This is exactly the question I’m trying to ask. Many people play alternative histories where Hitler and Nazism fail to occur, and therefore assume that the US never gets into a war in the 1940’s. However, given that it was Japanese aggression that actually brought us into the war, this doesn’t necessarily follow. On the other hand, it seems coincidental that both Japanese and Germany aggression occurred at about the same time, and so this caused me to wonder if the Japanese saw the European colonial powers distracted and seized the opportunity to expand.
From the posts above it sound like that may have been the case, but that probably some sort of war would be inevitable eventually.
A big factor was that nations like Britain, France, Spain, Portugal, and the Netherlands were all created relatively early. They were then able to go out and occupy colonies when the imperial era began.
Russia and the United States started later but they had the advantage of being on the edge of a continent where they could expand.
Germany and Italy were still broken up into small political units during this time. There wasn’t a single Germany or Italy to play the imperialist game alongside the other powers. By the time Germany and Italy each unified (coincidentally in the same year of 1871) all the good colonies had been taken.
Japan was a unified country but it had been isolated from world politics. It was “opened” in 1853 and like Germany and Italy it was playing catch-up in a race everyone else had been running for decades.
Japan came very close to forcing the US to concede several aspects of the pacific conflict. Three things stopped them (actually more than three, but these three would have pushed a US conflict farther into the 1940s and allowed Japan to roam rather freely until that time):
[ol]
[li]Greater destruction at Pearl Harbor - Had the Japanese destroyed the machine shops and the refinery during their attack, it would have late 1942 to early 1943 before the US could have successfully engage in a war with Japan. Also if Japan had caught the US fleet at sea and destroyed at least one of the aircraft carriers, the initial stages of any conflict would have gone far differently than they did.[/li][li]A Japanese victory at Midway - American naval aircraft lucked out and found the Japanese during the Battle of Midway. Had they run out or fuel or turned back sooner, it’s likely that the Japanese would have won that battle and thus forced an American counter-attack after Pearl Harbor to early 1943 or later.[/li][li]The Japanese paid scant attention to their anti-submarine campaign. - The American submarine campaign in the Pacific was as brutal as the German U-boat campaign in the Atlantic (in fact, it’s why Donitz wasn’t hung after Nuremberg. His defense was that the American practiced the same unrestricted submarine warfare that the Germans did) Had Japan been able to mount an aggressive anti-sub campaign, there would have been little to interdict their supply chains to either their far-flung island bases or the Japanese home islands themselves.[/li][/ol]
Japan was never going to “win” a conflict against the US. The best that they could have hoped for was US losing its desire to wage a prolonged war with them. Since North America is much closer to Japan than Europe is, it would have been far easier for US to fight Japan than it would have been for the European powers to do so.
That might have led to a VERY different global landscape of power than we have today. Who would have imagined in 1941 China and Japan basically swapping positions of power in modern times?
I for one think Japan would be a much better superpower than China
.
.
.
.
then again, Japan is the pacifist nation they are DUE to getting curb stomped in WWII
There were a few significant differences between the Allied ASW campaign vs Germany and a hypothetical Japanese ASW effort vs. the U.S. The main ones I can think of right away were the Japanese de-emphasis on developing airborne radar, and indeed widespread shipborne radar units, and the lack of an ULTRA-type codebreaking program. IIRC, their HF/DF efforts also lagged considerably behind the Allies and I also don’t think they had anything like the Operations Research analysis groups. Finally, unlike the German situation, where U-boats needed to transit either the Bay of Biscay—close to Allied airfields in Britain, or the G-I-U.K Gap, also close to Allied airfields in Iceland, the Faroes, and Greenland, U.S. submarines didn’t face any similar narrow choke-points that they had to transit on the surface, until they reached their operating areas in either the Inland Sea or the Sea of Japan.
Japan also had nothing like the sheer numbers of heavy bombers that were converted to maritime patrol aircraft that the Allies had. They’d be left to patrolling much larger areas of water with fewer aircraft. Perhaps they could have adopted a sanitize-the-convoy approach to utilizing their limited air assets, but then they still would have faced their inability to conduct effective nighttime maritime patrols due to their lack of airborne radar.
So even if the Japanese figured out that convoys were good, and giant convoys were even better, for dissuading diesel-electric submarine attack, I don’t think they could have attrited U.S. submarine forces to anywhere near the same degree that Allied forces did to the Unterseeboot Waffen.
