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I jut made it through this thread and I saw a bunch of people praise rightly world at war. One of the weird realizations of the perspective of time I have now that I'm heading toward middle age is that that documentary was roughly the same number of years distant from ww2 that we are from say the first gulf war. Far enough to have some reasonable perspective, not so far that there weren't a lot of primary or near primary actors still alive and lucid enough to give fantastic interviews. Another one I haven't seen mentioned is "victory at sea" which I ate up as a kid. It was made much more closely from the end of the war and as such has a more propaganda film feeling, but i still enjoyed the poo poo out of it. Ymmv. Another thing i haven't yet seen mention is the battle of midway cast in Mahan-Ian terms. It's been said over and over that Yamamoto saw the US as an undefeatable enemy, but I don't think he saw the 1941 pacific fleet as such. One big victory is what his doctrine called for and that's what he was looking for at Pearl Harbor and at midway.
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Sep 15, 2016 08:31
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The fundamental problem with the Versailles reparations is that Weimar didn't want to pay them because it didn't accept any of the Versailles settlement as legitimate, and started breaching it from day one as much as it thought it could get away with.
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Sep 15, 2016 08:40
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Besides the Port of Antwerp and the "highway to the Ruhr/across the Rhine", was there any other particular reason for the Netherlands being critically important to Germany during the waning days of the Western Front?
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Sep 15, 2016 09:12
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Randarkman posted:I'm with the French on Versailles, they weren't hard enough on Germany. If it had been politically possible they should have rejected the ceasefire or atleast insisted on unconditional surrender, with a following occupation of Germany and complete dismantling of the German military. Politically possible, nothing. Militarily possible, alone, it was not. France and Britain were out of men to throw into the meat grinder, and they still didn't trust each other in the slightest, assuming that if another war came it was going to be between them. And you're proposing that these two bitter enemies, rivalry briefly interrupted by WW1, are going to peacefully cooperate in an occupation of Germany, an occupation that will cost a great deal of money and manpower neither country has. This sounds less like a recipe for peace and more like a recipe for World War 2 starting 5 years after World War 1 ends.
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Sep 15, 2016 15:43
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Ron Jeremy posted:Another thing i haven't yet seen mention is the battle of midway cast in Mahan-Ian terms. It's been said over and over that Yamamoto saw the US as an undefeatable enemy, but I don't think he saw the 1941 pacific fleet as such. One big victory is what his doctrine called for and that's what he was looking for at Pearl Harbor and at midway. That's to split hairs a little. If Yamamoto wins a decisive enough battle, the premise is either (a) the US is pressured to negotiate a settlement or (b) Japan secures time to conquer more territory and then fortify and harden it against a coming attack so as to make negotiation more desirable later. It's clear no matter what happens the US can produce enough military equipment to win, it's just about exacting a high enough cost to dissuade them from doing it.
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Sep 15, 2016 15:48
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And Pearl Harbor specifically was aimed at a) to the exclusion of b), based on Yamamoto's recorded statements.
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Sep 15, 2016 15:54
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iirc the original 1920's era plan was to goad the us to sending their pacific fleet to the phillipines (or somewhere else) and destroying it in a recreation of tsushima, which would also give the battleships something glorious to do. pearl harbor was just a delaying attack to give japan time to seize the pacific, and midway makes more sense as a "well now that we've conquered the pacific what the hell do we do now, i guess try to bait and destroy the american fleet? sure why not"
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Sep 15, 2016 17:57
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Popular Thug Drink posted:iirc the original 1920's era plan was to goad the us to sending their pacific fleet to the phillipines (or somewhere else) and destroying it in a recreation of tsushima, which would also give the battleships something glorious to do. pearl harbor was just a delaying attack to give japan time to seize the pacific, and midway makes more sense as a "well now that we've conquered the pacific what the hell do we do now, i guess try to bait and destroy the american fleet? sure why not" The original plan was to seize the Philippines, abandon them, and destroy the US through attrition in the Marshalls and Marianas followed by a pitched battle in the Bonins after the US Pacific Fleet was reduced to the point where Japan had a hope of victory. With the Army's Strike South faction winning out, the locations involved shifted southwards and eastwards. Pearl Harbor was directly anathema to the plan, which relied on the Americans not even taking the time to link up the Atlantic Fleet. Yamamoto was convinced the plan was essentially flawed and worked up an attempt to crush American civilian morale by destroying battleships. Midway was developed out of the need to draw out and destroy the American carriers and battleships to force the Americans to the table, along with an insane plan to invade Hawaii.
