Japan Avoids War With the US

[Johanus]

WI the Japanese held onto Manchuria and focussed only on non-US 'soft' SE Asian targets such as the Dutch East Indies & British protectorates thus gaining their Asian empire with a whole lot less heartache. Hell, they might even get some great trading terms from Australia who are left defenseless without their great ally in the pacific. Justa thought friends

 

[The Red]

Pacific experts will explain this a lot better but simply, if Japan attacks SE Asia, the US WILL be in the war.

If the Japanese could have avoided fighting a monster economy, do you not think they would have?

 

[Astrodragon]

WI the Japanese held onto Manchuria and focussed only on non-US 'soft' SE Asian targets such as the Dutch East Indies & British protectorates thus gaining their Asian empire with a whole lot less heartache. Hell, they might even get some great trading terms from Australia who are left defenseless without their great ally in the pacific. Justa thought friends

Try the search function

 

[Cook]

Without War with China, Japan had no reason to move south. The attack on Malaya and the Dutch East Indies was to secure the strategically important resources necessary to continue the war in China. No China War means no US embargo, no need for resources that they could not buy and therefore need to gamble in a Pacific War.

Alternatively you can have a China war, therefore necessitating the leap south to take possession of the Far East Asian colonies of the prostrate European Empires without attacking the Philippines or the other American possessions in the Pacific. Had the Japanese done so their flank would have been dangerously exposed to attack by American forces in the Philippines. On December 1st, 1941 Roosevelt gave a guarantee to assist Britain against Japan in the event of an attack on Britain’s colonies in the Far East as well as those of the Dutch so such a Japanese Strategy would have been extremely reckless, which they well knew.

 

[Super Parker Brothers]

Have the Japanese discover the oil and various other valuable resources in Manchuria. Or have the Japanese more skillfully say they are restoring China due to it being in a civil war. Perhaps supply them more on the down low.

 

[phx1138]

if Japan attacks SE Asia, the US WILL be in the war.

That's far from certain, provided you break the Japanese perception of U.S.-British inseperability. It was that, plus IMO IJN's desire for a sustained share of the defense budget, which led to the attack on Pearl Harbor. If there wasn't a perception an attack on Britain meant the U.S. would inevitably join (& it was far from inevitable), this would've been Japan's best course. (Hazarding SLOCs by leaving the P.I. unconquered would seem risky, but it beats war with the U.S. all hollow.)

To avoid the embargo, really you only need to keep Japan out of IndoChina. Pressure on France to allow transit through to attack China would suffice IMO; actual occupation wasn't required, & that was what provoked such a strong U.S. response.

Have the Japanese discover the oil and various other valuable resources in Manchuria.

I like this one, but I'm not at all sure the Japanese oil industry had the capability to detect it, or to extract it if they did.

 

[Fenrir_Angerboda]

Have the Japanese discover the oil and various other valuable resources in Manchuria.

I like this one, but I'm not at all sure the Japanese oil industry had the capability to detect it, or to extract it if they did.

if I remember correctly, most of our more Knowledgeable posters agree that Manchuria's Oil is out of the Japanese reach in this time period.

 

[phx1138]

if I remember correctly, most of our more Knowledgeable posters agree that Manchuria's Oil is out of the Japanese reach in this time period.

I tend to agree. Just wasn't sure.

 

[Emperor Norton I]

With the idea of the Americans eventually entering into war against Japan regardless, I would expect some direct attack against the United States to be necessary to spark a Pacific war between America and Japan. The public was quite against getting involved in foreign affairs before Pearl Harbor. If I recall, there was also some good feelings between the Japanese and Americans in the 30's.

Without America, I think Japan would have a far easier go at carving up the Pacific; that is if they can hold onto the vast empire they wished to claim (or could reasonably come to claim).

 

[CalBear]

The thing that makes this just about impossible is that the Japanese, like any other country planning to fight a war, HAD to honor the obvious threats. The United States represented an utterly lethal threat to Japanese plans for the Southern Resource Area and for Japan's plans to retain control of the Pacific Mandates (something that tends to get short shrift when the reasons for the war are discussed).

The Philippines, and the major American bases located there, especially on Luzon, were perfectly placed to disrupt the flow of materials from the DEI and Malaya back to the Home Islands. Guam was only a hundred or so miles from Saipan, which the Japanese were determined to turn into a full blown colony, and Wake was only around 500 miles from Eniwetak and less than 700 from Kwajalein in the Marshalls, making these U.S. possessions perfect locations to disrupt the Japanese and their overall desire to create a defensible perimeter. Leaving these locations in American hands was a virtual invitation for American interference in Japan's plans.

The Japanese had no reason to expect the Americans to NOT act against them. Without going too deeply into things, the Americans needed to retain control of parts of the Pacific for U.S. strategic needs (not just for the Philippines or Guam, but also for Hawaii and even the Canal Zone) and these needs overlapped Japan's. Japan and the U.S. had been glowering at each other since at least 1905, the U.S. had already put Japan''s economy in a serious twist even before the oil embargo, and Japanese actions in China (and critically French Indochina) had taken tensions between the two countries at the breaking point.

