Earliest possible Pacific War? Japan & the US

[TFSmith121]

The Anglo-Japanese treaty was signed so the British

I was thinking something similar. Japan seeing WWI as an opportunity to right the wrongs of the Treaty of Portsmouth cast its lot with the CP. Maybe Germany sweetens the pot by offering to sell/gift whatever some of its Pacific colonies to Japan (not sure if the Kaiser would be willing to do that) in exchange for aggressive Japanese action against Entente interests in the Far East. Maybe too ASB but I think that scenario gets the US and Japan into a fight at some point during the war.

The Anglo-Japanese treaty was signed so the British didn't have to maintain a squadron in the Western Pacific to look after the Russians and/or Germans; Britain and Japan were allied before WW I broke out, and for good reason.

The Japanese were happy to be Britain's ally; there is nothing that would tempt them to join the Central Powers, especially given the relative states of German and British sea power.

Japan joining the CP is really ASB.

Best,

 

[zert]

I would agree that unless there were much earlier PODs and a realigning of power, Japan would not join the Central Powers. At most they stay neutral.

 

[Perfidious Albion]

The Empire of Japan in 1914 was much, much less independent than is being implied. By 1906, Japan was boldly making the transition from simply buying battleships manufactured entirely in Britain to manufacturing battleships with most of the parts (including the main guns of every single battleship until late 1917) coming in pre-made from Britain. For Japan to declare war on Britain at this stage wouldn't just be biting the hand that fed it, it would be a hand trying to attack its own arm; it would make Pearl Harbour look like a stroke of genius.

One should not confuse the Empire of Japan of the 1930s and 1940s, which was an independent great power in its own right, with the Empire of Japan of the twentieth century pre-WW1, which was a client state supported by the British Empire as a counter-weight to the Russian Empire.

As for the United Kingdom supporting Japan against the United States… forget it. There is no such thing as friendship among nations, only the pursuit of interests which may or may not converge. Unless the USA was already firmly an enemy of the UK, there would be absolutely no conceivable advantage in deliberately opposing the United States (with lots and lots of trade with Britain) against Japan (with much less trade with Britain), especially when the balance of power is so obviously tilted towards the United States.

For the sake of comparison, it is noteworthy that when the pre-WW1 United Kingdom saw Russia as a vast and rising power that posed an ever-increasing threat to British power in the east (as Russian power was hugely overestimated in that era), the response was two-pronged: to contain Russian expansion via alliances such as that with Japan, but also to form an alliance with Russia; and when the Russo-Japanese war began, Britain didn't give any military support to Japan, despite its alliance with Japan, its strategic interest in weakening Russia and the fact that the Anglo-Russian Convention hadn't yet come into being.

 

[Zheng He]

All excellent points which is why I thought my scenarios were probably ASB to begin with. A couple of other thoughts although these may be ASB as well:

1. Butterfly away US isolationism in the 1930s so the US takes a much more aggressive stance against the Japanese invasion of China much earlier with one thing leading to another. Maybe one POD for this is that Spain sells the Northern Marianas to Japan instead of Germany while the US still gets Guam causing higher tensions between the US and Japan earlier on.

2. Something happens much earlier like I don't know, Japan does a grab for the Marianas toward the end of the Spanish-American War thinking that nobody will mind and the US force sent to occupy Guam and the Japanese force doing the same thing blunder into each other and then crap happens. May not lead to anything more than a limited war but it does mean a poisoned well for future scenarios.

I'm sure these scenarios have plenty of flaws that have not occurred to me because it is early and I'm not even finished with my first cup of coffee.

 

[Zheng He]

One thing to keep in mind is that any US/Japan War scenario is arguably ASB to include the one that happened OTL because it involves a Japan stupid enough to go to war with the US.

Consider an alternate reality where a bunch of nerds sitting at their computers are trying to come up with a way to get quiet and neutral Japan involved in the European War of the 1940s on the side of the Axis and somebody develops and ATL where:

1. Japan invades China.
2. Joins the Axis.
3. Then decides to take on the US and the British Empire at the same time.
4. Starts the war with a sneak attack on the US.
5. Japan and the USSR stay neutral toward each other.

The scenario would get ripped apart for the following reasons.

1. Why would little Japan invade huge China all by itself?
2. Why would the Japanese sign on with the Germans and Italians? What do they possibly get out of it?
3. Why would the Japanese take on the US and the British Empire at the same time while bogged in China.
4. BTW, please explain how Japan and the USSR remain neutral toward each other during this whole mess?
5. How does Japan get an entire carrier force across the Pacific without anybody detecting it?

The developer of the scenario would then be accused of developing an ATL that is at total and unrealistic Japanwank for the at least the first six months of the war and the following points would be made:

1. No way would the USN be caught asleep on a Sunday morning like that.
2. No way could flimsy Japanese aircraft sink two mighty British capital ships at sea with room to maneuver (that alone would kill the scenario in the minds of many).
3. No way would US and British Empire forces in the Far East be so unprepared, poorly trained, poorly supplied, and poorly led.