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Sep 15, 2016 18:09
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fishmech posted:While the demanded payments were still plenty high by the beginning of the 30s, they had continuously gotten negotiated downward, and the horizon to finally pay them off kept getting pushed back. If I remember the terms right, the original time the last payment by Germany was to happen was sometime in the 1950s, while by the time Hitler got to power it'd already been pushed up past 1986. And as it all turned out, Germany made its final WWI reparations payment in 2010. Given the source I should probably make some joke as well about the Daily Mail's enduring flirtation with fascism generally and Nazism specifically, but nothing particularly funny comes to mind.
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Sep 15, 2016 18:15
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Popular Thug Drink posted:iirc the original 1920's era plan was to goad the us to sending their pacific fleet to the phillipines (or somewhere else) and destroying it in a recreation of tsushima, which would also give the battleships something glorious to do. pearl harbor was just a delaying attack to give japan time to seize the pacific, and midway makes more sense as a "well now that we've conquered the pacific what the hell do we do now, i guess try to bait and destroy the american fleet? sure why not" dunno, this might've been just me reading shattered sword, but midway sure felt like a more splintered effort than that. It was in many ways planned like a real land-grab, and its operation stretched across a wide area. They put themselves in a real position to get counter-attacked,and thats exactly what happened
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Sep 15, 2016 21:37
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Brainiac Five posted:
That was a pretty poor read on how the American public responds to "others" breaking our toys.
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Sep 16, 2016 02:42
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LingcodKilla posted:That was a pretty poor read on how the American public responds to "others" breaking our toys. Well, first of all, that had never actually happened previously. Just about everyone had a bad idea of what the US would do or was capable of.
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Sep 16, 2016 03:19
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Remember the Maine?
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Sep 16, 2016 03:39
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LingcodKilla posted:That was a pretty poor read on how the American public responds to "others" breaking our toys.
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Sep 16, 2016 03:39
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LingcodKilla posted:Remember the Maine? That was presented as sabotage, not a military attack. Rebel Blob posted:Well, the thousands of deaths might be something for people to get upset about. But that doesn't fit neatly into your narrative of the American public as petulant toddlers. 10% of the American populace wished to commit genocide against Japan, consistently, during the war. So, "petulant toddlers" is, in the aggregate, being nice.
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Sep 16, 2016 03:42
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Right or wrong as a nation we get super bent out of shape if we get attached or perceived to be. I don't see how they came to the conclusion that any attack would lead to us going to the table to sue for peace.
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Sep 16, 2016 03:45
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Brainiac Five posted:That was presented as sabotage, not a military attack. That 10% seems awfully low when you could probably get 10% of our current population to espouse genocide on member of our own nation.
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Sep 16, 2016 03:48
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LingcodKilla posted:Right or wrong as a nation we get super bent out of shape if we get attached or perceived to be. I don't see how they came to the conclusion that any attack would lead to us going to the table to sue for peace. The whole point of all of Japanese strategy was to create an image of Japan as too tough to easily defeat and make a negotiated settlement seem like the best option. Which is an important part of why the Midway operation was so clumsily concocted- it was attempting to do the opposite of what Japanese strategic thought was aimed at doing- creating a sense of Japan as vulnerable to lure out a supposedly combat-shy American fleet.
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Sep 16, 2016 03:48
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Brainiac Five posted:The whole point of all of Japanese strategy was to create an image of Japan as too tough to easily defeat and make a negotiated settlement seem like the best option. That's the problem right there with the plan. How are you going to convince the populace that we should "kow-tow to the yellow monkey emperor"? Holy poo poo we would have had an uprising at home. The US was deeply racist at the time and looking at it from a detached from modern reason that was never going to happen. It seems that strategy was looking at it from a very Japanese world view where all they had to do was convince the President to sue for peace. They hosed up.
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Sep 16, 2016 04:01
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LingcodKilla posted:That's the problem right there with the plan. How are you going to convince the populace that we should "kow-tow to the yellow monkey emperor"? Holy poo poo we would have had an uprising at home. The US was deeply racist at the time and looking at it from a detached from modern reason that was never going to happen. Historically, it almost worked. There was a major propaganda blitz in 1945 because of fears of civilian and military morale collapsing.
