Anglo-Japanese alliance in WWII

Here's a timeline by Scott Palter, from Changing the Times! I am bolding the important parts so please at least read those segements.

Victorious Japanese Arms

©2003 Final Sword Productions

The ATL I am going to propose here may seem absurdly unlikely to those who look at WW2 backwards from Pearl Harbor, Hiroshima, and Tokyo Bay. However, the participants read history forwards.

If quagmire has a meaning in historical terms, the Japanese war in China could be the poster child.

As part of a political struggle having both internal and external aspects the Japanese militarists had taken over both the government of Japan and control of Japanese forces already on the Asian mainland. Their weapons were assassinations, coup attempts, military riots and conspiracy. This produced very muddled situations in which there were no clear lines of responsibility or command. To this day we have no precise knowledge over how much control Tokyo had over events or how much control the Emperor had over either.

Be that as it may, in 1937 Japan went to war with China. The Japanese won battle after battle but could not induce Chiang to negotiate / capitulate or force the collapse of his government and forces. China was too big. It had too many people. It had no industrial heart the capture of which would force a decisive response. Chiang received just enough help from the US, UK and Soviets to keep in the field. Chinese xenophobic nationalism and endless Japanese atrocities did the rest.

In addition to a China war, the same aggressive Japanese militarists had been skirmishing with the Soviets on the borders of Manchuria and Mongolia. It is doubtful if Japan had the strength to fight the Soviets. Japan certainly lacked the strength to fight the Soviets and China while also guarding their back against the twin Anglo-Saxon navies. Japan’s only alliance of note was the anti-Comintern Pact, a nebulous declaration of intent between Japan and the European Axis, with the Soviets as the specified enemy.

Thus the news of the Nazi-Soviet Pact came as a bolt out of the blue. In OTL, the Japanese dithered through the window between this bombshell and its reversal with Barbarossa. This ATL will presume a very different response.

All polities are prone to inaction. It is always easier to get a blocking veto than to move a system to action. However, Japan seems to be at the extreme end of the spectrum. There is a history of endless deadlock / dither alternating with incredible rapid change. Thus Japan dithered from Poland to Pearl, then jumped off a cliff. Faced with a lost war, they dithered from Saipan to Nagasaki. For the last decade they have dithered through an economic winter.

Some real dates from OTL should be seen as providing context to what I will propose below:

8/25/39 – Japan protests Nazi-Soviet Pact, announces itself at liberty diplomatically

9/3/39 – Western powers declare war on Hitler

4/17/40 – US warns Japanese against attempting to take Netherlands East Indies

5/20/40 – Guderian’s panzers reach the sea at Abbeville in France

5/26/40 – fall of Bologne

5/28/40 – Belgian surrender seals fate of trapped Western army group

6/4/40 – evacuation at Dunkirk completed

6/5/40 – second phase German offensive begins

6/9/40 – Soviet-Japanese border treaty settles frontier issues in Manchuria

6/10/40 – Italy declares war on Western powers

6/13/40 – fall of Paris

6/17/40 – Petain asks for an armistice; US announces that it will not allow transfer of title on any European colonies in the Western Hemisphere

6/22/40 – Franco-German armistice

6/24/40 – Franco-Italian armistice

6/25/40 – Japanese make demands on French Indochina, send warships

7/3/40 – British attack French fleet

7/5/40 – Vichy severs relations with UK

7/18/40 – British close Burma road cutting off Chiang’s supply line through port of Rangoon

7/20/40 – FDR signs 2 Ocean Navy Bill

7/26/40 – Japanese occupation of French Indochina begun

8/6/40 – Italy invades British Somaliland

8/8/40 – Battle of Britain begins

8/9/40 – British withdraw their garrisons from Shanghai and north China

9/4/40 – US warns Japan against ‘aggression’ in Indochina

9/13/40 – Italian invasion of Egypt begun

9/2/40 – destroyers for bases deal between US and UK

9/16/40 – US draft act signed

9/22/40 – Dakar fiasco – British and Free French fail to take French West Africa

9/27/40 – Tripartite Pact between Germany, Italy and Japan

Look at this list and think it through in strategic terms. Japan is blown lose by the Nazi-Soviet Pact. The US and UK are blown lose by the collapse of the French army. By September things have begun to clarify. Germany and Japan kiss and make up. The UK survives the fall of Europe and the US begins to align itself with the UK. However there is a gap for a calendar quarter [June-July-August of 1940] where everything was in flux. A more adroit Japanese leadership could have taken advantage of this.

