I noticed the fighting between Russia and Japan. This would escalate to an undeclared war between the two countries where Zhukov annihilated the Japanese at Ulan Bator. Probably this played a major role in the Japanese not declaring war on Russia when Hitler invaded Russia.
I agree with that assessment. The Japanese really were faced with a choice to acquire the resources they needed. They could:
1. Invade eastern Russia for the oil fields and raw materials there.
2. Target the resources, including Dutch oil resources in the southern islands from Sumatra to New Guinea.
The black eye they received from Zhukov helped steer that decision which took a declaration of war on Russia in 1940 off the table for them since they knew at that point that they would have to face the United States. There was also an internal struggle going on between the Japanese Army and Navy at the time which also influenced this decision.
Hey Homer, I got my books for my second semester. 20 of the darn things with the shortest being 400 pages. How the heck I’m going to read that much in 16 weeks is beyond me. But included was West Point’s atlas of the Pacific theater. A lot of the maps in it are the same ones that are on the Military Channel’s website, but there are a bunch of additional ones. I’ll have to scan some of these in as we go through those events. That and I might see if I can find the European theater equivalent.
The major part of that battle took place in the last few days of August. Alas for our purposes there was a nearly complete news blackout, at least as far as the NY Times was concerned. That and the growing crisis over Poland combined to push the story completely out of the paper. Maybe we can provide our own coverage delayed by 70 years. It is called (Hi, Cougar!) a major turning point in World War II, even though it happened before war had been declared.