WI: Japanese Victory at Midway

What were the closest airbases and allied air power available to contest such? It's also not a matter of directly attacking merchants as it is the threat of doing so; the threat of German interception was enough to shut down the arctic route to the USSR concurrent to this.

The USN had been building up forward air and naval bases in the Fiji Samoa region since February or March 1942. The equivalent of two reinforced divisions garrisoned the region by late April and four more divisions were sent to the South Pacific that summer and autumn. In the air the strength forward on Guadalcanal represented about a quarter of the operational air strength in the SE Pacific that summer and autumn.

The really decisive problem for the Japanese is fuel. The operations of December-June ran down the reserves to near zero. The massive Midway/Alteutians operations sucked away the last real reserve. One of the reasons the Yamamoto or Mutsu were not committed to the surface actions around Guadalcanal was the bunker fuel at Truk and Rabaul was not building up fast enough from the DEI refineries. Instead the lighter Kongos were used, and were shot apart by the USN, along with their accompanying cruisers.

Attacking eastwards to the Fiji Samoa region attacks into a web of mutually supporting air bases, moves the battle onto the forward US naval supply points and near doubles the distance from the IJN naval replenishment at Rabaul. August-November the Japanese had severe difficulty sustaining the fight around Guadalcanal and on New Guinea. Its difficult to see how they can win a fight on a much longer LoC with the same resources in cargo ships, oil tankers, engineering battalions, fuel deliveries, aircraft replacements, lack of plot replacements, thin ammunition supply, ect... ect...
 
I am struck again and again, in reading correspondence within the administration, of the general disbelief that the Japanese would actually attack the U.S. - a disbelief that the PURPLE intercepts only really broke down in the final weeks before Pearl Harbor - and even then, of course, a refusal to seriously countenance the idea that they would do so by hitting the Pacific Fleet in Pearl. The one clear exception to this seems to have been Joseph Grew, who struggled to make FDR and his senior officials of the same mind. But he knew the Japanese leadership intimately; they did not.

A lot of American lethargy was based on the recognition of facts that the Japanese ignored vis-a-vis American economic strength and public opinion. The Navy did contemplate a Japanese surprise attack on Pearl Harbor in their pre-war planning, but rejected it because they thought it would have to be done with battleships (which was wrong) and because they thought it would enrage the American populace against Japan to the point the war could be unlimited (which was right) and the Japanese were rational enough to realize this (which again was wrong).

Churchill once supposedly quipped that madness in war carries with it the benefit of surprise.

Otherwise, one really struggles to explain the slowness to fortify and garrison the Philippines or Guam even through sheer ennui or entropy, because quite clearly the U.S. could have done so effectively with a quite modest effort. And we have seen a few very well researched timelines here at AHC (by Calbear, Galveston Bay, etc.) which have done a good job of showing what was possible with even very small and modest points of departure.

IDK about the army, but in the navies case it’s because they concluded the Phillipines and Guam were indefensible and any resources committed to their defense would invariably be lost so it would be better to retain those resources to help build up for the eventual counter-offensive. Absent a direct order from the President, they were never gonna commit more then the token forces they did historically. Given how the Pacific War, with the glaring exception of Pearl Harbour, went precisely as the navy planned it... they were probably right.
 
While all of the powers that signed the Washington Naval Treaties of 1922/23 and subsequent treaties "cheated" a little bit on tonnage here and there (underreporting the tonnage of various ships), beginning in the late 20s/early 30s the Japanese began seriously cheating including building up the military capabilities of various Pacific Islands forbidden by the treaties. When the treaties were finally tossed aside, they had a significant lead in breaking the rules and building more/bigger ships. Could the USA have cheated - perhaps some on ship tonnage, but not on base buildup. The Japanese could lock up their islands, the USA could not. Furthermore the amount of GDP the Japanese were spending on the military was huge compared to the USA, even when the buildup started. Japan, because of their governmental/social system and also their standard of (expected) living could hold off on expenditures designed for the population. The American democracy could not do that.

