If the USSR & Japan went to war in 1937, USSR would do better or worse against Germany?

How would USSR’s coping w/Barbarossa compare to OTL if there was a prior all out war w/Japan

  • Better

    Votes: 75 64.1%
  • Worse

    Votes: 42 35.9%

  • Total voters
    117

Deleted member 1487

2/3rds is a quite substantial gap and as observed the difference in per-capita is purely a function of different population, as the other figures in manufacturing output and war making capacity (which you comprehensively fail to address) demonstrate.
First of all sorry for adding yet another post to reply to, but the answer he gave about this was the ability to power project across the TS-RR and strategic needs to maintain military power in Europe. A gap that size is large, but if you can only use a fraction of it thousands of kilometers away, while needing to keep the bulk of your military ready in Europe while at the same time supplying the Spanish Civil War, while Japan theoretically could go all in in their backyard with greater infrastructure development in the war zone (see pp. 10-24), interior lines of communication, prime defensive terrain if attacked, and major food and industrial production centers nearby, with the ability to ship in more by sea and isolate and siege Vladivostok to death if needed.

The nearest core Soviet industry, which was only about 25% of industrial production in 1937, was the Ural Mountains, which were about 4800km one way from the border of Manchuria by road/rail (Yekaterinburg in the Urals to Chernyshevsk near Manchuria).
 

raharris1973

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Going back to the year 1937. What will the European reactions, especially Central European reactions, be to the start of a war like this?

Will Poland or Romania seek to aid Japan in any way? I think the Poles had decent intelligence and staff relations with the Japanese, but I think they know they know their forces are too obsolete and small to justify a war with the Russians, especially with the Germans rearming. Perhaps here it will matter whether Russia or Japan is seen as the primary aggressor or if this is before or after the Japanese have earned the opprobrium of attacking China.

I imagine the Soviets might scale down their effort to support Republican Spain quite a bit from the point the war begins or appears imminent. I would think this means Franco, with Italian and German support, wins faster.

I wonder if the Germans or Italians will send any advisors or volunteers to fight alongside the Japanese, along with any licensed production of any weapons designs. That''s the kind of thing that Japan will certainly ask for.

Might the Germans get impatient and try to make an alliance with the Baltic states to get a "window" for confronting the USSR? @DaleCoz suggested as much when he proposed two hypothetical scenarios for Soviet-Japanese war on his site about twenty years ago.

Also, if Soviet superiority is demonstrable, might that increase the western countries' interest in having the USSR onside if/when they choose to contain Hitler in Europe?
 

Deleted member 1487

Going back to the year 1937. What will the European reactions, especially Central European reactions, be to the start of a war like this?

Will Poland or Romania seek to aid Japan in any way? I think the Poles had decent intelligence and staff relations with the Japanese, but I think they know they know their forces are too obsolete and small to justify a war with the Russians, especially with the Germans rearming. Perhaps here it will matter whether Russia or Japan is seen as the primary aggressor or if this is before or after the Japanese have earned the opprobrium of attacking China.

I imagine the Soviets might scale down their effort to support Republican Spain quite a bit from the point the war begins or appears imminent. I would think this means Franco, with Italian and German support, wins faster.

I wonder if the Germans or Italians will send any advisors or volunteers to fight alongside the Japanese, along with any licensed production of any weapons designs. That''s the kind of thing that Japan will certainly ask for.

Might the Germans get impatient and try to make an alliance with the Baltic states to get a "window" for confronting the USSR? @DaleCoz suggested as much when he proposed two hypothetical scenarios for Soviet-Japanese war on his site about twenty years ago.

Also, if Soviet superiority is demonstrable, might that increase the western countries' interest in having the USSR onside if/when they choose to contain Hitler in Europe?
No Poland and Romania, other than their intel exchanges, had no interest in getting into a shooting war with the USSR. I doubt the Japanese would actually request anything from the Germans, as they didn't IOTL in terms of advisers or designs pre-WW2 (it took the Japanese realizing how much they needed that exchange during the war to start requesting it). It won't really matter who started things, both sides will lie and say it was the other with no one really being able to tell for sure or particularly caring.
I agree on the SCW stuff. I don't see why the Baltic states would agree to an alliance given their fear of provoking the Soviets, nor would there be a reason for the Germans to want to. IOTL the West did want the Soviets on their side in 1939, but by then it was too late as the Brits were trying to make Hitler a defacto ally until he broke the Munich Agreement. Soviet superiority would actually only make the Brits fear the Soviets more and might even make them more willing to deal with Hitler and look the other way. The question though is if anyone in Europe will really think beating the Japanese actually 'counts'. If the Soviets don't though they will probably hold it against them even more than they did after the Russo-Japanese war and value the Japanese even more highly. I wonder if the Brits might not even work out some deals with the Japanese if they are fighting the Soviets effectively while not invading China and pissing off America and Stalin is still considered public enemy #1 (which he was to the British ruling class until Munich).
 

raharris1973

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You mean conquers. Probably what it did IOTL.

So, to me that means a little looting of Korea before switching tack to install a Communist regime.

In Manchuria and some adjacent parts of China it means claiming co-control over the Manchurian ports and railways, looting the territory a bit, formally aligning and cooperating with the Chinese Nationalist government, but also playing a double game allowing Chinese Communist power to spread in the northeast.
 

Deleted member 1487

So, to me that means a little looting of Korea before switching tack to install a Communist regime.

In Manchuria and some adjacent parts of China it means claiming co-control over the Manchurian ports and railways, looting the territory a bit, formally aligning and cooperating with the Chinese Nationalist government, but also playing a double game allowing Chinese Communist power to spread in the northeast.
Sounds about right given their historical pattern, though it is possible that Mao might not be considered viable if the Soviets take Manchuria and Korea earlier and they might back the KMT like they were doing until 1939 (and would undoubtedly try to do when war is formally declared with Japan).
 
