What if the U.S. had been told to stop fighting Japan during WWII, the way Israel is being told to stop fighting Hamas?
No matter its stated reasons, no matter how misguided its policy, the United States administration, advised by its historically anti-Israel Department of State, is putting severe pressure on Israel to stop fighting Hamas in Gaza, without permitting it first to achieve its war aim of complete destruction of this threat to its existence. They are doing it without regard for the consequences to Israel, its population, and to the Western world.
Given the arrogance of the Biden administration’s dictating a suicidal wartime policy to an allied government which must answer to its own people, it is instructive to consider the potential consequences, had similar pressure been imposed upon the United States during WWII to stop its war against Japan’s military, to relinquish the accomplishment of its war aims, and to negotiate, in 1944, a ceasefire with Japan’s military totalitarian government.
It is mid-1944. The U.S. military has secured Saipan and the other Mariana Islands and is preparing to build there a complex of airbases from which the new B-29 long range bombers would historically burn down many Japanese cities and kill hundreds of thousands of Japanese civilian noncombatants.
But in this imagined scenario, it is not to be.
A confluence of pressures demands that the U.S. military cease its operations against Japan, and, rather than continuing to completion what was its historic policy of demanding unconditional surrender, the United States government is compelled to negotiate a ceasefire with Japan’s military government.
Such pressure potentially could have come from politics in this, a presidential election year. It could have come from friends or allies; from an American public concerned with the deaths of too many Japanese civilians during the Saipan campaign, or because of the mounting casualty figures among U.S. military personnel.
There were war correspondents among American troops during most operations, and the friends and families on the home front were historically both very knowledgeable of, and stressed by, the mounting U.S. casualties. Their loved ones were dying out there in the Pacific.
What might a settlement negotiated in July of 1944 have looked like, and, most importantly, where would it leave us in the United States today? What might be the consequences to us?
The Japanese negotiators would have demanded that in exchange for a ceasefire, the Empire of Japan would be entitled to retain the territories and the natural resources it had conquered during the first half of 1942.
Had the Japanese negotiated successfully, we would have watched natural resources, and oil in particular, flowing unabated from the stolen Southern Resource Area to Japan, unimpeded by United States submarines which historically almost completely blocked this from happening.
The military government of Japan would have been able to accomplish what the United States thus far had been preventing: Japan’s creation of greatly enhanced Imperial Navy and Army air forces second to none, and, most importantly, the logistical infrastructure which would enable Japan eventually to exclude all United States military operations and commerce from the entirety of the western Pacific area for decades.
The Saipan campaign began in June of 1944.
The United States did not begin to liberate the Philippine Islands, an American protectorate occupied by the Japanese military since early 1942, until Oct. 23, 1944, or Okinawa until April 1, 1945. Thus, the U.S. Philippine military allies, and all their citizens, as well as Americans who had been prisoners of war of the Japanese since early 1942 in the Philippines, would have remained under Japanese occupation and exploitation, and often brutal death.
Further, the slaughter of millions of unarmed Chinese civilians under occupation by the Japanese army would have continued unabated, and Japanese atrocities committed against Philippine and American civilians would also have continued.
The United States would have accomplished none of its war aims in the Asia-Pacific theater. It would not have eliminated the expansionist Japanese military government and the ideology of its leadership. It would not have removed the Japanese military from China, where it had already killed millions of civilians. It would not have removed the Japanese military from the Philippine Islands, a U.S. protectorate, which it historically did in the first quarter of 1945 after the destruction of the capital city of Manila and the murder of thousands of Philippine civilians, mostly by Imperial Japanese Navy troops. It would not have removed from Japan’s control the lands and resources it stole in 1942 in the Central Pacific, the South Pacific, the Southwest Pacific, and the Asian mainland. It would not have prevented further expansion of Japanese conquest and occupation into other regions of the Pacific, Asia, and the Indian Ocean area.
It is not improbable that under these circumstances Australia and India might fall under the commercial influence of a militaristic Japan, with or without actual invasion. The Japanese Navy striking force of six aircraft carriers which had raided Pearl Harbor in December 1941, moved on in April of 1942 to conduct a raid into the Indian Ocean where it sank a British Royal Navy aircraft carrier and two heavy cruisers. The Royal Navy had to pull its forces back to the coast of Africa. Had the United States dropped out of the Pacific war in mid-1944, could the U.K. have continued to defend the Indian Ocean area while still fighting Germany in Europe?
The hypothetical failure of the United States to accomplish its war aims in 1944-45 could have resulted in a weakened America and a much more dangerous world today.
In our present timeline, what may be the consequences to the civilized world should the Biden administration force Israel, now serving the West as the canary in the coal mine vis-à-vis militant Islam, be forced to stop its war against Hamas today, to let the barbarians win, to allow Iran hegemony over the Middle East, and to facilitate the spread of militant Islam through, at a minimum, all of Europe?
Michael S. Goldstein is Arizona State Director of Proclaiming Justice to the Nations. He is a 30-year veteran of the United States Navy and of the U.S. intelligence community. His articles appear in American Thinker.
Image: Naval History and Heritage Command, via Picryl // public domain