• '17 '16

    @Narvik:

    @Caesar:

    However the specific reason for US, UK, and Dutch cutting oil trade with Japan was because they were attack a nation they were heavily investing money into for industrial. So when you look at it like this, the only winning Japanese move would be to simply not invade China which is self defeating in Japanese eye’s.

    I am not saying you are wrong, but my history books says that oil and scrap metal embargo come right after Japan had occupied French Indo China. We never will know, but I guess history would have been different if Japan ignored FIC and focused on China, or maybe even put some pressure on Far East Russia too

    I read that US oil embargo (90% of Japan oil import) was planned to restrain Japan in his war effort in China.
    And when it was done, Japan had only 2 options: cease war in China (and loosing ground and momentum giving time for Chinese to regroup and rearm with Allies help) because of lack of oil or turn toward other resources: Borneo and East Indies.

  • '17 '16

    Probably too much a gambit, but it seems the only opportunity to severly hampered US Pacific lines of communication would have required a full invasion of Hawaii, not just a raid. Probably IJN SLNF and IJA troops already too stretched with Philippines invasion and Malaya.

    Short of this possibility, a complete raid on Oil Tanks, ship repair facilities and Subs pens in Pearl Harbor would have delayed  US response in PTO.
    This would have help IJN Sub raiding Strategy.


  • @Baron:

    Probably too much a gambit, but it seems the only opportunity to severly hampered US Pacific lines of communication would have required a full invasion of Hawaii, not just a raid. Probably IJN SLNF and IJA troops already too stretched with Philippines invasion and Malaya.

    Short of this possibility, a complete raid on Oil Tanks, ship repair facilities and Subs pens in Pearl Harbor would have delayed  US response in PTO.
    This would have help IJN Sub raiding Strategy.

    The problem with an invasion of Hawaii is that Japan had no interesting in capturing colonies of the US directly next to the US. Japanese war effort against the US was simply to destroy the Pacific Fleet, force an agreement heavily on Japanese terms using the excuse of invasion if need be. Japanese end game was always China and Pacific Islands. Japan wanted to move west, not east. Japanese knew that invading US territories would be dangerous for several reasons, the US had more industrial abilities than Japan hence why they wanted a fast hard hitting strike, attacking the US means more transports and equipment something they rather use against China (if they didn’t want to invade ANZAC, what makes people think they would the US?), and one that is somewhat ignored but makes sense, the US allows their citizens to have firearms (shocker I know) so they knew that a US invasion would be a total war on a scale never seen.

  • '22 '20 '19 '18 '17 '16 '15 '14 '12

    @Argothair:

    I agree with much of the analysis above. Here’s my addition:

    If Japan had overcome the limitations of its Bushido culture and focused on submarine warfare, Japan might have been able to impose high enough costs on the United States that the US got tired of war and agreed to split the Pacific with Japan – but that’s an inherently risky strategy, because the key variable (war weariness) is out of your control. Even if you sink 100% of Pacific shipping forever, you can’t force the United States to make peace that way; the US economy was perfectly capable of surviving and even thriving without any Pacific shipping at all.

    So ideally, Japan’s long-term strategy should have involved achieving some goal that would force a win regardless of political conditions in the USA. That’s not realistic as long as the USA is out-producing Japan’s industry by a factor of 10:1…so the only reliable path to a Japanese victory involves tripling the size of Japan’s economy. How do you do that? To some extent you can improve the economy by securing oil, steel, and rubber resources in Borneo, Manchuria, and Indochina…but after that you run into hard constraints based on the Japanese empire’s relatively small population. Japan had 70 million subjects on the home islands, plus 25 million in Korea and 50 million in Manchuria, for a total loyal-ish population about 150 million. The USA had 150 million citizens inside its own borders, plus 20 million people in Mexico, 25 million in Brazil, 20 million in Argentina, 10 million in Colombia, 20 million in the Caribbean, etc., all of whom were officially or unofficially supporting the US war effort. Essentially the entire Western Hemisphere was an economic bloc that was unified in its opposition to Japan – dockyard workers in San Francisco were eating bananas grown in Honduras and using rubber farmed in Bolivia. So in addition to Japan having a much smaller industrial base and a shortage of natural resources, Japan’s population is outnumbered roughly 2:1.

