WW II Historical Thread, Discussion, Pics, Videos

[chuck731]

gekokujo reach the peak of its influence in the failed coup of 1936 and lost much of its credibility in the aftermath.

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No, gekokujo was again much in evidence in 1939, when kwantung army, against the explicit prohibition of the imperial general staff against provoking any incidents of any kind with the Soviet Union, Decided to pick a fight with the Soviet Union anyway by using a small border dispute as pretext and launched a massive air attack against soviet air base 100 miles inside soviet controlled Mongolia, thus starting the nomonhan war.

It would seem not to be hard to inspire the Japanese army or navy to do something like that again should it become necessary for the United States to require from japan a casus belli.

 

[Rutim]

It would seem not to be hard to inspire the Japanese army or navy to do something like that again should it become necessary for the United States to require from japan a casus belli.

Dont compare Japanese Army to Japanese Navy. Those were two different 'animals' without too much mutal love between them and always were at each other's throat. It's normal in any army but in Japan it was pretty significant. Navy has been much more 'mature' than army. And don't compare Kwantung Army to the rest of Japanese land forces.

 

[chuck731]

Dont compare Japanese Army to Japanese Navy. Those were two different 'animals' without too much mutal love between them and always were at each other's throat. It's normal in any army but in Japan it was pretty significant. Navy has been much more 'mature' than army. And don't compare Kwantung Army to the rest of Japanese land forces.

Japanese navy was perhaps more mature than Japanese army in its appreciation of the science based, empirical approach to solving the problems it faces (next to the army's emphasis on the spiritual and the subjective), but it is not much more mature in the fractionalism of ots officer corp and the willingness of its officer corp to take matter into their own hands when not just the method, but the objective of their superiors do not meet their approval. It was fractions in the navy, after all, that instigated the assassination of a sitting prime minister in 1932 as a way to voice it's objection to Japan's signing of London naval treaty.

 

[lightspeed]

By 1941, Europe has been at war for two years. France has been defeated. Nazi Germany occupied most of continental Europe. Japan has been at war in China for ten years. In 1940, Japan invaded French Indochina. Vichy France protested, but the US didn't come to its aid.

the US wanted to build up its military and naval strength first before taking action against Japan. the Soviet agents that successfully penetrated the US and Japanese governments played a big role in facilitating the war. if the US did not deliver the "Hull note" ( an ultimatum written by Soviet agent Henry Dexter White ) to the Japanese. there would be no Pearl Harbor.

 

[shen]

regardless of whether Hull was a Soviet agent, whatever he wrote must be approved by FDR first before it was presented to the Japanese. that alone shows that FDR didn't have the domestic backing to start a war if Japan didn't fire the first shot.

anyway, its all what-if history. fun to think about, but ultimately there is no right answer.

 

[Jura The idiot]

...

Great discussion all around by the way.

Yes! I happened to be online yesterday when your posts were coming in fast pace and now I read the rest of them. What has not been addressed directly here is the "logistics part" of the WW2 (personally, I never bothered to find out how many cargo ships, trains, trucks, cartloads had to go there and back to supply the Armies etc.; I never read documents like this one:

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On one hand everybody understands that first of all you have to have enough ammo to shoot etc. but on the other hand I've seen stuff which I thought overemphasized logistics in the sense that "Germany and Japan had to loose because of overstretched supply lines".

 

[Jeff Head]

... on the other hand I've seen stuff which I thought overemphasized logistics in the sense that "Germany and Japan had to loose because of overstretched supply lines".

IMHO, logistics cannot be emphasized enough.

Tactically, in the air, on the ground, or on land, you can defeat, or cause to withdraw a better armed and higher technological foe if you can find a way to cut their logistical supply and starve the head of the beast.

 

[chuck731]

regardless of whether Hull was a Soviet agent, whatever he wrote must be approved by FDR first before it was presented to the Japanese. that alone shows that FDR didn't have the domestic backing to start a war if Japan didn't fire the first shot.

anyway, its all what-if history. fun to think about, but ultimately there is no right answer.

No, it showed FDR was not the rash type who squanders domestic political capital to execute foreign policy moves now when he could accomplish the same thing for less expenditure of political capital by being patient and methodically preparing the ground, both domestically and abroad. He knew the United States was overwhelmingly powerful economically, industrially, and demographically, and getting into the war a little sooner or a little later would not change the fact that the side America was on would be the eventual winning side.

Roosevelt was a very shrewd political operator. He realized the fewer political capital he uses to get the US into the war, the more political capital he would retain to influence the conduct of the war and the manner of its end, and shape the postwar world. In the end, maximum influence on how the war would be conducted and what kind of peace would emerge from the war was far more important than whether the US entered the war in May 1941, dec 1941, or August 1942.

Hotheads wants to get into war now, and simply have faith victory will come, at which time things can be twisted by brute strength to be better. More cunning operators think through how to enter and conduct the war in order to have the maximum leverage at its conclusion.

In the end, Roosevelt was already doing a fine job husbanding his political capital for the conduct and conclusion of the war, then the Kito Butai and Nagumo came along to give him an unexpected and massive additional windfall of political capital. His patience paid off even better than Roosevelt could possibly have hoped.

 

[chuck731]

Yes! I happened to be online yesterday when your posts were coming in fast pace and now I read the rest of them. What has not been addressed directly here is the "logistics part" of the WW2 (personally, I never bothered to find out how many cargo ships, trains, trucks, cartloads had to go there and back to supply the Armies etc.; I never read documents like this one:

Please, Log in or Register to view URLs content!

On one hand everybody understands that first of all you have to have enough ammo to shoot etc. but on the other hand I've seen stuff which I thought overemphasized logistics in the sense that "Germany and Japan had to loose because of overstretched supply lines".

It's not so much that Germany and Japan had to lose because of over stretched supply line. It's more like neither Germany nor Japan had enough industrial capacity and population to send enough troops and war materials of all type down those supply lines.

 

[lightspeed]

No, it showed FDR was not the rash type who squanders domestic political capital to execute foreign policy moves now when he could accomplish the same thing for less expenditure of political capital by being patient and methodically preparing the ground, both domestically and abroad. He knew the United States was overwhelmingly powerful economically, industrially, and demographically, and getting into the war a little sooner or a little later would not change the fact that the side America was on would be the eventual winning side.

Roosevelt was a very shrewd political operator. He realized the fewer political capital he uses to get the US into the war, the more political capital he would retain to influence the conduct of the war and the manner of its end, and shape the postwar world. In the end, maximum influence on how the war would be conducted and what kind of peace would emerge from the war was far more important than whether the US entered the war in May 1941, dec 1941, or August 1942.

you overrated Roosevelt. his Yalta mistakes lost millions and millions of people to Communist rule and the peace in East and West for decades. it is often said the US won the war but lost the peace after ww2 because of what happened at Yalta. Roosevelt miscalculated Stalin and Soviet Union's political ambitions in the new postwar world and the world did suffer dearly for his mistakes.