I may be wrong but I think the 2.5 million is the number recruited not the peak number under arms. Either way a hell of an effort for an all volunteer force.
Very true. I was at a talk on Sunday by Yasmin Khan(a researcher at Royal Holloway University of London) talking about WW2 in India, the contribution it made to the Allied war effort and the impact it had on all parts of Indian society. She went on to point out how, unlike in China, it is still neither studied nor taught in India to this day. She linked this to the trauma of partition and the fact that many of the Congress leadership, who shaped the narrative of India’s identity post '47, were actually in prison from 42-45 and not involved in the war.
That whole story sounds very unlikely. By my count, the Japanese had a total of four aircraft carrying subs, the I-8and the three ships of the I-400 series.. Of these four, only three ever entered service. The I-8 was sunk while all the I-400s were scuttled by the US Navy directly after the war. None of them ever menaced the South Atlantic to any appreciable degree.
In any cause, keeping a submarine running without support is impossible. Like any boat it requires a continues supply of diesel, regular maintenance to keep its engines and batteries running, and occasional dry docking…not counting the cost of crew supplies.
[QUOTE=MarcusF;14840563
Very true. I was at a talk on Sunday by [Yasmin Khan]
(http://pure.rhul.ac.uk/portal/en/persons/yasmin-khan(f38b7b83-a2e8-432a-9d01-0cd4bc70c7a2).html)(a researcher at Royal Holloway University of London) talking about WW2 in India, the contribution it made to the Allied war effort and the impact it had on all parts of Indian society. She went on to point out how, unlike in China, it is still neither studied nor taught in India to this day. She linked this to the trauma of partition and the fact that many of the Congress leadership, who shaped the narrative of India’s identity post '47, were actually in prison from 42-45 and not involved in the war.
[/QUOTE]
In India the post war Congress was in prison for most of the war and also the fact that 2.5 million men were under arms (the number BTW is the 1945 strnght not total under arms) meant that the image of an all encompassing freedom struggle against the evil British could not be maintained if it was given any traction. In Pakistan, because many of the post war military leaders (as well as several politicians) had fought in the war, it received reletivly more attention. However what needs to be remembered is that WWII was contemporaneous to the final push for Independence, which takes up most of the narrative of the era and moreover, although there was fighting in Assam and Bengal, for most people living in British India, the war was…something which happened overseas and you read about, even though quite a few families had men at the front.
WWI OTH, left quite a legacy which is still recalled.
I am enjoying this thread immensely and learning a lot, particularly the info on India/Pakistan, and also China. Thanks for starting it, Polycarp, and for everyone’s contributions.
Meanwhile, on the other side, people often think of the Axis as being three countries: Germany, Japan, and Italy. But there were actually six Axis countries: the big three along with Bulgaria, Hungary, and Romania. (Technically there was also a seventh: Yugoslavia signed the Tripartite Pact in 1941 but the decision was so unpopular that the government was overthrown and the alliance was renounced within days. Germany and Italy then attacked Yugoslavia and occupied the country.)
You don’t make this mistake if you played SPI’s “World War II”.
However, SPI made a mistake the other way: you wouldn’t know that Canada, New Zealand, Australia and India participated in the war, since they were all subsumed in the “British” counters.
I was a Europa man myself. GDW and its successors made the choice to try and have a distinct color for every nationality’s units. By the time they reached countries like Portugal and Lithuania and Turkey, they were coming up with some pretty unusual combinations.
For gaming purposes this makes sense, or else you’ve got a bit too much going on. The Commonwealth countries cooperated very, very closely, and the quality of their forces was (not coincidentally, since they shared tech and training programs) quite similar, so treating them as one force simplifies things without losing too much accuracy.
By comparison, the Axis powers were all dramatically different in intentions, command, structure and capabilities.
This is very inaccurate. The Goum (Qaoum) were specifically Moroccan forces. These were not Bedou and not Arab, but mostly Berber. They were colonial levies.
The majority of Free French forces until 1945 were in fact African and Arab colonial forces, not French Europeans, and raised by obligation.
That’s quite true. You could never combine the minor Axis counters with the Germans or Italians, and if my recollection is good, they never could be stronger than “1” or “2”, whereas if you had four German "1"s you could combine them to a “4” - quite significant in light of stacking limits.
