<i>Had fate turned ever so slightly at Pearl Harbor, Coral Sea, or Midway, the great gamble made by the Japanese would have been genius.<p>The embarrassment and face saving nonsense killed them not in 1941, but in 1943, when they followed through on a fools errand instead of settling for peace. Once the US industrial power was mobilized, the result was pretty certain.</i><p>Disagree strongly.  The way those battles turned just sped up the destruction of Imperial Japan---and if you expect every battle to go your way, you&#x27;re a damned fool.<p>The surprise attack, their brutality in war, plus our memory of how WWI did not end in a lasting peace, made sure settling for a peace was not an option by 1943.  By the time we were focusing on the home islands with Operations Starvation and Downfall, plus the fruits of the Manhattan Project, the details of the Bataan Death March unquestionably revealed by the liberation of the Philippines ... well, it <i>really</i> sucked to be Japanese by then.  But not hardly so bad as the subject people in the Greater East Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere, which they were killing at a rate of 400,000 per month by then.<p>I&#x27;m finishing reading <i>Hell to Pay: Operation Downfall and the Invasion of Japan, 1945-1947</i> <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.amazon.com&#x2F;Hell-Pay-Operation-Downfall-1945-1947&#x2F;dp&#x2F;1591143160&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.amazon.com&#x2F;Hell-Pay-Operation-Downfall-1945-1947&#x2F;...</a> and it&#x27;s really sobering.  Olympic as planned, the invasion of southern Kyuushu, wasn&#x27;t going to work, and with Marshall pushing for all nuclear weapons after Nagasaki to be earmarked for it, and liberal use of poison gas, it would have made Okinawa look like a walk in the park.  And there&#x27;s no way Coronet, the planned March invasion of the Kanto plane in Honshu that includes Tokyo would have happened on schedule before the weather made it impractical.  Yet we were absolutely determined to see it through, one way or another, with as many as a million of our men dying the process.