Had the USA in 1935-36 when the treaties went away, and Japan was doing bad things in Manchuria and North China, realized that Japan was "crazy" enough to roll the dice and go to war with the USA should the USA not let Japan have free rein in China, things might have been different. Of course then if that sort of thinking was around the Americans, and more important the British, French, and others would have decided that Hitler meant what he said In Mein Kampf and not been so surprised. The "problem" with the democracies during the 30s was that the public saw "solving" the Depression as having absolute priority, and diversion of any funds for a military buildup/fortifications was seen to be working against recovery. As WWI, and subsequently WWII, and the Cold War showed, if the populace of the democracies accepted the existence of an external threat, sacrifices were quite acceptable - absent that belief in a serious external threat, especially with the massive internal problems of the depression, those were not happening.
 
You seem to be unaware the bulk of the attrition of the IJN aircrew in 1942 & 1943 occurred from US land based aircraft. Thats why he referred to "Cactus". If you don't know what that name means you need to drop out of this discussion and hit the books for a semester or two.

I'm perfectly aware; it's why I asked where are the airbases and planes available to fight it out.

In any case the first new Essex class carriers were ready for operations July - October 1943. The USN kicked off its Central Pacific offensive, setting the wheels in motion August/September, and executing the landings in the Gilbert islands in early November. 1943. The Japanese can try for a big carrier battle then. The USN has well trained aircrew, heavily salted with veterans of the previous battles, equal or better aircraft in the air wings, radar & centralized air defense control refined from earlier combat experience, better damage control, more efficient ships. On the surface six new battleships were available plus eight of the old Standards, a robust and experienced cruiser and destroyer fleet, and a swarm of new submarines.

They won't have fleet carrier parity until the Fall, so I find it unlikely offensives will resume in August. I personally don't think the Japanese are going to go conquering everything, but the main effect I see is the delay of major U.S. offensives probably until the start of 1944 when they are sure they have the advantage.

According to the site you yourself cited, the US would gain the advantage in CVs in the second half of 1943:

7/1/43-
12/31/43

The Japanese would retain the advantage in aircraft carriers until about early 1944.

Espiritu Santo, Efate, Samoa, New Caledonia, and Fiji.

Air complements in these places were not overwhelming yet in the summer of 1942, but the garrisons were strong enough, and Japanese logistics and amphibious capability inadequate enough, that any effort by the IJN to execute Operation FS would pretty much have ensured an extremely bloody nose for Yamamoto. Japan simply did not have the ability to take these places, even if this was not entirely clear to either side at the time.

My main consideration is whether the Japanese, with naval superiority until at the earliest late 1943, can starve said garrisons out. From June of 1942 to Fall of 1943 is a long time, afterall.
 
DK about the army, but in the navies case it’s because they concluded the Phillipines and Guam were indefensible

It's really the Army (and the AAF) that I'm thinking of here.

That's where the POD is for both Calbear's Pacific War Redux and Galveston Bay's Shoestring Warriors of Luzon's timelines. (The Philippines are still lost in these, but at a much higher cost and time to the Japanese with very modest changes - which i think is highly plausible. Guam actually survives in Calbear's.)

Obviously, the Navy was not in a good position to forward commit until the Two Ocean Navy Act was passed, and it needed up to four years to realize the full fruits of even that.
 

nbcman

Donor
What were the closest airbases and allied air power available to contest such? It's also not a matter of directly attacking merchants as it is the threat of doing so; the threat of German interception was enough to shut down the arctic route to the USSR concurrent to this.
With respect to US bases, this website lists the bases that were developed in the SWPAC. Also, check out this thread on here for a prior discussion for Japanese Carriers at Guadalcanal. But the problem for Japan in trying to intercept merchant trade is the simple distances involved assuming they could work their way southeast towards the Allied bases. For example, their primary anchorage was Truk which was about 5500 kms from Auckland, NZ which puts the US-Australian supply routes pretty much out of reach of the IJ forces. Your example of the Murmansk route is not really comparable as the distance from the Norwegian coast to the Arctic ice pack was under 2000 kms in the best of times (image taken from the PQ17 convoy wiki page to illustrate the distances).
800px-Convoy_PQ-17_map_1942-en.svg.png

The US-Australian merchies would have to sail a few more days as compared to OTL but the supply routes would be intact.
 