Let us recap the situation:

1. This is should and could logic, not a statement of probabilities. There were only a few major powers in the world of 1940. So there were only a finite number of alignments.

2. I do not propose to explore the real power relationships in Tokyo 1939-40. I regard that as unknown and unknowable. Japan essentially wrote its own self-serving history of the period. The imperial bureaucracy had weeks between the formal surrender and effective occupation to purge the files. They then served as the administration under Macarthur. So to the largest of extents we know what that continuously governing elite wanted us to.

3. For this to work I must follow the thesis that the Emperor had real power. The official account has him as a passive front for the militarists until post-Nagasaki when he forces the surrender. There is a revisionist school that makes him an active ruler and a warmongering imperialist. I will make him an active ruler but either an intelligent actor on the scene or well advised. I do not assert that this is true. However, it may not be false. Unknown but necessary for this ATL.

4. The Japanese Army would not accept ending the China war on any terms other than total victory.

5. The Japanese Army at this stage of the war would not accept a real alliance with the Soviets. They lusted for Siberia and were rabidly anti-Communist. This would change under pressure of the war in 1944-45.

6. Neither the Japanese Navy nor the US would accept a sphere of influence agreement between Japan and the US. The US had a sentimental thing about China, plus the influence of the China Lobby. FDR didn’t like Japanese militarism which he lumped with the Nazis and Fascists. The Japanese and US navies were traditional rivals who planned their forces for a war they regarded as inevitable.

7. France and Italy, while major European powers, were marginal as far as Asia and the Pacific were concerned.

8. Japan was totally economically dependent on the Anglo-Saxons and their economic dependents [Netherlands East Indies, British formal and informal empire, etc.]. Faced with any embargo the Japanese could not continue the China War.

9. The UK had the 3rd major fleet in the world. The UK had assets Japan needed for the China War [oil, tin, rubber]. With the Dutch government in London, the Netherlands East Indies were a de facto British possession.

10. The UK and Japan had been allied for twenty years. That alliance was ended when after WW1 the US essentially forced the UK to choose between the US and Japan. However, the alliance had permitted Japan to grow and prosper while advancing Japanese interests on the mainland of Asia. This allowed Japan to pursue WW1 by looting Germany of her Pacific colonies while be subsidized by the UK and then US.

11. The UK needed all its forces to fight the European Axis. It had nothing to spare for defending the Far East.

12. The UK had depended on the French Army. With its loss, the UK desperately needed help and limitation of its non-European commitments.

13. The US essentially had counted on the UK-French alliance to shield them from Hitler. FDR was now panicked that the French and British fleets would fall into German hands. The US was rearming but needed years. It also needed the UK not to fall.

The solution was obvious. On May 20th, 1940, the Emperor calls an imperial conference. The heads of both services and the major cabinet ministers are informed of the analysis above. The navy is told it has ten days to prepare the fleet for a major expedition. Destination to be announced later. The army is told to assemble four divisions of lesser troops [Koreans, Taiwanese, White Russians, Manchurians, Mongols, Chinese] plus a second corps of two Japanese divisions built around the Imperial Guard. They are to be ready to sail with the fleet. Merchant ships may be seized as needed regardless of nationality. There is to be no attempt at secrecy except for the destinations. These will be announced in ten days.

Obviously the embassies and news services in Tokyo get wind of this. No attempt is made at censorship. The Emperor allows the crisis to build for a week. He then requests that the British ambassador attend him for lunch with his military attachés. The Emperor is polite but firm. London is to be told there are two alternatives.