EDIT: Mainly I’m miffed that TokyoBayer wrote these very succinct two sentences before I got the chance to:
No they didn’t. They came nowhere remotely close to making the US begin thinking about conceding any aspect of the Pacific conflict. They won a remarkable string of victories in the first hundred days or so, but this was going to come to an end as the Japanese themselves were well aware of. Their strategy for the war was to form an outer defensive perimeter where they would defend against the overwhelming material might of the United States with greater fighting spirit which would allow them to win. The euphoria of winning these victories led to what was termed ‘victory disease’; the inability to realize that they had already overextended themselves and to try to push further out.
Japan could have caught both of the US carriers at sea in the Pacific on Dec 7 1941 and sunk them and it would have made no difference. Greater damage to Pearl Harbor wasn’t going to prevent the US from successfully engaging in a war with Japan for a year to a year and a half. For the first offensive against Japan of the war at Guadalcanal, the US Navy operated out of Nouméa in support of the operation from August 1942- February 1943.
Japan could have sunk every US carrier at Midway and lost none of their own and it would not have mattered in the end. The US had more Essex-class fleet carriers under construction when war broke out as a result of the Two Ocean Naval Act than there were carriers in the entire Japanese Navy. If you scroll about half way down the page here (though I’d highly recommend giving the whole thing a read) the results of a ‘reverse Midway’ are postulated under just those circumstances: every American carrier is sunk, and none of the Japanese carriers are. The result?
There is also the argument to be made that Japan was doomed to a Midway of some sort, as the codes it believed were secure were in fact highly compromised.
Japan didn’t initially mount an aggressive anti-submarine campaign because anti-submarine duty was looked down upon. The lack of enough merchant tonnage also doomed Japan, as there was barely enough available to support Japan’s economy and their historic initial moves of the war; going to war also meant losing access to the merchant fleets of the rest of the world for the transport of goods. Japan needed to import everything; it did not even produce enough food to feed itself. The Japanese anti-submarine campaign in fact did become much more aggressive later in the war, with merchant ships travelling in convoys, aircraft tasked with patrolling for submarines, and mass production of submarine chasers and auxiliary submarine chasers and smaller destroyers which could be described as destroyer escorts - or at least what passed for mass production in Japan by that point.
If we’re going to play the what-if game regarding the submarine campaign against Japan in World War II, you’re overlooking the hugest what-if. What if US torpedoes had actually worked from 1941-44? Japan was extremely lucky in the submarine campaign; had the Mark 14 torpedo worked properly Japan would have been facing starvation by early to mid 1944 at the latest. The Mark 14 was plagued with crippling defects for years, and every time one was identified it turned out to be concealing another even worse defect. The short version: it used a magnetic exploder which was supposed to allow the torpedo to detonate just as it was passing directly underneath a ship. The magnetic exploder turned out to be hyper-sensitive and would detonate prematurely, with the result frequently being mistaken for a successful hit, the sub heard the explosion and saw the column of water, unaware that it had happened short of the target. Once the problem was identified and the magnetic exploder disabled and the backup contact detonator relied upon, torpedoes started never hitting anything. It turned out no one had ever test fired them with a war load pre-war and they were routinely running an average of 20 feet deeper than they were set for and passing harmlessly beneath their targets. Once that problem had been identified, torpedoes started to simply be duds, hitting the target but simply refusing to explode. It was finally identified that the contact detonator was being crushed on impact before detonating.
Neat link, thanks for including it. I’ll just say that, while amateur military historians (hand raised) love to talk about battles/tactics in same, and pros talk about logistics and production rates (like your link), few talk about political/national will. The 1942 midterm elections would occur 5 months after Midway. Even with the stomping given the IJN, the Democrats still almost lost the House. Going from 267 to 222 when you need 218 for a majority is kind of a big deal. Have the hypothetical curbstomping at Midway, and who knows what happens in those elections? The Senate majority was a lot firmer, at 66 seats, with 49 needed for a majority, but the Democrats still lost 8 seats. (To the perplexity of observers like Juan Cole.)
Lose the majority in both houses, and those carriers may not ever get off the production line. Not the way I’d bet—Pearl Harbor got this nation angry enough that I don’t know what would have dissuaded the desire for revenge—but stranger things have happened.
As you note, the torpedoes were a gigantic PITA for COMSUBPAC. Didn’t help that BuOrd was willing to look at any possible explanation for the misses other than a fault with the Mark 14 or its precious Mark 6 magnetic influence exploder. This article at Undersea Warfare magazine is a good 10,000 foot level explanation of the issues, as was your concise explanation of just how many flaws the submarine community had to overcome before they got a torpedo that worked.
And if they magically had space weapons, they could have easily won as well. (Sorry, Dissonance for stealing that line.)
Without Germany tying up five and a half million of her troops, the USSR would not have stepped aside a chance to grab back the territory its predecessor has lost in 1905, and more.
