AHC/WI: China Capitulates Early

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After the Marco Polo Bridge incident in 1937, Japan, really under the junta-like leadership of the IJA, declared war on China and invaded from their territories in Manchuria.

What followed was a 8 year long slog, with many key tactical victories over the Chinese forces but nothing decisive enough to win the war.

So from 1937 - 1941, what could the Japanese(IJA) have done differently to score a decisive victory in China and effectively knock them out?

What peace arrangement could be garnered, depending on your answer?

What would be the long term effects geo-politically, diplomatically?
 
After the Marco Polo Bridge incident in 1937, Japan, really under the junta-like leadership of the IJA, declared war on China and invaded from their territories in Manchuria.

What followed was a 8 year long slog, with many key tactical victories over the Chinese forces but nothing decisive enough to win the war.

So from 1937 - 1941, what could the Japanese(IJA) have done differently to score a decisive victory in China and effectively knock them out?

What peace arrangement could be garnered, depending on your answer?

What would be the long term effects geo-politically, diplomatically?

The Japanese treated the Chinese very like Whites treated American Indians. We'll take this land, you go over there. Oh. That land has something valuable, we'll take it, too.

Except where white incursion onto Indian land was spearheaded by farmers and prospectors, Japanese incursions were spearheaded by junior army officers.


There IS no possible 'peace arrangement', unfortunately. Japanese policy was determined by junior army officers who totally ignored directions from Tokyo, and just did what they wanted.

Plus, even the central government in Tokyo was completely [censored].
The Chinese 'puppets' they did set up were not client states, but Japanese run states with a puppet figurehead. Slaves, not servants, if you will.


If you managed to fix Japanese policy so they could KEEP any agreement they made (possibly by stomping on the first 'policy by assassination' efforts, that they let people get away with, iOTL), then you don't have the invasion of China (aside from Manchuria) in the first place.
 
Interesting.

Wasn't the first Sino-Japanese War the same way though, with junior officers firmly in control?

How could they achieve a negotiated peace then and not the second time around?
 
Interesting.

Wasn't the first Sino-Japanese War the same way though, with junior officers firmly in control?

How could they achieve a negotiated peace then and not the second time around?

Nope. Not the same at all. Japan in the late '30s was a very different place to Japan in the late 1890s or even WWI. They may have still been militaristic, chauvinistic and had a chip on their shoulders, BUT they had control over their military, discipline, and treated PoWs reasonably (well, European PoWs, anyway:().

The practice of 'policy by assassination', whereby any Japanese senior leader who advocated restraint got assassinated only started in the 1930s. Once the leadership let junior officers get away with murdering their superiors and government officials, Japan lost control of her army and any hope of any kind of negotiated surrender.

If they had stomped on those junior officers hard, and portrayed them as unJapanese, unHeroic, etc., could there have been a negotiated settlement? Yes, there could.

Chiang might have been forced to accept e.g. the loss of Manchuria, and then later effective (although not nominal) control of several coastal cities. But when any Japanese unit could (and did) decide to attack another city/province/whatever, when Japanese soldiers could rape and murder Chinese citizens with impunity, any negotiation after that point would be meaningless.
 
The thing is, Chiang didn't really want a war against Japan...he wanted to deal with the Communists first...
His hand was pushed by the people who were angry with the fact that he gave up Manchuria to the Japanese, which conversely made Zhang Xueliang a hero among them...
For them, to have Chiang capitulate to the Japanese after Manchuria would be unacceptable, and for good reason too!:mad:
 
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