The really decisive problem for the Japanese is fuel. The operations of December-June ran down the reserves to near zero. The massive Midway/Alteutians operations sucked away the last real reserve.

IJN started the war with about 6 million tons in the reserves in the Home Islands. By March 1942 that was down to something like 5 million tons. The Midway op was fought using a fleet and tanker train that might have carried 400,000 tons of fuel, and not all of that will have been used up.
 
A lot of American lethargy was based on the recognition of facts that the Japanese ignored vis-a-vis American economic strength and public opinion. The Navy did contemplate a Japanese surprise attack on Pearl Harbor in their pre-war planning, but rejected it because they thought it would have to be done with battleships (which was wrong) and because they thought it would enrage the American populace against Japan to the point the war could be unlimited (which was right) and the Japanese were rational enough to realize this (which again was wrong).

Actually the US public was getting war weary by 1945....and the US Navy put 150 fighters on Oahu to defend against a battleship attack? The coastal guns were there for naval assault. I think you'll find the specific calculation was that the IJN carrier fleet didn't have the logistics to reach Hawaii , that 1st Air Fleet was an administrative, not battle, organization (that is, the IJN carriers would be parcelled out in ones and twos like they were "supposed" to be under the US methods), and the harbor was too shallow for torpedoes if they did, and battleships were highly resistant to bomb attack. (That is, the typical dismissive operational/logistical assumptions that work right up until the point that they don't, as the IJN systematically identified and addressed each of these problems).
 
Otherwise, one really struggles to explain the slowness to fortify and garrison the Philippines or Guam even through sheer ennui or entropy, because quite clearly the U.S. could have done so effectively with a quite modest effort. And we have seen a few very well researched timelines here at AHC (by Calbear, Galveston Bay, etc.) which have done a good job of showing what was possible with even very small and modest points of departure.

The reason why the US military was slow to build up Guam and the Philippines was because they were both lost causes until the 1944 fleet was in commission, and it had other priorities that were not lost causes. The SLOC were just not going to be there in 1941/42. Now, had the war not broken out by 1943, different story.
 
To be more precise, the IJN failed to recover from loss of experienced aircrews and the exchange rate became so skewed that the IJN operated CVs to act as decoys for BBs later in the war as the IJN CV lost the capacity to launch meaningful strikes due to pilot shortages.

To be even more precise still, the IJN raised a number of 'waves' of carrier pilots for its units during the period late-1942 to mid-1944, such that each carrier might have been staffed 3-4 times over, but as circumstances evolved, it invariably threw these units into combat rather than build up its trained reserves. When the USN took the Marshalls in 1944, the IJN was in the process of squandering its latest batch of carrier pilots in the fighting around Rabaul. The IJN managed to train another batch in time for Saipan, which was promptly eliminated, but then the US Navy's tempo of operations surpassed the IJN's tempo of replacements such that it could not fill the void left after Marianas in time for Leyte Gulf. Had the IJN refrained from squandering its carrier units around Rabaul in late 1943 and early 1944, and instead built up a reserve in the NEI (where the fuel was), for the USN's 1944 offensive, it's not out of the question that the IJN could have recovered after Saipan in time for Leyte Gulf. Still wouldn't have mattered though...
 
With respect to US bases, this website lists the bases that were developed in the SWPAC. Also, check out this thread on here for a prior discussion for Japanese Carriers at Guadalcanal. But the problem for Japan in trying to intercept merchant trade is the simple distances involved assuming they could work their way southeast towards the Allied bases. For example, their primary anchorage was Truk which was about 5500 kms from Auckland, NZ which puts the US-Australian supply routes pretty much out of reach of the IJ forces. Your example of the Murmansk route is not really comparable as the distance from the Norwegian coast to the Arctic ice pack was under 2000 kms in the best of times (image taken from the PQ17 convoy wiki page to illustrate the distances).

The US-Australian merchies would have to sail a few more days as compared to OTL but the supply routes would be intact.

