Sometimes the small details make all the difference. The assasination of archduke Ferdinand may or may not be such a detail. The fall of Robespierre seems like it could be another, from what I gather from the article.
What are other examples of when the course of history have balanced on a knife's edge?
Gaius Octavius (later known as Augustus) at age of approximately 17 was able to convince his mother to let him join his great uncle Julius in Hispania. He impressed Julius so much that upon return to Rome Julius updated his will to make Octavius his primary beneficiary.
Julius' murder two years later on 15 March 44BC resulted in Octavian traveling to Rome to claim his inheritance, winning the loyalty of much of the army in the ensuing chaos, defeating and executing a number of heavy hitters including Mark Antony, Cleopatra, and Caesarion (Julius' son with Cleopatra), and eventually becoming the first Roman Emperor.
Some 80 or so years prior to Caesar's assassination, a consul fomented a mob to kill a Tribune (G. Gracchus) who was pushing hard for land reforms. Historians often cite this as laying the foundation for the Roman revolution because it normalized violence as a political tool. It was followed by proscriptions and the Catilinarian conspiracy in 63 BCE.
What if Octavius never traveled to Hispania? Caesar may well have still adopted his nephew in order to make him his beneficiary. What would have happened if there were no Octavius? Possibly Marcus Antonius would have consolidated power.
Would we have no transistors today if Shockley hadn't worked at Bell Labs?
I guess my viewpoint strongly biases me towards seeing continuity and underlying processes. For every tipping point, there was a pre-existing process; for every process an event you can treat as a "handle".
What's your take on Catiline? I have just enough classical education to be a little dangerous, but my understanding is that he's sort of seen as a would-be Julius Caesar who showed up at the wrong time; Cicero was horrified by them both, but his conservative faction eventually lost so much power in the Senate that Caesar succeeded where Catiline failed.
I can see that. Both Caesar and Catiline sought power through extra-constitutional means. Caesar surely took notes (and Cicero thought Caesar even secretly supported Catiline). They were all in the senate together under Cicero's consulship, after all.
They were all hyper-ambitious patricians. The conservatives (optimates -- the best) regarded the populares (the faction Caesar aligned himself with) as people willing to threaten the order of the state by pandering to the masses. This is what Catiline did, and Caesar too. This was the basic threat that the Gracchi brothers appeared to present in agitating for land reform and something that underscored Caesar's political agenda (he had to find land for his loyal veterans).
They're saying violence being normalized was a necessary step for the foundation of the empire. There's no moral judgment there, saying they should not be listened to would not change what happened.
Yes, I agree. However, life is short, and you have to take advantage of every opportunity you can to impress someone like Julius Caesar. There's no guarantee that you'll have another opportunity to spend time with such a busy and powerful man, even if he is your great uncle.
I just want to go in a small tangent here, but I imagine that if Cesar knew he was going to die and had to adopt someone to continue his rule, he probably wouldn't pick his sickly nephew with no experience, no matter how bright he might be.
So I think it's very likely that Cesar put him in his will since he is a blood relative and didn't really expected to die soon anyways, but didn't mean to have him as his sole heir forever.
That's a good point. Did Julius not have a mental disorder which caused him to lack fear? It's a good for Octavian that he got close to his great uncle while he could.
I've wondered if this isn't a "just so" story told by Octavius. Caesar just may not have had a lot of good choices, so posthumously adopted Octavius and made him his beneficiary, in which case it could have happened regardless of the trip (though it might be hard to make that case stick).
There also Vasily Arkhipov. He was deputy commander of K-19. And then submarine B-59 during the Cuban missile crisis. Where he cast the only vote not to fire a nuclear armed torpedo at the US ships dropping depth charges on them.
The decision of Alexander Kerensky and the Russian Provisional Government to repeatedly delay the Russian Constituency Elections seems to have provided critical time for the Bolsheviks to consolidate support especially under the worsening domestic situation.
I will reply to myself. The cold winter of 1658 froze the Great Belt, and allowed Swedish troups to march over the ice from Jutland to Zealand. This led to Swedish victory over Denmark and the Treaty of Roskilde. This ceded significant territory to Sweden, much of which is Swedish to this day.
