If that was your point, then you don’t have a point. It would be impossible for me to buy my own private jet. It would not be impossible for Bill Gates to do it. People and nations have different capabilities.
And, would we not expect them to be working closely with large-scale regular forces? Where the hell do you think the US Army would be? 
Defending Chicago?
Here is a point which we both agree. However, the Japanese believed that the method they had selected would have won them the war.
I’ll respond more to your argument in the quote below, but you are incorrect in saying that “we’ll never know.”
We know. See below.
Others have responded really well, so I won’t rehash all of their points, but will add several more.
The distance was not even the same. At the start of the war, the closest US military base in the Philippines to Japan (Kyushu) was 1,500 miles. The closest Japanese military base to the West coast was 5,300 miles.
PI fell and early efforts had to be staged out of Hawaii, which was still much closer to the areas of fighting than the West Coast would have been.
The US started out the war with 10 times greater industrial output than Japan. The US population was larger, it was building more ships than Japan could and Japan was already tied up fighting and occupying (parts of) China. The two sides were not equal and Japan would never, ever be able to invade the US.
Yup, that was exactly what I was addressing, the scenario posed by Musicat as follows:
Read for comprehension.
Same back at you. I was agreeing with you. Here’s my post "True, but the amount of 5th column and guerrilla activity would have been so intense that the Japanese would have been completely unable to secure their supply lines. "
You may be continuing your argument with Musicat in your head, but you were replying to MY posts. My posts agreed with you that “Minutemen” wouldn’t last a day as front line troops. But yes, they would be valuable as 5th column and guerrilla forces.
If you must argue with someone in your head, reply to them there, OK?
Based upon your experience playing wargames. The reality is that Japan had to secure sources of oil and rubber or its economy was going to collapse. Attacking Siberia would gain nothing for Japan. Before you say ‘but the Axis would have won the war’ your basic assumptions are based on fiction. That Milton Bradley, GDW, Avalon Hill, SPI or whatever game designer allows for an action to be possible within the confines of a game has nothing to do with what actually was possible. That a game allows for such actions reveals flaws in the game, not possibilities in reality. For example, take a look at your idea that Japan would be able to do among other things “push into India”. It may seem very plausible when pushing counters around on a map, but a look at what happened in reality when Japan tried doing this in Operation U-Go is illustrative. They starved to death.
As Sailboat points out, unsupported, it would not work as you claim. If you are going to change the scenario to have the US army there, well, then they wouldn’t need the irregulars there, now would they?
My Dad was in university in Michigan at the time, and the guns from the ROTC Artillery unit were shipped out to the West Coast (entrained) on Dec. 7. That was a Sunday - so that seems to indicate a certain level of urgency. The breechblocks (which were stored securely) followed on the Monday, which Dad took to indicate an equivilant level of disorganisation.
Uh. the claim was made that US force weren’t available. But more to the point, large scale US regular ground forces would render partisan activity trivial. In reality, the war was won overwhelmingly by regular forces.
- no regular forces = irregular forces ineffective/defeated
or - regular forces = irregular forces a minor factor
Only under Hollywood circumstances would 5th column and guerrilla activity be a decisive factor.
And, you note I said they had to take control of the DEI, etc, first for the oil, etc- and just put pressure on Siberia?
Yeah, “just wargames”. :dubious:Sure A&A, but also College vs College played on a super computer.
The US military, and in fact every military in the world since the late 1800’s has depended on wargames to show how things might go. Wargames show what could have been.
Sure, the Japanese didn’t- which makes it fiction. So? :dubious:We’re discussing what could have happened, Alt-hist.
Not by me. Are you arguing with **Musicat **in your head also?
Just Hollywood, eh?
"By the middle of 1943 partisan resistance to the Germans and their allies had grown from the dimensions of a mere nuisance to those of a major factor in the general situation. In many parts of occupied Europe the enemy was suffering losses at the hands of partisans that he could ill afford. Nowhere were these losses heavier than in Jugoslavia.”
Basil Risbridger Davidson MC a lieutenant-colonel awarded the Military Cross and twice mentioned in dispatches.
