Well in that case I'm guessing that the ox cart section of the line was 'not necessarily to Japan's advantage'.

Man, that's the most delicate and roundabout way of saying 'we lost' I ever did hear.

I take that as a reasonable source on the oxen.

And it certainly true that Japan was never able to produce enough aircraft to meet demand.

Even tough a lot of Japanese pilots did die there where several very skilled ones that lived through the entire war like Saburo Saki he actually was not a bad guy really either he actually once observed a cargo plane that appeared to have a women abroad it so he flew in to look and there was so he deiced not to allow his flight to attack the plane. Another time post war i guess in the 80's or 90's he sent a letter to the Australian government explaining the actions of a RAAF Hudson and the pilot of this plane Warren F. Cowan turned and faced Saki and seven other Zeros head on and actually caused confusion amongst the Japanese until Saki shot him down Saki felt that Cowan was worthy of being rewarded for his actions but wrote the letter when he found the man had not and they never did award any metals despite Sakis letter.Saki was also an NCO not an officer and spent as much time fighting the poor treatment of enlisted men as he did the Allies which was another underlying problem in the Japanese military.

Maybe the OP is sitting there in shock thinking "What have I created?":haha:

Production capacity?
Other "products" and services?
Alternative roots? Shipping out he disassembled planes via train or ship?
And above all what's the payload of a japanese ox cart?
Having worked in factories I will not believe that they would tolerate a permanent "lag" between production capacity and delivery rates via those god damn cows! :D

Not wanting to dispute you in any way tater... just ... something doesn't click ... :hmmm:


.

All of this is Very true. While thw wildcat didnt have better capabilities, it made up for it with being heavily armored and using tactics. without self sealing fuel tanks and NO armor the zero might as well been a flying match. one quick strafe and it burst into flames and killed the skilled pilots.

Don't forget as well that Japan could not produce 115/145LL AVGAS and only very limited quantities of military grade 91/96LL AVGAS (early in the war) and so was unable to match the west in aircraft engine power. This is why they could never reliably intercept the B-29's when they operated at high altitudes and one of the factors that allowed the USAAF to strip the turrets and associated defensive gear off the Silverplate Superfortresses used to drop the Bomb.

In 1941 Japan's GDP was less than 18% of the United States and the US economy was still operating at less than 80% capacity when Pearl Harbor was bombed. They realistcally never had a chance and chose war as their foreign policy choice since their warrior code would not allow for compromise.

There is a solid trend which echos throughout history that when warriors meet soldiers, warriors lose. For sure they'll score a few wins and maybe even provoke a disaster or two, but the overwhelming results of warrior societies fighting professional military's has ultimately been defeat and destruction of the warrior cult. Warrior cultures are inherently vulnerable because they place the highest premium on individual excellence rather than teamwork and mundane aspects of warfare like mass-production economies, logistics and technical innovation. The culture of Bushido doomed Japan.

:yep:

That's why the Romans did so well. They figured how to fight as a army, not as a group of champions.

Actually Steve you can go back even further, past the Spartan Army conquoring and enslaving the warrior tribes of Messenia and before that Darius I destroying the warrior city states of Mesopotamia with the perhaps the world's first conscripted regular army.

No doubt someone will come by and declare that Bushido's superiority in the Russo-Japanese War 1904-05 demonstrates the flaw in the argument but this war actually proves my point. Although Japan was fairly militarized in 1904, the cult of the Emperor worship was actually in its infancy. The military professionals in command of the Combined Fleet and Imperial Army in 1904 were largely foreign trained and brutally professional, as good as any produced in the West because they were inculcated in Western military thought. They were also far more apolitical and less inclined to hamstring the civilian government to get their way. The conscript soldiers and volunteer sailors operated in a highly discplined environment but corporal punishment was minimal. The Emperor was certainly revered but not specifically worshiped. The Japanese took thousands of Russian prisoners of war and there is no evidence of any abuse whatsoever.

Fast forward to 1935, discipline is now savage, doctrine has become dogma and innovation difficult to introduce unless it can conform to the mystical Way of the Warrior ethos. Junior officers murder politicians and their own superiors as secret societies flourish in an atmosphere of individuality and political intrigue. Unlike 1904 Officers could no longer come from middle class stock and required at least some Samurai heritage. The professional European style military imbued with the unique strengths provided by Japanese culture that thrashed the Czar's troops had taken a philosophical return to the 16th Century when the power of the Shogun ended all technical development to preserve the Samurai class from the scourge of firearms.

From, "The Eagle And The Rising Sun", an excerpt that explains quite a bit about the Japanese position upon entering the war. Unfortunately, it takes up a couple of pages but, it's very insightful.