Agreed. The other thing is that US merchant ship production was so far off the charts, (16 million tons in 1943 I think), that the ability to sink a few merchant ships here and there was really just a drop in the bucket compared to the size of the supply fleets overall. What Japan needed was an industrial scale solution to sinking ships cheaply with one hit from standoff ranges, and that just was not available, (the Ohka/Betty combination resembled the solution, but was too vulnerable against US fighter defenses).
 
The Japanese could have conducted a submarine campaign against US shipping to NZ, Australia, and the various islands that were never really threatened OTL. However the effectiveness would have been questionable, even had the Japanese gone with such a strategy. The number of submarines they had with sufficient range to get to those convoy routes was limited, so even under the best of circumstances the bag would have been relatively small. While the spaces were wide open, so land based ASW aircraft would still have coverage gaps, the Japanese did not have the sort of air assets for long range convoy detection which was quite helpful to the Germans - needle in a haystack does have a meaning here for finding a convoy. Such a campaign would have, at least for a time, forced the US to deploy more formal convoys and ASW forces but long run that would not have been a painful allocation of resources for the USA. As a final point, what does Japan do to replace the inevitable submarine losses. The Japanese shipbuilding industry as a whole was quite limited, there is no way they could crank out submarines like the Germans did - the Germans had more industry, and basically were devoting a huge percentage of capacity to U-Boats, while Japan had to use resources for surface ship construction and repair.
 
Actually the US public was getting war weary by 1945....

Not in any manner that remotely threatened the war effort. They were still perfectly willing to pay the prito defeat Japan and “Remember Pearl Harbour” was still a powerful driving motivation in this.

and the US Navy put 150 fighters on Oahu to defend against a battleship attack? The coastal guns were there for naval assault.

The 150 fighters were deployed for general air defense purposes, not to specifically ward off a carrier attack.

I think you'll find the specific calculation was that the IJN carrier fleet didn't have the logistics to reach Hawaii , that 1st Air Fleet was an administrative, not battle, organization (that is, the IJN carriers would be parcelled out in ones and twos like they were "supposed" to be under the US methods), and the harbor was too shallow for torpedoes if they did, and battleships were highly resistant to bomb attack. (That is, the typical dismissive operational/logistical assumptions that work right up until the point that they don't, as the IJNsystematically identified and addressed each of these problems).

None of that... really contradicts anything I said? I mean, yeah the Japanese put in the operational work to make the Pearl raid work. Doesn’t change that it was a strategically stupid move and the USN had already identified it as such.
 
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Not in any manner that remotely threatened the war effort. They were still perfectly willing to pay the prito defeat Japan and “Remember Pearl Harbour” was still a powerful driving motivation in this.

The US public was indeed war weary by 1945. The memory of Pearl Harbor was fading as the butcher's bill piled up to totals orders of magnitude past that one battle. The US public was willing to stick it through to victory via an aerial pummeling, or even a ground assault fought out in the traditional sense, but if the landings had gone into Japan and then turned into an endless Vietnam-style bloody insurgency....

The 150 fighters were deployed for general air defense purposes, not to specifically ward off a carrier attack.

The total of 150 would not be needed to chase the occasional flying boat. That level of establishment was for carriers.

None of that... really contradicts anything I said? I mean, yeah the Japanese put in the operational work to make the Pearl raid work. Doesn’t change that it was a strategically stupid move and the USN had already identified it as such.

I was just highlighting the dangers of the mentality where the enemy can't do such and such because it is assumed they can't address the difficult operational or logistic factors impeding the objective.
 
The Japanese could have conducted a submarine campaign against US shipping to NZ, Australia, and the various islands that were never really threatened OTL. However the effectiveness would have been questionable, even had the Japanese gone with such a strategy. The number of submarines they had with sufficient range to get to those convoy routes was limited, so even under the best of circumstances the bag would have been relatively small. While the spaces were wide open, so land based ASW aircraft would still have coverage gaps, the Japanese did not have the sort of air assets for long range convoy detection which was quite helpful to the Germans - needle in a haystack does have a meaning here for finding a convoy. Such a campaign would have, at least for a time, forced the US to deploy more formal convoys and ASW forces but long run that would not have been a painful allocation of resources for the USA. As a final point, what does Japan do to replace the inevitable submarine losses. The Japanese shipbuilding industry as a whole was quite limited, there is no way they could crank out submarines like the Germans did - the Germans had more industry, and basically were devoting a huge percentage of capacity to U-Boats, while Japan had to use resources for surface ship construction and repair.