> What are other examples of when the course of history have balanced on a knife's edge?
I suspect that almost all of history does balance on a knife's edge. How far back in history that edge exists, relative to the event is the real question.
There is probably a point in every civilization where it's rise would be anything but inevitable. You don't need very many of these events in ancient history before the chain of causality for everything that came after it would be seriously altered.
I think differently. For example, if Newton would have perished as a child due to an unfortunate accident, the physics he discovered would have been discovered by someone else. It was just a matter of time. But geopolitical events can turn out very differently due to random flukes, such as the outcome of a battle.
I would say that individual 'inflection points' might be incredibly rare. IE: maybe only 1 notable event out of 10,000 is like this. But something like this would only have to play out once or twice far back in history before the world we see today would be very different.
Maybe some leader consolidated power and convinced the tribe to embark in a journey to move somewhere else where water was more plentiful and food too, we can only imagine that ...had his attempt at convincing the tribe been unsuccesful we would not be here today!
Or maybe the opposite, which is also true...somebody level headed convinced the tribe not to embark in such a journey...to stay, because with so few units it was not the time to make experiments or gambles
Sir Francis Drake raid on the Spanish Armada in 1588 [1]
Colonel Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain, defeating the Confederate charge at Little Round Top in the battle of Gettysburg is arguably the key turning point of the US Civil War - the entire war and subsequent history could easily have turned out entirely differently without Chamberlain's successful order of the 'right wheel forward' maneuver bayonet attack when the 20th Maine was out of ammunition, which held a key ridge in a pivotal battle. [2]
It may be so, but the difference can be if the leaders remain in charge or not. Compare Robespierre with Stalin. I think they are similar in many ways, but while the French revolution "ate" Robespierre, Stalin got away and could continue the terror for decades.
One might argue that Stalin was the one doing the eating. His role in the revolution and it's immediate aftermath was relatively limited however after taking power by the late 1930's he had purged pretty all influential bolsheviks who joined the party prior to 1917.
IIRC, just about everything that could go wrong did go wrong for the Spanish armada. Some nice weather or good health of the originally slated commander might have possibly prevented the British Empire.
A few years later Napoleon almost broke the Allied line at Waterloo. According to the Duke of Wellington it was "the nearest-run thing you ever saw in your life." If Napoleon had succeeded we would be living in a very different world.
Or if Ney had sent forward some light cavalry to reconnoiter the crossroads at Quatre Bras at some point in the morning, he'd have seen that Wellington was not waiting there on the reverse slope. Had he seized the crossroads, he could've totally changed the circumstances that led to the battle at Waterloo.
Yeah talk about misfortune. I once read an account of a Ragusan merchant ship that was pressed into the Armada. Imagine being a run-of-the-mill Ragusan sailor one day, then, several hellish months later, trying desperately to navigate the Irish coast on a leaky galley just to survive and get home.
Democracy as an idea and form of government was almost extinguished from history by the Persians.
When Emperor Xerxes II invaded Greece to avenge the Greeks beating his father Darius it looked really bad. After the Persians put a pretty bad hurting on the allied Greek navy, the Athenian Admiral Themistocles lured the huge, but slow Persian navy into a bloodbath where Greek Triremes dominated their Persian enemies at the Battle of Salamis.
Meanwhile, a small contingent of infantry led by the famous King Leonidas and 300 volunteer Spartans (along with roughly 10,000 Thebans and Thespians) held off the brunt of the Persian infantry and cavalry. After these two battles, the majority of the Persians left Greece and thus ended the Greco-Persian war.
Democracy lived because of valor and cunning of a small group of very brave men.
The type of democracy practised in Athens was pretty widespread amongst various city-states (including non Greek ones like Rome, which arguable had a form of "democracy" much closer to the modern one because in Athens most public officials were chosen by lot) it's just due to a variety of reasons very few written records from cities other than Athens survived.
Also you mixed up the battles, Greeks lost the battle of Thermopylae (the one in which the 300 Spartans fought) pretty decisively as a result the Persians invaded Attica and sacked and razed Athens to the ground (most of the population was evacuated to nearby islands). The decisive battle after which the Persian were mostly expelled from mainland Greece was Plataea (during which at least 70 thousand Greeks (including 10 000 hoplites from Sparta) faced a Persian army similar in size.