Slackers, New Zealand declared war on 3 September when the UK ultimatum to Hitler expired. Although it’s debabtle whether NZ is part of the Western hemispher, being on hte other side of the dateline.
New Zealand’s contribution was much like Australia’s (albeit smaller of course). However New Zealand never withdrew it’s division in North Africa, and so New Zealanders fought in the Italian campaign through to the end of the War.
A New Zealand cruiser HMNZS Achilles took part in the Battle of the River Plate. Many New Zealanders also served with British forces directly, notably Keith Park (commander of No.11 Group during the Battle of Britain and responsible for defending London and the South West) and Arthur Coningham a World War One fighter ace who commanded the Desert Air Force, revolutionised Tactical Air operations and disappeared in the Bermuda triangle after the war.
The Indian National Army (the one that fought on the Japanese side) only numbered 45,000 at the most. Most of them were former POWs.
Poland never officially surrendered, despite being partitioned between Germany and the USSR. In addition to the 250,000 Poles attached to Allied forces we should probably include the various armed resistance groups as well. While numbers vary they were in the range of 300,000 by 1944.
The strange case of Brazil - on the 1 hand, a lot of their soldiers fought on the Allied side, especially known for their actions at Monte Cassino (Italy). On the other hand, unconfirmed reports tell of bases for Japanese submarines (don’t know the class or designation) that were used as mini aircraft carriers - they could hold 1 or 2 planes - and here’s the strange part - they were based in Sao Paolo Brazil, supposedly which had a big Japanese population and the state it was in (province, whatever they’re called there) did NOT support their country combatting Japan. These mini-carriers (whose existence is confirmed, the Americans confiscated them after the surrender) supposedly menaced the South Atlantic, & weren’t all accounted for & drydocked until 1951! (like those soldiers who hid in the Phillipine jungle and didn’t stop fighting til 1970). I’d love to get confirmation of that story.
Cite?
this guy on a radio show, claimed he oversaw the destruction of classified Pentagon dox - the same source who told the story of the subs roaming around the South Atlantic. He didn’t say they fired on any ship after the surrender, but that Japan kept them active ‘just in case’. His rationale is that Sao Paolo has a big Japanese community, and just like some nationals did help the attacking Zeroes during Pearl Harbor & after, the ones in Sao Paolo serviced & provisioned the mini-subs, much like the drug-smugglers’ subs that get occasionally found these days. Those subs were real, and they were roaming the Pacific and Atlantic.
I’m not slighting the military efforts of the Free Poles. But I figured most people were already aware of their existence. I mentioned the Enigma code breaking because it’s not well-known and it probably had a much greater effect on the war’s outcome that the Free Polish troops did.
There were only five countries in the entire world that were never officially involved during WWII: Ireland, Portugal, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland.
I don’t know what you call the countries that never really had a chance to pick a side because they got invaded before they could make a choice – Poland, Czechoslovakia, Belgium and numerous others. I would say that these countries contributed least to the war efforts, again because they never had a chance to.
However, how would you calculate, for example, the contribution to the war by the French? There were French citizens contributing to both sides. The Vichy French cooperated with the Nazis. I don’t know how many tens of thousands of French workers helped build the Atlantic Wall or worked in German arms factories. But there were tens (hundreds?) of thousands of Free French forces fighing with the Allies, and thousands more who were members of the French Resistance.
The same could be said for many of the occupied countries during the war. The occupiers looted them and appropriated workers and that was considerably to their benefit. Yet most of them also had resistance movements that were considerably to the detriment of the occupiers.
What about a country like China, which a lot of people identify as the real starting point of the whole war? China spent the entire war essentially getting the crap beat out of it by Japan, only kept “alive” by its vast size and huge propping up by the US and to a lesser extent by Great Britain? China was a basically a hole that both sides poured resources into, to no decisive outcome. The only way I can characterize China’s contribution to the war is as area into which Japan overextended itself.
Speaking of the Pacific war – what about the the Dutch East Indies and its oil fields, which were taken by Japan early on. Would this count as a Dutch contribution to the Japanese war effort?
To summarize, I’m just not clear on what exactly constitutes a “contribution”, including whether the contribution is necessarily voluntary.
