A most interesting thread
 

I'm coming in late but have to agree with RR, CaptainHaplo and torplexed that

1. The Japanese were carried away with their early victories (just like the Germans) and expanded way beyond what they could defend.

2. Both countries threw away their original battle plans and decided they could beat the US just like they were doing with other lesser countries. They failed to see that the US had the resources to send 1000 plane bomber raids into both Germany and Japan. Neither side could imagine the shipbuilding capability of the US once it got started. The last US Task Force in 1945 covered over 90 square miles of ocean and the D-Day invasion had some 5,000 ships.

3. Neither of the Axis had the capability to change direction with new technology while the Allies constantly evolved with new weapons and tactics. The Germans were too late with the Type XXI, V1 and V2, and the Japanese's major superior weapons were the Zero and the Long Lance.

4. The Japanese samurai influence was not a good one for fighting a long term war. If you visit Guadacanal, Lei, Port Moresby, etc. their tactics were wrong, and threw away thousands of lives, as did Iwo Jima, Saipan, Okinawa.

There are two "what-if's" for Germany. These are what-if they had 300 U-Boats at the start of the war and , and what-if they had built the Type XXI, V1 and V2 in 1943. There are no offsetting what-if's for the Japanese other than what-if they hadn't bombed Pearl Harbor. Once they did that, their fate was sealed, just like Germany's was virtually sealed when they crossed the border into Russia.

I'm old enough to recall the troops coming home from both Europe and the Pacific and can remember them saying "We made fewer mistakes than they did. That's why we won." It suggests that our leadership at the higher levels made better decisions. Whether that is because we are democracies is a topic for future debate.

There really isn't much debate: We made better decisions than both Germany and Japan because for a large portion of the war, we were reading their mail.

This is most especially true from 1943 onward. It effected both tactical and strategic plans, both theater and conflict-wide, and it was what guided Roosevelt and Churchill in their prosecution of the war. There is even evidence that they invented a Soviet spy network specifically to feed ULTRA intelligence to Stalin in a way that it would be believed.

I guess I've never thought very highly of this idea that a dual German-Japanese assault would have neccessarily toppled the Soviet Union.

It would not have helped Germany that much if the Japanese had invaded the Soviet Far East because besides the port city of Vladivostok the Japanese had no where to go and would have had no resources with which to drive further west. The mostly horse drawn Japanese Army, was not equipped or trained in Arctic warfare and would have perished in the Siberian Lowlands in the winter when it gets 70-120 degrees below zero! The Russians could have easily limited their advance with minimal forces in such an environment even with all of the Siberian divisions called away to defend Moscow. (As it was they didn't send all of them west!) And in the summer it's a hellish hive of bugs.

Eastern Siberia back then was a mostly trackless wilderness supplied by one slender rail line with no large cities or sources of supply, it is not suited for modern war in 1941, and even now would be a logistical nightmare to keep an army supplied in. Japan was ill-equipped to fight in the sub-Arctic as their reckless invasion of the Aleutians demonstrated. Plus, Japan badly needed oil and it wasn't until well after the war that a booming oil and gas industry was developed in Siberia. Those factories that Stalin shipped east during Operation Barbarossa were mostly resettled near the Urals. That's about 2,000 miles of endless swamps, forests and rivers from the Manchurian border.

I have to agree that a third raid on Pearl Harbor would have been beneficial to the Japanese effort. However, though able to do a fair amount of damage, the carrier aircraft lacked the ability to permantently destroy the facilities IMHO. A carrier Air wing carried a far less bomb load than a few B-17's. Yes, blowing up the drydocks and oil facilities would have been good but they would have been repaired in short order. Japan did not have the resources, even if they took Midway, to conduct exetended opperations off Pearl Harbor. One also has to remember that the much of fleet that destroyed the Japanese in 1943-1944 was already ordered or being built by the time of Pearl Harbor. Had the Japanese destroyed the carriers that should have been in Pearl, won Coral Sea and Midway AND not lost a single Carrier, they still would have been blown away by the Armada that sallied forth in 1943-44.

Kevin

But the Japanese would have had more time to strengthen their positions. A retake by the Americans would have been a long lasting bloody nightmare, even with their superior naval forces.

One thing that you aren't considering is that the Japanese failed to destroy 140 million gallons of fuel sitting out in the open in tank farms.

That fuel would have been easy to destroy, and *VERY* hard to replace. It fueled the war in the Pacific on the American side for several months. If you take that out of the equation, then you have to bring tankers full of fuel to support the Navy at Pearl, or withdraw your fleet to the West Coast. Either way, you are going to have some major logistical nightmares.

It's actually kind of suprising that they Japanese didn't think to take that out in the first wave.

True, taking out the fuel would have been a good move. It would seem the Japanese only tended to focus on direct military targets, objectives and this worked to be VERY shortsigted. In reality the fuel was of probably more importance than the Battleships that they sank. An example of this mindset was in the engineering troops that the Japanese fielded as opposed to the US. In the Japanese army/navy the engineering troops were essentially slave labor troops that were deemed unfit for "real" military service. In the US, the Engineering corps were made up of professional engineers, overseeing trained construction troops. If I'm not wrong, the engineering units got one of the top picks on draftees. The difference this made was that the Japanese were barely able build a crude fighter strip after Months of work as opposed to the Army / Navy being able to get a fighter strip up in about a week and then expand that to a field able to handle bombers.

This aside, my point was that after Pearl Harbor, all the Japanese could do is prolong the inevitable. After Pearl, the US would have settled for nothing short of unconditional surrender. It would definately been a tougher go but the end would have been the same. Yes the Japanese would have had more time to prepare but you then have to remember that they had 2-3 years to prepare defences in the Islands near the home Islands as it was. Here is what I'm talking about, the US and Japan started roughly equal in carrier strength. By 1944 the Japanese had built and launched the following (and I'll include the Shinano)

1 Fleet Carrier (shinano)
5 Medium Carriers (Junyo, Hiyo, Taiho, Unryu, Amagi (1945), Katsuragi (1945))
5 Escort Carriers

The US on the other hand had built and launched:

12 Essex class Fleet Carriers
9 Independence Class Light Carriers
40+ Various Class Escort Carriers

So, even assuming that we lost all our carriers and they none in 1942 (REAL unlikely...) by 1944, the USN is still able to way outnumber the IJN.

Realistically the Japanese could not have expanded their perimeter much larger than they did. The lacked the manpower or logistical support to capture Pearl Harbor or Australia. Now they could have possibly capured Samoa and cut Australia off.

thanks,

Kevin

You know, it would have made for a much more interesting game if this "what-if" scenario had actually been made into a mod for SH4. Drag the thing out into a "you might win, you might lose" set-up instead of a "we know the USA wins, we just want to know if you'll survive to the end of it" situation.

Did I just come up with an idea for a mod? Possibly SH6? :p