"Japan's senior military officers and political advisors could have saved all the trouble they were about to heap upon themselves, and indeed on much of the world, simply by having asked a few elementary questions:

1. For such massive conquests, where were they to find enough educated men in Japan to provide the officers that this expanded military would require, not to mention the troops to fill th ranks? As early as 1937, before the new navy had begun to add hundreds of new ships, that service lacked 1, 021 officers. The situation for the much larger army was even more severe.
2. Preparations for the war anticipated with the Soviet Union or the United States and Great Britain (for the Japanese still failed to recognize a full-scale war with China) required the stockpiling of oil and the continuing of the same effort for scrap iron, iron ore, and coal. If coal and iron ore deposits available in China and Manchuria were sufficient, transport vessels to haul them were not, and Japan was always to suffer a shortage of shipping, including the transports needed for troops during the war. As for scrap metal, most of that had been coming from the United States, and when tensions reached a certain level, an American boycott would halt the flow overnight. This was a constant worry for Hirohito, who discussed it on several occasions.
3. Vast reserves of aviation and diesel fuel had to be prepared, sufficient to meet the needs of warships, the merchant marines, and warplanes. (This excluded the consideration of the needs of industry.) Eighty to 90 percent of all Japanese aviation fuel and oil now came from the United States. Once that source was cut off, what was Japan to do? As early as the mid-1930s petroleum products, and the lack thereof, became the navy's most nagging logistical problem. It is not that the chiefs of the Japanese navy had over-looked the necessity of anticipating oil reserves for a growing navy, they simply miscalculated the extent of the reserves needed, and then how to top them up. By 1936, the Imperial Japanese Navy was importing 1.2 million tons of oil a year and would soon have 3.5 million tons stockpiled, but was already burning 800,000 tons a year. And this was before the war in China had escalated. The aircraft that were to play such a dominant role in that war would consume large amounts of 100-octane gasoline, which would require emergency imports of as much as 43,000 additional tons of this fuel from America in 1938.
When the United States began restricting high-octane aviation fuel after 1939, the enormity of their future problems began to dawn on the leaders of the Japanese navy's planning department. The navy scrambled to stockpile even more petroleum products, and by December 1, 1941, the country as a whole would have 6.5 million tons of petroleum reserves for all users. The navy's share of those reserves would meet it's requirements (for ships and planes) for a two year period. This was a maximum storage figure, one that was going to drop rapidly thereafter. By 1940, the navy would be consuming one quarter of all the petroleum used in the whole of Japan. Although the country possessed 300,000 tons of oil tanker capacity, the navy alone required 270,000 tons of that. The army and industry had somehow to make do with a mere 30,000 tons, an utter impossibility.
In August 1940, senior naval officers would convene another emergency meeting when they came to the conclusion that at the current rate, Japan could not fight for more than another twelve months, and the war with the United States, anticipated in it's 1936 policy document, had not even begun. Once a complete cutoff of all American oil was in effect, Japan would have to seize the massive oil reserves in the Dutch East Indies and British North Borneo. As they were to discover by 1943, however, that did not quite work out as expected, due to the heavy toll of oil tankers sunk by American submarines. The result was that by 1943, the Japanese Fleet would have lost considerable strategic and tactical maneuverability when it found itself 'tethered to it's Southeast Asia oil spigot'.
Thus, ironically, by 1941 oil would prove to be 'the single most important reason for undertaking the risk of war'. The Japanese Navy reckoned that at any single major battle at sea it would be consuming a maximum of 500,000 tons of fuel. But three major battles--Midway, the Philippine Sea (the Marianas), and the battle of the Philippines--surpassed even that figure. All prewar navy calculations proved overly optimistic. So lacking in the strategic appreciation of petroleum and fuel were the Japanese planners that when Pearl Harbor was struck, they ignored and left untouched the U.S. Navy's huge, vulnerable oil and fuel storage depots. Within a matter of minutes Japanese bombers could have destroyed the U.S. Navy's entire oil reserves, thereby crippling all air and sea operations for months to come.
4. Japan's military would require enormous stockpiles of aluminum, especially for the manufacture of warplanes. These stockpiles did not exist now, nor would they in the future. And once hostilities began, where could Japan turn?
5. Spare parts for the army's many mechanized divisions and artillary would be needed, ditto for the warplanes and warships; but no sufficient provision was made for this. Stockpiles remained low or non-existent, which would compromise any major military operation in the future.
6. Apart from radio, modern electronics technology was lacking and not even considered a top priority by most of the Japanese military chiefs. In 1937, this was a very small, poorly developed industry in Japan, and thus proved quite incapable of providing for the country's military needs. New inventions, such as the various types of radar Britain was currently secretly developing, were not even taken into consideration. Only once war had begun with the United States would the japanese hastily send a team of scientists to the Third Reich for the basic instructions on that project, which the Germans were not altogether happy about revealing even to an ally. When the first elementary radar was eventually installed in wartime Japan, there were very few units available, and they were grossly inferior to the gradually more sophisticated radar employed by the Americans and the Royal Navy.
These are but a few examples of the most elementary questions that serious professional military officers should have been considering. After even a single day's study, they would have realized that the war they were soon expecting to launch with so much bravado would never be feasible, or at least, not for decades to come.
:03:
Kind of makes one wonder why they ever went to war in the first place, don't it? Very thought provoking facts, wouldn't you say?:yep:

Combined Fleet Decoded offers some insights into the IGHQ before the war. They felt that they only had a 10% chance to win the war before they started, with a (their own words) "90% chance of national death."

