I was trying to be nice by not referencing that thread. But since you chose to bring it up, here’s a link to the entire thread not just one of your posts. So people can go back and judge your knowledge of WWII history.
Remember this post? “When did Japan attack the Soviet Union or French Indochina? It didn’t attack either one. The oil embargo and causes of the immediate tension between the US and Japan was caused by the Japanese invasion of China.”
You act like the United States had made some long-term commitment to Balikpapan and the Dutch East Indies. The reality is that the American ships had been there for only nine days when Japan attacked. Balikpapan was just a harbor some American ships were staying in, not an American base.
As for joining Force Z, both the British and American ships had been given their orders before the attack. When a war starts, pre-war orders are generally re-written.
A campaign promise has to be considered in light of changing circumstances.
By late 1941 the U.S. and Germany were already engaging in open warfare on the high seas. Full scale war was inevitable, I would guess within six months.
[QUOTE=New Deal Democrat]
Germany would have ruled the continent of Europe.
[/QUOTE]
A stable situation could not have existed, no matter who won what, as long as Nazis ruled Germany. Nazism holds as axiomatic that war and conflict are a permanent state of human societies. No matter what had happened in the war between Nazy Germany, the USSR and the UK, the result, had the Nazis won, would have been another war, with someone, on whatever pretext could be thought up. A Nazi regime is always looking for another war because that’s the fundamental, underlying principle of Nazisim.
I have read, although I cannot find verification on the internet, that immediately after the German invasion of the Soviet Union began President Roosevelt’s military advisers told him that without American support the USSR would collapse within six weeks. Roosevelt began to sent financial and military support to the Soviets.
In The German Generals Talk Basil H. Liddell Hart reported the results he had with interviewing German generals after the Second World War.
The German generals told Hart that the German Army could have destroyed the British Army at Dunkirk, but Hitler let the British evacuate.
The trucks, Willys jeeps, and other vehicles provided through lend-lease were most assuredly not “left over from WWI.” In any case, Lend-Lease was more than just military equipment. The US government not being a profit-making or wealth creating entity is exactly my point. If a company manufactures a crate of ammo at a cost to them of $75 and sells it to the US government for $100, that company shows a $25 profit. The US government got the $100 it used to buy that ammo either from taxes or borrowing (which is actually just deferred taxing). If they later “sell” it under Lend-Lease to the Brits for $10, the US taxpayer is still on the hook for $90. Stuff costs money, even for the government, and the government gets its money by taking it from others. If we take the US government out of the equation and just go with the idea of the US companies being allowed to sell directly to the belligerents, do you think the ammunition maker in the example would have spent $75 making the crate of ammo and then sold it to the Brits for $10? Obviously, no. By getting the US government in the middle, it all comes down to stuff being sold at a loss with the taxpayer making up the difference so that the manufacturer can still show a profit. Lend-Lease might have been the right thing to do, but it absolutely wasn’t a money making proposition.
Or:
Here is a timeline for Japanese operations in Borneo:
The Japanese Occupation of Borneo, 1941-45
Googling Wiki articles on the specific Town/Areas, and various map sites indicate
the dates cited above are for the beginning of Japanese operations in Borneo.
DEI declared war on Japan on 12/8/42, but Japan did not make a counterdeclaration
until 1-10-42, and according to this map did not attack DEI until then.
Japan launched operations against Tarakan 1-11-42 or against Balikpan 1-24-42.
Both are on the east coast of Borneo, 100s of miles from Japan’s first operations
on the island, which were directed 12-16 &ff against oil-rich UK possessions in the north/northwest.
So although the USN had a presence in DEI Borneo, without the attacks on Pearl Harbor
and the PI it would have been far from military operations and would not have had
a wartime mission, unless Congress decided to declare war because of Japanese attacks
on the UK and Dutch possessions, a very highly debatable hypothetical proposition.
You’re mixing timelines. The OP is theorizing that Japan doesn’t attack the Philippines or Pearl Harbor and instead only goes for the DEI and British possessions. As you can see on the map you linked, the attacks on Tarakan and Balikpapan were launched from Davoa on the island of Mindanao in the Philippines after the Japanese had occupied it. Had the Japanese tried to bypass occupying the Philippines and gone straight for the DEI it would have been the front line from the start of hostilities. British Borneo certainly produced a great deal of oil, but it pales in comparison to the amount produced by Dutch Borneo and shipped out from Tarakan and Balilpapan. The Dutch declaring war on Japan before Japan declared war on them is fairly meaningless; Japan didn’t bother declaring war on the US and UK until after it had already bombed Pearl Harbor and initiated hostilities.* Japan intended to occupy the DEI from the beginning of hostilities, it wasn’t something they did in response to the Dutch declaration.