The point being, truth is often stranger than fiction. The way things happened OTL would be very difficult to make up if they hadn't happened that way.

 

[Carl Schwamberger]

One thing to keep in mind is that any US/Japan War scenario is arguably ASB to include the one that happened OTL because it involves a Japan stupid enough to go to war with the US.

Consider an alternate reality where a bunch of nerds sitting at their computers are trying to come up with a way to get quiet and neutral Japan involved in the European War of the 1940s on the side of the Axis and somebody develops and ATL where:

....

Well said. So often these WI flounder because to much is known of the armor thickness of a Tiger tank & too little of the personalities of the leaders and the their social/cultural/political influences. I've severa books on my shelf concerning 19th & 20th Century Japan, and how Japan came to participate in WWII. Yet I have the feeling there is a great deal missing from my understanding of just what the Japanese leaders were thinking.

BTW may I quote your post elsewhere?

 

[Zheng He]

Well said. So often these WI flounder because to much is known of the armor thickness of a Tiger tank & too little of the personalities of the leaders and the their social/cultural/political influences. I've severa books on my shelf concerning 19th & 20th Century Japan, and how Japan came to participate in WWII. Yet I have the feeling there is a great deal missing from my understanding of just what the Japanese leaders were thinking.

BTW may I quote your post elsewhere?

Feel free although am curious, what other boards do you post on?

 

[Perfidious Albion]

One thing to keep in mind is that any US/Japan War scenario is arguably ASB to include the one that happened OTL because it involves a Japan stupid enough to go to war with the US.

Thoroughly, thoroughly disagreed. Calling OTL ASB is wrong by definition, for a start, but also: human stupidity is not ASB. The Empire of Japan was the sort of polity where such stupidity as to go to war against the United States could realistically be developed.

1. Japan invades China.

Entirely consistent with Japanese colonial policy in Asia up to that point.

2. Joins the Axis.

While opposed to the British and French empires, as Germany and Italy were.

3. Then decides to take on the US and the British Empire at the same time.

While the British Empire was distracted in an enormous war, and while Japan hadn't realised that the world had moved on from the days when great powers fought minor colonial wars without putting all their power into winning it. Japan wasn't experienced with total war; it didn't understand the concept.

4. Starts the war with a sneak attack on the US.

What the Japanese saw as not the first blow, but the only blow: to basically assure Japanese superiority for the moment and assume (wrongly) that the US wouldn't care enough about a few minor places in the Pacific to throw its entire industrial power into crushing Japan utterly.

5. Japan and the USSR stay neutral toward each other.

While the USSR and the Anglo-American alliance were only together as an alliance of convenience, and deeply and profoundly distrusted each other for obvious reasons.

1. No way would the USN be caught asleep on a Sunday morning like that.
2. No way could flimsy Japanese aircraft sink two mighty British capital ships at sea with room to maneuver (that alone would kill the scenario in the minds of many).
3. No way would US and British Empire forces in the Far East be so unprepared, poorly trained, poorly supplied, and poorly led.

Because of course, people in major powers that have won every war they have recently fought are never complacent and incompetent.

I'm not saying that no-one would ever call that kind of thing ASB; there are many people who would. But I also believe that the word ASB is overused tremendously on this board. I call things ASB if and only if I am convinced that they are genuinely 100% impossible; a successful Operation Sea Lion, Japan winning a Pacific War with the same sides as IOTL and Japan joining the Central Powers in WW1 are such things, but many things (especially long-term ones, e.g. a tiny settlement founded by convicts growing to dominate most of Europe over the course of several centuries) are not.

 

[CalBear]

I'm sort of surprised that no one has mentioned the fact that prior to 1939/1940 the IJN was profoundly inferior to the USN both in numbers and qualitatively. This was a specific result of the Washington Treaty, which the Japanese did not withdraw from until 1936.

IJN battleships were faster than their U.S. counterparts, but they were greatly outgunned both in terms of throw weight of the battle lines as well as in hulls. The U.S. carrier force had vastly greater capacity (both ships of the Lexington Class were able to support well over 100 aircraft) and the later much reviled TBD was, in 1935-38 the best carrier capable bomber in service, with dive bomber and fighter inventories being comparable in both capability and performance (the F3F was never used in combat, making it difficult to do a direct comparison to the A5M).

The IJN did not gain parity until well into 1940, and even then it was a very near thing. The introduction of the A6M gave the IJN a significant advantage in fighters starting in early 1941, but it was not until the commissioning of the Zuikaku in November of 1941 (along with the commissioning of her sister Shokaku in October) that the Japanese fleet gained a brief numerical advantage in CV. It is noteworthy that the Japanese attacked the U.S. virtually the moment Zuikaku was finished with her trials.

