I think the immediate result of a US loss at Midway would have been the collapse of the defensive perimeter in the South Seas. The USA would have redirected resources from the nascent Solomons campaign to Hawaii laving Australia to hold the islands and New Guinea alone. The pivotal 18-month bloodletting at Guadalcanal would have been avoided and Yamamoto would have had a free hand to strike either toward Hawaii, Australia or French Polynesia. In any case, a new front would be opened and Yamamoto would have bought the time he needed. By the time that US carrer strength rebuilt the situation in the Pacific would have been very, very difficult, perhaps bad enogh to force the USA into negotiations. Which was the whole reason for the Midway operation in the first place.
Hitler could have defeated the Soviet Union very easily, if he focused on taking Moscow....Stalin would have been finished, he was hanging by a thread as it was, the Bolsheviks may very well have been finished as well, and most likely the defense of Russia would have been taken over by non-Communists, like Vlasov, who most likely would have switched over to fighting the Germans, and perhaps gotten most of the former Red Army soldiers to fight for him.
Thanks jboot!
The main focus of the original United Nations was the defeat of Hitler (which is why that theater was finished first); the Russians concluded their destruction of the Wehrmacht (with the bungling help of Hitler himself) as quickly as they could, and the division of Germany was agreed upon in the wartime conferences. The western allies stopped their advance at the agreed-upon boundary.
[ Luckily, Werner Von Braun wanted to surrender to our side. The Soviet back-engineering of the V2 engines (there’s a cool photo of Sergei Korolev in uniform, standing next to a captured V2 engine) and some salting of Soviet efforts with some captured German missilemen led to some propaganda firsts, and then deaths of cosmonauts on reentry, and then the N1 disasters. ]
At Potsdam, Truman made an oblique reference to the successful A-bomb test by the US; Stalin nodded, and in private sent an inquiry home to check on on the state of the Russian nuke project. The traitors and spies in the Manhattan Project meant that Stalin already knew the US nuke project was nearing fruition (testing of the non-nuclear explosive components like those to be used in the first A-bomb had been tested the day before the German surrender).
Stalin’s main problem (as he saw it) was the contamination of the Red Army troops who met and swapped smokes and photos with the troops of the western allies. All those who could be identified from recovered photos wound up in the Gulag. He had the Soviet-occupied sector of Germany stripped of the machinery of heavy industry, and spent the rest of his time as ruthless, mass-murdering dictator trying to clean up the wartime damage and rebuild agriculture, while carrying out thousands of show trials and executions, and persecuting Russian Jews.
Anyway, I agree with you — collapse of the defensive perimeter would have followed a Japanese victory at Midway. OTOH, US victories in the Pacific land war showed that the Japanese were not any tougher or formidible than US soldiers and sailors, irrespective of their fanatical devotion to battle, and the US could decode Japanese military messages, one of the factors in the killing of Yamamoto. Also, the Japanese were never able to keep pace laying keels, and the ultimate outcome would never have been in doubt.
As a consequence of the prospect of a longer Pacific War, the US might easily have said “forget it” to Churchill’s stupid “soft underbelly” plan, which led to some of the toughest fighting of WWII — in Italy — and instead pushed for an earlier buildup in the UK, leading to an earlier D-Day. Opening that second front was what Stalin continued to demand, and was pretty insulting about the attempts in Italy. He could see that it was done for post-war political positioning, and for no other reason.