    So, you need to expand the loyal population of the Empire. Where can you do that? Not in China; by the time WW2 started, the Chinese already had lots of good reasons to resent the Japanese. Not in Siberia or Australia; almost nobody lived there.

    One option is to incorporate the peoples of the former Dutch East Indies into your Empire. There were 60 million people there at the time, and it was actually fairly industrialized for that region of the world – there were 1200 miles of railroads, there were banks and telegraphs and local newspapers and so on. The Javanese welcomed the Japanese as liberators from colonial oppression, and if the Japanese of the time hadn’t also been huge colonialist jerks, they could have made the most of the positive public sentiment.

    Another option is to try to convert or at least neutralize a portion of British India. Again, the Indians had very little love for the British by that point in history, and, if they’d been given suitable terms, part or all of the region’s 370 million people might have been willing to voluntarily join Japan. In mid-1942, the British had few assets available for reinforcing India; their tropical armies were heavily committed in Egypt facing down Rommel, and their logistics were stretched to the breaking point by German submarines in the Battle of the Atlantic. Rather than getting bogged down in jungle/mountain warfare that favors the defenders (Burma and Imphal), the Japanese should have smashed the remnants of the British Eastern Fleet and then launched amphibious assaults on the flatlands around Calcutta, Chennai, and Ceylon, carving out fiefdoms along India’s eastern coastline with support from the indigenous population.

    Other than that, I would say make peace with the Chinese as best you can – voluntarily withdraw to the borders of Manchukuo as a sign of good faith; you don’t need Shanghai or Wuhan or Shanxi province for any strategically critical goals, and you can’t actually knock China out of the war. Even if China won’t literally sign a peace treaty with you, you can at least withdraw to some more defensible borders and reduce the Chinese motivation to attack you – they are, after all, internally divided between the Communists, Nationalists, and warlords, and if you don’t give them a strong, continuing reason to resist you, they probably won’t attack you very often or very hard.

    Similarly, voluntarily withdraw from the Caroline Islands and the Solomon Islands (leaving Iwo Jima and Rabaul as your forwardmost naval bases). You don’t need or even particularly want control over the surface of the Central Pacific, and there’s no reason to waste scarce manpower or shipping on trying to establish an “outer perimeter” that only looks good on a map. Instead, focus your resources on building massive flotillas of destroyers to protect your jugular vein: the flow of oil from Borneo to the home islands. You don’t need to station tiny garrisons on tiny specks of coral in the mid-Pacific; you do need to be able to cost-effectively wipe out any enemy submarines that come within 100 miles of Borneo.

    If you can protect the flow of oil, rubber, and iron ore into the home islands while doubling the size of your loyal population by welcoming the Javanese and the Bengals, then at that point you become essentially unconquerable – you now have the same level of population and natural resources as America does. Your industrial base is smaller, but this is offset by America’s need to ship oil, ammunition, food, and men all the way across the Eastern, Central, and Western Pacific. By abandoning most of the Pacific, which is, after all, a vast desert of little or no economic value, you impose maximum supply line disadvantage on the Allies.

    I don’t think any of these strategies are realistic – during the real war, Japan was blinded by its contempt for other races, and obsessed with the Army’s grudge match against China. It was not capable of this kind of freeform strategic analysis; Japan’s goals were based much more on politics than on strategy. However, I do think that Japan could have held out indefinitely (and thereby won) if it had focused its efforts on expanding and protecting its population and industrial base, rather than on fortifying and supplying a series of irrelevant outposts in the vastness of the central Pacific and the disease-ridden trails of the Burmese mountains.

    Such an analysis!  what are you?  a lawyer?

  • 2023 '22 '21 '20 '19 '18 '17 '16

    Such an analysis!  what are you?  a lawyer?