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Sep 16, 2016 04:38
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cheerfullydrab posted:Herein we talk about World War 2, an event many people believe was the hinge between the world of today and the world of yesterday. OK great but it was WWI. Edit: Just in case this incredibly obvious point is considered a low content post No WWI means: No collapse of the Autocracy in Russia, or if so a more civil beginning to the Kerensky government. More support by the rest of Europe for Nicholas's government. Germany has no reason to send Lenin to Russia and likely no rise of Bolshevism. No vulnerable, mandated Democracy in Germany, less vulnerability to extremist political groups. No crazy Austrians. Germany may never lose its constitutional Monarchy. No check to German industrial and population growth. No check on British and French Power. No foreign governments to take advantage of Spanish instability for a proxy war. No end to American isolationism. God only knows what Austria and Turkey look like No Radicalization of Ho Chi Minh. A bunch of other stuff I'm too lazy to type. Eifert Posting fucked around with this message at 05:04 on Sep 16, 2016 |
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Sep 16, 2016 04:40
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Disinterested posted:That's to split hairs a little. If Yamamoto wins a decisive enough battle, the premise is either (a) the US is pressured to negotiate a settlement or (b) Japan secures time to conquer more territory and then fortify and harden it against a coming attack so as to make negotiation more desirable later. It's clear no matter what happens the US can produce enough military equipment to win, it's just about exacting a high enough cost to dissuade them from doing it. All the military equipment in the world won't matter without the bases and supply lines to use them. The Pacific War was very much up in the air for a good six months or so. If we didn't crack the Japanese naval codes, it is highly possible the US could have suffered a decisive defeat that would have allowed Japan to capture and fortify every island of consequence west of Hawaii.
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Sep 16, 2016 05:01
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KaptainKrunk posted:All the military equipment in the world won't matter without the bases and supply lines to use them. The Pacific War was very much up in the air for a good six months or so. If we didn't crack the Japanese naval codes, it is highly possible the US could have suffered a decisive defeat that would have allowed Japan to capture and fortify every island of consequence west of Hawaii. War Plan Orange, in its final form, (and Rainbow Five) settled on the exact tactics that the Central Pacific command would use. A massive force of carriers and fast battleships would smash its way into the Marshalls and Gilberts from bases in Hawaii, then proceed onward through the Marianas and into the Ryukyus and Bonins. The bigger issue would be an advance into Fiji and the South Pacific to cut off Australia. Historically, this was put off until after the US Pacific Fleet was crushed, although the preliminary preparations led to the Battle of the Coral Sea, which in turn allowed the US to have a clear operational advantage at Midway.
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Sep 16, 2016 05:12
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KaptainKrunk posted:All the military equipment in the world won't matter without the bases and supply lines to use them. The Pacific War was very much up in the air for a good six months or so. If we didn't crack the Japanese naval codes, it is highly possible the US could have suffered a decisive defeat that would have allowed Japan to capture and fortify every island of consequence west of Hawaii. Unless the Japanese can also conquer the entire east coast of India, all of Australia, and New Zealand, there are plenty of bases left over.
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Sep 16, 2016 05:23
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Even if Japan had won every major naval batle they never had an answer for Allied submarine warfare. That's an issue when you're an island nation with few natural resources. Many contemporary Japanese strategists thought the war was basically unwinnable if it was protracted and I agree with them.
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Sep 16, 2016 05:24
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Eifert Posting posted:Even if Japan had won every major naval batle they never had an answer for Allied submarine warfare. That's an issue when you're an island nation with few natural resources. Many contemporary Japanese strategists thought the war was basically unwinnable if it was protracted and I agree with them. This gets things backwards. Japanese strategists all knew a war with the US was unwinnable in the long run, so they designed their navy around fighting a short war with the ability to chase the anemic colonial fleets out of the Pacific if need be. That is, they based things around their only possible path to victory and neglected mining, commerce raiding, ASW, etc. as those were effectively irrelevant for their strategic posture.
