The
@Nell_Lucifer &
@Lalli Japan goes north before going south scenario - continued-
By July 4th 1942, Japan finds itself about two weeks into war with the Soviet Union with no notable territorial gains to show for it and a comprehensive western embargo imposed. It’s operations have dropped tons of ordnance on Soviet troops, sunk a multitude of Soviet Pacific fleet vessels, downed numerous Soviet aircraft, and mined Soviet Pacific ports. Most importantly, they have cut off shipping to the Soviet Pacific coast by driving away neutral shipping and attriting Soviet shipping.
Soviet troops in the fortified border regions put up a stubborn defense, but have little mobility for any counter-attacks in depth. Japanese airstrikes also impede lateral traffic along the Trans-Siberian Railroad where it is adjacent to the Manchukuo border.
The Soviet Stavka, simultaneously facing a breach of their southern front in the Donbass and northern Caucasus, is hard pressed to regain the initiative against both the German-led European Axis and the Japanese invaders at this time.
However, Stalin and Stavka have little problem reaching consensus that the priority for resources must remain the European front, first, last and always, to protect and buffer not only the capital, but the mineral and agriculturally rich step regions and the roads to control Soviet oil production at Grozny and Baku in the Caucasus. Certainly all resources and reinforcements from the Soviet Union west of the Yenisei and possibly Lena rivers, and all incoming Lend-Lease resources coming in from the northern Murmansk run and the Persian Gulf route must be allocated to the European front, with Far Eastern and Mongolian forces only subsisting on their local and regional resource bases.
The loss of Pacific Lend-Lease however creates immediate bottlenecks nationwide in the supply of food and POL. Effects are nationwide, but the effects are more acutely felt in food deficit regions like the Far East and interior Arctic.
Fortunately for the Soviets, for the first several weeks of their war with Japan, the Japanese are not making the deep territorial advances and troop encirclements the Germans are in the west, and the Japanese are facing facing heavy casualties from Soviet infantry amply backed by heavy artillery, armor and air forces.
However, the Soviet forces are facing heavy losses also, and theirs are irreplaceable.
In reaction to their strained position, the Soviets are practically screaming at their Chinese Communist comrades to initiate all-out divisional, brigade, and army level assaults on Japanese forces to divert their attention back to North China.
Mao declines to follow Moscow’s plainly suicidal directives for frontal offensives, but does increase the visibility and profile of guerrilla attacks and political organizing behind Japanese lines. The Japanese build-up and concentration for initial offensives from Manchukuo into the Soviet Far East and Mongolia did cause the Japanese to thin some of their lines and patrols in northern China, especially the hinterland, and the Chinese Communists take full advantage to expand their base areas and defeat, plunder, and subvert exposed puppet regime troops.
Slowly at first in the summer of 1942, but more rapidly as the seasons change to autumn and winter, the Manchukuo-Mongolia-Far East front becomes an ever greater troop suck for the Japanese, forcing even more troop transfers from the Chinese garrisons, allowing the Chinese Communists to fill more of the vacuum and undertake ever bolder attacks.
A similar process starts in Central and Southern China. The USSR is encouraging Chiang Kai-shek to mount full-throated attacks against Japanese garrisons in the Yangtze valley cities. Chiang is not so reckless to bet the farm on all or nothing assaults, but does take advantage of breathing space from Japanese troop transfers and reduced pressure to mount local counterattacks, step up guerrilla operations, and position forces to menace and harass the Japanese in a Fabian tactical manner.
The Navy and its air arm supports the anti-Soviet operations by crushing the Soviet Pacific fleet and with landing operations to help clean up Sakhalin, land on the opposing shore, and seize parts of Kamchatka. It masters its opponents at sea, but suffers some unwelcome pilot and aircraft and SNLF losses to Soviet ground and air forces.
Overall, this Strike North campaign is a strategic nightmare for the Japanese Navy, resulting almost immediately in an end to foreign petroleum imports, and calls for support to the Army led strategy with some depleting pressures on the naval oil reserve, and the prospect, for as long as the Soviet and Chinese wars continue, of having the Navy’s air assets commandeered to reinforce the Army’s mainland successes or redeem their mainland failures.
