http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_mechanics

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Many-worlds_interpretation

read the entire page please.


I see no reason why Japan would have gotten into a major war with the Soviets they easily could have during most of the war but they did not neither did the soviets declare war against Japan until they new they would win after both atomic bombs ask yourself why neither side went to war with each other until the very end.

Russia is so vast Japanese aircraft would not have been able to reach the regions of the Soviet Union had its factories they where not stupid they realized the Neutrality Pact aka Non-Aggression Pact might fall through with Japan at anytime and there are not very many large Soviet cities very close to Japan anyway only Vladivostok at that time so there is very little for the Japanese Navy to have done along the Russian coastline.Further more the Soviet Union always had the numerical advantage they had very poor leadership at the top and through out most of their officer corps early thanks to Stalin's purges(heck of a guy you just had to get know him) in the war and the Germans fought better against an a first poorly motivated,poorly trained enemy.

Japan did not do so well in the small border war against the Soviet Union called Khalkhin Go in 1939 so they felt like avoiding conflict with them at least for several years was wise.This was very helpful to the Soviet Union because in meant that they did not have to consume much manpower defending from Japanese attack.


The Japanese Army was not **** they where actually pretty good extremely aggressive fighters look at Singapore they where outnumbered I believe 5 to 1 by British and Common Wealth troops yet they took over rapidly the entire peninsula with acceptable casualties.The same can be said about the Philippines in 41,42 though the US and Filipino troops where able to delay the Japanese victory for months.

Next taking all non-US controlled areas in the Pacific would not have worked when the Japanese had no way to prevent the US government to consider attacks on Brit and Dutch colonies an obvious threat to our own. There is not an easy way to get around the European and United States strongly disliking the idea of Japan wanting any territory in the Pacific they did not already have after WWI.



Sorry but your theory sounds pretty unsound and not based on much factual data.

Steelhead wrote:
At Yalta, Stalin undertook to declare war on Japan three months after the defeat of Germany which would have been 8 August 1945. As it was they declared war at midnight on the 8th, almost 12-hours before Fat Man fell on Nagasaki and less than two days after Little Boy detonated over Hiroshima. However, combat operations by the Red Army preceded the official declaration of war in some sectors of the front by several hours.

Being as how the Soviets had assembled in Mongolia, Ussuri and Amur provinces north of Manchuria and in Maritime Province well over one and a half million combat troops, 26,000 guns, 5500 tanks and about 3800 combat aircraft, it's a pretty good bet nukes had very little to do with the Soviet Union coming in when they did. The evidence indicates that the Bomb was coincidental rather than causal to Russia's attack on Japan.

Other than that minor peccadillo, agree 100%.

Edited to correct date error

True, Id would say that the primary factor effecting the Soviet Union declaring war was the threat from Germany once that was gone it was game on.Stalin was never a fan of "keeping" non-aggression pacts he just used them to gain time Germany beat him to the punch in 41 and of course had as much intention of following that pact as the Soviets did.:shifty:


Sorry to be so aggressive towards CaptainMattJ. post I know this is a speculative topic but one does have to consider actual conditions and he seems to have little knowledge of Japanese-Soviet relations in 30-40's and their military capabilities as well.

I have read extensively on WWII and related history particular about the Soviet Union and Japan in my 30 or so years so sometimes my stuffed brain gets a little excited I guess.


Edit:heck yeah check out my new digs!! I hope it does not last just one post:yeah:

The Japanese army did, in fact, clash with Soviet troops along the Manchurian-Siberian border as early as 1938. On July 11th of that year, w/o orders from Tokyo, Japanese troops of the 19th division attacked Soviet troops holding a hill along the northeastern frontier. The Japanese suffered heavy losses and were forced to withdraw. In May of 1939, they again clashed with the Soviet army near Nomonhan on the northwestern frontier between Manchukuo and the USSR's Mongolian Republic. Long story short, the Japs had their heads handed to them. In fact, their entire 23rd Division was annihilated. The fighting ended in Sept. of 39 with a full Japanese retreat and the signing of a humiliating truce with Moscow on Sept. 15, 1939.