I've long thought that the IJN's 1944 carrier strategy was wrongfooted. Their doctrine was to go straight after TF-58, which was like marching into the lion's den armed with a whiffle bat. Send the carriers against the SLOC and avoid the US carriers. A ship like the Shinano, if completed as an oiler by January 1944 with limited flight operations capability, might have been able to hold 50,000 tons of oil and 150 (disassembled) aircraft spares.
 
The US public was indeed war weary by 1945. The memory of Pearl Harbor was fading as the butcher's bill piled up to totals orders of magnitude past that one battle. The US public was willing to stick it through to victory via an aerial pummeling, or even a ground assault fought out in the traditional sense, but if the landings had gone into Japan and then turned into an endless Vietnam-style bloody insurgency....

Nothing in the record supports the idea that a invasion of Japan, ignoring that it likely wouldn't have happened even had Japan not surrendered, would turn into proto-Vietnam. Neither Japanese nor American plans envisioned that.

The total of 150 would not be needed to chase the occasional flying boat. That level of establishment was for carriers.

Which is why they weren't deployed for protection against a air strike, but instead bunched up in easy to guard (and strafe) lines to protect against sabotage. Clearly a sign that the USN expected a massive carrier air strike! :rolleyes:

I was just highlighting the dangers of the mentality where the enemy can't do such and such because it is assumed they can't address the difficult operational or logistic factors impeding the objective.

You mean when there isn't otherwise evidence of the enemies incapacity to address difficult operational or logistical factors? Yeah, sure.
 
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Nothing in the record supports the idea that a invasion of Japan, ignoring that it likely wouldn't have happened even had Japan not surrendered, would turn into proto-Vietnam. Neither Japanese nor American plans envisioned that.

There was no other Axis scenario in which US war weariness might have played.

Which is why they weren't deployed for protection against a air strike, but instead bunched up in easy to guard (and strafe) lines to protect against sabotage. Clearly a sign that the USN expected a massive carrier air strike! :rolleyes:

So when Kimmel observed that for all 14th District knew, the Japanese carriers could sail around Diamond Head any minute - he was thinking they'd leave their planes in Japan? Lotta AA artillery on Oahu for one seaplane....

Short's doctrine on that date was that insurgent action was the biggest danger and he ordered his forces protected accordingly. Had he been appraised by the navy that a carrier attack was in fact the largest danger he'd have dispersed his forces. On Wheeler Field he'd no doubt have ordered the numerous fortified revetments to be used - these being in existence in part due to the danger of air attack, which could only be via carrier.


You mean when there isn't otherwise evidence of the enemies incapacity to address difficult operational or logistical factors? Yeah, sure.

The assumptions that laid Hawaii open to attack were based more on arrogance than on evidence. Now, in any successful military, arrogance is a handy thing since its the way you dare to win wars. But in those circumstances, not so much.
 
There was no other Axis scenario in which US war weariness might have played.

The only Axis scenario in mid-1945 the Japanese bothered to contemplate was that Japan would defeat the US invasion in a decisive battle on Kyushu. No other strategy was envisioned or contemplated. No provisions for guerrilla war, either in isolation or in conjunction with conventional war, were made. It’d be interesting to speculate how’d the Japanese would react if the US cancelled Downfall and embarked on a blockade-and-bombard strategy instead, which was probably what would have happened had the Japanese surrender not nipped everything in the bud. Not only would it have destroyed the basis for the historical Ichi-Go plan, but it’d do the same to one based around guerrilla resistance as well.

So when Kimmel observed that for all 14th District knew, the Japanese carriers could sail around Diamond Head any minute - he was thinking they'd leave their planes in Japan? Lotta AA artillery on Oahu for one seaplane....