I don't think the Soviets could have taken Korea or even south Manchuria. They'd likely get stuck battering themselves to death on the urban centers there, and the Primorye front is a nightmare. They might even have lost Vladivostok.
 
Interesting thread. I will admit to having skimmed parts of it, so maybe some of these points have already been made, but for what it is worth: (1) A Japanese War with the Soviets in 1937 probably means no Sino-Japanese war, as several people mentioned. That means that the Germans and Nationalist Chinese continue their economic quasi-alliance, with the Germans training and equipping Nationalist divisions in exchange for scarce raw materials, especially tungsten. That strengthens both the Nationalists and Germans to some extent in the years leading up to World War II.

(2) With Japan tied up in Manchuria, the Brits see much reduced pressure from the Japanese threat in the Far East and may feel that they can act more aggressively in Europe. The British nightmare was a simultaneous war with Germany, Italy and Japan with the US neutral. That threat hung over them in their response to European events like the one over the Sudetenland. We can't necessarily assume that British responses in Europe would be the same if the Japanese were off the board as a threat.

(3) The European and US response would depend on how well the Soviets did in the war. If they looked to be kicking Japanese butts in a strategic sense--as in looking as though they were about to take all of Manchuria, the US would essentially look the other way while US manufacturers poured "civilian" but dual-purpose goods into the Japanese islands, like trucks and radios. Before their atrocities in China, the US saw Japan as a useful counterbalance to the Soviet in the Far East, so they would tilt pro-Japanese, especially if the Japanese started losing.

(4) If the Japanese appeared to be losing in a major way in Manchuria, the Japanese had the ability to redirect their priorities from the navy to the army, though internal rivalries would make that difficult. You can make a lot of 15 to 20 ton tanks from the resources that went into one 70,000 ton battleship. Unless the Soviets were able to push the Japanese out of mainland Asia in a matter of weeks to a few months, the Japanese would gain in firepower and tank numbers as the war went on.

(5) The Soviets probably would not be able to pull off anything like a blitzkrieg over the Japanese in 1937, despite a relatively weak enemy. The Soviets, even as late as summer 1941 had a bad habit of producing lots of major weapons systems--tanks, airplanes, artillery, without producing enough of the stuff that made those systems effective, like spare parts, trained mechanics, ammunition for artillery, radios, enough tanker trucks to keep tank divisions supplied, etc. That's probably an inevitable feature of a command economy with a guy like Stalin at the top. The historic border skirmishes with the Japanese didn't last long enough or cover enough ground to uncover those problems, but an attempt at a bigger offensive would have. That's a two-edged sword. An attempt to take Manchuria in one swell foop in 1937 would be a fiasco, but the Soviets would be able to spot and eventually fix those issues in a more forgiving environment than fighting the Germans.

(6) If the Soviets pull out of Spain or offer only dribbles of aid to the Republicans, the Nationalists probably win by early 1938, which means that the Italians don't get as economically drained by the Spanish Civil War and are able to rearm somewhat more effectively in 1938 and 1939. That probably doesn't counterbalance increased British power in the Middle East because they don't have to worry about the Japanese as much.

(7) If the war goes on long, both the Soviet and Japanese will start running out of hard currency. That will hurt the Japanese more because they import more raw materials, but it will mean that the Soviets have less money to invest in machine tools they can't manufacture locally, which would cut back their manufacturing capacity in World War II, assuming the war comes.

(8) The Japanese army would in some ways be better in 1937 than it was in 1939 because it hadn't had the easy victories against warlord armies in China to make it overconfident and given to bad habits.
 
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Wouldn't the USSR potentially be lower on equipment, as well as a lower guard for the West (expecting the the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact still happens), leading to Germany's surprise attack going much further than the OTL. Let's assume the Japan can hold off the Soviets and capitulate China in this scenario. I believe that the USSR would move their armour, mechanised and the majority of their line infantry to Manchuria, giving Germany the perfect opening to attack. If Japan successfully holds fast, let's say they prepared adequate defences, the US still keeps trade going, and Germany still goes to war in 1942, the USSR would fare much worse against the Germans, having to move a portion of their army, including armour back across Siberia. I'd estimate that the German army could get to the Caucuses before the Soviets can mount a defence, giving Germany the vital oil, as well as the Ukrainian wheat fields. Potentially this is an Axis victory.

Wait, why would we assume Japan can hold off the Soviets and capitulate China when they couldn't force China to surrender IOTL?

Also if the war starts in '37, I bet it's over with a negotiated peace well before '41. The USSR isn't going to invade the Home Islands and Japan isn't going to get even close to the Urals, so they'll make peace after a year or two. The Soviets may have a few more forces in the Far East in '41 but not their full army or anything like that.
 

Anchises

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Wait, why would we assume Japan can hold off the Soviets and capitulate China when they couldn't force China to surrender IOTL?

Also if the war starts in '37, I bet it's over with a negotiated peace well before '41. The USSR isn't going to invade the Home Islands and Japan isn't going to get even close to the Urals, so they'll make peace after a year or two. The Soviets may have a few more forces in the Far East in '41 but not their full army or anything like that.

Agreed Japan is not going to achieve anything signifact against China, I doubt that they would even try.

Are we talking about the same fanatic Japanese nation though? I don't see them necessarily ending the war prior to 1941. This would probably turn into a weird ideological/prestige/honour thing for them. I don't really see how Japan could accept a victory of Soviet communism. This would jeopardize their whole imperial project.

If the USA don't szop selling ressources we might see a low intensity war that heats up from time to time.
 
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