Japanese troops and forces of the Red Army border guards and the NKVD started trading shots across the frontier as early as June 1935. The battles at Nomonhan in the summer of 1939 were the climax of years of aggressive actions by Kwantung Army units essentially out of control of the IJA General Staff. In fairness though, it is doubtful that the Soviets were entirely innocent victims in some of the clashes.

The bloody nose administered by Zhukov on the Khalkin Gol left a huge impression on the Japanese high command and drove both a military and political imperative to keep the Soviet Union neutral at all costs.

Always found it a bit odd that, after Corregidor, American ground forces defeated the Japanese in virtually every engagement but the senior Japanese generals were openly contemptuous of the United State's fighting ability. Yet the Russian's, whom were defeated time and again in 1904-05 were seemingly held in fear and awe after the disaster at Nomonhan by these very same officers.

Excellent English language book on the subject is Nomonhan; Japan against Russia, 1939 by Alvin Coox.

That was precisely my point.:up: The Japanese learned that the Soviet army was a force to be reckoned with and, in the best interest of their immediate objectives, one to avoid. As far as the Japanese deprecating US soldiers as opposed to the Soviets, I think that had more to do with the proximity of the Soviet's resources to their own, and to avoid any more non-sanctioned attacks upon them by over-zealous commanders.

It's amazing really isn't it?
They judged the US as not having the will or ability to fight, and didn't really change their view as the war progressed, despite the overwhelming evidence to the contrary.

There was a "special circumstances" clause to that which invoked a deep passion set aside just for US.

Would be interesting to get an idea of what these were.

As a general rule Warrior cultures do not generally deal with decisive defeat too well and indulge in all sorts of collective delusions to explain it away. That, or the leadership folds up and collapses when their mythological bubble bursts.

As Sergei points out they were defeated time and again by the American's and had plenty of combat evidence in the form of repeated disasters that their contempt for the U.S. forces was unjustified and yet overall, the IJA leadership revelled in that contempt*. Yet the Red Army beat them once before the battles in August of 1945 and like a school yard bully, the generals were terrified of Ivan.

Perhaps as pointed out above, it was something to do with proximity of the Soviet Union or maybe some cultural component that I'm missing. One thing is for sure, the Japanese armies in Manchuria collapsed almost completely under the Soviet offensive, shedding prisoners by the tens of thousands and vast territories in an entirely conventional rout of epic proportions. The exact military opposite of the American experiance on Okinawa only a few months before.

Wonder if the IJA had actually reached their breaking point at Okinawa and were internally ripe for disintegration in spite of bamboo spears and an Army of 100-Million Bayonets of General Staff propaganda.

Also wonder why the O.P. hasn't bothered to pop in to see what he started.

Edit: explanetory note added.

* Note: This apperant contempt for American arms was not just rhetoric, it actually shaped Imperial strategic operations and so was in all likelyhood sincerely held as true. Likewise fear of the Red Army also shaped strategic thinking and so also must have been founded in the worldview of the Imperial leadership. And yet the German experiance in 1941-42 and their own experiances in '42-43 did nothing to modify their dogma. Odd indeed.

Basically, in the PTO things went very well for the Japanese only during the phase of operations that was meticulously planned before hostilities.

Once they started to have to extemporize, things went down the crapper.

IMHO, it's odd given the sheer audacity of the initial expansion that their commanders in the field were so very conservative at the sharp end.

Partially it was realism, I suppose. the inital advance went so well precisely because they did stick to the plan. In some cases (Malaya, for example) they actually did everything right confronted with mistakes by the enemy. Again, as long as it was going their way.

They seemed to systemically be incapable of dealing with setbacks, however. Perhaps that goes to the very plan to start with. They sort of assumed anyone dealt the setbacks we were confronted with would be paralyzed.

Odd.

