Reprinted with permission of World War II Magazine
On May 4-8, 1942, American, Australian and Japanese naval units fought the world’s first engagement decided exclusively by carrier-based air power: the ships of each side never even sighted the other. Tactically the Japanese could claim a limited success. They sank the carrier Lexington and heavily damaged the carrier Yorktown while losing only the light carrier Shoho. But in strategic terms, the Battle of the Coral Sea was a major Allied victory. For the first time in the Pacific War, the Japanese withdrew without achieving their objective—in this case, vital Port Moresby in southern Papua New Guinea. And the two major Japanese carriers, Shokaku and Zuikaku, lost so many aircraft that neither was unavailable to participate in the decisive Battle of Midway four weeks later, whereas Yorktown was repaired in time to do so.
Many what-if scenarios are “close call” counterfactuals, in which the outcome pivoted on a single event that went one way but might easily have gone another. In the case of the Coral Sea, however, it is almost easier to explicate how the Japanese could have won the battle than to explain how they managed to lose it. . . .
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11 Comments
Absolutely true.
Japanese victory in the Battle of the Coral Sea would not have delayed the Trinity Project by a single nanosecond. The Japanese would have surrendered on 15 August 1945, just like they did in this universe.
If that is true, then the entire Pacific campaign was also irrelevant.
Including the capture of the island Enola Gay took off from.
No, not irrelevant.
In 1942 the Trinity Project was still very much in its infancy.
You seem not to understand the difference between circumstance and contingency.
The conventional aspects of the Pacific War were irrelevant only if you assume that US decision-makers had perfect knowledge of the possibility and timing of success of the Trinity Project. Even Robert Oppenheimer, the scientist in charge of the Manhattan Project, had no idea about that. And he certainly was not consulted on the military aspects of the Pacific War in any case.
Prudently, US military planners drew up plans for the invasion of the home islands of Japan even in the shadows of the Trinity success. I think it is true to say, however, that Hiroshima and Nagasaki rendered those plans irrelevant.
Was Tinian the only place in the world from where a B-29 could strike Japan?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fourteenth_Air_Force#World_War_II
I think not.
Hornet and Enterprise were sent by Nimitz to the South Pacific as soon as they arrived in Pearl from the Doolittle Raid. Yamamoto missed an opportunity to destroy all four Pacific Fleet carriers piecemeal. Ironic, he had his showdown battle open to him and missed it because of his fixation on Midway. No telling how such a disaster would have effected the overall progress of the war. Perhaps “Germany first” would have been shelved by public demand.
It’s worth noting that the dropping of the two atomic bombs came after the US had gotten close to the Japanese home islands and had pummeled Japanese cities in a series of fire bombings which could only have been mounted from the Marianas. (Attempts to mount an effective campaign from China, to which Katz alludes, proved singularly ineffective.) Even after Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the supreme war council barely edged toward surrender as the only remaining option, and it took the emperor’s personal intervention to accomplish this.
Without the fall of the Marianas in 1944, Tojo would not have been replaced as premier, and thus you would not in 1945 have had a premier (Suzuki) who was disposed toward a (negotiated) surrender prior to August 1945. Even then it was touch and go with the hardliners like War Minister Anami. Consequently, the deterioration of the overall Japanese strategic position was an important, probably indispensable element in the August 15 surrender.
On top of that, as Grant suggests, a Japanese victory at Coral Sea might have compelled a revisitation of the “Germany First” strategy. Even if it simply delayed V-E Day, that in turn would have delayed the “August Storm” Soviet offensive in Manchuria that seems to have shocked the supreme council as much as — some say more than — the atomic bombs.
Another problem: I doubt the US government would have been willing to risk flying the A-bomb over “the Hump,” since if the plane carrying the fissionable material crashed (which was not uncommon in flying over the Hump), the loss of the material, to say nothing of the compromise to security, would have been unacceptable.
None of this should be construed as pouring scorn on Katz’ original comment. The whole point of counterfactual thought experiments is to invite consideration of familiar subjects in fresh ways, and the idea that as events turned out, the Pacific campaign might have been irrelevant raises some productive questions.
I doubt that.
The Japanese Cabinet was gearing up for a maximum military effort against the Allied landings on the Home Islands. Most of all, the Japanese Cabinet (who knew the war was lost by early August 1945) wanted a concession of preserving the Emperor.
