Against Germany, perhaps- but Australia did fight the Japanese off alone (more or less, with some help from New Zealand), and had quite an extensive industrial base, even in 1941… SAF Lithgow was producing rifles and machine guns (and still is, even today), the Commonwealth Aircraft Corporation was manufacturing aircraft (again, they’re still in business today), as well as the shipyards, automotive industry, and natural resources (all of which are also still here today, fortunately for everyone!)
South Africa and India were also no slouches in that department (India being more industrialised than Australia -in some ways- at the time), and whilst a victory in the pacific would be almost impossible without US assistance, the remainder of the British Empire probably could have held the Japanese at bay long enough to get some sort of peace agreement sorted out, involving the Dutch losing the East Indies, the Japanese staying out of PNG/Australia/NZ/Anywhere else, and generally writing the whole thing off as a 1-all Draw, so to speak.
I think a more interesting “what if” is, suppose the UK had been successfully invaded. Could the US have projected into Europe and maintained there a force large enough to defeat Germany without the British Isles as a logistical base?
I am inclined to doubt it.
In the Pacific we did manage to fight at a very long range but we started with Australia as a base. It must be remembered that Japan was also conducting their operations at fairly long range. In addition, the assaults were done piecemenal, island by island. Each island then became a forward base for the next move. Had we been forced to invade Japan directly using Hawaii as a base I doubt we would have been successful there either.
I don’t think the Japanese had much of a chance to invade Australia-they had a very aggressive army, but as we know, it was ligtly armed (no heavy tanks or anti-tank weapons). In addition, they were at the end of a long supply chain. By 1943, Japanese troops on Guadacanal were starving-sufficient food could not be shipped to them. A landing in Austarlia (near Darwin) plus a 700 mile slog to Sydney? Well nigh impossible.
Japan started out with good weapons (the Zero fighter was excellent) . But by 1943, they were using increasingly obsolescent weapons, and this was a big factor in their defeat.
But not as a* racial* insult. In context it was clear I was using a period term to refer to the WWII Imperial Japanese Government and it’s Military forces. It was not iin anywayshapeorform used as a racial perjorative. If it was taken as a racial insult I apologize for that. Used in the context of period usage I consider it proper.
However, since we already have a GD thread on just this, I also apologize for the mini-hijack of the OP, so I’ll only talk about this further in that thread, OK?
scabpicker: as you your “What If Japan was notified of Germany’s intention to invade Russia, they collude and attack simultaneaously, and kept the U.S. out of the war by not having Pearl Harbor, and staying out of the Phillipines?” I consider that more or less politcally impossible. Tojo and his crew had to react to the “great insult” by the Americans. This is why I find many political “what ifs” to be outside the realm of possibility and try to restict myself to military “what ifs”. Having the Imperial Japanese put military pressure in the rear of the Soviet forces was certainly possible, and was discussed. If someone had brought up not attacking America, they likely would have ben assasinated.
Really? My impression (based on an extremely limited understanding of the early stages of the Pacific war) was that Commonwealth (and all other European forces) did nothing except retreat or be destroyed until 1942, at which point the US checked the rampant Japanese expansion in the Battle of the Coral Sea. The reason the Japanese were starving on Guadalcanal was because the USN was cutting their supply routes, something the fragments of the RN were incapable of doing.
In terms of industrial capacity, just how much materiel were the dominions capable of manufcaturing? Could they supply the tens of thousands of aircraft, thousands of ships and millions of tons of munitions required for a modern war? Did they have the capacity to produce their own machine tools, ball bearings, lubricants and all the other precision manufactures required? Could they spare (and train)millions of men for combat? Given the number of Anzacs who were caught in the wrong theatre and the size of the territories that needed to be defended, it seems to me that an unopposed IJN would run rampant and have no trouble forcing a landing.