Besides Sparta itself was anything but a Democracy so I can't imagine they were fight to protect it. And the also defeated Athens and their allies in the Peloponnesian War a few decades later (in large part due to Persian financial support).
Also the two ancient Greek philosophers who had the most influence on the development of western political philosophy were of Plato & Aristotle (who both were very critical of democracy).
> The type of democracy practised in Athens was pretty widespread amongst various city-states (including non Greek ones like Rome, which arguable had a form of "democracy" much closer to the modern one because in Athens most public officials were chosen by lot) it's just due to a variety of reasons very few written records from cities other than Athens survived.
From wikipedia: "The concepts (and name) of democracy and constitution as a form of government originated in ancient Athens circa 508 B.C." Rome was a representative republic starting in 509 B.C. their ideas absolutely helped democracy become a thing, but it was ultimately invented by Athens.
> Also you mixed up the battles, Greeks lost the battle of Thermopylae (the one in which the 300 Spartans fought) pretty decisively as a result the Persians invaded Attica and sacked and razed Athens to the ground (most of the population was evacuated to nearby islands). The decisive battle after which the Persian were mostly expelled from mainland Greece was Plataea (during which at least 70 thousand Greeks (including 10 000 hoplites from Sparta) faced a Persian army similar in size.
Perhaps I wasn't clear enough. I said they held off the brunt of the Persian infantry and cavalry, which they absolutely and historically did do, for three days with a fraction of the men. You are correct that they decisively lost the battle, but I also said that the majority of the Persians left Greece after this. Again, historically, after the spanking the Persian navy took at the Battle of Salamis, and three days of heavy fighting and casualties at the battle of Thermoplaye, Emperor Xerxes retreated to Asia with much of his army, leaving Mardonius to complete the conquest of Greece. It was almost a year later that the battle of Plataea happened, but the majority of the Persian forces left with Xerxes. Mardonius tried to convince Xerxes to continue after the defeat at Salamis, but his heart was no longer in it.
> Besides Sparta itself was anything but a Democracy so I can't imagine they were fight to protect it. And the also defeated Athens and their allies in the Peloponnesian War a few decades later (in large part due to Persian financial support).
Yes, I'm aware. Sparta forced the tyrant Hippias out of Athens, who ultimately fled to Persia. Realizing that a democracy was bad for Sparta, they attempted to recall him and reinstate him back as the tyrant of Athens. I believe it was the Corinthians and some of their allies who forced Hippias back into exile. Having tasted democracy, they were not keen on going back to a tyranny. Athens even told Persia no, they would not accept Hippias and that was what ultimately lead to the Ionian revolt and Darius's first Persian campaign into greece, whee.
I might be a bit off here as I've not read Landmark Thucydides since the beginning of covid (I have a hardcopy). What did I get wrong? Besides Athens inventing democracy, I think we're mostly in agreement.
Democracy in Greece was ended by the greeks themselves. Monarchy was the rule from Alexandrian times through to the fall of the Byzantine empire.
I buy the argument that modern representative democracy is descended from Germanic practices. Germanic warriors 'electing' their leader -> landed men having representation through a house of lords or parliament -> modern suffrage movemetns. See the origins of the Icelandic or British parliaments. But nearly any society based on a widespread warrior class was in some way democratic, from Rome to the Mongols.
One of my favorites is Alexander at the Battle of Granicus
Here is the relevant passage from Plutarch:
Many rushed upon Alexander, for he was conspicuous by his buckler and by his helmet's crest, on either side of which was fixed a plume of wonderful size and p267 whiteness. But although a javelin pierced the joint of his breastplate, he was not wounded; 6738 and when Rhoesaces and Spithridates, two Persian commanders, made at him together, he avoided the one, and smote Rhoesaces, who wore a breastplate, with his spear; and when this weapon snapped in two with the blow, he took to his sword. 9 Then, while he was thus engaged with Rhoesaces, Spithridates rode up from one side, raised himself up on his horse, and with all his might came down with a barbarian battle-axe upon Alexander's head. 10 Alexander's crest was broken off, together with one of its plumes, and his helmet could barely and with difficulty resist the blow, so that the edge of the battle-axe touched the topmost hair of his head. 11 But while Spithridates was raising his arm again for another stroke, Cleitus, "Black Cleitus," got the start of him and ran him through the body with his spear. At the same time Rhoesaces also fell, smitten by Alexander's sword.
