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Chapter Seven: The End of 1941
As 1941 drew to a close, several events of significance occurred which shall be discussed in a single chapter dedicated to the final months of the year.

The first of these came as a direct result of Tannenbaum, and the Nazi conquest of Switzerland. The fact that Switzerland had declared neutrality upon the outbreak of the war in 1939 and had done little to provoke Germany sent shudders down the spines of the other neutral nations of Europe – it was clear that neutrality would not protect them from the Wehrmacht, and that waiting for the war to come to a close was simply no longer an option. And so, the remaining neutral European nations – Portugal, Sweden, Ireland, and Spain – began mobilising their armed forces in preparation for a possible incursion by the German military (although, in the case of Ireland, many Irish soldiers had already mobilised themselves and left to volunteer in the British Army - consequently, when de Valera ordered the mobilisation of Irish forces to take place, he found the Irish Army rather bare).
The second event came from beyond Europe in East Asia.

It is at this point, at the end of 1941, that a general overview can be provided of the situation in East Asia, and the United States’ attitude towards it – for, while the Second World War was raging in Europe, the Second Sino-Japanese War was also taking place. The war began in July 1937, as Japan launched a full-scale invasion of China, hoping to conquer the nation and solidify Japanese dominance in East Asia. Although the war initially saw Japanese advances deep into Chinese territory, it eventually devolved into a brutal war of attrition, characterised by atrocities such as the Rape of Nanking.

Yet, by 1941, Japan faced a new problem – the international community’s reaction to their actions. After Japanese troops invaded French Indochina in September 1940, the United States, wary of Japanese actions, imposed an oil embargo on Japan in August 1941, so as to put pressure on the Japanese Government to withdraw from Indochina and cease its conflict with China. The US embargo soon had its intended effect, as Japanese oil supplies, which had already been running low, soon began to become scarcer, and many in the Japanese Military began to speculate on drastic action to secure oil – namely, attacking the US and the Allies to secure oil in the Dutch East Indies. Eventually, Japan began preparing for an attack on the US Pacific Fleet at Pearl Harbour so as to force a war between them and the Allies. Yet, in October 1941, an event occurred in northern China which changed the dynamic of East Asian affairs entirely.

In October, civilians in the Liaoning province of Manchuria noticed a suspicious liquid bubbling above the surface in several areas – initially the people who discovered this liquid were reluctant to inform anyone else, yet eventually (how exactly has since been lost to history) authorities in Manchukuo learnt of the discovery, and, soon enough, geologists were deployed from Japan to investigate the ‘liquid’ discovered in Manchuria. Several tests were conducted, and it quickly became clear to Japan that oil had been discovered in Liaoning [1]. By November, equipment had arrived in Liaoning to start the drilling of the oil, and soon enough the long process of extracting oil began, with oil reaching Japan in earnest in 1945.

Historians have emphasised the discovery of oil in Liaoning for a variety of reasons – yet the most important was that it enabled Japan to successfully escape the US oil embargo, and therefore led to the abandonment of Japanese plans for an attack on the US. Although supplies of other resources Japan lacked as a result of other embargoes, such as scrap materials, remained scarce, the discovery of oil was seen by the Japanese Government as enough, for the time being, to turn its attention away from war with the US. Meanwhile, Japan was able to solve its shortage of rubber, another precious resource made sparse by the embargoes, by pressuring Thailand, a generally pro-Japanese nation, to declare war on China in February 1942, thereby allowing the Japanese to gain access to rubber from Thailand. And so, no conflict came between the US and Japan at the end of 1941, and for the time being the two remained hostile to one another, albeit at peace.

Yet for how long?

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[1] Our timeline’s Liaohe Oil Field.

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