First, the Anglo-Japanese alliance is reinstated. Japan will declare war on the European Axis. Churchill will sever relations with Chiang’s Chinese government. In due course he will recognize whatever new [puppet] Chinese governments Japan deems appropriate. The two allies will jointly occupy the Netherlands East Indies to protect them from Axis attack [the four second rate Japanese divisions mentioned above plus whatever few garrison units the British Empire can scrape together]. The East Indies will be a joint economic zone between the two allies. China will be a predominantly Japanese economic zone but with some undefined protection for British economic interests. The Japanese carrier force will convoy the good corps to East Africa to fight Italy.

Second, the six divisions will attack the East Indies, British Borneo, Singapore and Malaya. The British Empire will have a world war at the worst possible moment.

Given this London would have no choice but to go with choice #1. The US would be upset. However, the primary US interest at this moment would be keeping the UK alive as a shield for the US. This Japan would be seen as doing.

Essentially, Japan would be on the Allied side in WW2. There would be no war in the Pacific. Japan would be an unpalatable ally. However so was Stalin. The two Japanese divisions would easily take Italian Somaliland and Eritrea [backed by six carriers]. This would remove a major danger to the UK and free up the Red Sea route. Several of the carrier air groups would then deploy to Egypt. With the extra air strength and without the need to divert 4th and 5th Indian divisions to Eritrea, Wavell and O’Conner would finish off Libya before Rommel arrives. In turn the extra air strength would make it possible to hold Crete in 1941.

Japan trades several more divisions over the next year for having the US put Japan into the Lend Lease program. Just as we financed the French Indochina War to keep France happy in NATO, we would finance Japan’s China war to keep the Japanese army and fleet fighting the Axis in the Mediterranean.

From these changes flow vast consequences:

1. The US never actually enters WW2. There is no Pearl Harbor, no German declaration of war.

2. The British and Japanese take Sicily in 1941 and south Italy in 1942. They can probably take much of the Peloponnesus and Sardinia in 1943. However, it ends there. Japan will only commit divisions in dribs and drabs while the Empire’s ground strength is limited by the large forces needed to defend the British Isles.

3. Without the US, the war in Europe burns itself out in a compromise peace sometime in 1944-45. Somewhere between Moscow and Warsaw a balance point is reached between thWhat's the plausibility?e two land contestants. The British cannot fight Hitler without Stalin. At the price of the Franco-Belgian sub-Saharan colonies, the British agree to peace.

4. Japan never actually beats Chiang, but they do bottle him up in Chunking while destroying the Maoists.

5. So we have a world where Hitler survives, Stalin is weaker, the British Empire is stronger and Japan wins.

How plausible is any of this?
 
How plausible is any of this?


Not very.

The author even admits as such when he writes I do not propose to explore the real power relationships in Tokyo 1939-40 and For this to work I must follow the thesis that the Emperor had real power.

His first proviso and his excuses for it are laughable. The power structures within Japan's government and military are knowable or knowable to an extent that plausible actions can be determined for them.

Any list of plausible courses of action for any of the political and military factions vying for control in Japan will not include an alliance with one of the "Anglo-Saxon Powers" it's propaganda machine has been increasingly vilifying since the end of WW1 because the interests of both Anglo-Saxon powers in China and Pacific are at complete odds with Japan's national aims.

His second proviso is equally silly. While Hirohito was not the passive nonentity postwar accounts made him out to be, he was also not active ruler and a warmongering imperialist either. The author even admits this, but then makes a fatal error by giving Hirohito both an amount of power and an active role that no emperor since the Restoration ever had. An emperor with that amount of power and that active a role would mean Japan's government and theory of government are completely different.

Finally, the author completely ignores the fact that Britain's policies in the Far East/Pacific are wholly constrained by it's need for US goodwill. In that, Britain finds itself in a relationship with the US regarding the Far East/Pacific which is very similar to the relationship France had with Britain regarding Europe. Just as any French policy in Europe depended on either British support or ambivalence, any British policy in the Far East/Pacific depended on US support or ambivalence.

The author mentions that Britain and Japan were allied for twenty years. He ignores that fact that the alliance was a rather limited one and that Britain dropped that alliance at the insistence of the US.

