The only thing ITTL is how fast the Red Army changes. OTL they looked at the success of Germany and did nothing. Same with France. Then they received Barbarossa and still it took them full two years to get their troops ready for such attacks. And having radio so widespread would simply be beyond the capabilities of the industry.
I'm going to confess I was not following the TL when the posts about the actual Sudeten War went up and "New Posts" jumped me past it, so I should go back and read exactly how Soviet troops got to Czechoslovakia and what they did there.
But there is a world of difference between a few observers, largely spies, taking notes on what two other armies do versus having your own regular officers and troops engaged directly with an enemy. Also the timing of the 1938 war preempts a lot of the infamous purges. OTL Stalin was jealous as hell of the expeditionary "volunteers" in Spain and their political fate upon returning to the Soviet Union was pretty dire. Here however substantial numbers of Red Army ranks from raw recruits to high commanders were fighting the Wehrmacht and Luftwaffe, such as it was in '38, face to face. Meanwhile the theoreticians at the Frunze and elsewhere in Red Stavka, who were experienced from the Great War and the Civil War, have their own more or less "Leninist" theories, which have a political element to them. They surely, like Patton in the famous movie of the name, are reading books by Rommel, and other Western theoreticians, and critically considering them in the light of their own preferred "Soviet" doctrines--OTL I gather they incorporated a lot of German stuff but with important differences. Here they have actual combat with the German geniuses, albeit relatively brief and less intense than the savage crucible of OTL Barbarossa, to think about. And then the ongoing Spanish Civil War for a laboratory to test and refine theory.
Then their next actual fight is against Japan, which Zhukov managed and won on its limited scale OTL. This is a third chance to test and refine their theories. "No battle plan survives contact with the enemy" and forces need a certain degree of initiative and flexibility to survive and prevail--but as the author noted, Stalin's regime would not be deterred by the cost of blunders, he'd just send more soldiers in. Against powers such as Britain or the USA that could draw on very large numbers too, in the British case with excellent drill training in advance, in the American case without that being so effective on green Yankee recruits, infamously, but also with US GI's demonstrating a remarkable capability to learn on the job, or of course against the superbly trained and disciplined and high numbers Wehrmacht of OTL 1940, this sloppy and bloody mentality costs dearly and might offset his numbers advantage. The Japanese were of course disciplined and effective man for man in their own way, but their numbers are sadly limited especially because they are spread out and bogged down trying to retain hostile control of huge swathes of China as well as Manchuria and Korea--in the latter two the despised and discriminated against local natives are I suppose more fatalistically acquiescent to Japanese rule and not a few are complicit in their regime and have every reason to fear Soviet conquest. So they are perhaps more asset than liability to the Japanese system. Certainly some of them are! And organized resistance if any is orders of magnitude less there--at least until the Red lines start steamrollering in.
That the USSR, with a whole lot of Chinese help, prevail against the IJA seems entirely reasonable to me.
Before war broke out in 1941 Britain, America and France had a significant amount of investiture bonds present in Japan. It was isolated diplomatically, but not economically. One of the major reasons why japanese production took a massive hit otl was the withdrawal of western firms and investment. Japan was not isolated economically. And that would be a huge prerogative for the Soviets to take into account.
