The issue with that was that if you look at Gallup polling, responses like "If Japan wars with the British and Dutch, we should take any measures short of war, even those which may invite war, to stop them from succeeding" were fairly common and rising in popularity. Making war only on the British and Dutch basically invites the US extending Neutrality Patrols into the Pacific, and there's plenty of ways the US from the Philippines can monkey-wrench making war on the Dutch and British.
Was Japan really in an "unwinnable" war?
- Thread starter LestWeForget
- Start date
I know the common one is 'If they only attack UK and Dutch holdings and ignore the Phillipines...' but you'd then be leaving an enemy on your flank and having them be able to interdict any lines of supply and convoys. And knowing the Japanese there would be an 'unfortunate Incident' where US ships were attacked.
Without WW1 or WW2, one could argue that Great Britian could have held onto India for many additional decades.
And considering Japanese policies in the 30s, I honestly wouldn't be surprised if Japan just ends up killing off most of the Chinese population through slave labor, organized famine, and mass murder, and whatever's left is just controlled by a puppet government like the Qing.
IMO their only chance would be to attack only the Dutch (and maybe the British only if they tried to interfere), seize Indonesia and then hope for the best. If their victories against the Dutch/British were so impressive as in our TL, maybe, just maybe the Americans would have stayed out of it - or at least temporarily.
You could argue Britain could have held on to India, yes. But they already had local power structures in place and onside, a century plus of rule behind them, and at least the passive acquiescence if not active enthusiasm of most of the population. Japan didn't have that (outside to a limited extent in Manchuria), it had force and frightfulness. And you can't casually handwave away half a billion people; killing them will take time, lots of time, in which the Japanese are pouring blood and treasure into a forever war where the only possible outcome is they win every battle except the last one.
For Japan to have a chance - you need peace in Western Europe, with France defeated, and the UK with a less than onerous 'peace'. Germany, can lean on the Dutch to supply oil, to Japan, just like the UK is obliged to supply oil to Germany. The UK does not assist China with any aid, or allow any aid from elsewhere to pass through it's Empire's borders.
In return, the 'Empire' in the Far East will not be threatened - as long as it continues to trade with the Axis.
Hence Europe's territories in the Far East are safe. It's all up to the US, they don't have the worry of L-L any more.
Japan doesn't have need to attack PH, and while the US will get stronger what reason do they have for firing the first shot!?
In return, the 'Empire' in the Far East will not be threatened - as long as it continues to trade with the Axis.
Hence Europe's territories in the Far East are safe. It's all up to the US, they don't have the worry of L-L any more.
Japan doesn't have need to attack PH, and while the US will get stronger what reason do they have for firing the first shot!?
Canalguy
Banned
I can see only one SLIM chance for Japan to have wrested a WW2 Pacific "ceasefire" with America ... and it requires several successful "what IFs" in a row ...
Historically the Japanese took the Chinese city of Nanking in 1938, and proceeded to massacre some 300,000 people therein ... even today no one knows the exact numbers ... referred to worldwide as "The Rape of Nanking" ... all covered in horrendous detail by the western film crews of Pathe News amongst others ... short newsreels of which were shown in British and American movie theaters before the main entertainment daily films were run ... in the days before TV, this was how most civilians got their visual news reports ...
What IF #1 ... Japan succeeds at a surprise invasion of Oahu on Dec. 7'41, not just 2 air raids on the USN's Pacific Fleet ... a topic debated in alternative history discussion boards for decades now ... in doing so she captures roughly 250,000 Americans on the Hawaiian Islands, and eventually another 200,000 or so on the Pacific Islands (mostly on the Philippine Islands) then rendered well behind the new Pacific "front lines" ... the confidence of the American "body politic" is profoundly shaken by this unexpected defeat.
What IF #2 ... on that same Dec.7'41 date another small scale by surprise Japanese air attack on Panama knocks out the Panama Canal for from between 6 months and 2 years ... not that doing so would prevent Atlantic to Pacific transfers of American war materials and weapons but that without the Panama Canal it takes an additional 2 -3 months for America to arrange the refueling tankers and convoys needed for such traffic around Cape Horn without stripping the British Royal Navy of so much fuel that her trans-Atlantic convoy system would collapse and prevent Lend-Lease shipments to the desperate Russians as well ... the collapse of Britain to Germany MUST NOT be allowed to happen under any circumstance ... another body blow to America's faith in her civilian leadership's ability to successfully lead the Nation in wartime.