It's a neat idea, but one ultimately fails because it requires PODs that are either more wrenching or deeper in time than the author proposes. The PODs that could bring the scenario about would also change the global situation enough that a WW2 like ours would not happen.
 

Kharn

Banned
Is this basically Britain siding with Japan? Because Hitler could very well not declare war on the US and watch America stomp some ass. This means that nuclear weapons come online slower and later, and it could mean the end to Lend-Lease entirely, which means the USSR will do worse enough to where it will be slow enough for the Nazis to successfully mobilize Poland to fortify the shit out of itself among other things. Basically, it ends with the Nazis in control of Europe, the Soviets MAYBE still dominating Asia, and America building it's sea dominance on the corpses of the only Naval powers the could have contested it in the 20th Century. The problem is that this is one of the least likely ways to see the British Empire get destroyed by America.
 
So, ignore this scenario specifically, but by using some of the reasoning he has, could it still be possible for an Anglo-Japanese alliance in WWII?
 
Wouldn't a sufficiently different Japan be enough?

It would be a beginning, but you need to remember that Britain, not Japan, chose not to renew the alliance in 1922, did so during peacetime, and did so years before Japan got really "frisky" in Manchuria, Manchukuo, China, and the rest.

By the time the treaty had come up for renewal, the reasons for it, imperial aggression by Wilhelmine Germany and Tsarist Russia, had been "resolved". Further limiting any British need for a renewed alliance, in 1921 a Four Power Treaty regarding naval forces in the Pacific had been signed between France, Japan, the UK, and the US. Finally, Britain had also grown appreciative of the suspicion with which the naval alliance was held in two nations which were more important to Britain's world position; China and the US.

Britain's condition after WW1 and the imperial overstretch she faced meant that she needed the goodwill of China and the US more than she needed naval assistance from Japan and the suspicions China and US held about the relatively well-behaved Japan of the early 1920s were enough to scupper any desire for a renewed Anglo-Japanese alliance on Britain's part.

Even a changed Japan isn't going to turn the trick. you'll need to change Britain too and that means the world, and the war that might be brewing, is very different also.
 
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Still, I think these points he brings up re: WWII seem cogent-

8. Japan was totally economically dependent on the Anglo-Saxons and their economic dependents [Netherlands East Indies, British formal and informal empire, etc.]. Faced with any embargo the Japanese could not continue the China War.

9. The UK had the 3rd major fleet in the world. The UK had assets Japan needed for the China War [oil, tin, rubber]. With the Dutch government in London, the Netherlands East Indies were a de facto British possession.

10. The UK and Japan had been allied for twenty years. That alliance was ended when after WW1 the US essentially forced the UK to choose between the US and Japan. However, the alliance had permitted Japan to grow and prosper while advancing Japanese interests on the mainland of Asia. This allowed Japan to pursue WW1 by looting Germany of her Pacific colonies while be subsidized by the UK and then US.

11. The UK needed all its forces to fight the European Axis. It had nothing to spare for defending the Far East.

12. The UK had depended on the French Army. With its loss, the UK desperately needed help and limitation of its non-European commitments.

13. The US essentially had counted on the UK-French alliance to shield them from Hitler. FDR was now panicked that the French and British fleets would fall into German hands. The US was rearming but needed years. It also needed the UK not to fall.

...
However, the primary US interest at this moment would be keeping the UK alive as a shield for the US. This Japan would be seen as doing.

...
Japan would be an unpalatable ally. However so was Stalin.
 
Still, I think these points he brings up re: WWII seem cogent-

Let's look at some of them then.

8. Japan was totally economically dependent on the Anglo-Saxons and their economic dependents [Netherlands East Indies, British formal and informal empire, etc.]. Faced with any embargo the Japanese could not continue the China War.
Could not continue the China War? Huh? When finally faced with an embargo, Japan not only continued the war in China, it also attacked the UK, US, and the other colonial powers in the Pacific.

By the time 1939-1940 rolled around, there wasn't a single faction in Japan, either political or military, who could gain power, withdraw from China, and stay alive. Stopping the China war was not an option Japan recognized.