Well gosh, by that argument no capitalist power can ever go to war against anyone who accepts investment from them. Yet OTL the USA was deeply hostile to Japan even before Pearl Harbor. The USN had been assuming their major challenge, likely next foe, was Japan since at least the 1920s. The US China Lobby would be more alarmed at Soviet initiative than the author suggests I think--but these people emphasized China over Japan. The latter was a loose cannon who could pose a serious threat and naturally Japanese domestic policy had to prioritize Japanese interest over that of any of their Western investors. The British were more ambivalent I think, I forget if I already mentioned Churchill's post-war memoirs of the war years in which he shared a sentiment that it was a pity the Americans strongarmed Britain into cutting their alliance ties with Japan. I think Churchill wrote and published those memoirs with a keen eye on their immediate political effect, at a time when Labour had gotten control of the Commons and 10 Downing. Obviously having fought a bitter war with the relentless Japanese many a Briton would have acquired a chip on their shoulder, not to mention any speaking up for Imperial Japan being unpopular with his Yankee audience. (Recent revisionists cite very private correspondence and other memoirs of candid talks with close political sympathies such as the King, showing Churchill played his true feelings very very close to the vest and invested in friendly-seeming dissembling with people he had serious quarrels with in truth--his career played up good feeling with Americans where he very privately fumed against their ascendency for instance. Post-war during the Cold War the Tories consistently favored as much independence from US hegemony as they could muster, while Labour tended to fall into line with US wishes. Yet Churchill never lost sight of the fact that Britain needed excellent relations with the USA, however costly and humiliating to British imperial pride this might be). Letting slip something like that suggests to me Churchill must have counted on substantial sympathy despite the bitterness of the late war among at least some key classes of Britons who agreed that this Yankee demand was unfortunate. Mind I think Churchill had enough realism to honestly suppose the Anglo-Japanese rift went deeper than just bratty Yanks petulantly demanding the British unfriend them.
Fundamentally this "we are all mutually profiting investors here" made sense up to the Crash of '29 and subsequent world depression. When there was enough profit to go around for all, the British could and did maintain fairly good relations with Japan despite Yankee muttering. With the Crash though, it was every nation for itself, and while the British imperial system gave them a lot of shock absorption and wiggle room to muddle through, cushioning the severity on UK subjects themselves, with the "white" Dominions of the Commonwealth also pretty well able to limp along on their relatively high per capita wealth and ample resources, much as the USA could get by on welfarism, I am quite sure this meant that a relaxed attitude toward letting the Japanese participate informally had to go by the board, in the interest of actual British subjects the regime cared about first. Japan has practically no resources, scanty farmland (enough, with fishing, to feed herself with policy strongly favoring their domestic agricultural sector, but quite frugally)--any prosperity on capitalist terms would require heavy trading with overseas partners. They had Taiwan, Korea and a scattering of tiny Pacific islands they seized from the Germans in the Great War (who had purchased them from Spain in the wake of Spain's defeat in the Spanish-American War) under their direct control. It is no accident at all that the warlords, notably the IJA, took power from the nominally liberal and parliamentary forms of Japanese government (always beholden to the upper classes and wealthy from Meiji days to be sure). Aside from a handful of Communists, easily arrested or driven deep underground, the common peasants of the Japanese countryside actually regarded the IJA as their spokesmen, and the gung-ho conquest policies offered gratification of their hopes and quelling their fears. Meanwhile objectively speaking Japanese industry needed resource inputs which they were no longer, in tight Depression markets, in a good position to purchase by selling manufactured goods--the various colonial regimes that largely controlled sources of raw material on the global markets were each trying to nurse along their own domestic industry as top priority, leaving damn little to no demand for Japanese imports, hence no funds to buy working material inputs with. Were it not for their infamous inhumane brutality against most of those they dominated, and the basic moral bankruptcy of imperialism (which even the USA was complicit in, arguably in some ways less brutally though I suspect the Filipino insurgents of the 1900s decade would offer a second opinion on that, as would others, formally under the US flag or in the "Roosevelt Corollary" Central American sphere of informal interest, such as Sandino and his followers in Nicaragua) I'd have some sympathy for the militarists; it was a fact that British, French, Dutch, Belgian and yes, US prosperity did lean on imperial holdings acquired mainly by violence and extortion; Japan carving out a big broad resource base and captive market of her own out of China was no more awful in principle than the Western imperialist systems were, and of course indeed these same Western powers were guilty of extorting quite a lot from the Chinese themselves. All they were "guilty" of in their view was getting into the game late. The autarky of British and French and lesser colonialist systems during the Depression was a stark demonstration, as these Japanese leaders could reasonably argue, of the necessity of Japan doing the same thing. To this they could at least pretend that as fellow Asians, their rule over Asian subjects would be inherently less offensive than the white supremacism Europeans and Yankees so often expressed frankly and still more widely demonstrated in practice. Not a lot more widely, the pre-WWII era in European-centered societies involved plain racism as avowed common sense in many cases, notably the USA but also to an extent everyone; persons claiming absolute human equality were suspected of being Communist sympathizers if not outright Reds. (One reason I expect Stalin to have some serious clout with Third World nationalist anti-colonialists, certainly the reason Ho Chi Minh joined the Third International OTL--this despite the Kremlin's ham-handed and self-serving demands on loyal Reds that crippled more than fostered them as local revolutionaries). Japanese credibility as liberator of the oppressed Asians was rapidly blown by their practices in China and elsewhere pretty quick, but still a factor in places like Indonesia and Thailand even as they were being defeated.
