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Oh okay. Yeah I'm no history expert like he is, but an army spredding across the continent like that, seems like a huge concern and would be everyone's problem, including the USs.
The IJ Army spreading across Asia? They didn't have the numbers, nor the economy nor the industrial depth (mostly lack of resources) to go the distance. & IJ was miserably bad @ exploiting their conquered territories. They'd remove everything portable to Japan - whether needed or not. They displaced the local administrators with appointed Japanese, who typically didn't know (or care) anything about the harvest, industrial processes, local population - even though it was the local population that typically knew & did all the grunt work. They starved out populations - took all the food to Japan. The same for minerals & industry.
Even left to their own devices, IJ would have faced massive revolts in the Great Japan Co-Prosperity Sphere in a year or two - because they took everything, savaged the local people, & gave nothing in return. Look @ Korea, Manchuria, China, Philippines, Vietnam, Malaysia, everywhere that IJ administered the countries for the duration. I don't think a one of them did well, & it took them decades to return to pre-war production levels, & population.
The IJ Army in China (& Korea & Manchuria) was simply a drain on IJ's scarce resources. The IJ Army in China didn't accomplish anything, except give IJ a black eye in the World press & public opinion. Not that they cared, but it complicated their diplomatic attempts.
He also says that if the US really feel that hey had to go to war, that it doesn't make sense to nuke Hiroshima and Nagasaki, as it's just more collateral damage, rather than just dropping bombs on Hirohito, directly, killing the leader directly as oppose to all this other collateral damage in comparison. Would he be right on that?
Killing Hirohito would have been the single most disastrous mistake we could have possibly made in the entire war. The fact is, the Japanese revered him as a God. If we had killed him, the Japanese would have resisted the United States until not a single one of them was left alive. But instead, we did the right thing: by means of overwhelming force, we persuaded him to surrender. And once he announced his desire to give up, the war suddenly came to a screeching halt. (Well, true, it took a few days for some of the hotheads to be calmed down.) And because he had expressed his will in this matter, the Japanese turned on a dime from ruthless savage fighters to peaceful, docile surrender-ees. As a result, there was no underground resistance movement against the American occupation.
I have a friend who is a history buff and has very strong opinions on WWII, and he says that the US shouldn't have done anything after the attack on Pearl Harbor and should have just accepted it because of the oil embargo, and just let it go, and let Japan colonize other countries if they wanted to cause it was not the USs fight.
But I think that if the US had done that Japan's could have colonized too much, which is not a good thing. Do you think he's right though?
Accepting Pearl Harbor attack and just let it go....
Needless to say I can't imagine that being acceptable to anyone anywhere then or now considering the damage and casualties inflicted. I don't even need to argue the points, it's not worthy of an argument, except to say let's not forget that at the same time they landed in the Philipines and engaged with US troops. Summary - he couldn't be more wrong if he tried.
Colonization - as has been detailed, even before the attack on Pearl Harbor, Japan was bogged down in China. It was a stalemate. Just like Germany in Russia you just can't get supply lines to extend that far into the interior.
Nevertheless Japan had it's plans for the colonization that included much of Asia and Oceana.
Part of it's strategy was to overthrough the colonial powers that occupied some of these nations. In theory that seemed plausable, until the people of these countries found out to be occupied and ruled by Japan is much worse that to be ruled by a colonial European power. And then there was the IJA policy for colonization - "the three alls': -
Kill all
Loot all
Burn all
Japan did very well in accomplishing that mission in the places it "colonized".
The IJ Army spreading across Asia? They didn't have the numbers, nor the economy nor the industrial depth (mostly lack of resources) to go the distance. & IJ was miserably bad @ exploiting their conquered territories. They'd remove everything portable to Japan - whether needed or not. They displaced the local administrators with appointed Japanese, who typically didn't know (or care) anything about the harvest, industrial processes, local population - even though it was the local population that typically knew & did all the grunt work. They starved out populations - took all the food to Japan. The same for minerals & industry.
Even left to their own devices, IJ would have faced massive revolts in the Great Japan Co-Prosperity Sphere in a year or two - because they took everything, savaged the local people, & gave nothing in return. Look @ Korea, Manchuria, China, Philippines, Vietnam, Malaysia, everywhere that IJ administered the countries for the duration. I don't think a one of them did well, & it took them decades to return to pre-war production levels, & population.
The IJ Army in China (& Korea & Manchuria) was simply a drain on IJ's scarce resources. The IJ Army in China didn't accomplish anything, except give IJ a black eye in the World press & public opinion. Not that they cared, but it complicated their diplomatic attempts.
But if the Japanese army was not very good at being resourceful and there are only so many of them to conquer the far East, then why were they so powerful that they needed to be nuked in order to back down?
But if the Japanese army was not very good at being resourceful and there are only so many of them to conquer the far East, then why were they so powerful that they needed to be nuked in order to back down?
The IJ government was essentially taken prisoner by the radical young officers of the IJ military, & their allies in the Japanese trading blocs that profited from the drive to industrialize & build up a modern military. They crushed Russia in the Japanese Russian War.
The IJ military's war aims were to conquer a comfortable empire for Japan. Failing that, they meant to cause such a bloodbath that the US would sue for terms - & leave Japan much of her conquests. As it turned out, the US & allies developed nukes, & the raised ante was too much for the IJ emperor - who decided it was more important to survive as a nation; then to die as martyrs to the IJ military's will to power. The IJ military meant to defend Japan to the last civilian, & then they would see.
