What did the Japanese want in India? [WW2 Question]

I had always assumed that if China had surrendered, Japan might have had a couple of dozen more divisions to put everywhere from New Guinea to the Philippines to Okinawa, making the war a lot worse for the Allies. Did they really have such trouble with supplies that no significant number could have been moved to other theaters?
 

Markus

Banned
They did have trouble but they did also move significant numbers to the PTO but only after the battle for Guadalcanal was lost. Before that the IJA wasn´t interested much, resulting in the weakness of GC for example.
 
Notably, the places that they reinforced were all larger islands with significant indigenous food production...which ended up almost all bypassed and the reinforcements slowly starved in complete impotence until the war was lost elsewhere. New Guinea indeed was the shining example of this. The little dots on the ocean just big enough to support an airfield but not big enough to support too many defenders that the Pacific War ended up revolving around were already very much at capacity. Pushing even more troops onto the irrelevant islands would just turn slow starvation into rapid starvation, while the little islands where every single grain of rice has to be shipped in, well the U.S. can only wish shipping gets diverted from ammunition to more men and food.
 
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Did they really have such trouble with supplies that no significant number could have been moved to other theaters?


As xchen08 as explained, supply issues meant Japanese troops either literally starved or were on starvation level rations across the Pacific. The food deficit was so critical that, while no where near commonplace, cannibalism among Japanese garrisons wasn't exactly rare either.

Taiwan was an exception, but it was a pre-war colony. The DEI was a partial exception as was the Philippines, although Japanese troops in certain parts of those island chains did starve too. The food situation in Burma varied depending on Japanese plans. Not enough food could be seized locally so, when munition stocks needed to be built up for attacks, food rations were cut due to a lack of transport.

Elsewhere across the Pacific, IJA and SNLF detachments either faced a quick death from Allied attacks or a slow one from a lack of food. Even when the IJN controlled or just contested the waters around a garrisoned island, such as in the beginning of the Solomons campaign or during MacArthur's advance along the northern coast of New Guinea, Japan could not get enough food to the troops she already had in place.

Cramming more troops into Pacific islands will simply cause an already broken Japanese supply system to fail much more quickly.
 
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