AHC: Have Japan Surrender before Germany does in WWII

Just fix the Mark 14.

You are mistaken. 2 MILLION tonnes of shipping including 5 AIRCRAFT CARRIERS in 1942 and 1943 shaves off a year.  

USS Trigger (SS-237)

Let me tell you the REST of that story...


There were THREE Japanese aircraft carriers present, Hiyo, Junyo and Chitose. The USS Trigger attacked all three with 10 torpedoes. She hit all of them with 7 of 10 fish. The four explosions were all prematures. Three missed and three clanged.     

Now there is the one about USS Nautilus, which clanged both the aircraft carrier Kaga and the battleship Kongo at Midway. or the FIVE US submarines, each steered by Ultra to intercept her, who should have gotten the aircraft carrier, Shokaku, after Coral Sea, where her bow was stoved in by a defective 1,000 pounder from a Dauntless, but those submarines' fish ran too deep, failed to run or prematured when the Mark 6 exploder went off too far away from that aircraft carrier. There are your five aircraft carriers.      

NOW... here is the KICKER. 

The ever helpful British suggested that the Americans might want to check their own magnetic exploders about October 1940.  Our idiots did. Bu-Ord knew by January 1940 (Note the date? M.), that there was something seriously wrong with the Mark 6, and they even had an idea that it was the inclination of flux lines in the Earth's magnetic fields which affected the sensitivity of signal thresh-hold, which would cause a premature triggering dependent on latitude. The PROBLEM was that the fix required a US warship to circumnavigate the earth at least a hundred times and MEASURE those flux line inclinations according to latitude. The reason for that, was to compile a firing tables book. This would have been an indexed lat/long set of tables that would have told the torpedo men how to adjust a back installed rheostat slide controller to set the Mark 6 for the local magnetic flux line inclinations and estimated tonnage of the STEEL target that would disrupt those flux lines thus triggering the klystrons in the firing circuit.
      
That would take at least four years to MAP the earth, magnetically, and compile the tables.    
 
Now imagine what would happen if THAT got out? The Germans knew about the magnetic exploder problem from Norway. The British knew about it from the Taranto Raid when most of their fish failed. Albert Einstein, after the USN asked him about it, knew about the magnetic exploder problem. It seemed the last people who knew about the magnetic exploder problem were the fighting crews of the USN. 

By the way, there was a USN officer who suggested the rheostat switch and global mapping of the Earth's magnetic field. His name was Ralph Waldo Christie.

He invented the Mark 6. He took a new US cruiser, the USS Indianapolis as a trials ship to start that mapping, when guess what interrupted this program? Change of administration in 1933-34 (Note the DATE?) and a new idiot, secretary of the navy, and a new chief of the Bureau of Ordnance, (STARK), kiboshed the survey as a cost savings measure. Besides, FDR needed a yacht. 

Anyhow, 1926, 1931, 1933-1934, there were a dozen chances to get the magnetic influence exploder right which the University of Washington finally did in 1946. Note that date? The magnetic mapping of the Earth was completed by the Korean War. 
    
The depth keeping problem was another piece of stupidity that would have been solved once live fire trials of the exploder, if done as suggested, had been carried out once the mapping issue was resolved. The contact element of the exploder, was additional stupid engineering, that cold shots, also suggested, would have revealed. The expletive deleted who nixed, neined, Frankensteined, all of these suggestions 1934 to 1937 was this piece of manure.               
 
Then HE HID the exploder away (1937) so technical people within the fleet could not look at or tinker with it, using the excuse that it was a "national security secret".

Call me cynical, but I tend to think Stark knew exactly what I wrote. Just like he knew what stripping the Pacific Fleet of its oil tankers, and the Atlantic fleet of its destroyers would do. 

I happen to know a lot about my nation's naval history, Steve. Most of it, is not let out into the public domain, because of that thing about not letting the people lose confidence in their navy. But you know something? I am not a believer in that fakery. If you want to shorten wars, avoid wars and in general keep the peace, then you want to understand what went wrong and make sure it never happens again, like the problem we had with Polaris / Poseidon when the missiles carried warheads that would not detonate even though we ran cold shots on those jokers for a DECADE before we fixed that problem. That would be a long wee bit before my time; but it was fixed about the year James Earl Jackanapes became POTUS.  We retired those missiles 3 years later. 

       
   

Thanks for pointing this out. I'm sorry I didn't look and see the question had been explored so recently before starting a new thread on it.

You're going to need a Japan first strategy in order to make this happen. I think the easiest way to do this is to have some sort of disaster happen in Europe that is such a morale blow to the US that they need to shift gears to a front where they have been getting victories prior to keep morale up and prevent calls for peace. So, let's say that the American brass stays stubborn and insists on landing in Europe in 1942, they decide North Africa and Italy are distractions and if Germany itself is threatened the other fronts will collapse.

This early D-Day goes about as well as one can expect, tens of thousands of Americans are dead/captured and the Army in Europe is humiliated and also needs time to rebuild. Worse though is that the American public thinks the war is going to be lost. The only good news is coming out of the Pacific. Politicians are already worried about elections (depending on the timing of the invasion we might still be contending with midterms) and demand victories to bolster poll numbers. Because of this political necessity there is a push to focus efforts on Japan for at least a year or so until a new strategy can be utilized in Europe. It won't cut down the end of the war tremendously simply because of the massive logistics and distances involved in the Pacific but it could eke out a slightly quicker victory against Japan.

Another option, or combined with the one above is, a big cut to lend lease to the Soviet Union. Let's say the Soviet spy rings in America get found out early in the war and in a dramatic public fashion. There is strong hostility against this so-called "ally" now and there are demands that lend lease ends. The US government doesn't believe a separate between Germany and the SU is possible given Hitler's personality and decides to cut lend lease hoping to bleed the SU dry in the process of the war. Slower SU advance means a slower collapse of Germany.

Now I wonder how promising landings somewhere in SE Asia in the back of the Japanese would be. Is there a "soft underbelly" somewhere?