So in this dog eat dog context I think we can dismiss the weight of Western capital investments in Japan as being largely written off as good money after bad. Western interests favored regimes Western investors had leverage over. Japan was a fine fair-weather partner but when the chips were down, given a choice between expanding Japanese influence versus the easily romanticized plight of their Chinese victims, mere sentiment veered to these, who cynically speaking seemed far more helpless and liable to paternalist guidance. (Sun Yat Sen and Chiang Kai Shek, not to mention the Chinese Reds, had very different and more self-assertive aspirations of course. But OTL Chiang at least bleakly understood he was dependent on Yankee and other European-sphere Great Power charity. Not enough to faithfully and reliably take detailed direction, probably as much because he was incapable of exercising control as because he was a "bad puppet," with genuine if perhaps unrealistic nationalist priorities.
The US China Lobby is in my acerbic and perhaps overly cynical view, a bunch of apologists for American informal hegemony over China, taking an allegedly high-minded stance against formal imperialism, concessions, extraterritorialty (the latter ambiguously, I suppose American "China hands" leaned pretty heavily on special privileges for "white" great power foreigners in practice) and so forth, relying in rhetoric on the free market as China's salvation. Basically Republicans, with a major investment in Christian mission work in the Chinese Republic as well. The sentimental layer should not be dismissed as utterly empty of content--US Army Air Corps aviator Chennault of the "Flying Tigers" married a Chinese woman for instance. (US racism, especially in this frank period of open and normalized white supremacism, had its nuances and internal debates. Some would grant that such Europeans as Poles or Sicilians were reasonably "white," others would not; in the American West bigotry against Asians in general (along with against Latinos, especially Mexicans, and Native Americans who were rare and romanticized in the East--if as Western movie heroes were known to put it "the only good Indian is a dead Indian," in US popular culture apparently dead Indians become retrospectively and sentimentally good--out west they were manifestly not all dead yet and anti-Native bigotry was and remained quite blunt and vile. So not all Americans, even among the conventional taking racial stratification as a "fact" of "nature," equally devalued Asians--but Chennault's legal marriage would be just as illegal in say Virginia as if he had married an African-American woman; OTL it took a court case in Nevada after WWII to cause the US federal courts to clear its throat against laws barring Asian-"white" marriages and I don't think the precedent had any weight whatsoever in Virginia for instance, at any rate the dramatization of the Loving case in the recent docudrama film of that name had the Virginia local judge demanding the Lovings leave Virginia and not come back citing God's creation of separate races listing the "Malay" among those who should not marry "whites." Perhaps the American aviator's political status would protect him and Madame Chennault if they should happen to stray onto Virginia Commonwealth soil.
But meanwhile, OTL, a high Japanese diplomatic official in the late 1930s was forbidden by California state troopers from setting foot on California soil; he was ordered to remain in a car IIRC driven all the way from San Francisco to the Oregon border on highway 101. (That's a fair distance even today to remain in a car seat, some 200 miles and more to Eureka I know from personal experience setting trip meters, and the drive onward to Crescent City and over into Oregon is perhaps almost as much more, considering how twisty the roads are; at reasonably safe driving speeds on the 1939 or so version of the highway I imagine it took the better part of a full day). This was before major war scares or Japanese expansion into Indochina; it was just general West Coast version of anti-Asian bigotry having its routine play.