Alexander almost was killed by a battle axe. This was at the Battle of Granicus when he was facing a provincial Persian army. If Alexander had died that day, he would not have conquered the Persian Empire. Greek culture would not have spread nearly as wide as it did. It would have profoundly affected both the development of the East and West.
How reliable is this narrative, though? Alexander was highly revered by many, so these kinds of heroic stories would naturally be attributed to him. And Plutarch isn't always known to be super reliable.
(That said, I don't necessarily fully doubt the story, either. He certainly seemed to like putting himself in dangerous positions.)
The Second Defenestration in Prague, May 23, 1618. Three people of the catholic church were thrown out a window and dropped 17 meters below on a pile of manure, all the survived, one with head trauma.
What followed was the 30 Year War, a topic that I know is sadly a but underdeveloped in US/UK history class, since the US didn't exist then and the UK didn't really do anything on account of it's own internal problems at the time.
The 30 Year War was pivotal for religious rights in Europe as well as one of the most devastating wars in history (up to 40% of the population perished either in war, famine or plagues). Another big point was that as a result of this war, german cities and the rest of europe experienced a big uplift in trade. Especially France, Spain, Netherland and England got a huge boost to their ship trade, which I would argue at minimum indirectly lead to financing the expeditions that discovered the Americas.
Sadly it is a rather complex topic that many historians still fight over, since in most cases if you open history books about it, you see a map of the HRE + Europe with about 2 million arrows labelled "attacks" or "leads to" or "defends" or "defeats".
There were a number of points during the Cold War (that we know of) including but not limited to the Cuban Missile Crisis when things could have escalated.
Maybe, but the underlying reasons for WW2 still existed (and indeed it had started by that time). Would Goering or Himmler have taken over and done things differently? Perhaps the allies would have sued for peace, perhaps the invasion of France would wait until the smoke cleared and a new leader is in place, with the same army and increased internal pressures. Would that new leader invade the Soviet union before pacifying the UK. Would a delay in invading France have led to FDR not standing in 1940? There's all sorts of posibilities, but it doesn't feel as major a change as some other fateful decisions - the broad strokes wouldn't have changed.
An intriguing possibility is that the execution backfires because the Nazi leadership had a war to inspire the public so they didn't really need Hitler, and could make much smarter decisions in his absence, and so the Nazis actually win the war (or at least achieve a settlement in a much smaller war which leaves them still in power). But I guess it's also possible the leading Nazis fight each other like rats in a sack over who takes over, who was to blame for the assassination, what military action to pursue next and why were they going to war alongside the hated communists against everyone else in Europe in the first place, and the whole thing falls apart very quickly.
"Nazi leadership had a war to inspire the public so they didn't really need Hitler, and could make much smarter decisions in his absence, and so the Nazis actually win the war "
Since fanatism and not smartness were the desired traits in the Nazis, I doubt they would have made more smart decisions - rather infighting with the national conservative part of the Wehrmacht and society taking over. (thanking the nazis for the plain power base they build them and getting rid of democracy and then kicking them out, like they planned from the beginning and reinstall a king)
Well, we will never know, but I think it is very likely to have had a huge impact. All sorts of outcomes are possible, from internal Nazi power struggles, leading to more moderate forces taking over and making peace with the west and later in a new alliance against russia, or simply consolidating Nazi germany as a mid european superpower between soviets and the western alliance.
There was a thread on Twitter a few months ago about "history balancing on a knife's edge." All the examples (many of which also appear here) are fascinating.
My own favorite (no disrespect to the others) is C. Wade McClusky, the hero of the Battle of Midway in WW II. He just happened to find the Japanese carriers, where no one else would have thought to look, and sink them.
Had the US lost, it might have lost Hawaii as well. Then what would have happened? I can't say and neither can anyone else.
All that would have happened was that the war in the pacific would have been extended by another six to twelve months.