He was being flippant in order to highlight his displeasure with intelligence losing track of them. He figured, like the rest of the US military establishment, those carriers were heading somewhere to Southeast Asia. And yeah there was a lot of guns and aircraft at Oahu. It was the same at San Diego or Norfolk, which were likewise major military bases housing lots of major formations. Their presence is no indicative of the expectation of their use.

Short's doctrine on that date was that insurgent action was the biggest danger and he ordered his forces protected accordingly. Had he been appraised by the navy that a carrier attack was in fact the largest danger he'd have dispersed his forces. On Wheeler Field he'd no doubt have ordered the numerous fortified revetments to be used - these being in existence in part due to the danger of air attack, which could only be via carrier.

But he wasn’t and he didn’t, so clearly the navy wasn’t expecting a carrier attack.

The assumptions that laid Hawaii open to attack were based more on arrogance than on evidence. Now, in any successful military, arrogance is a handy thing since its the way you dare to win wars. But in those circumstances, not so much.

More like flat out underestimation. But in any case I can’t help but notice the contradiction here where you are simultaneously arguing that the US was preparing to defend against a carrier air strike against Hawaii... yet also assumed the Japanese were incapable of overcoming the logistical-operational difficulties in mounting a serious carrier strike against Hawaii. So which is it? Did the USN believe a carrier strike was possible or didn’t it?
 
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raharris1973

Gone Fishin'
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Monthly Donor
A lot of American lethargy was based on the recognition of facts that the Japanese ignored vis-a-vis American economic strength and public opinion. The Navy did contemplate a Japanese surprise attack on Pearl Harbor in their pre-war planning, but rejected it because they thought it would have to be done with battleships (which was wrong) and because they thought it would enrage the American populace against Japan to the point the war could be unlimited (which was right) and the Japanese were rational enough to realize this (which again was wrong).

Did you mean to say "A lot of American lethargy was based on failure to recognize that Japan was ignoring American public opinion" because that, I agree with. And that is consistent with the underlined portion of your statement. As originally written the two sentences are mutually contradictory.

Churchill once supposedly quipped that madness in war carries with it the benefit of surprise.

I heartily agree. And we had two major powers do something strategically mad in 1941 alone (Germany and then Japan), and two other powers who were caught by surprise in large part because they did not accept the degree of their potential attacker's madness (the USSR and USA)!

IDK about the army, but in the navies case it’s because they concluded the Phillipines and Guam were indefensible and any resources committed to their defense would invariably be lost so it would be better to retain those resources to help build up for the eventual counter-offensive. Absent a direct order from the President, they were never gonna commit more then the token forces they did historically. Given how the Pacific War, with the glaring exception of Pearl Harbour, went precisely as the navy planned it... they were probably right.

Imagine defense spending in the late 1930s, say after the Panay incident, at a higher level, like one of the "hollow army" periods of the Cold War period (FY1950 or FY1976 for example). Compare those resources against what Japan has. If that amount of resources goes to the Navy, Army, service aviation and things like fortification and the training of local forces, are the Philippines, Guam and Wake really being lost causes? I think that kind of resourcing means the Philippines survive until relief and Wake holds out. Or, even more likely, the Japanese do not dare attack at all.

While all of the powers that signed the Washington Naval Treaties of 1922/23 and subsequent treaties "cheated" a little bit on tonnage here and there (underreporting the tonnage of various ships), beginning in the late 20s/early 30s the Japanese began seriously cheating including building up the military capabilities of various Pacific Islands forbidden by the treaties. When the treaties were finally tossed aside, they had a significant lead in breaking the rules and building more/bigger ships. Could the USA have cheated - perhaps some on ship tonnage, but not on base buildup. The Japanese could lock up their islands, the USA could not. Furthermore the amount of GDP the Japanese were spending on the military was huge compared to the USA, even when the buildup started. Japan, because of their governmental/social system and also their standard of (expected) living could hold off on expenditures designed for the population. The American democracy could not do that.

The American democracy has sustained substantial expenditures for national security, to include power projection capability and forward bastions, since 1945. Even in times where all the other great powers were quiescent like in the 1990s.

Regarding cheating in the mandated islands - the Japanese had an advantage in that they could censor what they were doing there, and the spread of their islands was so vast and yet centrally located that it was a far better basing network for naval and air support than what the U.S. had in the Pacific.