Japan would not pick and choose her opponents. More importantly, there were enough idiots running around with field commands who took actions on themselves. One of them would have started something.
There simply is no way that Japan could have fought a major war with France, Great Britain and the Netherlands and kept both the US and USSR out.
You already know this but for those playing along at home, Admiral Yamamoto was one of the treaty supporters as well as opposing the Tripartite Pact, and at one point had to be assigned to sea to prevent his assassination.
This exactly.
To further add to this, the US didn’t retake the Philippines and Guam until 1944 and early 1945. If Japan hadn’t had attacked them and they US built up its forces there, they would have been two years ahead in the game.
In addition, without the US shipping away thousands of planes before the start of the war, she could have had a much better air force.
We’ve discussed this frequently so as you know, another one of Japan’s serious limitations was its inability to train pilots rabidly. They had a reasonable program, but not scalable. The US only needed to getting into an air war of attrition and would win.
Well, if we are going to play the what-if-game, then I want first shot at it with nevadaexile.
You are Japan in 1934 and you’ve just announced that you’re withdrawing from the London Naval Treaty in 1936.
I’m the US. As a concession to you to accept the limits of capital ships, Great Britain and I had agreed to maintain the status quo on military bases in the Pacific.
My turn. I fortify the Philippines, Wake Is. and Guam as well as Pearl Harbor. I build 20 air bases in the Philippines with 100 planes each which are mutually supportive.
Your turn.
In fact, I’ll let you take several turns if you want. I’m only going to slowly upgrade my fortifications and planes, and the Two Ocean Act.
I’ll argue that without a war in Europe, the US would have been more, and not less likely to go to war with Japan. I looked into this before, and public opinion polls in around 1940 and 1941 showed that a good amount of people expected a war with Japan. The US government, military and public all underestimated the Japanese military capacity and were surprised once the war started. Without the fear of getting entangled in another European affair, I think that the US would have pushed harder against Japan.
It’s hard to say. Japan ended up fighting an American military that had been largely intended for Germany.
There were very strong calls for isolationism and slashing military spending in American politics. Roosevelt opposed them due to a fear of Germany. If Europe had been peaceful, then America’s pre-war military buildup might have been limited.
During the 20’s and 30’s the majority in the U.S. were not interested in another European war and there was little interest in an Asian war. Until Pearl Harbor. Then, somebody was going to get their ass kicked.
IIRC, the U.S. military had been considered 17th best/strongest in the world. Hardly a credible threat to G.B., France, Germany, or Japan.
Shared British technology help jump start the U.S. war machine and its nuclear effort. U.S. ingenuity, manufacturing, and manpower created the rest.
Imperial Japan had been creating its modern war machine for decades. One-on-one, Imperial Japan’s navy would have been a match for G.B. or France or Russia or Germany.
Suppose the US doesn’t get involved? Suppose it’s just Japan vs UK and France and Holland? The UK has the fleet advantage but Japan has the aerial advantage, at least initially. And if the war drags on, Britain has Tube Alloys - the atomic bomb - in development.
But weren’t those “very strong calls for isolationism and slashing military spending” a reaction to the events in Europe? The US and Japan were rivals in the Pacific and it could very well be that without the fear of an European entanglement, the US public would not have objected as much. This, of course, demonstrates the severe limitations of playing the “what if” games, in that if events unfolded differently then they would have, well, unfolded differently.
The US had possessions in Asia and had long looked at Japan as a rival, and could very well reacted as such.
We’re only talking 2,000 planes. That’s nothing and much less than any of the capital ships which the Two Ocean Act authorized.
Note that my point was made specially in rebuttal to nevadaexile what-ifs, but more importantly, had the US built bases on its Pacific possessions, the beginning of the Pacific war would have unfolded completely differently. Japan would not have been able to attack and invade all the territory unopposed.
The Japanese invasion of the Philippines was actually more difficult than expected and took longer. This was with it being unopposed and with MacArthur stupidly allowing his planes to be caught on the ground, even after the attack in Hawaii.
Wake Is. put up stronger than expected resistance, resulting in the Japanese forces have to retreat and come back again. This was with just the minimal amount of fortification.
Give them 2,000 men and 100 aircraft, fortify it and Japan simply did not have the ability to launch an amphibious assault against strong resistance. Look how difficult it was for US forces to attack Japanese-held islands after their military was able to dig in.
The only reason Japan was able to grab all that territory was that the Allies were unprepared. If someone wants to play Monday morning quarterbacking for the Japanese and say that they could have done X, Y and Z, then I want my turn.
It was the mad dog defense.