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Sep 16, 2016 05:27
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LingcodKilla posted:I don't see how they came to the conclusion that any attack would lead to us going to the table to sue for peace. when you're an authoritarian miltary junta with a long history of military dictatorship and glorifying military culture as a way to justify the current status quo it's pretty easy to convince yourself that everyone else is a pushover coward besides it had worked in 1905, japan basically crushed the russian fleet and then beat up the russian army then bam! japan gets a seat at the big boys table for being the first non-western power to defeat a modern western army KaptainKrunk posted:All the military equipment in the world won't matter without the bases and supply lines to use them. The Pacific War was very much up in the air for a good six months or so. If we didn't crack the Japanese naval codes, it is highly possible the US could have suffered a decisive defeat that would have allowed Japan to capture and fortify every island of consequence west of Hawaii. well they pretty much did do that, but even if the us hadn't gotten absurdly lucky at midway we would have just bided our time until we could fart out two dozen carriers and then go ahead with the pre-war plans imo the thing japan hadn't counted on was the pacific war being part of a larger world war. once germany declared war on the us that was it, the us wasn't going to back out until japan either had multiple crushing victories or surrendered. negotiated peace was out the window once the japan-us war became the axis-allies war boner confessor fucked around with this message at 05:31 on Sep 16, 2016 |
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Sep 16, 2016 05:27
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Brainiac Five posted:That is, they based things around their only possible path to victory This is pretty much it. After the US stopped selling the Japanese oil, they were pretty much forced to attack south to the DEI to get their own and because the Americans would likely stand up for Dutch colonial interests, they had to be dealt with. Somehow. Their only hope was victory in a single big Mahanian battle against the US Navy and a negotiated peace. They missed a knockout blow at Pearl Harbor, stalemated at Coral Sea, and lost at Midway. It was never in doubt after Midway, but by that point the Japanese wouldnt or couldnt back out.
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Sep 16, 2016 05:32
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The biggest issue is that the Japanese aligned themselves with the Germans and never repudiated it, which cut off their most useful bargaining chip- offering to join the Allies in exchange for the Americans providing political cover for a Japanese withdrawal from China, which would resolve all the political problems that had led to the brink of war in the first place. This really has to be laid at the foot of the incompetence of the Fumimaro government and the Showa governments before the military takeover, in my opinion.
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Sep 16, 2016 05:36
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Eifert Posting posted:Even if Japan had won every major naval batle they never had an answer for Allied submarine warfare. That's an issue when you're an island nation with few natural resources. Many contemporary Japanese strategists thought the war was basically unwinnable if it was protracted and I agree with them. Allied submarine warfare really got going in 1943, after the Japanese had already lost the operational initiative and much of their precious carrier fleet.Japanese victory at Coral Sea or Midway would have sealed the fate of the Solomons and probably Australia and New Zealand too. At that point the war drags out, the Japanese fortify their positions, and the whole thing becomes becomes Iwo Jima x 5 along the way. Going ahead with pre-war plans of just smashing a giant carrier and battleship fleet through the central Pacific after a Midway defeat, the loss of the Solomons, and the likely capitulation of Australia and New Zealand becomes risky at best and suicidal at worst. The Americans would eventually win, yeah, but it would have been much, much bloodier.
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Sep 16, 2016 06:39
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KaptainKrunk posted:Allied submarine warfare really got going in 1943, after the Japanese had already lost the operational initiative and much of their precious carrier fleet.Japanese victory at Coral Sea or Midway would have sealed the fate of the Solomons and probably Australia and New Zealand too. At that point the war drags out, the Japanese fortify their positions, and the whole thing becomes becomes Iwo Jima x 5 along the way. No it doesn't. The lack of institutional knowledge would be the biggest issue, but improvements in aircraft range meant that any defensive perimeter established in autumn 1942 will be of marginal utility by spring of 1944. Island-hopping and all that jazz.
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Sep 16, 2016 06:42
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 Who wants to go down with me boys?
