X-Day: The Plan to Invade Japan

Today on Far Future Horizons we mark the seventieth anniversary of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima by taking another foray through an Alternate History of the Second World War with “X-Day: The Plan to Invade Japan”.

Let us suppose that the Trinity Test at Alamogordo, New Mexico had gone very badly and the Manhattan project, that involved the efforts of 130,000 people and cost nearly US$ 2 billion ($ 22 billion in present day value), rather than detonating the world’s first atomic bomb, had in fact produce a dud.

The Allies would have gone ahead with Operation Downfall, the overall plan for the massive invasion of Japan planned for November 1, 1945. This would have protracted the war until 1946 costing millions of Allied and tens of millions of Japanese military and civilian casualties.



This scenario was depicted vividly in the novel “The Burning Mountain: A Novel of the Invasion of Japan (1983)” an alternate history novel by Alfred Coppel. They key change in history in the novel is that the Trinity nuclear test of July 16, 1945 fails. Then the novel goes on to depict the outcome of Operation Downfall.


In today’s video feature we trace the invasion plans from Pearl Harbor to Hiroshima and analyze why President Truman chose the bomb over Operation Downfall.

X-Day: The Plan to Invade Japan is available on DVD from Amazon Books.

X-Day: The Plan to Invade Japan

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