The grab for the Southern Resource Area was a massive gamble by the Japanese. The only way to make it work was to be able to present it as a fait accompli. The only way to do that was knock the Westerners out of the game before they even knew it was under way.

We all know now that it was a REALLY bad gamble by the Japanese. At the time it was a questionable choice, but from the Japanese perspective, it was also their only chance.

 

[anon_user]

One other issue - taking Manchuria led to the Kwantung Army basically running China policy on its own. If you want to avoid a Second Sino-Japanese War (which led to the war with the US), you probably need to keep Japan out of Manchuria.

 

[JimmyRibbitt]

WI the Japanese held onto Manchuria and focussed only on non-US 'soft' SE Asian targets such as the Dutch East Indies & British protectorates thus gaining their Asian empire with a whole lot less heartache. Hell, they might even get some great trading terms from Australia who are left defenseless without their great ally in the pacific. Justa thought friends

It might have been possible. It turns out that war nearly started with Germany in April of 1941. If that had happened, the USA would have been totally concentrated on fighting the war with Germany. Japan would have not needed to attack Pearl Harbor, and a US-Japan war is avoided for quite a while.

 

[HeavyWeaponsGuy]

WI the Japanese held onto Manchuria and focussed only on non-US 'soft' SE Asian targets such as the Dutch East Indies & British protectorates thus gaining their Asian empire with a whole lot less heartache. Hell, they might even get some great trading terms from Australia who are left defenseless without their great ally in the pacific. Justa thought friends

Australia's both Commonwealth and a regional ally for the US at this point, the Japanese wouldn't be able to extract absurdly pro-Japanese terms of trade especially considering that the Australian Navy won't beat the IJN ship for ship but it's enough of a deterrent to make Japan wary. Without being actively at war with Australia like it was at the time of Coral Sea, Japan won't risk picking a fight with Australia.

Snatching up British and Dutch colonies in SE Asia will also piss off the US. 90% of the world's rubber at this time comes from Southeast Asia and any OTL seizure of said resources by the Japanese (who obviously need it for their own military needs and such) is going to put a lot of people at Japan's mercy for rubber which will piss off everyone, US included, Southeast Asia is basically the Persian Gulf for the US before the Persian Gulf was even important, that is to say, the US will defend its resources.

Manchuria will still anger the Americans, they know that a Japanese Manchuria is a spear pointed right at China and if Japan is perceived as setting up shop in Manchuria for the long haul they might get an embargo anyway. The US taking economically punitive actions is more than enough to cripple Japan, Japan's logical course of action was to abandon its dreams of Asian conquest save for small piecemeal acquisitions of resource-rich areas but that would mean a completely different Japanese leadership than OTL grounded in reasonable goals that didn't involve picking fights with towering industrial giants in the region.

Japan is hemmed in by British possessions, American possessions, and the Soviet Union (on land in the north anyway) in its area of operation, militarily even the most competently-lead and skillful (and rather lucky) Japanese military operations will only delay an inevitable defeat, Japan can't dig in for a long haul and gets weaker the longer her wars go, her opponents, on the other hand, become stronger.

Japan is militarily capable but structurally it is quite possibly the weakest of the Axis powers for the reasons I have listed.

 

[jtjr26]

If Japan had managed to hang on to Manchuria, Korea, maybe a chunk nearby Soviet territory and backed off British and American interests, war with the US might have been avoided and Japan would probable be a major military power today.

 

[Malta]

If the Japanese had gone to war with the Soviet Union along with the other Axis could they have snatched up the Russian Far East?

 

[elkarlo]

Pacific experts will explain this a lot better but simply, if Japan attacks SE Asia, the US WILL be in the war.

If the Japanese could have avoided fighting a monster economy, do you not think they would have?

Personally I would love to see a TL of this. Be interesting to see how the US goes with the war, without the PH fury.

Also would love to see the BBs fight=D

 

[HeavyWeaponsGuy]

If the Japanese had gone to war with the Soviet Union along with the other Axis could they have snatched up the Russian Far East?

No, although people vastly smarter than I am could give you more detailed lists with bells and whistles and uh... free cupcakes, basically the Japanese have so much going against them for any theoretical Soviet invasion.

1. Not enough tanks, as demonstrated by Japan's disastrous expedition in Mongolia where Zhukov steamrolled them.

2. Crappy manpower, if all else fails, the Russians can easily take ten losses of their own for every one Japanese soldier they kill.

3. Not much for the Japanese to take aside from Vladivostok, otherwise they're expanding into Siberia, whose mineral wealth wasn't as well-explored at that time and was largely a huge hunk of snow.

4. Crappy industrial capacity compared to the Soviet Union. Remember, Germany over the long term could never have won in the Soviet Union, forced them into a Brest-Litovsk peace that favored the Germans, maybe, but never won, either way, Japan would be mounting a huge operation for minimal gain, the Axis powers rarely worked well together unless out of necessity and this is not liable to be an exception.