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Sep 16, 2016 06:46
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KaptainKrunk posted:Allied submarine warfare really got going in 1943, after the Japanese had already lost the operational initiative and much of their precious carrier fleet.Japanese victory at Coral Sea or Midway would have sealed the fate of the Solomons and probably Australia and New Zealand too. At that point the war drags out, the Japanese fortify their positions, and the whole thing becomes becomes Iwo Jima x 5 along the way. Nah. The Japanese merchant shipping situation was incredibly dire before any potential victory at Coral Sea or Midway and without the American submarine threat. There was no way that Japan could reliably transport additional troops and all their supplies to increasingly far flung outposts as their logistical situation was already on the verge of collapse; they just didn't have enough spare ships to move troops in one go for the quantity you needed to take bitterly contested positions. Plus you have to factor in the internal rivalries between the IJA and IJN - the army was opposed to any expansion of the defensive perimeter due to the manpower crisis Japan was facing, owing to all the territory they had just taken and were now garrisoning. They had to have their arm's bent to approve enough forces just to be sent to Midway, and post-war analysis has shown that the Japanese actually taking Midway atoll after a hypothetical naval victory was not a sure thing at all. That doesn't exactly bode well for a supposed invasion of Australia or New Zealand.
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Sep 16, 2016 11:09
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Ron Jeremy posted:This is pretty much it. After the US stopped selling the Japanese oil, they were pretty much forced to attack south to the DEI to get their own and because the Americans would likely stand up for Dutch colonial interests, they had to be dealt with. Somehow. Their only hope was victory in a single big Mahanian battle against the US Navy and a negotiated peace. They missed a knockout blow at Pearl Harbor, stalemated at Coral Sea, and lost at Midway. It was never in doubt after Midway, but by that point the Japanese wouldnt or couldnt back out. Why would they stand up for "Dutch colonial interests" at a time when they wouldn't even stand up for the existence of France or Britain? I can't see FDR speaking in congress about some imperial profits being threatened when American children were literally malnourished. The Japanese might have gotten away with invading some of South-East Asia if they hadn't tangled with the Americans.
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Sep 16, 2016 11:26
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On the other hand it would have been an incredible gamble to go for the DEI and points south/west with an "unsinkable aircraft carrier" and a naval base standing astride your main sea routes. Even if you knew that the Americans wouldn't get involved at the outset, letting the Philippines continue to exist as a base would be a constant danger.
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Sep 16, 2016 11:30
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gradenko_2000 posted:On the other hand it would have been an incredible gamble to go for the DEI and points south/west with an "unsinkable aircraft carrier" and a naval base standing astride your main sea routes. It would have been a much better option that surprise attacking the USA and absolutely guaranteeing that they will want to kick your teeth in no matter what though. Not attacking the US at all would have been the best plan for the Japanese, but they dismissed this option from the outset due to the military culture of Japan at the time
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Sep 16, 2016 11:38
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Rosscifer posted:Why would they stand up for "Dutch colonial interests" at a time when they wouldn't even stand up for the existence of France or Britain? I can't see FDR speaking in congress about some imperial profits being threatened when American children were literally malnourished. The Japanese might have gotten away with invading some of South-East Asia if they hadn't tangled with the Americans. Because Japanese expansionism in the Pacific was a more direct threat to US interests than German expansionism in Europe, and would have been much easier to interfere with since Japanese supply lines were extremely vulnerable to attack from the Philippines and we could involve ourselves with just some gunboat diplomacy rather than a full ground war.
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Sep 16, 2016 13:56
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People tend to conflate US opinion in 1939 and US opinion in 1941 and the US was already increasing its involvement in the war. It's possible a DEI-only coup de main could've kept the US out but everyone knew by then that the US was slowly mobilizing its resources.
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Sep 16, 2016 14:25
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Rosscifer posted:Why would they stand up for "Dutch colonial interests" at a time when they wouldn't even stand up for the existence of France or Britain? I can't see FDR speaking in congress about some imperial profits being threatened when American children were literally malnourished. The Japanese might have gotten away with invading some of South-East Asia if they hadn't tangled with the Americans. But the embargo was literally in response to Japanese occupation of Vietnam? That seems like involvement to me.
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Sep 16, 2016 19:27
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Ze Pollack posted:Politically possible, nothing. Militarily possible, alone, it was not. France and Britain were out of men to throw into the meat grinder, and they still didn't trust each other in the slightest, assuming that if another war came it was going to be between them. And you're proposing that these two bitter enemies, rivalry briefly interrupted by WW1, are going to peacefully cooperate in an occupation of Germany, an occupation that will cost a great deal of money and manpower neither country has. on one of your points. people kinda forget that France and Britain were at each others throats up(at least politically) until like 20ish or so years before WW1. everyone thought WW1 would be like a fast war like they were when they fought various tribes in africa or the boxer rebellion.
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