The Japanese had been told, in advance what the result of invading French Indochina would be,
Really, before which stage of the Japanese occupation, the first northern stage or the second southern stage? Where's you hear/read this?
Worst part was the whole reason for invading was to gain the supposed huge rice surpluses the region produced and export the excess to the Home Island and to Manchuria. Never happened. First few years there was barely enough to feed the locals and the IJA forces conducting the occupation, when they finally got that unSNAFU'd the U.S. Navy had also gotten the submarine torpedo issue sorted, so almost no rice arrived. Literally started the whole Pacific War to gain a resource that was never actually available.
Ha, too bad so sad on them.
By comparison how much return did they get on their other big resource grabs.
Essentially given Japan's slender resources before and going into the war, I'm wondering how they managed to keep trucks, planes and ships running at any level all the way until August 1945, even while under nasty blockade, aerial mining and bombing.
Their ability to do suggests, they did manage to loot other vital resources more effectively than Indochinese rice:
Anybody know how much of the following resources they were able to loot/import from their Southeast Asia conquests?
Oil and all petroleum derivatives - ?
Tin - ?
Rubber - ?
Rice (from non-Indochinese sources) - ?
Coal - ?
Rare earths (tungsten, antimony, chrome, bauxite etc)
Foreign shipping captured and impressed into Japanese service from throughout the Asia-Pacific region?
Essentially, the algebra for how long materially Japan could have persisted in a continued China war in the absence of the Pacific War, looks something like this:
X=OTL's result (losing but slow enough to still occupy a lot of ground and remain locally active until August 1945)
Y= ATL hypothetical situation of Japan in August 1945 in the absence of the Pacific War but continuance of the China War
Essentially the question we are grappling at is what is the time value of "Y", how much is it plus or minus "X"
The value of "X" is known. To credibly estimate the value of "Y" would require an equation like this one:
Y (ATL) = X (OTL) +plus Allied attrition combat against Japanese imports and shipping (A)+plus fuel consumption and other aeronaval production necessitated specifically for the Pacific War instead of China(B)+plus wartime reconstruction costs/property destruction due to Allied bombing of Japanese held territory(C), +plus any domestic agricultural production lost by manning the Pacific War at full wartime levels (D), but -minus looted imports and shipping (including food consumed by Japanese within occupied Southeast Asia that could not be otherwise important to pre-Pacific War territories, and including any captured foreign exchange they were able to spend and any debts they could stop paying with the onset of war) (E), -minus the time value of when Japan runs out of exchange to pay for any imports from areas not already under their occupation (F)
Generally speaking, Y will only be less than X (Japan has to quit China by "Z" months earlier August 1945) if the variable "E" above is quite large and in fact much larger than the value of "F" also.
The above is actually the relatively simple equation.
Other variables on the sliding scale influencing the material situation could include:
G: Extent and timing of any embargoes or financial freezes (the later and more selective the embargo the higher the value of Y can be)
H: Outside material support for Chinese forces and Chinese level of military activity (if worse than X, Y can be higher, if better than X, Y can be lower)
The omega variable throughout is Japan's level of political commitment to continue the China war under several alternate circumstances. Bolstering it similar to OTL is the threat of assassination of leaders for making compromises and the prospect of simple insubordination or non-responsiveness of the armed forces to ceasefire and/or withdrawal orders. *Possibly* something psychological that could make Japan's political commitment to the China War fade faster than OTL in addition to the simple material factors would be if the act of launching the Pacific War itself upped Japanese leaders psychological commitment and also provided "hope" that would not have been present otherwise.
So there you go, that's all the algebra related to the what-if.