AHC: WW2 a truly global conflict

How could we have had significant land battles on every continent in the world?

That means North America, South America as well as Australia. A few bombing raids by the Japanese don't count, I'm talking combat at least on the level of North Africa.
 

Deleted member 1487

Probably the USSR in the Axis and thus invades the US, while the Japanese then are freed up thanks to no US island hopping to invade Australia, while getting USSR LL oil and whatnot. Then the more successful Axis gets allies in Latin America to fight US proxies, say Chile and Argentina fight Brazil.
 
Let's see...

A whole lot of this is ridiculously unlikely, but here goes:

The Japanese decide around 1942 that they want to go help the Nazis. So, they launch an amphibious invasion of the Aleutians. They manage to make a landing point, and stay there. However, winter starts setting in, and the Japanese in the Aleutians start starving. Basically, it becomes Okinawa, as both sides take heavy casualities trying to either defend their position or dislodge, but it's cold as fuck everywhere. 5 months later, the garrison surrenders, and the Japanese dispose of who proposed the idea.

Meanwhile, in Australia, something similar happens, except that it's a lot more intense. The Japanese get further, but are pushed back to the coast. They fight brutally, more like ancient hand-to-hand than modern tactics. By the time it's done, the entire Japanese force is either a POW or dead.

In South America, a coup occurs, and the government pledges to support the Nazis. Once the Nazis are dealt with, they refuse to surrender, and combined American-Commonwealth troops take care of business easily. The Pacific War ends earlier, due to massive, unnecessary losses in Aleutia and Australia.
 

TFSmith121

Banned
You need different alliances...

How could we have had significant land battles on every continent in the world? That means North America, South America as well as Australia. A few bombing raids by the Japanese don't count, I'm talking combat at least on the level of North Africa.

You need different alliances, if the basic drift of history is the same from 1919 onwards...

Japan cannot wage expeditionary warfare in the western hemisphere, in any real sense, and the Germans and Italians have even less capacity to do so, in anything resembling reality.

The US and UK were the two greatest maritime powers; they were also the two greatest producers of POL (directly in the US case and indirectly in that of the UK); Japan was the third (maritime power, that is, not POL producer), and France was the fourth (maritme power). WW II was a conflict fuelled by oil, and without it, there's no chance of transoceanic offensives from the eastern hemisphere to the western, or from the northern to the southern.

Absent a different line-up of the Axis and the Allies, it is really going to be unrealistic to expect (for example) a Latin American nation to break with the western Allies and line up with the Axis. Anyone that did, of course, would be an economic and military backwater in short order.

A Japanese invasion of Australia, although certainly in the realm of the possible, requires the Japanese to commit very limited resources (merchant marine, naval, air, and military) to a type of warfare - continental and mobile - they didn't do well and which is going to be even more of a resource sink than (for example) New Guinea and the Solomons were historically...

It's worth remembering that even in the initial December, 1941-January, 1942 set of offensives by the Japanese, they never had more than about four divisions afloat simultaneously, and to do that, and sustain the expeditionary forces (military and aviation) necessary for the Malayan, Burmese, Philippines, and NEI campaigns took just about everything the Japanese had, and then some ...

Simply by going to war, the Japanese lost something like 30 percent of the shipping they had relied on to keep their peacetime economy going (since they required foreign flag shipping to that percentage)...

The USBS reports, which are available on-line, are excellent resources for understanding the economic and operational constraints on the Japanese war effort.

Best,
 
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Let's see...

A whole lot of this is ridiculously unlikely, but here goes:

The Japanese decide around 1942 that they want to go help the Nazis. So, they launch an amphibious invasion of the Aleutians. They manage to make a landing point, and stay there. However, winter starts setting in, and the Japanese in the Aleutians start starving. Basically, it becomes Okinawa, as both sides take heavy casualities trying to either defend their position or dislodge, but it's cold as fuck everywhere. 5 months later, the garrison surrenders, and the Japanese dispose of who proposed the idea.


Not all that unlikely. There was a Japanese campaign in the Aleutians IOTL. It was a sideshow compared to the South Pacific, but it did happen.
 

TFSmith121

Banned
It's worth noting, of course, that the US was able to

Not all that unlikely. There was a Japanese campaign in the Aleutians IOTL. It was a sideshow compared to the South Pacific, but it did happen.

It's worth noting, of course, that the US was able to drive the Japanese out of the Aleutians by the summer of 1943, using what amounted to one reinforced infantry division, a single air force, and a naval force that would have gotten lost in the 3rd or 5th fleets in 1943-45...

The expeditionary force for COTTAGE (Kiska) amounted to the US 7th Infantry Division (3 RCTs), the Canadian 13th Brigade Group (RCT equivalent), and the 87th Mountain Infantry Regiment and the 1st SSF...

Formidable enough for 1943 in the North Pacific, but not exactly on the scale of TORCH - and the Japanese had already evacuated.

Best,
 
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