The OTL WWII narrative was "Chinese good, Japanese bad" and there were posters created to educate Americans on the alleged differences so they could learn to vent their bigotry against the right Asians. Prewar sentiment presented a conflicting kaleidoscope of old school Yellow Peril fear and hatemongering against Asians indiscriminately with popularizations of "good" Chinese, such as Charlie Chan the Chinese-Hawaiian police detective (played by a "white" actor though IIRC from seeing some Charlie Chan movie or other as a kid, his (more highly Americanized) sons were portrayed by Asian actors) or I have the impression such comic strips as Terry and the Pirates, which had a radio version too I believe. (God knows who the voice actors were, I could look it up I suppose).
Thus, if we look at US society as layers and classes and groups of some diversity of interest and sentiment, the China Lobby itself, in its more active and central form, is a bunch of businessmen and clergy (with active laymen in the religious aspect) interested in maintaining good business conditions and spreading Christianity among the "pagans" (I did see a 1950s or late '40s black and white film in Catholic school in the mid-70s, in Los Angeles, urging kids like myself, in 4th grade at the time, to donate money to "saving a pagan baby," to give some sense of the durability of such terms in moderately "hip" US venues as late as 1975, at least in a conservative religious school).
The fact that some of these people are indeed "China hands" who have been to China and lived there some years might well mean a genuine softening or close to erasure of generic anti-Asian bigotry and more or less appreciation of Chinese culture as a valuable thing in itself. Or not!
Then we have a wider penumbra of people with some sentiment at least for a romanticized (and somewhat supplicant) image of at least some Chinese, most of whom will have reinforced the general anti-Asian bigotry against the Japanese in particular, perhaps some with the notion that with a different government Japan might be all right. This group blends into the religious-missionary lobby on one side and the business-oriented China lobby on another, but also overlaps leftists with some degree of anti-racist notions along with hard core Red radicals and the passionate humanists.
Beyond this, we have both the ruling elites who don't have any particular sentiment for China nor governing particular business or political interests, and broad classes unmoved by the pro-Chinese sentiments.
Permeating most of these groups, perhaps least among some of the general public pro-China sentimentalists where a fair number might be more or less leftist and perhaps anti-racist, there is a common current of anti-radicalism, at least against left-radicalism (quite a few could be quite paleoconservative, or more or less "libertarian" in the sense of the modern American party, or zealously Christian--clearly a deeply and self-aware racist view would conflict with sentiment for the Chinese as people too though not so much perhaps against a notion that "white" America can benefit from racially inferior allies who know their place, or can anyway be kept in it without too much trouble; these types would be queasy or angry about intermarriages of course).
What surprised me about the canon post most (not a lot really) is that the USA stays totally aloof of this active war against Japan. Certainly there is not much of a pretext for the USA to declare war on the Japanese Empire, but both positive American ties of affinity with the Chinese, such as they are, and the moderate-left lean of Roosevelt's administration seeking detente and what Ronald Reagan would call "constructive engagement" (in his 1980s case with the South African Nationalist apartheid regime, he wouldn't use such a term for engagement with a Leninist regime of course) with the USSR, with a small but substantial and vocal US minority of left radicals spinning everything the Soviets do in the most glorious light possible.
So an unholy alliance of sorts not unlike the overall grand WWII package would be possible perhaps. OTL it was moderates, security hawks who weren't pro-fascist, and leftists who wanted the USA in the European war to fight the Nazis, and meanwhile the hawks versus Japan were mainly this moderate to right wing China Lobby/USN lobby which leaned farther to the right, plus of course security hawks, and humanists opposed to Japanese imperialism more than they were anti-war. "Something for everyone" except committed pacifists and radical isolationists--"America First" was not so much hardline isolationist as skeptics of another European war, and leaned a bit right and were a lot softer on the issue of a possible war with Japan.
