Soviet-Japanese war in 1939 How much of the mainland could Japan hold

Deleted member 1487

If you think the Japanese holding offshore natural gas or oil matters, you don't know just how terribly bad the Japanese were at oil and gas.

The oil well got invented by the Chinese before the Han dynasty.

The Japanese dug pits to get oil in Timor. Pits.
Do you have some source about that? One perhaps that might explain the situation and context?
 

Ian_W

Banned
And you're uncritically accepting a single unsourced sentence from a powerpoint why? Or extrapolating it to wider practices, rather than an issue of say shipping in the necessary equipment due to US submarine interdiction?

If you want to live in a fantasyland where the Japanese had a robust oil and gas industry that can imagine exploration drilling in the 14m of water that Chavyo is in then you're welcome to believe that.

In reality, the Japanese went to war without even setting up a specialist engineering unit to do drilling, which is something that the bad-at-logistics Germans did with the Technical Oil Brigade (which didnt actually get any oil out of Baku, because oil fields are easy to destroy - burn the refinery, pour concrete into the wells - and hard to get going again).
 
Assuming the Japanese hang on to all of Sakhalin/Karafuto and other areas where they may be oil/gas IF they are not fighting with the USA and IF they have reached a settlement with China they can "rent" the oil gas expertise from the US (or UK or Netherlands) to develop resources - but no matter what that is in the future and long term.

There are several key points here:
1. As long as the USN and RN are not players there is no way the USSR can invade Sakhalin/Karafuto in the face of the IJN, let alone the Japanese home islands. Period.
2. Fighting the Japanese from summer 1939 until Spring 1941 - assuming for a moment Barbarossa goes off on schedule - does notmarkedly improve the Red Army any more than the disasters with Finland did IN THE SHORT TERM. It took some time to reorganize the Red Army and learn and incorporate lessons, and the officers did not get out of the Gulag until the Germans invaded. I don't see 18 months of fighting with Japan changing that timeline.
3. If Japan is fighting the USSR in 1939, this is before the biggest embargoes on oil and other key raw materials. The occupation of French Indochina after Germany conquered France, was what tipped the final embargoes (not until summer 1941). If Japan is fighting the USSR in summer 1940, I doubt they will have a desire to occupy FIC and certainly won't have the spare military resources to do it. Hence the final embargoes which made Japan desperate unlikely here.
4. If Germany invades the USSR, and a USSR distracted in Manchuria and on the Pacific Coast is going to be even more attractive. If and when the Germans invade, the USSR is, quite rightly, going to focus all military assets and attention to the front on their western border. The reality is that the USSR can suffer major reverses in Manchuria, Mongolia, and eastern Siberia and recover. Losing the western USSR is crippling and if they get Moscow and beyond... You can bet that if the Germans invade the Soviets will try to end the fighting in the east and cut a deal.
 
If you want to live in a fantasyland where the Japanese had a robust oil and gas industry that can imagine exploration drilling in the 14m of water that Chavyo is in then you're welcome to believe that.

In reality, the Japanese went to war without even setting up a specialist engineering unit to do drilling, which is something that the bad-at-logistics Germans did with the Technical Oil Brigade (which didnt actually get any oil out of Baku, because oil fields are easy to destroy - burn the refinery, pour concrete into the wells - and hard to get going again).

Uh, you do know that non-existent Japanese engineering unit was packed onto a freighter and sent to the DEI to repair some of the damaged Dutch oil fields, but before they could get there a US sub met the freighter and killed it and most of them?
 

Deleted member 1487

If you want to live in a fantasyland where the Japanese had a robust oil and gas industry that can imagine exploration drilling in the 14m of water that Chavyo is in then you're welcome to believe that.
Until you've got real sourcing the demonstrates otherwise, I have no reason not too given they were producing millions of tons per year back in Japan.

In reality, the Japanese went to war without even setting up a specialist engineering unit to do drilling, which is something that the bad-at-logistics Germans did with the Technical Oil Brigade (which didnt actually get any oil out of Baku, because oil fields are easy to destroy - burn the refinery, pour concrete into the wells - and hard to get going again).
Got sourcing?
 

Deleted member 1487

Which is demonstrating they were sufficiently bad at the oil business to not be able to refine the crude they were extracting into fuel oil, which is not exactly one of the higher fractions.
Or, if you read the link, lost the equipment to refine it, which was destroyed by the Dutch, then lost their engineers and equipment when the ship carrying them was torpedoed by a US submarine. Kind of hard to refine with such losses.
 
Assuming the Japanese hang on to all of Sakhalin/Karafuto and other areas where they may be oil/gas IF they are not fighting with the USA and IF they have reached a settlement with China they can "rent" the oil gas expertise from the US (or UK or Netherlands) to develop resources - but no matter what that is in the future and long term. SR is crippling and if they get Moscow and beyond... You can bet that if the Germans invade the Soviets will try to end the fighting in the east and cut a deal.
If you want to live in a fantasyland where the Japanese had a robust oil and gas industry that can imagine exploration drilling in the 14m of water that Chavyo is in then you're welcome to believe that. In reality, the Japanese went to war without even setting up a specialist engineering unit to do drilling, which is something that the bad-at-logistics Germans did with the Technical Oil Brigade (which didnt actually get any oil out of Baku, because oil fields are easy to destroy - burn the refinery, pour concrete into the wells - and hard to get going again).

Two things to be checked off,
1) even with modern technology, Japan still would not survive with Sakhalin offshore oil and gas exploitation alone. The fantasy was not how able Japan could have exploited the resources but there simply were not enough to quench the need.
2) In an OTL that posters could develop, specialist engineers in Japan could investigate more on Sakhalin and (Inner and Outer) Manchuria. However, long term peace needed to be present. With reference to Italian engineering in Libya, the detailed exploration by Italy in Libya was halted by the ww2 in the OTL, not to mentioned exploitation.
3) In another related OTL, how could this long term peace be secured?
 
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