A Draka-Like Ending for the Pacific War

In which the US annexes Japan, the Imperial Japanese Army becomes an American version of the Irish Republican Army, and the U.S. becomes a low-level police state, at least for awhile.

This was intended to be a blog post only, but I forgot to uncheck the “send to everybody” button when I posted and all my newsletter readers (who are only supposed to get newsletters twice a month) got it. I hope you like dystopian alternate history with warnings about how war endangers civil liberties. :)

Alternate history writer S.M. Stirling once described his Draka series from the late 1980s and early 1990s as the worst-case scenario for human history. To make a long story short, the Loyalists from the American Revolution and various other dregs (French planters from Haiti and aristocrats during the Revolution, Hessian mercenaries, Confederates) settle in Africa, conquer, enslave, and industrialize the continent, and then use it as a basis for world conquest while the rest of the world is too stupid to do anything until it’s too late. Now in control of the nuked Earth and with the survivors of the “Alliance for Democracy” safely exiled to Alpha Centauri, they genetically engineer themselves into a Homo drakensis master race and everybody else into Homo servus servitors.

I was discussing an alternate-history Pacific War scenario with some Twitter associates of Baen Books’ Sean C.W. Korsgaard as a result of some idiocy by another writer and brought up an AH scenario where, due to a premature A-Bomb-less U.S. invasion brought on by a Unit 731 bioweapon getting loose, the islands get so depopulated they end up becoming U.S. territories. Like the Draka this is very low-probability event given the sheer distance from North America, the fact the Japanese military had dedicated most of their remaining ammunition for the defense of Kyushu and would probably implode once Kyushu was taken, the massive racism of the era that would make mass granting of U.S. citizenship to the Japanese problematic, etc. but telling an interesting story (this was originally a background for a spy/noir-thriller set in this world’s 1960s or 1970s) comes first. Although a book in this world is not a high priority in light of my other projects, it might make for an interesting role-playing game.

The more we talked, the more dystopic it got. Here are some highlights:

*With the US distracted by a prolonged war in the Pacific, the Soviets can make more territorial demands in Europe. In real life they left Bornholm Island in the mid-Baltic (liberated Danish territory) in exchange for recognition of their conquest of Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia. In this scenario, they keep it and use it to squeeze Sweden as needed. With support by sea from Britain Norway might maintain its independence and NATO membership, but I could imagine Sweden being Finlandized. Consequently we end up with a more paranoid and heavily-armed Denmark and Norway to keep the Soviets from pouring out of the Baltic in the event of another war.

*In real life, the Soviets made a play for northern Iran but the U.S. forced them to back off. In this scenario, that doesn’t happen due to Anglo-American attention elsewhere. Soviet-backed Kurdish and Azeri states emerge in northern Iran, with the latter possibly being absorbed into the Soviet Union directly. Rump Iran might get Finlandized too, or the US and Britain will have to exert themselves more strenuously to keep Iran in the Western camp and keep the Soviets from establishing naval bases on the Indian Ocean.

*With less U.S. aid for the Soviet Union, which in real life suffered famines after World War II ended, the Soviets will try to make up the difference by squeezing their occupation zones in Eastern Europe and possibly even Manchuria.

*To minimize US casualties and reduce war-weariness in the United States, German prisoners of war might be rearmed and sent to fight in Japan. Although this would reduce American casualties, it would be a massive propaganda boon for the Soviet Union and its foreign-Communist subordinates, much like the how (at least according to this letter to the New York Times), Communists claimed the French were using a largely German army to maintain control of Vietnam. American soldiers are not going to be fond of fighting alongside people they’d been fighting against not long before, so I could easily imagine these men being used as cannon fodder, targeted for fragging, etc. Germany, both West Germany and East Germany, is going to suffer demographically as a result, with the postwar German economic miracle weakened or, if it still happens, necessitating the import of more foreign workers and resulting complications.

(Germany does not have birthright citizenship, which led to all sorts of problems for guest workers and their descendants in both East and West Germany, especially those of non-European or non-Christian backgrounds.)