10. The UK and Japan had been allied for twenty years. That alliance was ended when after WW1 the US essentially forced the UK to choose between the US and Japan. However, the alliance had permitted Japan to grow and prosper while advancing Japanese interests on the mainland of Asia. This allowed Japan to pursue WW1 by looting Germany of her Pacific colonies while be subsidized by the UK and then US.
There's so much that is just slightly wrong in that paragraph. In turn:

  • Britain and Japan had a limited naval alliance aimed nearly solely at German and Russian ambitions in the Far East.
  • Far from the US talking the UK into not renewing the alliance, it was Canada's PM who did the trick by pointing out the need for both Chinese and American goodwill.
  • The alliance may have helped Japan grow and prosper by giving her cover with other European powers, but Japan was of the opinion, especially during the Russo-Japanese War when she couldn't raise loans in London except at ruinous rates and after Versailles where she felt she received little in the treaty, that she hadn't gotten enough from the alliance.
  • Far from providing loot, Germany's colonies provided little more than bases for Japan's later aggressions.


11. The UK needed all its forces to fight the European Axis. It had nothing to spare for defending the Far East.
And yet the UK did spare resources for the defense of the Far East.

12. The UK had depended on the French Army. With its loss, the UK desperately needed help and limitation of its non-European commitments.
The UK depended on it's fleet and the French were more dependent on British assistance than the other way around, just as Britain's "veto power" over France's European policies shows.

I don't think it's impossible, I just think you need a different Britain, Japan, world, and world war.
 

Kharn

Banned
I just thought of something. How crazy would it be for a Anglo-Japanese-Soviet Alliance against the Axis of D.C., Berlin, Rome and Paris? Could something like this happen?
 
I just thought of something. How crazy would it be for a Anglo-Japanese-Soviet Alliance against the Axis of D.C., Berlin, Rome and Paris? Could something like this happen?

You've been playing too many variants of 'Axis and Allies'.
 

Kharn

Banned
So it'd be real crazy? What would it be like and how would the end of such a crazy-ass war look like? Let's say it starts because Hoover declares war upon the rest of North America for economic recovery/manifest destiny. Somehow, Japan and Britain manage to tie up America long enough for the Nazi to come online, except the appeasement is even more conciliatory with Germany getting all of the former continental German Empire but letting Poland have the rest. The final straw with them is Alsace-Lorraine which kicks off the War in Europe....
 

Cook

Banned
Pure ASB.

Scott Palter said:
The two allies will jointly occupy the Netherlands East Indies to protect them from Axis attack

The Dutch Government in exile was in London and was a full and active ally of Britain. The only threat to the Dutch East Indies was from Japan, Germany posed no threat to the D.E.I whatsoever.

Scott Palter said:
The East Indies will be a joint economic zone between the two allies

Dutch East Indies oil, rubber etcetera was already contributing to the war effort against the Axis; any sharing by the Allies with Japan would reduce this and not be in the Allies interests.


Scott Palter said:
China will be a predominantly Japanese economic zone

This was Japan’s objective for going to war with China in the first place. The whole reason the British and American’s were aiding Chiang Kai Shek was because they were committed to an ‘open door’ trade policy with China. Both had major trade interests with China that they were not about to abandon. Add to that the fact that Japan had spent nearly ten years raping and killing in China, with highlights such as the ‘Rape of Nanking’ and public sentiment is not going to suddenly swing Japan’s way.

Scott Palter said:
The US had a sentimental thing about China, plus the influence of the China Lobby.

Plus the above stated trade interests.


Scott Palter said:
The solution was obvious. On May 20th, 1940, the Emperor calls an imperial conference.

To disregard nearly ten years of diplomatic development and align the Empire of Japan with two European Empires (Britain and France) who were seen as at that very moment on the verge of surrendering to Japan’s German Ally.

Scott Palter said:
The two Japanese divisions would easily take Italian Somaliland and Eritrea [backed by six carriers]. This would remove a major danger to the UK and free up the Red Sea route.

The Italians in Ethiopia were not a threat. Their lines of supply with Italy and Europe ran through the Suez Canal and were severed the moment war was declared.

The only threat to the British Empire east of Suez was Japan.

There is more but I can’t be bothered.
 
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