"*From December 1939, he was a Secret Intelligence Service (SIS) / MI-6 D Section (sabotage) officer sent to Budapest to establish a news service as cover. In April 1941, with the Nazi invasion, he fled to Belgrade, Yugoslavia. In May, he was captured by Italian forces and was later released as part of a prisoner exchange.[1]
From late 1942 to mid-1943, he was chief of the Special Operations Executive (SOE) Yugoslav Section in Cairo, Egypt, where he was James Klugmann’s supervisor. He parachuted into Bosnia on 16 August 1943, and spent the following months serving as a liaison with the Partisans, as he would describe in his 1946 book, Partisan Picture. Davidson moved east into Srem and the Fruška Gora. He was nearly captured or killed several times. SOE higher-ups sent him to Hungary to try to organize a rebel movement there, but Davidson found that the conditions weren’t ripe and crossed back over the Danube into the Fruska Gora. The Germans encircled the Fruška Gora in June 1944 in a last attempt to liquidate the Partisans there, but Davidson and the others made a narrow escape. After the Soviets moved into Yugoslavia, Davidson was airlifted out. Davidson had enormous appreciation for the Partisans and Tito.
From January 1945 Davidson was liaison officer with partisans in Liguria and Genoa, Italy.
Yep, just Hollywood. :rolleyes:
As I claim? Still continuing your argument with **Musicat **? You do see I have a different username, right? It was Musicat that claimed no US regulars. Not me. Read for comprehension yourself. I am not changing the scenario, who are you debating with?
Again- My posts agreed with you that “Minutemen” wouldn’t last a day as front line troops. But yes, they would be valuable as 5th column and guerrilla forces.
Need? No, but as was said, they’d be valuable.
Not all of the necessarily artificial constraints and allowances in war games are created equal. Alt-history changes the scenario sufficiently enough to make it interesting, not to present a learning or fact finding mission as is done with the military. (Or, as is often the case, to confirm one’s bias.)
The objection is not that you weren’t having fun, it was that you were attempting to drag the results into a thread about history.
Rubber would have been an issue, but Siberia has more than enough petroleum, iron, and other metals deposits to have supported their industry. And, with Siberia secured, it is possible that Japan could have negotiated with the Dutch, (either the government in exile or the Nazi dominated government), to purchase rubber.
The Japanese defeat by the Soviets at Khalkhin Gol resulted in the Japanese leadership who favored a Siberian invasion losing face and having to let the advocates for a South facing war determine their intended conquests, but prior to Khalkhin Gol, the North facing party was in ascension. A Siberian conquest would not have been a wasted effort.
You are claiming that irregulars would be useful if the army were there. Right? That is you, correct? You are claiming this, are you not?
However, if there are regulars around, the Japanese could not have landed, established a beachhold and gotten anywhere that would require logistics.
Nope. In 1941, Siberia only produced a fraction of the petroleum which Japan’s navy and industry required. They had to invade DEI, there was no other choice.
Even had there been petroleum, the Soviet army would have decimated the IJA, which was based on light infantry and lightly armored small tanks. Stalin had kept The Soviet Far Eastern reserves – 15 infantry divisions, 3 cavalry divisions, 1,700 tanks, and 1,500 aircraft were kept there until it was clear that Japan was going south.
As there was not enough petroleum, attacking Siberia would have been completely nuts.
I don’t understand what you’re getting at. I don’t care who started the claim. I was responding to the claim, whoever made it, and refuting it. If I quoted you because the part I quoted was related to what I was refuting, just clarify your position.
You seem to be impressed by the irregular forces. If your position is that they would be trivial in effectiveness, you are in agreement with me (and John Keegan); if you are arguing otherwise, my post is relevant to you, whether or not it is to Musicat’s posting.
Yeah, that sounds Hollywood to me. Daring escapes! Capture! Impressed by the partisans!
None of that tell us the partisans were militarily effective. The statement “In many parts of occupied Europe the enemy was suffering losses at the hands of partisans that he could ill afford” is very vague and unquantified; the very sort of claim advanced by propaganda and by intelligence officers writing their memoirs. Truth is, the partisan movements did do measurable damage – but much of that was to anti-partisan units that would not have existed except to suppress partisans, and were not militarily useful for other duty. Hell, the Special Operations Executive mentioned in that quoted passage eventually tried to discourage the partisans because the damage to human life was out of proportion to the relatively modest military effect (on second- and third-string units in backwater areas). Partisans did not kill war-winning numbers of Germans.