Sorry, I never meant to imply that you were. I just wanted to expand on the points made about the Polish contribution already. I agree that the Polish contributions to code-breaking were hugely important, and certainly deserve to be remembered.
I thought you called them “mini-carriers”? The plane carrying Japanese submarines were huge, hardly like a Columbian drug smuggling semi-submersible. Why would they be on station “just in case”? What good could a couple of already aged and beaten subs do in the South Atlantic when your country has been nuked twice and is presently being occupied by a foreign power?
(Quotes re-sorted by Polycarp to accurately reflect who said what.)
Around these here parts, friend, the request for a “Cite?” asks for a factual (or occasionally expert-opinion) reference, ideally viewable online, supportive of the assertion made in a post. What "this guy on a radio show, claimed " is not adequate, particularly when no substantive refernece is provided to what guy and what radio show are being alluded to.
In addition, I must raise an objection to the underscored portion of your second quoted post. While it is true that a few Issei provided a modicum of visual intelligence to the IJN, regarding it as their duty to their birth-homeland and its divine Emperor, as opposed to any loyalty they should putatively have felt toward the country of which their current place of residence was still an overseas possession, as of the last material I had read on the topic, what they were able to get was no more than what was available from Army and Navy PR offices, or tourist postcards freely sold (which in some cases is what they provided) – the majority of Japanese-Americans in Hawaii were fiercely loyal to their new country, and in fact provided a highly-decorated battalion, the 442nd, to the Italian campaign. There’s a great deal of factual documentation on this, but perhaps the best source for getting a feel of how the Japanese-Americans of Hawaii felt is the relevant chapters of Michener’s Hawaii, the characters of Shigeo and Goro Sakamoto being modeled quite closely on Sen. Daniel Inouye and his war-casualty older brother respectively.
This is not, benbo, to accuse you of anything nefarious, but to critique your source. You’ll find numerous threads in the Pit, one currently active, on the subject of falsehoods and twisted half-truths perpetrated by Rush Limbauch, Glenn Beck, Ann Coulter, and their ilk, much of which is taken for fact by credulous listeners.
I don’t consider any country that was overrun, or which felt itself forced to surrender by being overawed by (usually German) might, to have been itself “making a contribution” to the war. Certainly the Skoda works in Czechoslovakia turned out German arms, but they hardly had any choice in the matter.
I didn’t wanna get into the whole thing since the guy who’s claiming this may just be full of shit. However, like most bullshit, there could be a grain of truth to it.
According to him, part of the surrender agreement was American aid to rebuild Japan (the Marshall plan) AND America withdrawing from China & Burma. This face-saving way allowed the Emperor (who also was allowed to stay in power, another part of the deal) to sell it as ‘reparations’. Just to ensure compliance, supposedly the Japanese kept these subs active, and they got resupplied from Sao Paolo.
Look, I ain’t endorsing it - if u got proof 1 way or the other, let’s hear it - something like a document showing there were 12 of these subs and all 12 were handed over, OR testimony from some of the crewmen who swear they were at sea for a few years after 1945, or pictures & testimony from some1 in Sao Paolo, etc. I ain’t saying I believe, I’m asking for confirmation or negation 1 way or the other. saying ‘dude, you’re not making any sense’ is not helpful no matter how u slice it. Since u seem to be the sub expert, how about proof 1 way or the other?
And, anyone can say ‘cite?’. Reminds me of the guy who when u tell a joke, he says, ‘and then what happened?’ How about positive contribution instead of snipes & criticism?
Well, if you read my above post, all Japanese subs have been accounted for. Specifically, the four completed submarines capable of ferrying seaplanes can be found at the bottom of the ocean, sunk or scuttled. You’ll find the cites there.
There is now way for me to prove that something doesn’t exist (the 'ol you can’t prove a negative), I can merely point out the complete absence of positive evidence as well as the rational arguments against the case.
In any case, as far as I know the US never had any permanent presence in China during WW2, the emperor did in fact abdicate his position as supreme ruler and divine figure with the Humanity Declaration, and the US created and still maintains a base on Japanese soil in Okinawa.
Also, the Marshall plan covered the recovery of Europe, not Japan. Japanese aid post-war was separate.