 

[Andras]

Speaking of an early US-Japan war, Theodore recently reposted his Panay War timeline on HPCA.

The first post on the time line is here

 

[Zheng He]

Good points Cal Bear but as you said, it was a BRIEF numerical advantage and in large part because of the USN's requirements in the Atlantic.

Consider that if after Pearl Harbor the US had stripped the Atlantic Fleet, the US Pacific Fleet could have had seven fleet carriers (yes that includes USS Ranger with all of her glorious flaws as a fleet asset), seven old BBs, and two fast BBs with three more old BBs (Pennsylvania, Maryland, Tennessee) rejoining the fleet in the February - March 1942 time frame. I realize there were reasons the US did not do this but that fact remains - the US could have done this.

Numbers were never going to win for the Japanese and they knew that and they designed ships to try and offset that. Yamato and Musashi were the ultimate expressions of that philosophy but their fast and well armed heavy cruisers were emblematic of that as well (you know that as well as anyone though).

I would argue that the two big advantages the IJN had in 1942 were in airpower. Not so much in numbers but in capability in that they had two things the US did not. A well trained land based naval air arm to backup their carriers and their surface fleet and the ability to launch coordinated combined arms deck load strikes from multiple carriers although they didn't really develop this until the later part of 1941 after some pretty hard training. This was a skill the USN did not develop until late 1943 at the earliest.

So we are back to my previous post that PA didn't like. Any US-Japan war is going to involve a scenario that is arguably easy to poke holes because it will involve Japan's leaders making a series of bad decisions and PA, I guess we are going to have agree to disagree but I do think that the OTL scenario would be a pretty difficult one to make stick as an ATL in an alternate reality.

 

[TFSmith121]

PA - "a tiny settlement founded by convicts"?

I call things ASB if and only if I am convinced that they are genuinely 100% impossible; a successful Operation Sea Lion, Japan winning a Pacific War with the same sides as IOTL and Japan joining the Central Powers in WW1 are such things, but many things (especially long-term ones, e.g. a tiny settlement founded by convicts growing to dominate most of Europe over the course of several centuries) are not.

Okay, I'm intrigued - Rome?

Speaking of ASB (and off topic) but any thoughts on the latest BROS chapter?

Best,

 

[TFSmith121]

You could go back farther - make the Japanese

You could go back farther - make the Japanese "liberate" the Filipinos and Chamorros in 1897, rather than pick on the Chinese...the Japanese will probably treat them about the same as they treated the Okinawans and Koreans historically, but hey - the "yellow man's burden" and all that. Progress!

The above also gives the US a reason to urge the Spanish to leave the Caribbean...which, given the psuedo-alliance between the powers when the Boxers rose, is not out of the realm of possibility.

The Japanese may be able to do it again with the Koreans and Chinese "under the thumb" of the Russians in 1904-05; that's probably the last time they can get anyone to swallow it with a straight face, but it is a possibility.

In 1914, they pick up the German holdings in China, and - if they are a little more active in the Mediterranean theater in 1915-18 - the British may go along with it.

The Japanese may or may not be able to hold on to gains in the Russian Far East after 1920, but the above chain of events yields the reality that with the only US territory in the Pacific east of the dateline, there is less liklihood there will be a collision between the two in the Twentieth Century.

That has some interesting ramifications come the 1930s...

Best,

 

[Perfidious Albion]

To CalBear: That's interesting; I had no idea the attack was timed so carefully. So what, then, would be needed to make Imperial Japan's naval build-up faster and thus make the Pacific War earlier, or is such a thing simply impossible?

To Andras: That looks like something to watch. Unfortunately, it appears to be abandoned and the longer version I can find elsewhere appears to be a different TL. May I please have a link to the full TL?

To Zheng He: We might as well agree to disagree indeed. The basis I am working on is that IOTL Imperial Japan was the sort of regime that made very bad decisions, but for reasons that they regarded as rational: e.g. the Japanese leadership believed that a war against the United States was necessary for the good of Japan and that it was impossible to fight the United States without also fighting the British Empire, so a war against both the United States and the Empire was necessary, so they might as well try to conduct it in the most advantageous possible time (a surprise attack while one of their two inevitable enemies is distracted in Europe). Thus, vaguely logical reasoning based on flawed premises leads to flawed conclusions, and this is how I believe that Imperial Japan operated.

So my argument is that it is not enough to simply say that Imperial Japan made bad decisions IOTL so it is plausible for them to make just any bad decision; we must consider why they made particular bad decisions that they IOTL made, so that we can figure out which bad decisions they might plausibly make and which bad decisions they would not make in which particular ATL environments.