Japan had constant oil shortages[0], had over a million men tied up in a land war in China, and its naval capacity was outproduced five-to-one by the United States. [1] The outcome of the War in the Pacific was inevitable, as of December 8th, 1941. [2]
It’s hard to imagine a world where the US in 1941 would not use its industrial power to assert hegemony over the Pacific after being attacked. The Japanese strategy was to neutralize the US fast enough to reduce morale for waging a losing war. But US morale remained high throughout, so it too is hard to imagine a world where the strategy would succeed even if the attack on Pearl was executed flawlessly.
The anime Zipang brings up a more interesting point: had oil been discovered ten years earlier in Manchuria, would Japan have attacked the US and Dutch at all? Possibly yes: the question of “how do we defeat America?” eclipsed the more important “should we defeat America?” in Imperial Japan.
Imagine that organometallic chemistry had developed quicker, and decent Ziegler-Natta catalysts had been discovered in 1935 instead of 1955. Would the Japanese have gone to war over the caoutchouc plantations in Southeast Asia instead of relying on synthetic rubber?
To be fair, the Japanese strategy also relied on heavily fortifying the territory they took and then daring the Americans to take it back. With another 6-12 months they might have had time to build up much stronger defenses. If every island was as bad as Iwo Jima/Okinawa it's an open question how long the American public would have supported the war. We ended up using nukes for multiple reasons as it was, one of which was doubt that the American public would stomach the cost of an invasion of the Japanese home islands.
At the time, the U.S. Admirals recognized that clearing the occupied islands wasn't necessary and would be ruinously expensive. Their explicit goal was to create airstrips within bomber reach of the Japanese home islands. Even with 6-12 more months to fortify, it's not obvious that the outcome wouldn't be the same, with the U.S. grabbing a few key islands and ignoring the rest.
> It’s hard to imagine a world where the US in 1941 would not use its industrial power to assert hegemony over the Pacific after being attacked.
The policy of isolationism was very strong in the continental US. It's quite easy to imagine that the US gets bogged down in internal politics for years before stepping up.
It’s easy to wax philosophical about how we can’t predict things, and it’s true that you can never have certainty, but it really is relatively cut and dried here. There are many cases in history that could have gone the other way. But Japan was terribly outmatched in every way in 1941.
After Dunkirk, England was at the head of an empire that numbered over half a billion people - a quarter of the world's population, a similar industrial output to Germany, uncontested dominance of the seas, and a sympathetic United States that was supplying food, munitions, and warships.
It was a far closer fight than the United States and Japan. An invasion of the isles would have been impossible to pull off, and the war would almost certainly had gone the same way that it did - years of fighting over African colonies.
If you have studied world war 2. We can make a more informed guess. The Japanese admiral considered the war doomed from the start, with the only hope being the destruction of all the 4 American aircraft carriers.
The battle of midway instead knocked out of all Japanese aircraft carriers. Unbeknownst to Japan, the United states was already pumping out several aircraft carriers per month and was also developing the nuclear bomb. The only possible change could have been surrendering to the Soviet union instead of United states. However, even that seems unlikely given the N bomb.
No one knows with certainty indeed. But we do know with high probability that the outcome would have been roughly similar given the massive unbalance of important metrics.
Remember Japan was angling for a peace where they got to keep a lot of their conquered territories, even if the US could manufacture more stuff eventually it doesn’t mean we wouldn’t have settled to end the war.
America still takes a lot of flack for demanding unconditional surrender which led us to drop two nukes on Japan. “The US could have just accepted peace terms with some concessions to Japan, then they wouldn’t have had to drop the bombs” is the line of argument.
>Had the US lost, it might have lost Hawaii as well. Then what would have happened? I can't say and neither can anyone else.
Once the US had nuclear weapons, the result was not in doubt.
Putting aside nuclear arms as your comment seems to do, the question is not nearly as open as you make it out to be: Japan was heavily outmatched in resources, facing an array of enemies while having no significant allies of its own in the Pacific theater. So, even on a non-nuclear basis, they were in deep trouble. The best they could have hoped for was a stalemate: the Allies reclaim all lost ground, but don't invade the Japanese mainland.
