A very interesting thread.
I have one major observation.
The bulk of this thread is far more bullish on Japanese short and medium term chances than I have tended to see in my last twenty years of participating in what-if discussion boards. Usually Japan's short and medium term chances, for over the entire period of 1936-1945, are dismissed with the retorts: "Japanese beaten at Khalkin-Gol", "Nomonhan", "superior Soviet armor and artillery", "superior Soviet industry", sometimes even "superior Soviet airpower" or "Japan spent all its money on its navy and left its Army a WWI era force".
1. Actually, I subscribe to the light infantry, peasant farmer boy, Yamato spirit, hypothesis to explain the IJA's WWII performance. I discussed elsewhere and here; that the IJA had its modernist faction, but that
lack of economic means meant that their professional officer corps had to solve the land warfare problem with the resource it had in relative abundance, which was the excellent hardy and intelligent human infantry recruits it obtained from its drafted cohorts.
The discussions here also leave me with a question.
Posters on this thread have address a Soviet-Japanese regional clash at multiples times:, the OP's 1938, but also 1939, and 1941-1942. The Soviets are argued to be most vulnerable in 1937 and 1941-1942, and least vulnerable in 1939. Since we are looking at a range of times, what would Soviet vulnerability in the 1932 timeframe be to a Japanese attack? What about in 33 or 34 or 35? Are the Soviets more or less vulnerable than in the periods we have been discussing?
2. Based on the time periods, I would estimate soviet maximum danger to IJA attack as being 1925-1933, the very years when the pre WWII Imperial Japanese Government (IPG) was most "liberal" and reluctant to engage in wars of aggression. After 1935, the Russians can make a stiff fight and very likely win a prolonged war, because by then their heavy industry is capable of turning out tanks, artillery and mortars enough to mechanically overmatch superior Japanese infantry proficiency. The Russians will have air parity to about 1937, when the Japanese will introduce new generations of aircraft that leapfrog soviet competencies materially and operationally in the air. Nevertheless, the soviet ground power, provided that Stalin is shot, his cronies likewise, the Russians learn logistics for mechanized forces cross country and the STAVKA runs the war, should result in Russian victory through sheer mass of numbers of machines and high explosives. I think the IJA is steam-rollered, unless the European situation keeps 2 of every 3 Russian bullet-stoppers west of the Urals as it RTL did. This conclusion seems to hold up in spite of the botched soviet operations at Khalkin Gol.
And I like to remind people, that anybody, who fights long enough, will become tactically very proficient...
in spite of Stalin.
Several posts also take a line I would dispute.
I think some posters are overestimating the degree that anti-communism will shape American, British, and French reactions to a Soviet-Japanese war, particularly in the Far East.
3.
The Henry Ford effect? Seems to be a persistent theme in at least American history, that the upper level capitalists, think they can do business with anybody, even monsters like Stalin and Hitler. Such naïve men (My opinion; YMMV.) have done enormous historical harm by not paying attention to the moral components of "doing business".
America, under both Wilson and Harding, distrusted Japanese intervention in the Russian Far East to the point that they both pushed for Japanese withdrawal at risk of Boleshevik takeover. This was even though Japan had been a loyal wartime ally in WWI, and Russia was a turncoat ally and radical revolutionary threat.
4.
The Yellow Peril was a real American bugaboo, an utterly
despicable western US adjunct to an already deeply schismed and racist polity, which still had embers of race-hate left over from the American civil-war.
The strategic rationale for recognizing the Soviet Union in 1933 was to help contain the Japanese. [this ran parallel to the economic rationale of increasing trading opportunities during the Depression].
5. Do not dispute this conclusion. Might temper it with the realism of Cordell Hull and some members of the professional American military, but the "Ford Effect" saw Japan as an economic competitor, not a partner. The Russians were "customers". Roosevelt was part of that fluster-clucked misapprehension unfortunately.
This all being the case, why then would FDR's America in the 1930s or 1940s favor the Japanese over the Soviets, when the US past its earlier Red Scare, and the Soviet Union was a more established fixture of the world scene? Further, since the early 1920s when the US judged the Yellow Peril was at least as bad as the Red Menace, Japan had not done itself any favors compared with the Soviet Union. The Soviets entered the League of Nations, while he Japanese had quit the League of Nations, attacked Manchuria and Shanghai, started breaking arms limitation treaties, and began a habit of domestic governance by assassination.
6. Because for the Americans, at least, the soviets bent over backwards to look "small", compared to other predatory nation states in an era when the ambitions were based on cutthroat state centered economic competition inside an imperialist system. The Russians went out of their way to gin up "good press" (LIE.), about their own imperialist goals and ambitions. They were for "the common man", when
Stalin was just as evil and imperialist as Nicholas II. The Japanese had to crash through a language and culture barrier to get their own message across and unfortunately FOR THEM, the Americans knew exactly what the Japanese meant and intended.
Britain *might* have a somewhat different perspective, less unfavorable to Japan, more unfavorable to the USSR, but still may think of Russia as a potentially valuable diplomatic counterwieght to Germany in Europe. France at this time, the mid-1930s, had a security pact with Russia. Although the pact was weak and turned out to be ineffectual, Paris considered it useful enough to sign, and Paris logically had far more to be concerned about if it alienated Moscow compared to the risks of alienating Tokyo.
7. Ahm… That flipflops during WWII. Germany may have been a mortal threat to the UK metropole and had to be thrashed, but JAPAN cost the UK her empire. The British conservatives in their polity "might" still hold some resentment over this outcome.
8. The Americans, on the other hand, after having been measured out by the Japanese and vice versa, have come to "respect" each other. Notice I do not use the term, "like"?
9. France was so splintered politically from 1935 onward, that even French historians are not sure what their society and government was ultimately about. Past warns future, there, folks.