I’m guessing that since you did not answer me, you have NOT, in fact, read the books I mentioned? Resistance and partisan movements have been re-appraised in recent years and, underneath the veneer of inflated claims, romanticism, and braggadocio, we are seeing they were less effective – in many cases, a LOT less effective – than previously claimed.
Don’t take my word for it, read the two books I mentioned upthread.
OK, well you do have Keegan, altho you have no cite from him. On that hand Keegan was never in the actual military, and has been greatly criticized by other famous Military Historians who actually served in the Military such as Sir Michael Eliot Howard, OM, CH, CBE, MC, FBA, who founded the Department of War Studies for Kings College & Christopher Bassford . And I quoted a real life hero, the guy who spent WWII actually working with the partisans and being highly decorated and awarded for doing so.
And Lt Col Basil Risbridger Davidson MC did tell us exactly that = “the partisans were militarily effective”. On the other hand, you can’t even give a cite from a armchair tacticians, one who spent not a day in the military. But somehow, wargames are fantasy, eh?
You’re talking about things that couldn’t have happened. There’s alt.hist that is based around the possible and the plausible, and alt.history that is based upon the fantastical. “Because I could do it in a wargame” doesn’t mean it could actually have happened. Sure, freed from the constraints of reality and logistics Japan could march right into India conquering it with ease. The reality is they stopped in Burma in 1942 because it wasn’t practical to march into India. When they tried in 1944, they ran into the same problem that had been projected in 1942: it was impossible to supply their forces. Half of their army starved to death or exhaustion. Just to note, this wasn’t the first time Japan put troops where they couldn’t even keep them fed, the abbreviation “ga-to” for Guadalcanal became a rather dark pun, as the ideographs can also be taken to mean ‘starvation island’.
Again, the problem is your basing this on the fantastical. Japan could not attack north and south at the same time; they did not have the resources for it. The idea that Japan could take the DEI and British colonies without drawing war with the US - indeed you claim it would have delayed US entry into the war for more than a year - is a very, very thin one. Japan didn’t think it was possible, or at a minimum exposed them to unacceptable risk of being cut off from access to them at a moments notice due to the location of the Philippine islands right astride from the sea lanes. They were right to think so, in one of the few things done right the US Asiatic Fleet had dispersed from Manila Bay in response to one of the war warnings sent out to US Pacific forces. Note where they dispersed to and were headed for: Tarakan and Balikpapan, Borneo, Dutch East Indies. One destroyer squadron was laying over in the DEI on its way to Singapore where it was to join up with British Force Z. Attacking the DEI and British colonies would have meant attacking the US Navy. Ironically, want to know how I’m so familiar with US deployments on the outbreak of war? Wargames, War in the Pacific Admiral’s Edition and its earlier incarnations and Victory Game’s Pacific War.
Yeah, damn that Keegan for developing tuberculosis at the age of 13. Clearly that discredits him as a historian as much as it disqualified him from military service.
As TokyoBayer said, not in 1941. It’s my understanding that the oil reserves in East Siberia and the Sakhalin Islands hadn’t been identified in 1941. Siberia is also a very large place; oil that was being produced in the Urals in 1941 wasn’t of any use to Japan.
Probably Japan’s biggest problem was that it didn’t have a leadership. Japan sort of had a loose federation of three governments. The army would make one set of plans, the navy would make another, and the civilian government would make another. They were all theoretically subordinate to the absolute rule of the Emperor - but he wasn’t supposed to actually use his power. So the army, the navy, and the civilian government would get together and essentially negotiate over what Japan would do.
Getting back to your post, the army had been the major force in China which was a land war. When that bogged down, the army pushed for a “northern” strategy that would keep the war under their control. The navy however wanted a “southern” strategy because that would be a naval war. So the issue wasn’t decided so much over the economic or strategic merits of the two possible target regions as it was by the political maneuvering of the two rival services.