In the ATL, with the Soviets taking aggressive action against Japan, certainly hard line anti-Communists would be alarmed but any suggestion of positively helping Japan would be countered by the strong lean, especially on the right, against Japan and for a paternalist patronage of China. The China Lobbyists, and I suppose a fair number of USN officers and even larger share of their civilian boosters, will share some anti-Red sentiment (though perhaps more Naval officers and enlisted than one might imagine are at least indifferent about the Red Scare, and some positively pink or an even redder hue). But they definitely would like to see Japan taken down a few notches--it is just that they'd rather the USA do it, on our terms. Meanwhile the more diffuse and soft pro-China sentimentalists would be less a right wing group as a whole and basically glad to see someone knocking down Japan, without much worry an invincible monster Bear takes Japan and Hitler's places put together.
Which I honestly think is not a fair description of where Stalin is headed anyway--yes, he might match and exceed their combined mobilized manpower and firepower though it would be a heck of a struggle to catch up to the combined naval power of the IJN and Kriegsmarine. On paper he would become an equal and eventually worse threat. But I do think he and his successors lack the kind of fanatical drive to triumph by warlike means, as a virtuous end in itself, which definitely describes both Nazi and Imperial Japanese militarist mentalities. On paper the Communists are supposed to be trying to conquer the world, but the same paper says to do it by aiding domestic revolutionaries and not by a steamroller Bonapartist conquest campaign, and prudence tells them "the correlation of forces is not yet favorable enough" for generations to come.
So these moderate to pink skeptics about the Soviet threat would be basically correct, granting Stalin will pick any easy low lying fruit he can. That opportunity does not come so easily though, and moderate degrees of Western commitment to containment would just about eliminate them.
Alongside American far left radicals then, the moderate to pinkish pro-China/anti-Japan sentimentalists could form at least a fair weather alliance with a considerable portion of the US corporate bureaucracy, centrists, security hawks and right-leaning China Lobby to go so far as to openly declare war on Japan, throwing in with the Soviets and RoC, with the USN obviously doing naval heavy lifting against the IJN while the Russo-Chinese alliance takes on most of the IJA.
That this did not happen is not surprising of course; going to war is a step most Americans would view as a grave one, whereas the Japanese have not done anything grossly provocative to justify it. Meanwhile, alarming as it is to the China Lobby and security hawks, not to mention anti-Communists, many Americans would be grateful such a bloody and expensive and painful task is someone else's problem.
The realistic upshot is not so much a passionate celebration of the Russia-Japan War as moderate controversy, but the case against the Soviets would be largely confined to people who rant against the Godless Reds at every opportunity anyway; others who might nod along will be quieter than usual because the Soviets are taking down Japan. (After all, they cannot invade or even heavily damage the Home Islands, nor interdict Japanese trade, such as it is). That they are moving on to get control of Manchuria and Korea and effective strings to probably make the RoC a largely compliant puppet, will seem like tomorrow's problem, and one that in the most crucial respect, control over China, might never happen in effective reality.
Thus while the USA probably wouldn't declare war (though that is the only way to sweep up Japanese possessions in the Pacific to be sure) I do think there would be a spectrum ranging from shaking their heads at the Soviet led campaign to those who consider it downright good. Certainly Chiang's embassies will be well received in America (by all but the most extreme leftists, and even those among them who are literal card carrying Communists will be under Comintern orders to be pleasant about the KMT leader). The Soviets will not be as much liked, but neither will they be as hated and feared.
Broadly speaking, in all the Western powers that are after all all essentially democratic domestically, similar spectra of opinion leading to overall national ambivalence will prevail.
In this, I think our author is being very level headed and reasonable in this post. Attacking Japan, especially since this practically means attacking Japan's recently ill-gottten gains on the Asian continent and not attacking their Home Islands at all, will not seem either as scary or as morally outrageous as say attacking Finland, Poland or Romania. They are entirely different cases, nor does Stalinist victory in China mean he must be looking to attack on another front any time soon.