Not much. Japan couldn't possibly have kept Hawaii past the middle of the war.
There is a nice video somewhere on YouTube that shows the production of US naval ships vs Japanese naval ships in scaled time.
It is shocking the amount of ships that that US was producing starting near the middle of the war. A new destroyer or cruiser rolled out every couple of days. Japan wasn't even close.
I imagine that staffing the ships at some point was going to become a problem.
Probably
Military History Visualized's
"Why Japan had NO Chance in WW2": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l9ag2x3CS9M . Go to the 12:30 mark for the the near-final ship totals.
US could not lost. Japan was running out of resources - steel, oil (in fact blocked access to resources was what pushed them to the war they could not win). Maybe war on Pacific would last a bit longer, probably it will cost more lives, but from the beginning it was lost for Japan.
That's why using atomic bomb had no real military justification, it was just a very powerful political demonstration and USA retaliation on Japanese people.
The Japanese were fanatical and vowed to fight to the very end. There is also the story where they found a couple of Japanese soldiers who didn’t realize the war ended and maintained their post for several years after the surrender. Who knows how long a ‘bit longer’ would be. And a land invasion would have been devastatingly long drawn out conflict.
>The Japanese were fanatical and vowed to fight to the very end.
That's the official pretext / party line of the US, to self-justify the nuclear bombings (as if they ever could be justified).
The reality is the Japanese were dead scared (also of the incoming Soviets) and were looking to surrender. They just didn't want an unconditional surrender, but to save some face/dignity.
> "The reality is the Japanese were dead scared (also of the incoming Soviets) and were looking to surrender."
Anytime one hears the "the Japanese were looking to surrender" narrative, it should be understood that, even being generous, it's a half-truth that isn't borne out by a closer examination of the historical record, which even Japanese historians interviewing wartime Japanese officials, who had every possible reason to want to save face for their country, don't contradict.
The reality is that while, yes, there was a peace faction in the Japanese government who did want to surrender but the ultranationalistic Japanese military was quite firmly in control and was very much _not_ interested in surrendering, even at the cost of millions of Japanese military and civilian casualties involved in continuing the war. The aim (and preference of all factions) would have been a peace treaty that let Japan keep its ill-gotten gains in Asia. It took a direct order from the Emperor to initiate the surrender, over the objections of the military, and even then a coup attempt was made by fanatics willing to defy even the Emperor in an attempt to prevent the surrender proclamation from being broadcast (the Kyuujou incident).
> ...the Japanese were dead scared...and were looking to surrender...
Just how widespread was this sentiment at that time? Reading the accounts of the Kyūjō incident starting from the Wikipedia entry and branching from there [1], I got the sense that some of the Imperial Japanese Army leadership prevarication in the very early phases of the incident up to Kawabe's organizing of the agreement was this history's knife's edge playing out again. I just lack the cultural referents to even understand how significant was the fact that after the emperor's stiffly formal announcement, there was a broadcast immediately following to confirm in lay language that indeed it was a surrender announcement.
If specialist historians with the appropriate cross-cultural training can confirm it was that opaque to the Japanese themselves, then I wouldn't be surprised that the Americans misread the cues that Japanese were giving in their attempts to surrender, not helped by their selection of the Soviet Union as an intermediary that turned out to be an unreliable partner. This is all on top of the usual chaotic swirl of the fog of war.
There are criticisms against the narrative the Japanese were trying to surrender but the US ignored those attempts because the US wanted to use the nuclear bombs [2]. And there are narratives that the nuclear bombs were not decisive, but the Soviets opening another front was [3]. This account gives some useful color background to the decisions' context [4].
General consensus of casual discussions (as opposed to scholarly studies, which I couldn't find) of why the US didn't use the nuclear bomb on Tokyo seems to converge upon the US leadership emerging a strategy that desires a negotiated peace with some Japanese power structure intact. So any narrative that the US "just wants to use the bombs" takes place within the framework of the demonstrated and carried out desire for a negotiated conclusion. It might not have been as simple as "we want to use The Bomb, and by God, we'll use it", it might have been used as an instrument to achieving the strategic objective.