By early August, the IJN Fleet (majority) faction along with the remains of the Army strike south faction send memorials to Cabinet, and Privy Council and throne warning that Japan must strike south within 90 days to seize the oil of the Dutch East Indies and Borneo, or Japan’s naval autonomy will be lost forever - unless Japan can restore international oil supplies by diplomacy.
The government insists on pursuing a diplomatic track before committing irrevocably to war, but the government concedes to a timetable.
The IJN plan for the strike south prioritizes in sequence as strike south from Taiwan, Hainan, the Spratlys and the mandated islands onto the Philippines, Guam, and the eastern half of the Dutch East Indies and northern Borneo. The immediate follow on objectives are the remaining western islands of the Dutch East Indies, Singapore, Malaya, the Bismarcks, Solomons, and Papua New Guinea.
IJN logic is that the Philippines are an essential target, as they sit astride the main shipping lane between the DEI and Japan. Although the western DEI are more petroleum rich, the eastern and central DEI are more geographically accessible by short leaps accessible to land-based Japanese AirPower operating from Japan’s mandated islands and Taiwan. Captured forward airfields will have to be used to extend Japanese land-based air power support and then the occupation as quickly as possible to the western DEI. This is where the lack of prior occupation of French Indochina hurts Japanese ability to quickly power project by a western prong to Malaya, the Kra Isthmus, and Borneo.
The Japanese, as a tertiary objective, after securing the DEI and Malaya, hope their defeats of the American Asiatic Fleet and British Far Eastern fleet will intimidate the Vichy French authorities into permitting Japanese occupation and transit rights. [The maximum concession the French have been willing to yield from 1940-1942 has been the cessation of ground and sea traffic to China, but not basing Japanese forces], and inspire Thailand to ally with Japan and support further operations against British Burma and India.
However, given existing Japanese commitments in China, and their massive ground and air commitment on the anti-Soviet, anti-Mongolian front in 1942, and the requirements to reducing the increasingly strong US Philippine garrison and Philippine Commonwealth Army, Japan simply has no Army Divisions, air groups, or Special Naval Landing Forces left over to mount a credible invasion threat of French Indochina or anyplace in mainland Southeast Asia at the same time, and has to trust in Vichy French Indochina’s neutrality at the outset of its assault on the ABDA powers.
Admiral Yamamoto insists that the the strike south for the Indies and PI coincide with a disarming first strike against the US fleet at Pearl Harbor.
As Japanese-US diplomacy fails, Japan strikes Pearl Harbor, the Philippines, DEI, Hong Kong, on the first Sunday of November 1942.
…Meanwhile, on the North African front, the British 8th Army has spent the time period between June 1942 and November 1942 dueling with Axis forces between Tobruk and Tripoli in Libya, steadily gaining a materiel and air advantage while catching up with the Axis in tactical proficiency.
The closure of Pacific Lend-Lease to the Soviet Union also raises the priority of improving the infrastructure for Persian Gulf Lend Lease for all the Allied powers. The British, with American engineering assistance, boost port, road, and rail construction in Iraq and Iran to supply the Soviet Union via Baku and the Caspian Sea. To protect this endangered investment as the Axis Case Blue offensive aimed at the Caucasus unfolds, the British even detach some fighter formations to participate in the air defense of Soviet oilfields in the Caucasus, much like in 1941 they had dispatched a fighter group to northern Russia. In this June through November 1942 timeframe, the absence of an active British fighting front in the Far East enables the British focus on the Middle East-North Africa and Atlantic theaters. Nevertheless, Japanese entry into the war against the USSR, and the western program of sanctions against Japan, do compel British imperial forces to reinforce somewhat in the Far East and raise their alert levels from July onward.