*It is often said that the delay in decrypting the 14 part message by the Japanese embassy prevented a declaration of war from being delivered as Pearl Harbor was attacked, but this is untrue. The 14 part messagewas in no way a declaration of war, at best it was a suspension of ongoing negotiations about China and the oil.
And I was trying to be nice by not bringing it up either until you replied to me here again trying to compare the accidental sinking of the Panay which caused the loss of only two lives and which Japan could not formally and officially apologize fast enough or often enough to deliberately attacking and sinking major US naval vessels as if they were the same thing. I have nothing to fear from a judgment of my knowledge of WW2 history and welcome enquiring minds to read the whole of the other thread and draw their own conclusions.
You’re making a straw man saying what you think I’m acting like; nowhere have I said or implied Balikpapan was an American base. However, the reality is Tarakan and Balikpapan is where the Asiatic Fleet dispersed to nine days before the Japanese attack upon receiving the Nov 27 war warning. It is where they would have been when war started if Japan attacked Pearl or not. Balikpapan was also not some harbor American ships were staying in, it was a stop-over point on the way to Singapore which is why a destroyer tender was with them; the old 4 stack flush-deck destroyers didn’t have very long legs.
The point you seem to be missing is that US destroyers were on the way to join Force Z to create a joint US-British task force which was searching for Japanese transports on the way to invade Malaya. Again, you might want to take a look at some of those links I gave you, the US and UK had been planning joint operations on the outbreak of war for some time. See “Oct 5 . Naval Conference between US and British commanders in Singapore. [Hey look! Singapore!]”
As PrettyVacant noted that’s not the accepted view of most historians. The German Generals Talk is a very useful insight into the minds of various German generals, but if you’ve read it you might have noticed a common theme from the generals: everything was Hitler’s fault and we would have won if he had just let me do what I wanted to do. Now Hitler certainly made a large number of extremely stupid decisions but he also made a convenient scapegoat for the generals for failures that weren’t actually his fault or entirely his fault.
You couldn’t find verification because it isn’t what he was told. He was told the Soviet Union would collapse within six weeks; there was no mention of with or without US aid. Hitler said ‘We have only to kick in the door and the whole rotten structure will come crashing down,’ pretty much everyone underestimated the Soviet Union’s chances. As for the US sending financial and military support, lend-lease to the USSR didn’t begin until November 1941 and was initially a small trickle; it was a non-factor in the defeat of Barbarossa. It wasn’t until late '42/43 that the US was sending torrents of aid.
I was pointing out some things that actually happened not just hypotheticals.
Japan and Germany did attack and sink American ships before Pearl Harbor and it didn’t lead to an American declaration of war. You’re the one hand-waving that away and claiming that any attack on the Dutch East Indies would have to include sinking American ships and that sinking American ships is completely different than sinking American ships.
I’m not missing this point. I’ve already addressed it. Once again; orders change when a war starts.
Force Z was initiated before the Pearl Harbor attack. The British and American navies were planning a joint task-force. But if Japan had gone to war with Britain but not the United States, that plan would have simply changed. Knox and Stark wouldn’t have sent American ships to fight alongside the British if the United States wasn’t at war just because a pre-war plan had existed for them to travel together.
The earlier bits are sound, but its very unlikely a RAF plane can get through all of Europe to nuke Moscow (its very unlikely the British could pull off D-Day on their own, so by this time the Soviets could very well be on the Rhine or even in Paris). And even if Moscow gets nuked it just means the highest surviving figure (Molotov? Beria?) rallies the Red Army-by 1945 very few people wanted the Czar back.
I don’t believe so.
OP does not impose any timeline of its own.
Bypassing the PI would not have given Japan any reason to take Tarakan
and Balikpapan a month earlier.
Oh? please provide citation for the fact that DEI Borneo was more productive
than UK Borneo, and that DEI Sumatra and Java were not more so than both.
And no matter where the greatest oil-supplying potential lay, Japan was not
in immediate danger of running out. Japan imported about 5.075 million tons
(5075kt) of oil in 1940. That is 37 million barrels of oil at 7.3 barrels per ton.
It had 43 million barrels in stock (1 year 2 months supply) at the end of 1941.
See links:
Japanese Source: Pre-war Japanese Economy
USAAF Source: Pre-war Japanese Economy
I agree the counterdeclaration in itself was meaningless, and that Japan always
intended to take over DEI.
I only mentioned the timing to illustrate that Japan did not attack DEI before
the USN had ample opportunity to leave the area.
I have discussed this at considerable length on other boards and I agree.
All the more reason, though, to contend that there was no imperative for the US
to do anything absent attack on US possessions.