    Takes one to know one, my friend. Merry Christmas!

  • '22 '20 '19 '18 '17 '16 '15 '14 '12

    @Argothair:

    Such an analysis!  what are you?  a lawyer?

    Takes one to know one, my friend. Merry Christmas!

    Shhh… don’t give it away!


  • The commitment of resources that captured such little gains in China, should have been used to reinforce the islands. Japan already owned Manchukuo and that could have lasted forever. Take the Dutch oil areas and never attack the US, because they had nothing to do with war.

    I think Japan could have just fought the British and won if they left China alone. Fighting Russia would have been stupid and a waste with nothing to gain.


  • @Imperious:

    The commitment of resources that captured such little gains in China, should have been used to reinforce the islands. Japan already owned Manchukuo and that could have lasted forever. Take the Dutch oil areas and never attack the US, because they had nothing to do with war.

    I think Japan could have just fought the British and won if they left China alone. Fighting Russia would have been stupid and a waste with nothing to gain.

    I notice there seems to be a lack of abstraction in Japanese war plans maybe because most of you play Axis and Allies and can’t see beyond what that game brings. My point: China has no resources except the one the Japanese wanted the most, land. Lands for farms and lands for cities. That’s why China was being invaded, a pure land grab.


  • @Baron:

    @Zooey72:

    There was no way for Japan to win the war, but there was a way for Germany to win it… and hence Japan would win as well.

    I think the only way they could have gotten a victory would have been to attack the USSR.  I know many on this board disagree with that, but most would agree that a major turning point in the German/Russian war was Stalingrad.  If the USSR had not been able to drain troops from the East they would not have had the men to counter-attack at Stalingrad and thee major German defeat there could have been avoided.  Would a German win at Stalingrad changed the war?  No one can say for sure, but if a win there led to the fall of the Caucus and a huge influx of oil to the German war machine an argument can def. be made.

    Despite the vast numerical and manufacturing advantages the Americans had the biggest factor to me is a cultural one.  I read a story where a platoon of Japanese soldiers were told to man their machine gun at a certain point to hold off the American’s charge.  Once the machine gun was set up (and the ��� machine guns sucked, they made a huge target of the person firing) the first guy went to man it and was shot by a sniper.  They moved his body and the next guy manned it and was shot by the same sniper.  This went on until the entire platoon was dead.  You can’t win a war like that.

    Now if you look at the Japanese Americans who fought you see a completely different kind of soldier.  The same bravery and willingness to die for their country was there, but they did not behave like… well idiots.  Sacrificing your life for your country is the ultimate expression of patriotism.  Throwing your life away for no good reason is the ultimate expression of stupidity.

    The Siberian troops were more a matter of propaganda than a real increase in numbers for the Eastern Front. I read a very detailed analysis about this wwii myth. The truth is that Soviet conscription and enlistment of soldiers was the real deal in the 6 months after june 22nd 1941.

    But it does not imply that a two fronts war for Soviet Union could not have make things much harder from a logistical POV.

    I also read elsewhere that Lend-lease for Soviet Union was around 5% of all Soviet war productions. Was it an essential part of their war effort? IDK exactly what kind of material was send to them.

    The greatest contribution of Lend-Lease for the Soviet Union was trucks. This allowed the Soviet Union to conduct mobile warfare on a grand scale.

    A Japanese Soviet War,  would have played out much like the Finnish Front, after 1941, low mobility, forces concentrated around railroads and towns.


  • @ABWorsham:

    @Baron:

    @Zooey72:

    There was no way for Japan to win the war, but there was a way for Germany to win it… and hence Japan would win as well.

    I think the only way they could have gotten a victory would have been to attack the USSR.  I know many on this board disagree with that, but most would agree that a major turning point in the German/Russian war was Stalingrad.  If the USSR had not been able to drain troops from the East they would not have had the men to counter-attack at Stalingrad and thee major German defeat there could have been avoided.  Would a German win at Stalingrad changed the war?  No one can say for sure, but if a win there led to the fall of the Caucus and a huge influx of oil to the German war machine an argument can def. be made.