To TFSmith121: Yes, though it's written euphemistically. The first king of Rome "[drew] together to [himself] an obscure and mean multitude" and "opened [the settlement that would become Rome] as a sanctuary" (resulting in an influx of people described as "a rude class of men") and "hither fled from the neighbouring states, without distinction whether freemen or slaves, crowds of all sorts, desirous of change: and this was the first accession of strength to their [the Romans'] rising greatness". All right, I do accept that taking Livy at his word is not exactly a 100% reliable source, but I'm going with the (definitely questionable) idea that it's so contrary to Livy's own political alignment that he wouldn't have said it if he didn't believe it to be true (presumably because he heard it from an older Roman source), and that it's such an ignominious origin that the Romans wouldn't have passed it down if it were not true.

More on-topic: You appear to have proposed an excellent scenario for avoiding the Pacific War. It is a strange accident of history, I suppose, that the United States acquired a colonial empire in the Pacific Ocean mostly by accident, and as such found itself posing a strategic threat to Japan that it had never set out to pose. The problem, of course, is how you change Japan's mentality, but I leave that to people who know more than I do about Japanese history, which is to say a probable majority of this board.

I do wonder whether American support for China would still happen, and whether, if it did happen, it would be enough on its own for Japan to go to war against the United States. I hope it wouldn't, because that would give the opportunity for an interesting timeline. I confess that I'd be particularly interested in seeing the effects on the United Kingdom of a world where the USA takes much longer to enter the war (presuming that it still would enter the war at some point and that the UK wouldn't accept a peace agreement from the Third Reich).

 

[CalBear]

To CalBear: That's interesting; I had no idea the attack was timed so carefully. So what, then, would be needed to make Imperial Japan's naval build-up faster and thus make the Pacific War earlier, or is such a thing simply impossible?

...

Japan would need to walk away from the London Treaty meeting in 1930. That might give them the time. The issue then would be money. Japan was devastated by the Great Depression, and then by the trade barriers that resulted.

The wild card, of course, is what, if anything the U.S chose to do. The U.S. could handily out-build the Japanese, question there is if they would.

 

[Carl Schwamberger]

Feel free although am curious, what other boards do you post on?

Mostly here:

http://forum.axishistory.com/index.php

& here:

http://talk.consimworld.com/WebX/?14@@.bebc200

...these days. I used to particiapte a number of others, but just read or am entirely inactive.

Still a little active on Armchair General, but dont highly recommend that one, other than for the Russians & Urkranians that appear in the RKKA section.

 

[zert]

If Japan has gotten the Philipinnes and somehow the US went nutso Fascist, would Japan join the UK againt the US?

 

[Andras]

To Andras: That looks like something to watch. Unfortunately, it appears to be abandoned and the longer version I can find elsewhere appears to be a different TL. May I please have a link to the full TL?

Dude, click to The Fiction Page index, and track down the individual posts. The timeline is complete, the chapters have the dates covered in the title. They are all posted on pages 1 and 2.

 

[TFSmith121]

Thought you were going for Livy

To TFSmith121: Yes, though it's written euphemistically. The first king of Rome "[drew] together to [himself] an obscure and mean multitude" and "opened [the settlement that would become Rome] as a sanctuary" (resulting in an influx of people described as "a rude class of men") and "hither fled from the neighbouring states, without distinction whether freemen or slaves, crowds of all sorts, desirous of change: and this was the first accession of strength to their [the Romans'] rising greatness". All right, I do accept that taking Livy at his word is not exactly a 100% reliable source, but I'm going with the (definitely questionable) idea that it's so contrary to Livy's own political alignment that he wouldn't have said it if he didn't believe it to be true (presumably because he heard it from an older Roman source), and that it's such an ignominious origin that the Romans wouldn't have passed it down if it were not true.

More on-topic: You appear to have proposed an excellent scenario for avoiding the Pacific War. It is a strange accident of history, I suppose, that the United States acquired a colonial empire in the Pacific Ocean mostly by accident, and as such found itself posing a strategic threat to Japan that it had never set out to pose. The problem, of course, is how you change Japan's mentality, but I leave that to people who know more than I do about Japanese history, which is to say a probable majority of this board.

I do wonder whether American support for China would still happen, and whether, if it did happen, it would be enough on its own for Japan to go to war against the United States. I hope it wouldn't, because that would give the opportunity for an interesting timeline. I confess that I'd be particularly interested in seeing the effects on the United Kingdom of a world where the USA takes much longer to enter the war (presuming that it still would enter the war at some point and that the UK wouldn't accept a peace agreement from the Third Reich).

Yes, I think a 20th Century where the US is NOT holding territory is probably a more peaceful century; as others have said, a man has got to know his limitations, and the PI and Micronesia were both an archipelago too far...

And I agree, it would have left Britain in an interesting position.

Did you give up on BROS? Too much? I appreciated your comments.

Thanks