As the title says. The challenge is to have the Mongol invasions of Japan succeed.
During their first attempt they did manage to land , but the Japanese did a primitive form of human wave attacks and drove them back.
Yeah , Japan swarmed the shit out of them on land that's why. The Japanese form of warfare was no match for the Mongols tactics so they just threw everyone at them until the Mongols left.RGB;7564245[B said:]They landed in one single location and were unable to use their mobility to any great extent, and they ran out of arrows. [/B]Their navy also arrived piecemeal so that the landing was carried out before the forces were properly gathered, and then soon after they got assembled the autumn storms hit.
They had poor intelligence both by land and sea. I think that's the killer. Korean navy outclasses whatever Kamakura Japan can summon quite handily, Yuan troops are overall better both individually and in mass action. With good intelligence and supplies they could win.
Mongol invasions where they worked (lots of places) usually were the final act of several years of very thorough intelligence gathering and scouting and probing attacks. Japan was too isolated to allow that, so they rolled the dice.
I've always wondered why the Mongols didn't have good enough intelligence to know that it would be easier to attack Japan via Sakhalin and Hokkaido to Tohuku (Northern Honshu).
The Mongols could send an advance guard over the ice of the Tatar Strait (only 3 miles) to subdue the Ainu in Sakhalin and then across the Soya Strait (20 miles) which is also ice bound in winter) to HokkaidoThe main invasion force could move from what we now call Peter the Great Bay by what we now cal Vladivostok to Hakodate and Matsumae and then invade across the 30 mile Tsugaru Strait to land at Ssugaru, maybe with outlying forces landing at Akita and Hachinohe on either side, as opposed to a 200 mioe voyage from Korea to Kyushu. From there, it would be a matter of fighting one's way down the length of the Japanese Archipelago.
If the Japanese did manage to stop the Mongols or when, after a hundred or two hundred years the Japanese managed to drive the Mongols out of Japan, the Japanese would now have a healthy concern about Ezo (Hokkaido) and Sakherin that they never had before and feel a need to keep those islands and ver likely Wusuri, the adjoining mainland, at least to the Black dragon River, under Japanese control--and maybe the Kuril Idlands to and even including Kamchatka as well.