    Despite the vast numerical and manufacturing advantages the Americans had the biggest factor to me is a cultural one.  I read a story where a platoon of Japanese soldiers were told to man their machine gun at a certain point to hold off the American’s charge.  Once the machine gun was set up (and the ��� machine guns sucked, they made a huge target of the person firing) the first guy went to man it and was shot by a sniper.  They moved his body and the next guy manned it and was shot by the same sniper.  This went on until the entire platoon was dead.  You can’t win a war like that.

    Now if you look at the Japanese Americans who fought you see a completely different kind of soldier.  The same bravery and willingness to die for their country was there, but they did not behave like… well idiots.  Sacrificing your life for your country is the ultimate expression of patriotism.  Throwing your life away for no good reason is the ultimate expression of stupidity.

    The Siberian troops were more a matter of propaganda than a real increase in numbers for the Eastern Front. I read a very detailed analysis about this wwii myth. The truth is that Soviet conscription and enlistment of soldiers was the real deal in the 6 months after june 22nd 1941.

    But it does not imply that a two fronts war for Soviet Union could not have make things much harder from a logistical POV.

    I also read elsewhere that Lend-lease for Soviet Union was around 5% of all Soviet war productions. Was it an essential part of their war effort? IDK exactly what kind of material was send to them.

    The greatest contribution of Lend-Lease for the Soviet Union was trucks. This allowed the Soviet Union to conduct mobile warfare on a grand scale.

    A Japanese Soviet War,  would have played out much like the Finnish Front, after 1941, low mobility, forces concentrated around railroads and towns.

    Actually Lend-Lease to USSR in terms of what they needed the most was gun powder, boots, trucks, tanks, and food. Not in that order. I can’t seem to find an exact number of what was sent.


  • The IJN should have started out using kamikaze tactics early instead of waiting until they got desperate.

    The army medical teams were also very slow in development of biological super weapons.  Assuming the Navy bought them enough time - Whole islands could have been infected, if not major allied shipping and ports.  Refugees escaping Japanese combat areas could be weaponized as disease vectors.


  • What is the benefit of loosing trained Pilots and tons of steel, braz and Aluminium??

    Infected with a cold??
    What so you mean?


  • Pretty sure by “infected” he means championing the use of biological warfare as the Japanese were pursuing with their unit in Korea. Not that the research was advanced in 1941 (that’s like saying the US should have just dropped the A-Bomb in 1941…same thing,  research wasn’t there).

    It’s a ludicrous topic anyways that only people with a cursory knowledge of WW2 would propose… the title of this thread could at best be “how Japan could have prolonged the war”, since Japan simply wasn’t capable of winning the war with a massive shortage of men, supplies, material and production compared to the enemies Japan engaged.

    Japan resorted to Kamikazes precisely because she ran out of trained pilots to put into cockpits… and still, kamikazes didn’t come close to winning the war for Japan… if you sacrifice either your pilots or your aircraft at the beginning of the war, you’ll only expedite Japan’s fall anyways… it’s a foley to go to war throwing away your pilots and aircraft right off the bat.

    The real world isn’t Axis and Allies, there was no path to victory for Japan. The clock to Japan’s defeat started ticking as the first torpedoes were dropped at Pearl Harbor.


  • And also note that Japan’s kamikaze tactics had a very poor effectiveness rating.  Very roughly speaking, if I remember correctly: out of every 100 kamikaze plane losses, only 10 resulted in an enemy ship damaged and only 1 resulted in an enemy ship sunk.  Applying those percentage just to the biggest units that the U.S. Navy had in 1945 (23 battleships, 28 fleet carriers and 71 escort carriers, for a total of 122 vessels), it would theoretically have taken 12,200 kamikaze planes to send them all to the bottom, a figure larger than Japan’s total production of bombers during the entire war.


  • Besides anyone with knowledge knows that Kam. Pilots were all volunteers and only existed out of desperation.

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