The nuclear weapons short-circuited that plan, & the Emperor acted without them. On balance, I think it was a good thing.
Okay thanks. But it was said before that Hirohito was considered to be a god to Japan. But if that's true, then why did the military want to overthrow him and the government to gain more power, if they thought he was as god?
But if the Japanese army was not very good at being resourceful and there are only so many of them to conquer the far East, then why were they so powerful that they needed to be nuked in order to back down?
Topography. If Iwo Jima was bloody, it would have been a Sunday school picnic compared to the bloodbath that would have accompanied any conventional invasion; for the Japanese as well as the GI's.
Quote:
Originally Posted by ironpony
Okay thanks. But it was said before that Hirohito was considered to be a god to Japan. But if that's true, then why did the military want to overthrow him and the government to gain more power, if they thought he was as god?
Perhaps they suspected that Hirohito had only a limited tolerance for more senseless bloodshed?
Okay thanks. But it was said before that Hirohito was considered to be a god to Japan. But if that's true, then why did the military want to overthrow him and the government to gain more power, if they thought he was as god?
The young military officers & their faction took over the IJ government from within. The position of Emperor in the Japanese system was often a figurehead - he was praised for all the good things in government, society & the World. (Blame apparently didn't attach to him.) Too often, he was a kind of legitimizing figurehead - with very little real power, but he could be trotted out to endorse whatever harebrained scheme the powers behind the throne cooked up, & so was useful, in a Potemkin Village kind of way.
@ the very end, Hirohito said he'd had enough. He broke protocol & spoke out when the War Cabinet deadlocked - he opted for surrender. The young officers still tried to stage a coup, & they nearly succeeded. Loyal military & Imperial Court servants died, so that a recording of the Emperor surrendering to the US & allies could be played over the radio. It was a near thing - a dead Emperor, if the facts could be managed, would have been nearly as good as the real thing.
Did the young officer faction believe Hirohito was a god? They believed in Bushido, which should have kept them subservient to the Emperor, the embodiment of the national imperial will. Somehow, they seem to have convinced themselves that Hirohito was not a legitimate font of national authority for the IJ military - he was too soft? He had been spoiled by too much contact with foreigners?
Targeting London was effectively the end of any possibility of invasion. The RAF was already winning the battle of Britain. Once it's airfields were no longer targeted it was able to further increase its rate of recovery.
There was precious little chance of an invasion even before the Luftwaffe shifted to terror bombing in early September.
From the very beginning of the Battle of Britain, on the vast majority of days it was the Luftwaffe and not the RAF that was losing more machines. They were also losing more pilots, as a German aircraft disabled over Britain meant not only a lost machine but a lost man. On the other hand, British pilots who weren't killed in the air could often land crippled planes or bail out and return in short order to the battle.
The myth of the barely-won Battle of Britain largely comes from the British thinking at the time. The British significantly overestimated German aircraft production, to the extent that they thought Germany was outpacing the United Kingdom. The opposite is true - the Brits were cranking out aircraft much faster than was Germany. They were also more carefully tending to their pilot reserves, while the Germans weren't.
Simply put, the Battle of Britain neither hinged on the courage of the Few nor on a strategic mistake by Hitler and Goering. The RAF had more men, more machines, home-field advantage, and was better run.
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Originally Posted by dozerbear
No. To knock the British out of the war the Germans would have had to invade, which they didn't have the equipment for, to say nothing of what the RAF and Royal Navy would have done to German transports in the English channel. Neither the British or Germans had the power to deliver a knockout blow to the other, leading to a stalemate.
Thank you. The idea that the Germans were going to invade as planned, with a flotilla of river barges, is beyond inconceivable. Even in 1944, which the Allies holding a position of dominance over Germany that was orders of magnitude greater than Germany vis-a-vis the UK in 1940, D-Day was still a perilous operation.
Quote:
Originally Posted by dozerbear
If not for Lend-Lease, the Soviet Union likely would have been beaten. After the war, general Georgy Zhukov said "The Americans gave us so many goods without which we wouldn't have been able to form our reserves and continue the war." "And how much sheet steel they gave us! How could we have produced our tanks without American steel? Without American trucks we wouldn't have had anything to pull our artillery with." https://www.rbth.com/defence/2016/03...st-hour_575559
I disagree somewhat here. Lend-Lease, previously enacted to aid the UK and China, was extended to the USSR by the Congress only in October of 1941, by which time the expected knockout blow of Barbarossa had failed to occur. By the end of the year, materiel had only just begun to flow, and when the Soviets stopped the German Army at Moscow in early December, Germany had lost all of its invasion initiative. Lend-Lease definitely contributed to the USSR being able to turn the tables and drive German forces back (and seize much of eastern Europe in the process). But those German supply lines were just too long. They had a shot at winning via quick KO but they were never going to be able to win a drawn-out slugfest. Without Lend-Lease, perhaps the USSR has to sue for some sort of terms, but it isn't conquered.
We did have the American Volunteer Group (the Flying Tigers) in China well before Pearl Harbor. We may have upped our support in China but I doubt it.
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To get their attention, of course