And there is definitely room to strenuously object to that use even within that framework, but for me to be convinced it was objectively black-and-white "wrong", I'd have to know more about the information and context the decision-makers on both sides operated upon, not the hindsight information we are privy to. Would appreciate any pointers to material along those lines.
What I took away from that pivot point in history is war is indeed, hell.
Most if not all of the US Navy was in the Pacific and there were enough defenses that the Japanese could not have taken Hawaii. The reason they could take much of Manchuria and southeast Asia is their defenses were mostly filled with pre WWI era weapons or had little to no defenses. They just blitzkrieged the entire place. Hawaii had significant modern defenses capable of warding off an invasionary force. Which is why Pearl Harbor wasn't a legitimate invasion. Japan just wanted to knock out US involvement. They didn't honestly want a long term conflict and take over like in "The Man in the High Castle."
You should read Shattered Sword, by Parshall and Tully. It is one of the most comprehensive accounts of Midway I've ever read, and dives deeply into Japanese archival sources in a way that the vast majority of histories of Midway do not. The last third of the book is a discussion of the effect that Midway had on the war.
The short version is that the Japanese did not have the merchant tonnage available to support operations already in progress at that point in the war. An invasion of Japan would've required landing several infantry divisions, across thousands of miles of open water, too far from any airstrips for land-based aircraft to support them. The Hawaiian islands are small, but Oahu, Maui, and Hawaii are big enough for maneuver warfare.
An American loss at Midway would've been a huge setback, especially had all three carriers been lost. The rate of commissioning of new Essex-class ships, not to mention the light and escort carriers, however, would've more than made up for the loss by mid-1943, and the Japanese simply did not have the industrial capacity to sustain a long naval war of attrition.
An American victory was not inevitable, but there's a fairly strong case to be made that the means by which the war was begun, by a sneak attack, had incensed the American populace sufficiently that even further serious naval defeats wouldn't've sapped their willingness to fight on. Indeed, several more American carriers were lost throughout 1942 (Hornet and Wasp), as well as the calamitous loss of four cruisers at Savo Island.
I don't actually think they would have "won" the war. I think their aims were really to dominate Asia and have the U.S. accept that, if grudgingly. There was certainly no desire to do a Man in the High Castle thing.
My guess is that it would have taken a couple more nukes to settle things. Whoever got the Bomb first was always going to win WWII, if only because there was so little social or ethical opprobrium associated with atomic warfare at the time.
If forced into an existential conflict by a string of Axis victories on all major fronts, we would've turned most of the planet into a smoking crater, and there would have been nothing Japan, Germany, Russia, or anyone else could have done about it.
Everything leading up to August 6 was just so much posturing.
Maybe not even that. By the time they dropped the nukes, 90% of structures in Japan were razed, in a far more deadly manner. Russians were a looming, merciless threat the Japanese leadership was very conscious of. There has been the suggestion that use of the Bomb had allowed for a good excuse to surrender to the U.S. then and there, because dealing with Russians would have been worse. I'm writing this from memory of an article on foreignpolicy dot com 5-7 years ago
There's a special on Prime about something you almost NEVER hear about: the Soviet Manchurian invasion. Which is what finally convinced the Emperor he had to stop it. The USSR had 1.5 million troops involved, and not surprisingly won a crushing victory.
Look at the dates: Aug. 9 was Nagasaki. It wasn't until the 15th that they surrendered. Up until then, the war councils actually thought Stalin would intervene and force a better peace than the "unconditional surrender" the Allies demanded.
I know everyone believes the A-bomb ended the war. Unfortunately even that wasn't enough. If it was, the Japanese would have surrendered on Aug. 10.
That's not to contradict CamperBob2 about the US would have done. We could only produce about one bomb per month, though, IIRC.
It's hard to imagine that anyone with observers in, or news from, the European theater could imagine that surrendering to Stalin was a better idea than surrendering to the US.
Indeed. It's well documented that Wehrmacht soldiers went out of their way to surrender to American and UK forces rather than fall into Russian hands.[1]
Tip to HN users: "This is indisputably true but I don't like it" isn't a good reason to downvote people.
>Indeed. It's well documented that Wehrmacht soldiers went out of their way to surrender to American and UK forces rather than fall into Russian hands.[1]
That's because Wehrmacht soldiers and their pals have warred on USSR, and took millions of lives and caused untold suffering there.