What IF #3 ... the Japanese manage to fend off the inevitable American counter-attack on fortress Oahu, intended to retake their captured "Gibralter of the Pacific"...
The confidence of the American voter would be shaken to the CORE and with memories of Japan's "Rape of Nanking" as presented by Pathe News just 3 short years previously dancing in their heads, I would suggest that America might just have entertained a Japanese request for a Pacific ceasefire while discussion were held with respect to eventually returning the still alive 550,000 American citizens captured by Japan, to American control while a de-militarized Hawaii was traded back in exchange for American recognition of Japan as the new owners of all of the Dutch East Indies natural resources, including oceans of oil, yearly rubber crops, all types of minerals and foodstuffs ...
Not a bad trade off from the American point of view since America had never owned the Dutch East Indies anyway ... and 550,000 American VOTERS, who each had wives, husbands, sons, daughters, grandfathers and grandmothers, nieces and nephews, cousins, aunts and uncles, brothers and sisters who would also vote against the current US administration if fresh Pathe newsreels of butchery started arriving from Hawaii and the Philippines ... quite a sizeable voting block ... probably more than enough votes to swing America firmly back onto a pacifist WW2 path ...
Quite a risky plan to consider, I know. The short war which the Japanese so hoped for since they KNEW that they could never hope to win a long production war against America. But with an American, British, and Dutch oil embargo swiftly choking her, what else could the Japaneses Empire have even entertained, other than abject surrender ?
Historically the Japanese took the Chinese city of Nanking in 1938, and proceeded to massacre some 300,000 people therein ... even today no one knows the exact numbers ... referred to worldwide as "The Rape of Nanking" ... all covered in horrendous detail by the western film crews of Pathe News amongst others ... short newsreels of which were shown in British and American movie theaters before the main entertainment daily films were run ... in the days before TV, this was how most civilians got their visual news reports ...
What IF #1 ... Japan succeeds at a surprise invasion of Oahu on Dec. 7'41, not just 2 air raids on the USN's Pacific Fleet ... a topic debated in alternative history discussion boards for decades now ... in doing so she captures roughly 250,000 Americans on the Hawaiian Islands, and eventually another 200,000 or so on the Pacific Islands (mostly on the Philippine Islands) then rendered well behind the new Pacific "front lines" ... the confidence of the American "body politic" is profoundly shaken by this unexpected defeat.
What IF #2 ... on that same Dec.7'41 date another small scale by surprise Japanese air attack on Panama knocks out the Panama Canal for from between 6 months and 2 years ... not that doing so would prevent Atlantic to Pacific transfers of American war materials and weapons but that without the Panama Canal it takes an additional 2 -3 months for America to arrange the refueling tankers and convoys needed for such traffic around Cape Horn without stripping the British Royal Navy of so much fuel that her trans-Atlantic convoy system would collapse and prevent Lend-Lease shipments to the desperate Russians as well ... the collapse of Britain to Germany MUST NOT be allowed to happen under any circumstance ... another body blow to America's faith in her civilian leadership's ability to successfully lead the Nation in wartime.
What IF #3 ... the Japanese manage to fend off the inevitable American counter-attack on fortress Oahu, intended to retake their captured "Gibralter of the Pacific"...
The confidence of the American voter would be shaken to the CORE and with memories of Japan's "Rape of Nanking" as presented by Pathe News just 3 short years previously dancing in their heads, I would suggest that America might just have entertained a Japanese request for a Pacific ceasefire while discussion were held with respect to eventually returning the still alive 550,000 American citizens captured by Japan, to American control while a de-militarized Hawaii was traded back in exchange for American recognition of Japan as the new owners of all of the Dutch East Indies natural resources, including oceans of oil, yearly rubber crops, all types of minerals and foodstuffs ...
Not a bad trade off from the American point of view since America had never owned the Dutch East Indies anyway ... and 550,000 American VOTERS, who each had wives, husbands, sons, daughters, grandfathers and grandmothers, nieces and nephews, cousins, aunts and uncles, brothers and sisters who would also vote against the current US administration if fresh Pathe newsreels of butchery started arriving from Hawaii and the Philippines ... quite a sizeable voting block ... probably more than enough votes to swing America firmly back onto a pacifist WW2 path ...
Quite a risky plan to consider, I know. The short war which the Japanese so hoped for since they KNEW that they could never hope to win a long production war against America. But with an American, British, and Dutch oil embargo swiftly choking her, what else could the Japaneses Empire have even entertained, other than abject surrender ?
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...or their anger is stoked to even hotter levels than OTL. Why would their confidence be shaken by this?