The reality is that there’s basically bugger all north of Brisbane, and certainly little of strategic value. The plan, in the event of an invasion, was to simply pull back, destroy everything of value in the area, and watch as the Japanese starved to death in the Northern Territory and Cape York.
Of course, the way I see it, any conflict involving the Japanese in the Pacific invariably involves the US- the two countries were going to cross paths militarily eventually anyway, IMO.
As for New Guinea: My understanding is that the Australians fought the Japanese to a standstill on their own. Yes, the fact it was getting harder and harder to get supplies to the Japanese troops was a factor, but the Japanese defeat on New Guinea was the start of the Allied offensive against them, IMO- and even if the Commonwealth hadn’t been able to take back any Japanese territory, they may have been able to convince them simply to stay out of Australia’s way…
Why would they attack empty desert? The most likely strategy would be something similar to the Malaysa/Singapore campaign, which would imply taking important objectives by land after an amphibious landing nearby. They could just do Darwin, Brisbane, Sydney, etc. one after the other.
Yep - taking us neatly back to the point that anyone smart enough to win a world war is unlikely to be dumb enough to start one. Thank goodness.
As for New Guinea, it may just be the Yanks blowing their own trumpets, but I believe they made a fair-sized contribution to that, especially in terms of air power…
Airborne formations of the era lacked the stamina and power to serve much of a strategic role. In the run-up for the invasion of Normandy, (US) Chief of Staff George Marshall proposed using three or four airborne divisions to drop deep and cut the Seine bridges.
In the event, Ike opted for a drop near the beaches, where they had a more direct effect.
Even that drop was a tough fight. One could only imagine the effect a week or two standing alone would have had on these units.
So in a word, No. Sealion could not have been an airborne-only thing.
September 1941: general Guderian 9ignoring orders) sends his panzer armies around Moscow, encircling the city. Stalin evacuates the city, and sets up in the city of Ekaterinburg. meanwhile, Tojo orders the “Kwanktung” Army in Manchuria to cut the trans-Siberian RR. japanese army units move in to attack, the soviet far east cities of Harbin , Vladivostok, and naval units land on Sakhalin island (oil siupplies for the japanese navy). Now there is no reason fopr “South Wind Rain”-japan has a ready oil supply, and the Soviet Armies in the far east are cut off from their supply lines.
December 1941: Stalin sues for peace-he allows the germans to keep all of european russia, including St. Petersburg.
Hitler summons his generals to conference, and decides to make an overture to the UK…
Good info: I’ve always wonder what the japanese thought they were DOING in New Guinea. As far as I know, the interior of the island is just about impassible-and it has 12,000 foot mountains (the Owen Stanley range) across the middle of it… I think it was in new Guinea that the japanese weaknesses were first exposed-they had very poor equipment and had extremelt long supply lines. in addition, the easy victories (in Maylaya, the Philippines, etc.) went to their heads. I have also heard that the japanese had few if any anti-malarial drugs; and coming down with malaria stops a soldier dead in his tracks. My late uncle told me that while in the S. pacific, he was taking so much atabrine that his skin turned yellow-but it saved him from malaria. Consider the japanese-weakened by disease and privation-it’s not hard to see why they failed in new Guinea.
When were these reserves proven? I thought they were only discovered in the 70’s. During WW2 global oil production was basically focused in the Caucasus, Balkans, Middle East, Indonesia and SW US.
My understanding was that after stomping the allies on Rabaul they then tried another reprise of the same successful ‘singapore’ strategy to capture Port Moresby as a staging post to attack Australia, but were prevented from making a successful amphibious landing nearby by their defeat in the Coral Sea. Some psychotic armchair warrior then decided that the lack of sea access was no problem, they would just march across from ‘their’ side of New Guinea to capture Moresby instead.
As you can imagine from our logistics discussions earlier in this thread, that was unlikely to go well in the face of a determined resistance.