…Meanwhile back again on Soviet battlefronts…
Japanese persistence, and attrition of Soviet forces protecting the border regions finally begins to tell, and Soviet forces need to make major retrenchments in the face of Japanese advances in the Far East. By the beginning of August, all Soviet guns in Vladivostok are silenced. By August 15th, all Sakhalin is in Japanese hands. By the end of August, all of the Kamchatka peninsula and primorsky krai/maritime province have been occupied by the Japanese, and the integrity of the Manchukuo frontier has been restored along the entire Amur. By September 15th, Japanese forces occupy Soviet outer Manchuria up to the Stanovoy mountains, reducing Soviet resistance to the south to isolated pockets. The remainder of the fighting year in northeast Asia through December 15th is consumed with Japanese pushes to occupies the Chita and Irkutsk and southern Buryatia regions, east of Lake Baikal, stabilize western Manchukuo, and occupy eastern Outer Mongolia. These operations burn through much of the IJA’s fuel reserves and vehicles and pull in mobile forces and air support from field armies in China. As the season goes on, Japanese reliance on human and animal power for mobility over machine and vehicle power increases. There is significant material want and starvation on both sides of the line here, but it is somewhat more catastrophic for the Soviets and Mongolians who don’t have as many nearby agriculturally productive Chinese and Korean peasants to skim sustenance off of.
Demand for Arctic bushmeat is devastating to many Arctic megafauna and indigenous cultures.
In Europe, Nazi spearheads approach perilously close to Grozny and the Caucasus mountains, and Nazi troops occupy Stalingrad, a point that Hitler fixates upon. The Nazis push the Soviets aside from their highest priority objectives, but the Soviets remain an important force in being. Meanwhile, the Soviet hold over the Moscow sector remains secure.
Lend-Lease imports absorbed up through 22 June 1942, and internal production, sustain Soviet resistance through the summer and autumn combat season, but rations and fuel supplies are shortened across the board compared with OTL by November 1942. Somewhat greater investment in the Persian Gulf Lend-Lease will start to help eventually, but not really until some point in 1943.
Lower fuel reserves, and a hungrier, less productive factory workforce makes it take longer for the Soviets to prepare for and ultimately launch their counteroffensive around Stalingrad.
Into this mix comes the Japanese strike on the US fleet at Pearl Harbor, and strike on insular Southeast Asia, commencing from early November, 1942. This diverts multiple IJA and IJN air groups from pressing the offensive in the Soviet Far East and eastern Siberia. It also brings Japan immediately to war with the US, UK, Netherlands, and Australia.
Already annoyed increasingly brazen American convoys all the way to Ireland and antisubmarine patrols, Hitler is happy to hear of the initial American setbacks and happy to have the Japanese fleet engaged on his side.
Hitler feels liberated and finally able to unleash his U Boats for unrestricted operations across the Atlantic and declares war on the USA.
The Japanese and German attacks and declarations of war have a rally around the flag effect which limits the Democrats midterm election losses.
The Japanese assault on Pearl Harbor is detected by radar only around the final hour of approach. In the ensuing battle, a majority of the US Pacific battle line of battleships and carriers is sunk or heavily damaged. Some of the carriers and battleships are underway and sunk a short distance outside the harbor, other are sunk in the harbor, but engage in the fight with battle stations manned. There is heavy attrition of US Army and Naval air squadrons at Pearl both in combat and of aircraft still on the ground. However, the limited warning and manning of battle stations also causes substantial damage to the first wave of Japanese attacking aircraft and forces the Japanese to abandon a second wave of attacks. None of the Japanese flattops themselves are sunk or directly engaged by US ships or aircraft, despite some attempted hunting by US subs and air patrols.
In the Philippines, the Japanese attacks, to the chagrin of Washington, destroy much of US Far East air force on the ground, and these forces miss the opportunity to preemptively attack Japanese air forces massing in Taiwan.
The Japanese take advantage of the dispersed geography of the Philippines to land at multiple points throughout the archipelago, including points on Luzon and Mindanao.
MacArthur’s decision to defend at the beaches instead of Corregidor is disastrous for the defense of Luzon.
The Japanese are unmistakably ensconced in the Philippines two weeks into November, with the Japanese gaining control of ports and airfields and having largely chased off the Asiatic fleet before Christmas 1942. The endgame of the final defeat and surrender of the besieged and starved defenders of Corregidor and Bataan doesn’t finish until May 1943, but in any case, from the beginning, the Allies acknowledged sending a relief fleet, with a proper fleet train and logistics, was not going to be possible.
The Japanese occupation of most eastern and central Dutch East East Indies proceeds through December. Dutch and Australian resistance is stronger and longer in Timor. Initial Japanese SNLF leaps and and invasions of points in Java, southern Borneo Kalimantan, and Sumatra, get underway in December as well.
[edited for format 3/22/2024]
——to be continued——-
