Charge 7
Master Gunner
godofthunder9010 said:The thing of it is, Charge7, I don't think that the USA would have let the Russians join in. The Russians were quite willing, but the USA had control of the seas. Nothing was getting past the US Navy without her permission. Russia did not have anything close to enough naval strength to press the matter. The question was, would the USA have bowed to the need for help if things got hairy in the invasion? I'm sure that Stalin was hoping so.
Well, since one of the central aims of Yalta was just that, to bring the Russians into the war against Japan, I don't think we'd have had much choice in the matter unless we were prepared to go to war with them. As Yalta surely answered in the decision to have Russia control eastern Europe, we were not willing to go to war with them to keep them from controlling white nations. We wouldn't have been more inclined to do so to keep them from controlling half of a yellow nation. I know that's racist, but I am commenting in the context of the times.
The invasion of Japan would have dwarfed anything else the US did in the war and we would have been forced to call on Russian manpower and materiel in order to accomplish that. Roosevelt knew that and that is why he courted Stalin so closely at Yalta. He was hedging his bets in case the bomb did not work.
LeEnfield is correct in his comment as well, the Russians were already knocking on Japan's door.