It is hard to answer without a better understanding of what you mean by evolution. In general, the evolution of new species by descent through modification and natural selection is going to be hard to disprove, since we’ve seen it happen. About the only way to disprove this is for some deity to claim that he has been fiddling with our genetic material for every newborn, and show it somehow by having generations where evolution does not happen - and what that even means is beyond me.
As for some degree of intelligent design, we’d need to see evidence of the designer. For creationism, we’d need both solid evidence of the flood and the Biblica story, direct testimony by a deity, and/or Noah’s logs. None of this is any more likely to happen as the discovery of evidence that the sun goes around the earth.
As, for the other side, creationists are as scarce as hens’ teeth around these parts, so I doubt you’ll get many answers. Doesn’t the creationist “research” society require members to agree to the following (paraphrased)
Wow, I had no idea, I thought they were doing it all for steel and oil. Surely they weren’t so bezerk they felt they had to attack the U.S. for an insult? Well, I suppose that goes along with how “brilliant” they were. Actually, I never thought about how arrogant the plan I thought they had was. “Attack the country that has every resource you need, a greater population, and greater industrial potental.” Has to be the worst plan ever. It makes Barbarosa totally sane and cautious by comparison.
But yeah, once the U.S. is involved, Japan’s only real hope is to get the carriers at Pearl, and hope that the U.S. does not have the stomach for it.
That was pretty much my understanding too, along with lots of sordid squabbling over influence in China and general willy-waving over who got to replace the British as ruler of the pacific waves - I’ve never come across the phrase ‘Great Insult’ before. However I’ve never really studied the byzantine manouevrings of the Japanese elite, so it wouldn’t surprise me if I’m wrong.
As an aside, here is the explanation of the man himself as to how he came to lead his nation into apocalypse. Quite eye-opening, particularly some of the footnotes
:dubious: History through the looking-glass, so to speak.
Yeah, amazing what happens if the leadership believe their own propaganda about how superior they are. Similarly to in Germany, most of the professionals knew they were biting off more than they could chew, but obediently went along.
I don’t know how your knowledge of Australian geography is, but Darwin is many thousands of kilometres from Brisbane- it takes days to drive from one to the other on modern paved roads.
Militarily, Cape York was very important (lots of military bases up there because of the New Guinea thing), so the Japanese would have had to land there anyway- if they’d simply sailed around Cape York (without getting bombed or shelled to pieces- the Torres Strait isn’t especially wide) and landed at Brisbane (some 2,500kms to the south), they’d have all the troops from Cape York attacking them from behind and encircling them. If they’d made a landing at Darwin, the plan was to evacuate and pull back, and have a few cold ones as the Japanese soldiers starved in the desert, got eaten by wild animals, and then got bombed to pieces out of the range of Japanese AA guns.
A landing in Sydney? Not likely. There’s 1000kms between Brisbane and Sydney, and SAF Lithgow (the arsenal) in NSW. Talk about home ground advantage.
The best way I can put it is that a Japanese landing in Darwin would be like trying to stage an invasion of the Continental USA by an amphibious landing at Juneau, whilst a landing at Brisbane would be like starting at Portland. An invasion of Sydney? Same as taking on New York.
Not gonna happen. German army did not have enough troops/tanks to either blocade or take Moscow, that’s the problem. It’s a huge city with a lot of stone buildings, tube system and big dedicated diversionary force specially created for the occasion. Any encirclement attempt will mean another Stalingrad a year earlier, and much better campaign of '42 for USSR. A full-scale seige of Moscow will take quite some time, with big casualties and a loss of forward momentum anyway. Then - enter soviet winter counteroffensive. Either way, germans loose.
So, any viable alternative for Germany will have to start with: draft MORE troops. An earlier start would have been quite big bonus too, but there’s absolutely NO WAY for Germany to win war with USSR in 1941 with amount of troops Germany had.
I think motorizing will not help much… Germany needs much bigger invasion force right from the start, or in september '41 at the latest.