They figured 10% was good odds, apparently.

Bottom line is that they would not back down in China, so in that sense they were compelled to go to war.

The OP notion, that an alternate strategy might have proved more successful is I think a good one. Given the requirement (in their own eyes) to secure oil (the NEI), how could they do this and have a better than 90% chance of "national death?"

The preferred grand strategy, IMHO, would be to feed on anti-colonial feeling, and establish friendly countries that way. At the same time, they might have changed the look of their activities in China. Fight a PR war. Make themselves as protectors of local nationalism vs European kingdoms (playing on US feelings regarding self-determination vs royalty).

It could have been done, I think.

I would agree with this with the caveat that they would have had to given up in China, completely and unambiguously. Chang had too many highly placed friends in America and after the bombing of USS Panay and the Rape of Nanking, Japan's motives and propaganda spin was on the rocks in Washington. It would take more that a makeover to make the U.S. look the other way. They had to leave, period.

They probably could have maintained the status quo in Manchuoko but they would have had to give up mainland China to keep America sweet. Dropping out of the Axis would have probably helped relations with the US and Soviet Union both. Ultimately being a member of the Axis and Comintern hurt Japan far more than it helped. Had they concentrated on building their Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere on the ashes of European colonialism they might just have made a go of it.

No American president would send the boys off to fight in order to save British India for Britain or the Netherland's East Indies for the Dutch.

America herself showed in 1917-18 that one could fight as a co-belligerant without being an ally so direct military support to end percieved injustices in the colonial territories might have just been sold to Uncle Sam provided the stink of Nazism and Fascism wasn't detectable.

The generals had to fight for cultural reasons however and considering a 90% chance of defeat an acceptable risk shows just how blind to reality Bushido had made them. Realistically not even Harry Turtledove could script a scenario where Japan and the USA don't go to war in the early 1940's.

There was no military solution to Japan's strategic situation in 1941 as shown by its post-war metamorphosus into an economic superpower. The generals and admirals were just too brainwashed to see this.

I agree, it's amazingly unlikely, and they'd need to convince the IJA to seriously curtail China.

I think that would've been difficult for them to do, even it they did avoid joining the Axis. They couldn't leave China because, besides the mineral resources they so desperately needed, they had to have the ports and coastal bases necessary to protect the vital shipping lanes from the Dutch East Indies and British North Borneo. There's no way the allied powers would overlook the fall of these rich petroleum resources and the Japanese were going to try to take them, come hell or high water. They knew Britain would fight to prevent this and that, according to the way things were going in Europe, America would eventually be drawn into war on the British side. They couldn't afford to overlook that eventuality, let alone possibility. That's why the Philippines were destined to fall too.

Actually it would have been impossible I believe because the Japanese Army would never give up the territorial gains in China. Also the continued existance and Japanese dominion over Manchuoko would need to have been guarenteed.

Leaving China with a peace that establishes economic primacy for Japan would have secured these resources (most of which were already secure in their puppet state of Manchuoko anyway). If Japan ceased to be a threat to American interests and even facilitated American businesses at exploiting a now peaceful China, exactly what are the British and the Dutch government in exile going to do about it? Remember America is still neutral with her attention focused on Hitler and congressional approval required to make war.

Although the Philippines was a colony in all but name, the Japanese proved to be a pragmatic enough peoples to let this little contradiction slip through the cracks, at least temporarily. A gentler hand in French Indochina leading to independence under a Japanese hegemony followed by active subversion of colonial rule in the British and Dutch colonies and the Japanese cease to be aggressors and become agents of poltical and economic freedom for the poor oppressed colonials while growing filthy rich in the process.

Japan's leaders were incapable of seeing past their sword tips, far better to fight a war of aggression they knew they could not win.

Well said, randomizer, I agree completely.

That was the gist of my statement way up the thread that it would require a cultural change starting with the Meiji Restoration. They really did set themselves on a path to extreme militarism that proved to be impossible to get off of (even though there were certainly many who opposed the militarism).

I think the only problem here would be to convince these colonies that Japan was any better than their current master.I think many Asians looked at China and thought "Well I don't like being under British (example) rule but those Japanese don't seem any better they seem worse.

There may be others but the only notable nation to side with Japan in Asia willingly of the top of my head was Thailand of course this nation was under their own control.Still I think many of the nations under Brit and Dutch rule felt by and large that being in Japans pocket was of no benefit.Of course the Filipinos knew that the US was going to turn over their nation to full Filipino rule with in the next decade or so in the 30s.Also many true nationalists and patriots prefer to take their nation back as much as possible on their own.

I know that there was a number of Indians who sided with the Japanese but a far larger amount sided with the Brits though they obviously knew of the other option.

P.S. @ WernherVonTrapp ha ha wild night in Bangkok you savage!:har: