Posted on 07/12/2020 9:24:25 AM PDT by Rebelbase
Supposedly some age-old former U-boat commander was asked for his opinion of U-571. He said they got one thing right in the movie - there were U-boats in the North Atlantic during the war.
They were tired by then?!
Though I did find the idea of folding-stock Thompson SMGs intriguing!
My father had a classmate in engineering school, post-WW2, who thought he could avoid the draft in 1941 by joining the Merchant Marine.
He was assigned to the Port Arthur-Murmansk run...on an aviation gasoline tanker.
To understand how that happened, Hitler believed he had won the war in the West.
England would come to terms.
The Submarines would starve the British.
It was pretty close.
Churchill was probably the only one who was able to prevent the English government from coming to terms.
Churchill's grand strategy was, essentially - get the Americans into the war!
He was assigned to the Port Arthur-Murmansk run...on an aviation gasoline tanker.
There is the story of a man who supposedly foresaw WWII, did not want any part of it, and looked to find an out-of-the-way place to wait out the war.
He ended up going to a remote Pacific Island.
The Island was Guadalcanal...
I don't know if it is true, but it ought to be!
[the Japanese typically didn’t think outside the box, they were tough]
Basically, they jumped the gun. Once China was safely pacified, they could have launched their big war. Instead, they looked at Hitler’s rapid gains and thought they’d better belly up to the bar before Germany overran the Soviet Union and threatened their hold on China. The Sengoku period, in which alliances were formed and repudiated once objectives were met, until one Shogun stood supreme over the whole mess, would have informed Japanese decision making:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sengoku_period
Germany was an ally, until its borders reached the Japanese empire’s. Given the magnitude of the technological gap, a German victory over the Soviets would be disastrous for Japan, since it would marry Germany’s massive technological lead to Russia’s huge natural resources.
The Japanese weren’t creative in combat, as their culture discouraged that. When an Allied patrol would venture into the jungle, Japanese snipers would often shoot the first one (instead of letting a larger group into the kill zone - which the Allies would do to Japanese troop columns). Their technology was great for the 1930s, but obsolete by 1942.
The Japanese didn’t maintain a truce with the USSR by choice; the Soviets had fought them well in the 1930s, and they couldn’t “strike north” while simultaneously “striking south”. South was where the desperately needed oil lay, so that was where they struck (the Pacific part was just to protect the home islands and the traffic routes of those resources headed back to Japan).
FWIW, the war would have looked very different if Japan had gone to war with the USSR in the beginning; the truce they observed allowed Far Eastern troops to save Moscow. Western Allied troops that encountered Soviet troops at the end of the war were shocked at how many of them were Far Eastern (Oriental) minorities - and women. Stalin fought the second half of the war in a very different fashion than the first half, preserving troops behind a rolling barrage rather than throwing them away in suicidal frontal attacks. He had already lost most of a generation of actual Russian men...
*SIGH*
[The Japanese weren’t creative in combat, as their culture discouraged that. When an Allied patrol would venture into the jungle, Japanese snipers would often shoot the first one (instead of letting a larger group into the kill zone - which the Allies would do to Japanese troop columns)]
In addition, the Japanese were hamstrung by turf wars - it was as if the military was commanded by rival warlords who would fight it out for the Shogun’s spot once a final victory was won over Japan’s external enemies. In addition, as the war went on, they had huge problems due to starvation or near starvation, pretty much right from the beginning. That’s a level of resource limitation that no Allied expeditionary force in the Pacific ever had to deal with except if their supply lines were cut.
[The Japanese didn’t maintain a truce with the USSR by choice; the Soviets had fought them well in the 1930s, and they couldn’t “strike north” while simultaneously “striking south”. South was where the desperately needed oil lay, so that was where they struck (the Pacific part was just to protect the home islands and the traffic routes of those resources headed back to Japan).]
That was their own fault for outrunning their supply lines (on the Asian mainland) and keeping garrisons on islands when they lost control both air and naval superiority.