The Japanese, at that point, not so much.
So, angry retribution against Wehrmacht soldier scum was to be expected...
It's a lot more than just that. Beyond their justified mad-on for German soldiers, the Russian military was (and continued to be, and essentially still is) monstrously brutal to pretty much everyone who crossed their path. Russian POWs liberated by the Western Allies begged not to be sent back to their own country. The ones that were sent back anyway were mostly murdered for the crime of being captured.
>That's because Wehrmacht soldiers and their pals have warred on USSR, and took millions of lives and caused untold suffering there. The Japanese, at that point, not so much.
This didn't really matter for the Soviets. Though the Manchurian invasion was too rapid and short-lived to really escalate to European-level Soviet brutality, the Red Army engaged in plenty of the same random massacres, mass rapes, brutalities and mass deportations after they entered and occupied Manchuria.
Many of these soldiers had already long since been brutalized by their campaigns in eastern and central Europe (from which they had been shipped in massive trainloads shortly after VE Day) and the basic nature of the Soviet leadership hardly fostered a spirit of good military conduct to civilians at any time.
Some deeper reading about the Soviet Manchurian campaign reveals quite a few of the uglier details.
Also, none of this in the least bit excuses the grotesque behavior of the Japanese Army in the same region during its long occupation. Regardless of how the Japanese are perceived today, their army's habits during the 2nd World War were completely beyond justification in their genocidal viciousness.
But once the dust settled...would the US hold the same moral high ground that it has today had it used 20 atomic bombs?
And would the US be so magnanimous in victory had the toll been higher due to Axis victories on all major fronts (meaning that the human losses of the Axis were transfered to the Allies) up to the Atomic bombs use?
War deaths? Surely you jest. Most of that 2.5x were civilians and were killed by the Imperial Japanese Army in ways a lot nastier than the concentration camps; it was genocide in all but name. The depth of hatred for the Japanese among older Asians is staggering for that very reason.
Japan's wartime actions in Manchuria were a genocide, they followed the "Three Alls" policy: "kill all, burn all, loot all". Arguably responsible for the deaths of more than 2.7 million Chinese civilians.
After Robespierre was taken out, the Convention was supposedly in charge. But they botched their win so badly that they ended up with the end of the Republic and Napoleon as Emperor.
That period, from 1792 to 1799, is worth more attention. Because it covers the death of what had been, briefly, a democracy. Compare with Russia after the breakup of the USSR.
> Bush v. Gore 2000 down in Florida comes to mind.
I think about this one frequently. I think this was actually pretty impactful, and in an interesting way. I suspect that Gore would have put all of his energy into climate change work, and he might have actually made a dent in it, because it was still possible to do so relatively cheaply then. I think the consequences of that would likely have been that the problem got mitigated to a degree, and everyone would remember it as that ridiculous fake crisis that Gore made up and wasted a bunch of money trying to prevent.
For anyone interested, another more sympathetic figure to contrast with Marat and the like is Camille Desmoulins. A lawyer before the revolution, he engaged in the same 'rage-culture' diatribes as Marat -- until he realized he had gone much too far and began to speak against the Terror. Of course, he lost his head. Just his Wikipedia page is quite an emotional ride.
>Responsibility for the September massacres has been attributed to [Marat], given his position of authority at the time and an alleged paper trail of decisions leading up to the massacre
>Charlotte Corday was guillotined on 17 July 1793 for the murder. During her four-day trial, she testified that she had carried out the assassination alone, saying "I killed one man to save 100,000."
A special life moment for me was being in Paris for the first time, reading a book about the revolution. It seems like this book would be even better for that experience. I.e. visiting places mentioned in the book as you read through it.
> ‘Only by getting “up close” and drilling down into the “infinitely small” details of the revolutionary process’, its author insists, can the day’s course and outcome be understood.
Sometimes history is inevitable, and small details do not matter. Sometimes the small details make all the difference. The assasination of archduke Ferdinand may or may not be such a detail. The fall of Robespierre seems like it could be another, from what I gather from the article.
What are other examples of when the course of history have balanced on a knife's edge?