Again, I’ll strongly argue that Japan could not have gotten into a fight without getting the US involved.
As has been pointed out repeatedly, with the Philippines aside her vital shipping lanes, the US would have completely severed Japan from her critical oil and other natural resources.
Without the conflict in Europe, the British and French fleets could be moved to Singapore and Indochina, with a corresponding increase in troop strength to guard them. In 1941 and 42, Japan had been able to take British colonies because they were unprepared, understaffed and lacking in material. Minus the European war and in the face of a increasingly strong rival, these two powers would be loaded for bear.
Japan was unable attack DEI without ether going through Malay or the Philippines, or both as it turns out. With the French in force in Indochina, they would have one hell of a battle to take that, let alone go further.
Country % of Total Warmaking Potential
United States 41.7%
Germany 14.4%
USSR 14.0%
UK 10.2%
France 4.2%
Japan 3.5%
Italy 2.5%
Seven Powers (total) (90.5%)
Even taking the US out, which could not be done, Japan is still outclassed by a 4:1 ratio without the USSR and more the 12:1 without.
Of course, without Japan being able to cut off the Burma Road, US war material for China would have continued and having a better armed China would have made things that much worse for the IJA.
I do not see a scenario where Japan remains bogged down in China, gets further entangled with France and Britain and the USSR doesn’t decide to reclaim its interests in Asia.
The problem with Japan’s ASW effort (or lack thereof) was the fact that by early 1944 US submarines were operating in the Inland Sea with almost impunity. That’s the equivalent of U-boats being based in the Long Island Sound or Chesapeake Bay. Japan needed to develop some form of ASW capability as an island nation almost totally dependent upon receiving raw materials cannot “not” have one.
While it is true that the US was assisted by being able to base planes in the UK, Gibraltar and Iceland, the Japanese had Guam, the PI and even Wake to use in a such an effort,. They did not and they paid the price.
TLDR ( actually I did, but I don’t feel the need to address each comment individually)
Hawaii and the PI were the home of the two major American military installations in the Pacific. The Japanese attacked one (bot not completely as they failed to destroy the facilities there which allowed for ships to be repaired and oil to be refined) and the conquered the second and held it for two years (the PI).
If the Japanese had sunk all of carriers at Midway, then perhaps new carriers could have been built, but that would have done little to address the loss of so many pilots and naval crews. Planes didn’t fly themselves in the 1940s and it would have taken months for the US to field new aviators to replace those who would have been lost. That was what helped to the Japanese was that many of the pilots who participated in the attack on Pearl Harbor were subsequently killed during the Battle of Midway.
Japan was never truly able to replace these losses and the effectiveness of their naval aviation after Midway makes that fact more clearly than I ever could.
Please feel free to re-read what I wrote.
The US was never going to LOSE a war against Japan.
However, had things gone far worse for the US from Pearl Harbor to mid-1943, then the end of the conflict wouldn’t have been the same or similar to what it was in our iteration of history.
No, they were more a reaction to the first world war. A lot of people thought American involvement in the war had been a mistake. And if getting involved in wars was a bad idea, why would you need a standing military? Not having a standing military avoided the possibility that some temporary outrage would lead to a war. And as a bonus, it reduced government spending.
So you’re conceding? It was nice chatting with you. Have a great day.
So the US eliminated the standing army after WWI? Hmmm. I must have missed that. I’ll try to reread my history book again. Perhaps you could send me a cite.
My point, again, is that in a hypothetical where there is no war in Europe, which means there was not the threat of another entanglement there, things could very well have developed differently, and as someone mentioned upstream, Europe was on a collision course for war in the late 30s, so that for this scenario to be entertained, it would have to be that events played out very differently on that continent. Perhaps if France and Germany had decided to stop wars like they decided with the EC or some other scenario.
My point is that Japan was able to do as well as she did in 1941 and early 1942 because of a perfect storm of events, without which she would have been crushed.
In your quest to find a way for Japan to win, you propose less and less realistic scenarios.
You are proposing that the US become even more pacifistic than she was even if WWI had become “worth it.”
While this is how things turned out, Japan didn’t start out wanting a war with the US. Japan wanted an empire in the Pacific and somehow thought that the US would stand by and let them take it.
It wasn’t until 1940 that Japan started to seriously consider a war with the States and only because of the pushback for the empire.
It appears you’re confused on how a hypothetical works. I said there was a significant number of people in America who opposed military spending. And I said that if Europe had been peaceful they might have been more successful.
Do you have me confused with somebody else? I haven’t suggested Japan could have or should have won the war. I was the person that said that Japan might not even have risked a war if Europe had been peaceful.