[That was their own fault for outrunning their supply lines (on the Asian mainland) and keeping garrisons on islands when they lost control both air and naval superiority.]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mongol_conquest_of_China
The idea that Japan should take its collective eye off the ball (i.e. China) and strike out to conquer all of the Western holdings in the Western Pacific was akin to a gambler’s roll of the dice on which he had staked all of his earthly belongings. It was tempting fate, given Japan’s staggering material inferiority. And sure enough, that dice roll came up snake eyes.
[That was their own fault for outrunning their supply lines (on the Asian mainland) and keeping garrisons on islands when they lost control both air and naval superiority.]
https://www.eiu.edu/studiesonasia/documents/seriesIV/Michael_Wright.pdf
Essentially, Japan fought the war with an economy not too far removed from the agrarian powers of centuries ago. When primitive economies go to war, significant percentages of their populations succumb to starvation. During the Thirty Years War, 20% of the populations of the German states died, mostly from famine and famine-induced disease.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thirty_Years%27_War
China was a side show compared to the real prize: oil to the south. The oil embargo was crippling Japan, and without it they’d be set back centuries. Everything they did early in the war has to be viewed through that prism; as I said, the Pacific war was only to safeguard those seizures to the south (by setting up a defensive screen).
PFL
[China was a side show compared to the real prize: oil to the south. The oil embargo was crippling Japan, and without it they’d be set back centuries. Everything they did early in the war has to be viewed through that prism; as I said, the Pacific war was only to safeguard those seizures to the south (by setting up a defensive screen).]
Note also that it was possible to attack Western interests in the region without attacking the US. But Japan just had to roll the dice, and attack the only Western power in the region that did not have huge portions of its military tied up elsewhere.
The principal measure of whether Japan’s attacks on Western interests made sense is whether the average citizen of the empire ate better before or after that invasion. From the git-go, the answer was no.
But they just had to not only attack, but do a sneak attack, as if they were guaranteed a win, thereby triggering a highly-unusual American demand for unconditional surrender that would wreck the empire that Japan spent many decades pacifying, prior to the Pearl Harbor attack (including Korea, Formosa and Manchuria), amounting to 5x Japan’s current land area. This ratio doesn’t even include the areas of China that Japan had recently conquered at great cost to itself, including 18,000 dead during the 3-month Battle of Shanghai.
This is apocryphal and mentioned only in the Wiki on the Battle of Shanghai, but it is said that Japanese planners boasted they would conquer Shanghai in 3 days and China in 3 months.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Shanghai
In reality, Shanghai alone took 3 months - an eternity when you consider that just years later, Rotterdam fell in days and Brussels and Paris fell without a shot. You have to wonder if meth usage was a factor in the Japanese estimates.
It’s possibly on the basis of this over-optimistic mindset that the Japanese thought they’d also knock over Western interests in the Western Pacific as a side gig. Perhaps Japan’s run of successes that began with its victories over China and Russia in 1895 and 1905 respectively and its annexation of Manchuria in 1932 within a matter of months had infected the Japanese high command with a bad case of victory disease.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Victory_disease
Yamamoto pledged six months of victories after which Japan wouldn’t fare well (he hoped the US would negotiate a truce); instead, within five months of Pearl Harbor Tokyo was bombed and within six months the Battle of Midway had already determined the Japanese could never win the war. There would be battles for the next three years, and a lot of people would die, but Japan was finished by June 7, 1942 - they just didn’t know it. There was simply no path to victory for them from that point forward; they would go on to lose an industrial slogging match in which they could never compete, either in arms production or the training of personnel on a mass scale.
A year later, Germany would face the same reckoning; the losses at Stalingrad and in North Africa signified there was no conceivable way to win the war. Even the Battle of the Bulge was just a hopeless spasm, a pipe dream - what if they had broken through? There was no endgame there; they’d gain a little breathing room before getting flattened again - with no way to replace losses.
The Soviet Union in the Cold War had over 300 submarines. Most armed with nuclear torpedos.
That would have been a mess...
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