World War Two started in September of 1939, Germany invaded the Soviet Union in June of 1941, and Germany declared war on the US (not vice versa) in December of 1941. So as of Pearl Harbour, Germany and the USSR had been pals for the majority of the war. I don’t think your explanation works, unless Roosevelt was consulting with a soothsayer.
Come to think of it, William Lyon Mackenzie King (Canada’s prime minister) was conducting séances with the ghost of his dogs, so maybe that’s more plausible than we thought.
(Referred to, for example, in the penultimate strip on this page.)
There’s some debate on those dates. Europeans may consider WWII to have started in 1939 but Asians often date the start of WWII from when Japan invaded China in 1937. Sure that war was confined to a single continent for a while but the same was true about the war being fought in Europe. Both wars grew larger and eventually merged together into a global war.
Honestly though, that actually would strengthen my point.
The more I study WWII, the more I am shocked at Japan’s remarkable operational and tactical genius, and their likewise remarkable deficits in the strategic and geopolitical dimensions. Japan seemed to never follow the maxim, “One war at a time,” as stated by Lincoln to Seward, who considered expanding the Civil War to Britain and France.
Japan’s series of border wars with Russia between 1932-1939, reaching its climax in Khalkhin Gol in 1939, was reckless, especially given the fact that in May 9, 1939, just two days before the beginning of Japan’s invasion of Russia in May 11, 1939, Japan had won a victory in the Battle of Nanchang…but to continue this with an opening of a second front…? By September 16, 1939, the Battle of Khalkhin Gol had ended, with a total Japanese defeat. A hypothetical ensuing Sino-Soviet alliance would have been a complete military and geopolitical disaster, for Japan. Such an alliance was possible because on September 11, 1939, five days before the Soviet-Japanese battle ended, Germany invaded the western half of Poland, which led to a declaration of war on Germany by Britain and France. This meant that Germany would face a war on its western borders; the nonaggression pact with the USSR (22 August 1939) formalized the geopolitical reality that Germany wasn’t planning to fight a two front war. The fact that the Soviet Union now could concentrate its forces in the east was the major factor in Japan choosing to end the battle and cut its losses.
If the Soviet Union, in addition to having formed a treaty of nonaggression with Germany, had not attacked Poland on 17 September 1939, but had kept the eastern half of Poland as a buffer state between the USSR and Germany, for insurance’s sake, and instead had made agreements with China in secret to enter the Sino-Japanese war, and escalated its war with Japan, either without a cease-fire, or resumed the war after it, then Japan would be stuck in a hard place.
I believe that the reason the USSR didn’t respond with a massive counteroffensive in the east against Japan, with an alliance with China, was because the USSR simply didn’t have any more territory in the east into which to expand, for to take Chinese territory in Manchuria and mainland China that Japan had occupied would make enemies of both nations. The USSR wasn’t looking to “liberate” Chinese territory from Japan, since the cost of doing so wouldn’t result in any territorial gain…and taking Chinese territory for itself would lead to a war between both China and Japan, or some other ugly and complicated situation.
The USSR didn’t have anything to gain, but Japan had the land it had occupied in mainland Asia to lose, if the USSR entered into an alliance with China. The continuation of the Soviet-Japanese war in 1945 can be taken as tentative evidence that if Germany hadn’t later invaded the Soviet Union, the conquests achieved in Japan at heavy human and material costs were always at the mercy of Soviet forbearance.
Japan’s foresight was much worse than its hindsight, perhaps. It managed to start wars with two nations that were powerful enough to defeat it alone and made strategic and geopolitical errors at every stage of escalation of the war that were too great to overcome with tactical and operational excellence and the courage of its soldiers.
Its two greatest mistakes, in my opinion, was its failure to recognize that Communism, while an ideology that it hated, was one also to be feared, and that the United States was a nation that just shouldn’t be attacked, and that the third term of President Roosevelt meant that it was a time when the US was preparing for anything, a recognition that the times were exceptional and that it expected the worst, but hoped for the best.
Although unlikely, what would be the consequences of a Sino-Soviet alliance made during the Battle of Khalkhin Gol, one of the results being that instead of the USSR invading Poland six days after Germany’s invasion of its western half, its victorious eastern armies began a counteroffensive with its Chinese allies on September 17, 1939, the battle not ending on September 16, but continuing without a ceasefire, with Soviet troops under Marshal Zhukov, as agreed by the alliance, entering Manchuria and mainland China, joining the forces of the Nationalist Army under Chiang (and the Red Army under Mao), the Soviets agreeing to withdraw from Chinese territory in exchange for other gains? What would the result of this war be, and would Germany invade the USSR if the buffer state of eastern Poland remained?