But, the U.S. sphere did have at least one potential advantage over the Japanese Mandates in the "South Seas" - the large population of the Philippines, dwarfing the conscriptable manpower of the mandates. Seriously raising, training and arming Filipino troops in the interwar, especially once the U.S. put them on a timeline for independence, probably could have been a relatively inexpensive way to complicate the crap out of any Japanese Pacific aggression. It would not have the same amount of potential domestic pork-barrel benefit for U.S. politicians, but I'm sure that the aid program for the build-up could be structured so that several large firms, their employees, and the congressional districts they are based in could benefit and champion continuation of the build-up.

Also, this raises a larger question about the Naval Arms control treaties. It seems to me the non-fortification pledge of 1922 ill-served U.S. and probably also U.K. interests in a big way. No deal at all, and instead saying to the Japanese, "Hey, we will spend what we want and think we need on our Pacific defenses, and you are welcome to do the same" would have been superior to the OTL treaty. The inner monologue for the U.S. could be, "Who gives a rat's patootie if the Japanese build up to fleet parity, they'll just bankrupt themselves and if we then raise the ante ourselves Japan will be unable to repeat the process again."

Had the USA in 1935-36 when the treaties went away, and Japan was doing bad things in Manchuria and North China, realized that Japan was "crazy" enough to roll the dice and go to war with the USA should the USA not let Japan have free rein in China, things might have been different. Of course then if that sort of thinking was around the Americans, and more important the British, French, and others would have decided that Hitler meant what he said In Mein Kampf and not been so surprised. The "problem" with the democracies during the 30s was that the public saw "solving" the Depression as having absolute priority, and diversion of any funds for a military buildup/fortifications was seen to be working against recovery. As WWI, and subsequently WWII, and the Cold War showed, if the populace of the democracies accepted the existence of an external threat, sacrifices were quite acceptable - absent that belief in a serious external threat, especially with the massive internal problems of the depression, those were not happening.

Well, the above illustrates the huge mood swings or pendulum swings over the decades in public opinion in the democracies. Americans pre-WWII accepted an inexpensive, bare bones, military-naval "insurance policy" that Americans post-WWII would have seen as insanely inadequate. The U.S. then gambled with its own colonies and territories, but later adopted such a different view of what the necessary level national security "insurance coverage" is, that the U.S. has been routinely funding wars of choice, even in cases where the country has no explicit treaty commitment, for over 70 years now.

So, what I'm envisioning is, "what if we could somehow have U.S. defense spending in the 20th century, ''revert to the mean', and be kept on a more even keel throughout?"

Also, is it right to blame irresistible public opinion for the complacency, or should the blame not be shared with the country's legislative and executive leaders. I'm arguing there was insufficient legislative and even executive leadership on this score in the 1930s.

The reason why the US military was slow to build up Guam and the Philippines was because they were both lost causes until the 1944 fleet was in commission, and it had other priorities that were not lost causes. The SLOC were just not going to be there in 1941/42. Now, had the war not broken out by 1943, different story.

Well the two-ocean navy act really needed to be passed in 1938. The Rape of Nanking, Panay, Guernica and Anschluss could have been taken by the U.S. as wake-up calls.
Heck, in 1938, ramping up spending would have helped alleviate rather than worsen the Depression,in the United States at least (I cannot vouch for France or Britain). It also would have rendered raw materials and other inputs sold by the U.S. to the Anti-Comintern powers more expensive for them, as a side benefit.
 
In a democracy, leaders can lead, and try and sell the population on their programs - whether climate change, mass transit, highways, or a bigger military. However, even the best leaders cannot always convince the population to go along with the program, no matter how "objectively" correct they may be. Additionally the population needs to be convinced to pay for these programs. The reality was that FDR, even if he and the Democratic Party leadership had been convinced that the Japanese/German threat in the early/mid 1930s needed a significant buildup of the US military earlier than OTL there is no way it could have be sold to the American public. It was difficult enough to get some of the expansion passed as it was, and in in 1941 the draft law was extended by one vote - with Europe at war an PH in the near future.
 
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