Also, the air raid on Pearl Harbor was already pushing the Kido Butai's operational range to the limit. They definitely lacked the means to supply an amphibious invasion over that great a distance, to say nothing of concealing a much larger and slower invasion fleet.
If Japan invades Hawaii, the American public would emphatically NOT take this lying down.
This being 1941, there would have been tens of millions of Americans calling for every [insert racist slur here] to be killed. Anti-Japanese sentiment, which had already existed before Pearl Harbor in OTL, would have been orders of magnitude worse in TTL.
What kind of naval production for the US vs. Japan by 1945 are we looking at if the US goes to a total war economy in say, 1944 vs. (basically) 1942?
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Problem was once the US was committed, they were weren't going to accept negotiation. They knew they had the capacity to win, and the sudden attack on Pearl Harbour had galvanized the public. Any sentiments of isolationism were shaken off the moment the bombs landed in Hawaii. Japan dramatically misunderstood the United States and democratic states in general. There was a perception that democracies could not stomach high casualties and defeats, and that they would eventually vote out any leaders that were giving that to them. "Coping" is probably the correct term for Japanese Military policy in WWII...
Bombing things and kidnapping half a million people and holding them to ransom just tends to piss people off. If handed significant defeats, the voting public will be saying "Well if you cant beat them, we will find someone that will" as opposed to "Maybe we should give in...". It's incredibly hard to break the will of a nation through terror and violence, especially when the latter dwarfs the former.
Propaganda had also painted the Japanese in a very negative light (a rather easy job considering how awful they behaved with captive populations) and uncomfortably, there is a huge degree of racism at play here. The US public wasn't going to tolerate defeat at the hands of a racial lessers, especially ones that is perceived to have behaved as treacherously and barbarically as the Japanese military.
The issue with Japan is that they consistently underestimated the people they were fighting. Even in China following the Marco Polo bridge incident, there wasn't a super clear policy on what they wanted to achieve beyond the vague plan to take Beijing and Nanjing and force the Chinese to negotiate a settlement. Their campaign of brutalizing the Chinese people had opposite effect of just pushing the idea of negotiation further and further away. It wasn't even Japan's intention to get into a drawn out war on the Chinese mainland, the military was calling the shots, and they were kinda just making it up as they went along until the ground finally gave in beneath them.
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Imagine Japan rolls lots of sixes in naval engagements and at pearl harbour. The initial US forces in the Pacific are sunk, forces moved from the Atlantic are then sunk, and then the first newly built fleet is sunk. The US has industrial capacity to keep building new fleets but I wonder about the psychological shock. Imagine hearing about a fleet you took 18 months to build being Tsushimaed and knowing it will be another 12 months before you can field an equal sized fleet again. Of course, I am aware that Japan actually underperformed in most OTL naval battles.
I assume that at the same time the Germans launch Sealion? Because that has about the same chance of succeding.
If Japan attacked the Dutch East Indies and the USA declared war, then that changes the whole psyche. Just in peoples minds its a war, not the anger of we were bushwacked. Of course Japan would probably need better leadership to pull it off.
Honestly, yeah it might re-frame the entire war in the eyes of the US public. But the issue there is Japan doesn't get to smack the Pacific Fleet, a key element in their plans to attack at all. They had just dug a big hole for themselves with no easy way to climb out and the solution often boiled down to "keep digging!"
As somebody who has attempted to write a victory for Japan in the Pacific, you start to learn how much copium the Japanese were smoking... But to not be a guy who just shuts something down, maybe with a different pollical space, (Roosevelt being shot might help) and more isolationist minded Presidents taking the reins for a while, ones that don't enact the embargos that triggered Japan's attack on the DEI. Japan meanwhile realizing this strategic issue with their oil still hit the DEI, but ignore the more isolationist USA, confident that they aren't going to be hit in the rear via the Philippines or anything. Maybe then the US strikes but the entire affair is a fiasco, the more isolationist minded US decides the Pacific is a foreign war and bails out? It's flimsy, but it's something?
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Hearing about a fleet that took eighteen months to build being destroyed is the sort of thing that gets the US wanting revenge long before it wants peace, though. The US was angry and committed post Pearl Harbor OTL, not reluctantly going along with something most people didn't care strongly about.
Japan rolling sixes still has to address that.
In the actual event, the smacking of the Pacific Fleet at Pearl made little to no difference on the tactical level. None of the four sunk and four damaged American battleships could have influenced the early Pacific battles in any significant way had they been left untouched.