The ruling consensus in the Japanese Cabinet hoped that a fanatical defence of the Home Islands would cause the Allies to be more prepared to demand something less than unconditional surrender.
The other element that stupefied the Japanese War Cabinet was the Soviet declaration of war and invasion of Northern China. The Soviets made short work of a large and well-supplied Japanese army.
There is also another factor infrequently mentioned. The Japanese were well aware of the potential of nuclear weaponry. Indeed the Japanese had their own program of nuclear enrichment. Some details here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_atomic_program
I have never seen any reference to it but James Byrnes’ final speech of warning on 26 July 1945 projected a powerful message: “There is still time, but little time for the Japanese to save themselves from the destruction that threatens them.”
Those words must have been very ominous for any Japanese leader who was aware of the potential of nuclear power.
Hi Katz,
I don’t quite see where we’re disagreeing. It seems to me that the points you make buttress mine, and vice versa. And I gather we’re both influenced by Richard B. Frank’s excellent book, Downfall: The End of the Japanese Imperial Empire.
I’d add to Mark’s summary that the US was also successfully mining the minable straits among the Home Islands (Operation Starvation?). This meant that Japan couldn’t import food and supplied and (IMHO) would have had problems evacuating troops from China to Japan.
Meanwhile, as Mark pointed out, the US was hitting Japanese cities with very frequent and very, very destructive large-scale fire raids. ISTR that the initial post-war assessment of the Hiroshima bombing was that it inflicted damage and casualties equivalent to slightly over 200 B-29’s. Under the assumption that the US would not have attempted a fall invasion of Japan (because this would have involved bitter fighting in weather unsuited to air support), by Spring 1946 Japan would have been in a situation even more horrific than it was in August, 1945. There’d have been a winter of famine, with any city worthy of the name absolutely destroyed by firebombing (as many times as needed).
I agree Mark.
My only point of disagreement with you was your conclusion that the Pacific War may have been materially lengthened by a Japanese victory in the Coral Sea.
My point is that there were too many factors exogenous to the conventional warfare of the Pacific campaign which determined Japanese surrender and the timing of Japanese surrender.
Chief among these were:
1. Soviet declaration of war on Japan. The Soviet decision was not influenced in any way by what happened in the Coral Sea in early 1942.
2. Deployment of the Atom Bomb over Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The timing of the completion of the Manhattan Project and the desirability of dropping the bombs were not influenced by the outcome of the Battle of the Coral Sea.
It may, perhaps, be argued that the US would have baulked at using the bomb if it needed to be deployed from a less secure airstrip. But this question takes us into realms of obscured speculation. And, given the urgency of ending the war before the Soviets were fully deployed (it was not beyond the realms of possibility that Soviet Forces would be the first into Tokyo, just as they had been the first into Berlin. The Soviets took Sakhalin in early August 1945 and from there it was a series of easy island hops via Hokkaido to Honshu and on to Tokyo)*, and the growing concern about how costly an invasion of the Japanese home islands would be, I am reasonably confident that the US planners would have found a way to use the bomb even without use of the airstrip at Tinian.
*That is a counterfactual well-worth considering!
Katz -
Since we’ve reached the point of diminishing returns re the Coral Sea counterfactual, let me just second your idea that US planners would have found an alternative way to deliver the Bomb.
When physicists first considered the idea of developing an atomic bomb, they thought it might be too heavy to be delivered by aircraft, and so thought in terms of delivery by sea. In the absence of having air fields in range, it would have been entirely feasible, I think, to convey a nuclear device via submarine and detonate it in the harbor of one of Japan’s major ports. Offhand I can’t think of how an air burst could have been achieved, but certainly even a sea level explosion would have been very destructive, and the radiation fallout might well have been even worse than what occurred historically.
If the Japanese had won the battle of the Coral Sea, they would have captured Port Moresby. They would then have been bled white trying to supply it. No road could have been built over the Owen Stanleys. All supplies would be by ship, highly susceptible to allied attack from many bases in North Queensland.
Another “what-if” might be: What if the Japanese developed an aircraft engine at least the equal of those available to the allies? American carriers would then not be able to support a central pacific drive, because land-based airforces would trump sea-based airforces. Only the route through New Guinea would offer the allies a chance of advancement along the island chain to the Asian mainland, with land-based aircraft being able to cover the next landing. With an improved Japanese airforce, that advance would have been much much harder.