At the start of the war the Japanese knew exactly what they needed to do the territories they needed to gain so on and so forth so they had been planning this action for several years.

Then take into account that they where obviously observing what they could about each possible enemy in Asia its military capabilities in the region and they also had to know the general prejudices towards them many truly believed that Japanese where near sighted and that their bodies where not capable handling advanced maneuvers in an aircraft there was a huge and foolish belief that the Japanese where inferior from a military standpoint and that was a very foolish and costly mistake and it always is such a thing to underestimate your enemy or potential enemy.I guess Japan just felt very confident at the start of the war and some high ranking leaders never lost that feeling.

The Japanese where very keen observers of other nations military success they where very impressed with the Royal Navy raid on the Italian Naval base in Taranto.And they also changed their tactics as the war progressed they learned to build complex very well inter connected defenses rather than the earlier war tactics that they had on Guadalcanal. A very good book that can give you a great impression of their later war tactics is "With the Old Breed" by E.B. Sledge himself a US Marine.

As to the Japanese failure to deal with sets backs who knows but I believe it can partly be blamed on the bitter rivalry between the IJA and the IJN.One could not look weak in front of the other needless to say they had a lot of problems and not very many real solutions beyond by the later part of the war making each gain of land by the US so costly that eventually a peace treaty seem a better option and this was not overly unrealistic though it did not work out that way in the end.

the Japanese army sucked in comparison is what i meant. and there's things called airfields that are set up on land and let airplanes fly off of it. the Germans came DAM close to beating the Russians. if they had to fight a 2 front war it would've most likely finished them. the Japanese would either capture soviet airfields or build their own. the Japanese may have been aggressive, but they were a poor fighting force in terms of their army in comparison with others. the Russians also had control of very rich oil reservoirs. The Russians won mainly because of numbers. they had the AWESOME PPSH and their tanks could easily be manufactured and could take on the Germans tanks. They may have had good equipment and numbers, but yet they still lost 25 MILLION soldiers alone.

the REAL challenge was taking out Britain. the royal navy was unstoppable. the Germans couldnt defeat them, the Italians couldnt either. however i often wonder what would happen if the royal navy and the Japanese navy clashed. disregarding air cover i wonder who wouldve won a ship vs ship cannon battle.

The USSR actually lost in the region of 8-10 million military casualties.
That's still a hell of a lot though.

oops. that was all military personnel of all countries in the war. still the russians shoudntve lost that many.

Sure, Japanese defensive tactics improved, but to what end? They lost every battle. Winning is the only thing that matters. So all that effort was for nothing.

The Axis in general failed in the one real test of professional military effort. The backbone without which nothing else matters. Tactics? Bah.

LOGISTICS.

Germans sucked at it, so did the Japanese. In their initial assaults, both powers did well because they were "the firstest with the mostest." They covered for their abysmal logistical capability with the luxury of being able to load the game board before hostilities. Once the fight was on, they had to have follow up, and depth in logistics. Both Germany and Japan failed utterly in this respect.

Look at Stalingrad. The entire LW bent its will to air supply of the "kessel." They needed something like 700 tons a day to just keep up. They were incapable of this. The 5th AF built and supplied airbases in NG entirely by air, and they were a very poor stepchild of an AF. Heck, the initial invasion might have gotten Moscow with any sort of modern logistics (they still used HORSES for christ's sake, lol)—many of the trucks used on the Eastern Front were captured from France.

In the PTO, the japanese started with a deficit in shipping. They conscripted able-bodied men willy nilly, and decimated the stevedores, and other merchant marine related workers. As a result, loading and unloading was crippled. One ship making three trips instead of two in a given time period is the same as have 1/3 more ships. One ship making 1 trip instead of 3 because of inefficiency, is like have 1/3 as many ships as you actually have.

This is why the USN submarines (and anti-shipping aircraft, both Navy and USAAF) were so terribly effective. They hit the most critical element of the japanese military very hard, and it was teetering to begin with.