Result of the 2nd Sino-Japanese War

Lets say there was an isolationist administration in the white house or there was no WW2 in Europe or something, would the Japanese have been able to win the 2nd Sino-Japanese War if they had not been involved in the Pacific War and were not cut off from oil.
 
Lets say there was an isolationist administration in the white house or there was no WW2 in Europe or something, would the Japanese have been able to win the 2nd Sino-Japanese War if they had not been involved in the Pacific War and were not cut off from oil.

The Japanese would have most likely been able to beat the organized resistance eventually, but it would take a very long time, cost an enormous amount of resources, and they'd get absolutely nothing out of it since it would still be seething with partisan activity. They'd essentially wreck the Empire trying to subdue China. China is far too big for the Japanese to subdue, though they can wreck the place very thoroughly before giving up.
 

Jlinker613

Banned
They could never keep control of China entirely. At best it could keep what it had before the war, take control of a few ports, peninsulas, and Islands, and carve out a very nice sphere of influence. It also could keep Manchuria and support an independent Tibet and East Turkestan Islamic Republic as puppet states/dependent states.
 
Not without nuclear and biological weapons, and they'll probably already have been bled white by then.
 
Tactically Japan pretty much did win the war, strategically their concepts of how to turn this tactical victory into a peace never worked properly and the indisciplined armies that were the IJA kept screwing Japan as it attempted to do this. It was hard for them to make peace when their own generals undercut it every single time, and in particular after Nanking. Japan's whole problem in that war was that it set itself up to fail when it deliberately refused any political accommodations with any of the existing Chinese factions and expected terror would give it everything it wanted. This in a real sense is the exact same mistake that the Nazis made a few years later, and in both cases the reasons were inbuilt into both systems.

A Japan that could reign in its generals sufficiently to negotiate a peace is a Japan where the Mukden Incident and government-by-assassination that characterized the 1930s would never have happened.
 
Lets say there was an isolationist administration in the white house or there was no WW2 in Europe or something, would the Japanese have been able to win the 2nd Sino-Japanese War if they had not been involved in the Pacific War and were not cut off from oil.
Sigh.

1) Most of the tankers carrying oil to Japan were foreign owned, and would have been pulled out to support WWII in other theaters.

2) Japan was rapidly running out of hard currency with which to buy the oil. They couldn't have afforded to buy it OR lease the tankers (even if the latter hadn't been pulled out)

3) So in, say 18 months, the whole Japanese war machine starts grinding to a halt for lack of oil anyway.
 
Japanese are unlikely to win outright. Their armies had stalled in China, and they were not able to economically benefit from the areas in China they had occupied. From 1940-1944, the Chinese and Japanese had adopted a quid pro quo over large amounts of their areas. Neither pursued the war diligently, because neither could afford to. This does not mean there was inactivity or lack of big battles. There were. However, China did not have the capacity to engage in large scale offensives after 1939/1940, and Japan did not have the will to mobilize their society entirely to knock out the Nationalists because of the cost versus the gains.

None of this changes should the US administration refrain from helping China more, or if no European war breaks out.

A likely scenario is this: British complete Burma-Yunnan railroad in 1942 allowing the Nationalists a secure route to receive supplies. Chiang slowly rebuilds his army. Japan refrains from escalting the Chinese war out of concern that Britain and France will step up any support for the Nationalists. Various battles happen in 1940-1945 that keep the stalemate. By 1945/1946, Chiang has sufficiently built up the Nationalist Army that it can begin winning battles and inflicts a substantial defeat on Japanese forces, and for the first time truly reconquers territory. Japan responds by sending additional reinforcements, instituting a new stalemate. The conflict likely remains frozen for many years in this pattern until China gains enough land to sufficiently build up a modern army (will take many years) or a new government in Tokyo agrees to leave China in a negotiated peace. The resolution may not happen until well into the 1950s.
 
I think the outcome would be very similar to the war between Nazis and Russia or the HUndred Years War. China would win eventually but it would take such an enormous cost of lives, manpower, resources, goods and wealth that the country would have been left prostate and destitute for a long time. Now I see no possibility the Japs would ever negotiate with the Chinese gov't and would see no possible outcome other than victory or death so I see casualties in excess of 10 million for them, and 25-30 million soldiers and 50 + million civilians for the Nationalists.
 
After the initial Japanese gains between 1937 and 1940, they kind of ran out of steam, however the Nationalist armies could not really inflict any meaningful defeats on them. Likewise, the Japanese would not be able to penetrate into the mountains of Southwest China, where the KMT base was. In a few years' time, the KMT would've had streamlined their war production and had enough men under arms to the point where the Japanese would've been forced out simply because the Chinese had a 6:1 advantage in manpower.
 
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