*The Soviets take all of Korea and their man Kim Il-Sung ends up in charge. Something resembling real-life juche is implemented and all Korea becomes something resembling Ceauseacu’s Romania. There will be no Samsung, Kia, or Hyundai in this world. :(

*The French philosopher Foucalt described a phenomenon called “the Imperial Boomerang” where techniques of repression used in Europe’s colonies were eventually brought home to the mainland against the metropole’s own citizens. With the dregs of the Imperial Japanese Army fighting for years in the mountains and Japan now U.S. territory, imagine FBI and military intelligence squaring off against Japanese guerrillas, the KGB, and possibly even leftover Nazis and honing counterinsurgency tactics. Since in this scenario Japanese people are much more easily able to come to the United States, I could easily imagine attempts to take the war to the mainland and a much more powerful FBI deployed against them. Combine that with how Communists like Dalton Trumbo claim the US was trying to encircle the Soviet Union — and controlling all Japan would fit that narrative — and you might get the American Communist Party and allied groups involved. This is especially plausible if Japan becomes super-militarized with the Soviet Union or its allies just across the sea….think mega-Okinawa. The FBI could become a European-style gendarmerie.

As a result of the above, I could easily imagine a bizarre two-headed panic combining the real-life Second Red Scare with the most extreme excesses of the War on Terror (think the Patriot Act, indefinite detention, Guantanamo, etc), all under the benevolent (this is sarcasm in case it’s not obvious) supervision of J. Edgar Hoover. If the Soviet Union is using Red Korea and members of the Communist Party as conduits to secretly assist the Imperial Japanese Army dregs in the name of anti-imperialism and there are IJA terrorist attacks in the U.S. itself (think The Troubles in Northern Ireland — more on that later), I could imagine critics of US policy in Asia getting the guilt-by-association treatment. Instead of “just” getting blacklisted, Trumbo and those of his ilk might well end up on trial for treason. Even if they’re ultimately found not guilty or freed on appeal (assuming something like the liberal Warren Court still emerges in this world), it would destroy their lives much more thoroughly. And during WWII the U.S. government repressed philo-Japanese African-American movements like the Nation of Islam. In a scenario where the IJA becomes an American IRA, they’re likely to stay repressed.

This has certain implications for the broader Civil Rights Movement, especially since more moderate leaders like Martin Luther King Jr. were set up as alternatives to people like Malcolm X. We might see a longer-lasting Jim Crow, at least in certain places.

*With what’s left of Japan becoming U.S. territory, there’s a much larger Japanese-American population in the continental United States. This on principle is not a bad thing, but I could easily imagine much greater friction between immigrants from Japan and native-born Americans, especially with the Japanese Internment and a much bloodier Pacific War relatively recent history. More hate crimes.

And even though in this world there’s no Korean War and probably no Vietnam War, the greater militarization of the smaller non-Communist Western Europe, the Middle East, and now-American Japan probably means the draft never ends.

*If Japan ultimately becomes multiple U.S. states or one or more Commonwealths in the vein of Puerto Rico, Guam, or the Northern Mariana Islands, it’s going to have its own National Guard(s). Under the circumstances it could end up infiltrated by IJA elements or be filled with a disaffected younger generation who grew up second-class citizens in a ruin and are rather bitter about the whole thing. What used to be Japan could produce for the United States what Northern Ireland provided Great Britain, only on a much, much larger scale and with the possibility of army-on-army conflict rather than “just” gunfights and bombs.

(The plot of a story I had planned for this world was the ugliest possible version of the American counterculture — a mutiny of the National Guards in support of restoring Japanese independence led by people whose sucky lives have caused them to view the WWII Empire of Japan with rather rose-tinted glasses.)

*A fairly common treatment for mental health problems in the WWII or post-war US was lobotomy. Imagine millions of veterans of the defeat of Japan with PTSD for whom that option is on the table.

The end result of this scenario is a less free, much poorer, more militarized, and more racially-divided world in which the Soviet Union and its allies/vassals have a much stronger hand. We should all be glad it didn’t happen. Remember Randolph Bourne’s dictum that “War is the health of the State” and these quotes from Founding Father James Madison.