Posted on 02/05/2009 4:50:57 AM PST by Homer_J_Simpson
Rats! I thought it was 2009.
Fascinating, thanks for posting.
The latest from the mysterious east.
This was a little known war that may have led to Pearl Harbor. The Jappers were soundly thrashed by the Soviet armor, and it may have led them to give up any attempt to take Soviet territory, and create their empire in eastern and southern Asia. That put them in conflict with the USA’s interests in the region.
The bloody nose delivered to the Japanese is one of the lesser known potential turning points in the war because it gave the Japanese no appetite for opening up a second front against Russia two years later when the Germans invaded Russia.
That's the current thinking, yet a naval advance into the Dutch East Indies to secure working oil fields & refineries made a heckuva lot more sense for the Japanese economy than pushing a borderline here or there in the permafrost in the hopes of maybe, one day, drilling a well in that area.
I personally think that the Steel & Oil embargos against Japan did a lot more to seal the fate of Pearl Harbor, Wake, Guam & the PI than anything else.
I do agree that when Hitler expected Japan to attack through Siberia he was asking a bit too much from his reluctant ally. The Japanese got beat like a drum in Manchuria.
It was the Japanese Navy that wanted to go south. The U.S oil embargo was hurting the Japanese badly. When the final plans for Pearl Harbor were put in motion, the Japanese fleet was down to something like a 90 day reserve of fuel.
Japan went to war to seize the oil fields of Indonesia. The inexorable logic [to them] of attacking the Dutch was the inevitability of Great Britain jumping in, and the high probability of the U.S engaging in hostilities. So the Navy won the battle, to go south. And since the principal threat to their operations was the U.S Pacific fleet, which FDR had moved to Pearl, Yamamoto decided to preemptively strike there.
Interestingly, the Soviet spy in Tokyo, Richard Sorge, was able to ascertain that the Japanese were not going to attack Siberia, allowing Stalin to withdraw the divisions that counterattacked the Germans in front of Moscow, drove them back, and broke the myth [in WW II] of German invincibility.
There is a lot of truth to what you say, but, the short, disasterous war in Siberia and Mongolia resulted, I think, in the Japanese signing a nonagression pact with the Soviets, which, unlike Hitler, they honored. the Soviets broke that pact in 1945 at Roosevelt’s urging.
It was that nonagression pact that freed up the Soviet forces under Zhukov to move west to stop Hitler’s forces. I think it was Zhukov’s posting to the remote regions of Siberia that saved him from being purged, which probably saved the Soviets from total defeat from both ends of their empire.
In the lead up to Japanese entry into WW II, the Japanese Army despite [and possibly because of] the loss at Kalin Gol [saving face, as it were], wanted to fight the Soviets, AGAIN. It was the Japanese Navy that sent Japan on the path it took.
This report identifies a different area of conflict from the Changkufeng incident of the previous year. The new area of dispute will lead to the summer battle of Khalkin Gol, also known as the Battle of Nomonhan.
As others have posted, the pasting delivered to the Japanese by Georgi Zhukov had some effect on diverting the Japanese from the “Northern Resource Area” (Siberia) and gave them more incentive to secure the “Southern Resource Area” (the NEI & Malaya). The motives to pursue the southern strategy were as much economic as military. The resources in Siberia were largely undeveloped, and with the technology and infrastructure of the time, the Japanese could not have expected a return on investment for several years. Years they didn’t have. Instead, the southern strategy, with already developed resources, offered an instant return.
The southern operation, as it turned out, required a huge logistical effort by Japan, mostly in the area of their slender merchant marine resources. Obviously the entire Imperial Japanese Navy is committed to this operation. However, the army’s commitment was rather small. Three divisions for Malaya, three division equivalents for the Philippines, a few brigades for the NEI. The bulk of the Japanese Army remained in the Home Islands, Manchuria or China.
Thanks to Soviet spy Richard Sorge, Stalin was made aware that the Japanese would not pursue the “northern strategy.” In October 1941 he was able to begin moving the bulk of the Far Eastern Army to save Moscow and lead the counter-offensive against the Germans. The Siberian frontier was pretty much left to border guards and light screening forces.
An interesting dual scenario:
1. Scenario 1: The Japanese change their minds and decide to take on the USSR as well as the USA in December. This is after Stalin has transferred the forces to Moscow. The Japanese can probably cut the Trans-Siberian railroad as far as Irkutsk, and a valuable lifeline of lend-lease through Vladivostok is cut off.
2. Scenario 2: Sorge gives Stalin the heads up that the Japanese are planning the invasion of Siberia. Stalin is now in a quandry. Does he move the Far East army to Moscow anyway, knowing he will give up Eastern Siberia? Does he leave the forces in place and lose Moscow or not mount a winter counter-offensive? Or does he move only part of the army and try to accomplish both objectives with limited resources on both fronts?
I was going to point out the fact of the resources in Siberia being undeveloped too. That was a factor in the Japanese decision to expand south rather than take on the Russians. There were a whole list of reasons that led to the decision that the Japanese made and everyone here has hit on one or more aspect. It really was a combination of everything that made Japan’s ultimate tact inevitable since the other option which was abandoning their military imperialistic policy (and gain thereof) was an impossible direction for those who were in power.
I am currently grinding my way through "At Dawn We Slept," by Gordon Prange, to get my Pearl Harbor timeline tuned up. It describes the great controversy within the Japanese military about the wisdom of Yamamoto's plan to take out the U.S. Navy at the beginning of hostilities. The Imperial Navy was evenly split, if not slightly negative, on whether the Pearl Harbor raid was a good idea. Those charged with the southern movement knew it was such a large scale operation they would need every available plane, both land-based and carrier-based to pull it off. They thought it unlikely that the fleet could get to Hawaii undetected and, once there, that they could do the damage necessary to make it worthwhile. Another "what if" scenario is - the Japanese concentrate all forces on the southern strategy and let the U.S. decide to venture east for the "All Out Battle," which was the Japanese doctrine throughout the war.
Here’s an ironic turn of history for Japan in WW2. While the Navy had considerable political influence, the Army had much more influence. It was a more or less open rebellion of officers in the semi-autonomous Kwangtung Army in Manchuria that precipitated the China Incident. That influence grew unchecked through a policy of intimidation and assassination of civilian leaders so that after 1937 the Army more or less ruled Japan.
Now, here we have Japan ruled by the Army, and the army’s policies create confrontation with the United States. Yet it is not the Army that will bear the brunt of fighting the United States. It’s the Navy that will do all the fighting. So the Army created the war for the Navy to fight.
And it was a war that just about every intelligent Japanese who had traveled to America knew they had no business fighting, and in the long run, could not win. Most of those people, including Yamamoto, were in the navy; the army had little contact with America. The navy was more reluctant to pick the fight with America, but once the decision was made obviously they went along with gusto. Yamamoto’s plan to give the United States Navy the quick “knockout punch” had much merit. He knew that he had to get in the quick first strike and gain the strategic leverage. In a long war of attrition, Japan could not win. And they didn’t.
Yamamoto knew full well what had to fall in their favor to pull it off too. He went to the U.S. Navy War College as well as Harvard in the United States. It was after this time that he shifted his specialty from Naval Gunnery to Naval Aviation. He clearly understood the importance of aircraft and aircraft carriers in any future war. He was very dissappointed that the U.S. carriers were out to see at the time of the Pearl Harbor attacks. What was it he said, “I fear we have woke a sleeping giant” or something close to that. He knew a prolonged fight was not winnable.
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