|
Epicurius posted:Japan didn't have the manpower or the supply/logistics to win in China. If you look at the map of the land they took, its never all that far from the coast, except for a little bit near the puppet state in Inner Mongolia, because so many of their supplies were being shipped by sea. The further away from the coast they got, the more strained their supply lines got. Meanwhile, behind the lines, the combination of the Communist "base areas" and the non-Communist resistance meant that Japan couldn't even secure the countryside in the area they controlled. There was an active resistance movement in Manchuria that the Japanese actively tried to put down for ten years, finally succeeding in 1942. Meanwhile, the whole "burn to ash/three alls" campaign by the Japanese was a symptom of their inability to do anything against unrest, or to get any benefit out of the territory they controlled. When you resort to large scale civilian massacres and scorched earth combat fighting guerrillas, it's a sign that your conquest attempt has gone pretty seriously wrong. Pretty much. "Victory" would have just meant extending this mess to the rest of China instead of just the coastal regions. It was not a well thought out plan, to the extent it was even a plan at all.
|
# ? Jun 4, 2018 12:48 |
|
|
# ? May 27, 2024 02:04 |
|
keep in mind the whole thing got kicked off with the extremely rad strategy of the Kwantung army field grade officers being like "lets go bonk some heads" and then sort of working backwards and forwards from there
|
# ? Jun 4, 2018 12:57 |
|
Cythereal posted:I've repeatedly heard stories that a lot of the lend-lease trucks sent to the Soviet Union still had USA painted on the sides, which most Russians who saw them thought was an acronym to the effect of (I don't remember the exact Russian words) "Kill that loving Adolf." I've read an account that said the soldiers believed (or at least so they told civilians) that it's because they're export models. You know, for exporting to America.
|
# ? Jun 4, 2018 14:05 |
|
Even at the height of its territorial presence in China, the Japanese only really managed to maintain control of the cities and railroads- huge pockets of Chinese troops could remain behind the 'line' and even retain their supply- even if by 1944 the KMT troops weren't really capable of offensive or effective defensive action, the Japanese also weren't capable of gaining much from fighting. Chiang faced similar problems when he went to war with the Communists- he attacked and took cities and railroads but in the end it mostly left him more vulnerable when the Communists decided to counterattack- it wasn't a war of thick, impenetrable front lines.
|
# ? Jun 4, 2018 15:04 |
|
Kinda hard to do that, China big.
|
# ? Jun 4, 2018 15:13 |
|
And then the Soviets kicked their arse.sullat posted:Would it? From a Soviet perspective, China being a big mess would be preferable to China being a stable power that's still unhappy about the loss of the north side of the Amur. I don't think the Sino-Soviet rift is a thing that is obvious ahead of time.
|
# ? Jun 4, 2018 15:40 |
|
Fangz posted:And then the Soviets kicked their arse. Before the Japanese invaded, there was an entire, very bloody war between China and the Soviet Union. The Sino-Soviet split has nothing to do with this.
|
# ? Jun 4, 2018 15:57 |
|
feedmegin posted:Japan is about 50% bigger by land area and has twice the population of the UK, you know... drat, why didnt the Japanese think of having two and a half million Indians fight their wars for them?
|
# ? Jun 4, 2018 16:02 |
|
Libluini posted:Before the Japanese invaded, there was an entire, very bloody war between China and the Soviet Union. The Sino-Soviet split has nothing to do with this. Yeah, but I don't think that's going to be enough to dissuade the Soviets from intervening in China on the logic that doing so would secure them influence there.
|
# ? Jun 4, 2018 16:07 |
|
HerraS posted:drat, why didnt the Japanese think of having two and a half million Indians fight their wars for them? Didn't they have that exact idea/concept? Like, liberating the Indian subcontinent and then rallying them as kind of a pan-Asian brotherhood against western imperialists?
|
# ? Jun 4, 2018 16:09 |
|
bewbies posted:Didn't they have that exact idea/concept? Like, liberating the Indian subcontinent and then rallying them as kind of a pan-Asian brotherhood against western imperialists? They toyed with the idea, yes, but the IJA said oh gently caress no we're not invading India we barely have the manpower or equipment for our current commitments. It was one of several possibilities the Japanese military leadership considered in 1942 after taking the Philippines. Their immediate military goals secure, they faced the question of what to do next. The main ideas considered were ceasing expansion to consolidate and fortify their gains, invade India and Sri Lanka, invade Australia, invade the rest of the DEI to cut off Australia from the US, or invade Midway as a stepping stone to Hawaii. Thanks to Yamamoto pulling a "Do it my way or I and my senior staff quit," Japan went with that last option and we all know how that turned out.
|
# ? Jun 4, 2018 16:19 |
|
FOIA request lead to 73mb of 50's and 60's internal NSA security posters being declassified. I've always found the "groovy" 60's pop iconography unsettling and NSA propaganda messages don't help
|
# ? Jun 4, 2018 17:02 |
|
|
# ? Jun 5, 2018 02:01 |
|
Cythereal posted:Thanks to Yamamoto pulling a "Do it my way or I and my senior staff quit," Japan went with that last option and we all know how that turned out. This is pretty much post WWI to end of WWII Japan in a nutshell. Officers did what they wanted, when they wanted, and then browbeat the imperial government/establishment into accepting it. Civilian officials were impotent too because you were dealing with a system based on Imperial Germany's but the previous emperor was mentally retarded, most likely lead poisoning, and his son was raised by the military establishment.
|
# ? Jun 5, 2018 03:52 |
|
Cythereal posted:They toyed with the idea, yes, but the IJA said oh gently caress no we're not invading India we barely have the manpower or equipment for our current commitments. Even if they did it the other ways I doubt it would have gone much better in the long term
|
# ? Jun 5, 2018 04:15 |
|
Milo and POTUS posted:Even if they did it the other ways I doubt it would have gone much better in the long term Probably so. The IJA vetoed the India and Australia invasions (and thought they'd vetoed the Hawaii move) because they'd be massive sinks of manpower when the IJA had very little manpower to spare. The consolidation and fortification plan was dismissed by both the IJA and IJN because it was cowardly and unglorious. The IJN and IJA thought they'd agreed to advance southeast into the rest of the DEI to cut off Australia until Yamamoto threw his tantrum.
|
# ? Jun 5, 2018 04:23 |
|
WW2 Data The first part of US mines is up, and we get a few revelations. How is the tree suspension device supposed to work? What are practice mines painted as; what about dummy mines? What is an Anti-Tank Mine M5 made of, and why does using an anti-lifting device defeat its purpose? All that and more at the blog!
|
# ? Jun 5, 2018 05:36 |
|
The more things change, the more they stay the same.https://www.cnn.com/2018/06/04/politics/mueller-manafort-witness-tampering/index.html posted:Hapsburg group activity goatsestretchgoals fucked around with this message at 06:17 on Jun 5, 2018 |
# ? Jun 5, 2018 06:08 |
|
Those Habsburgs might have been in eastern europe but they definitely have the intelligence of the Spanish Habsburgs
|
# ? Jun 5, 2018 06:12 |
|
goatsestretchgoals posted:The more things change, the more they stay the same.
|
# ? Jun 5, 2018 06:13 |
|
Cythereal posted:Probably so. The IJA vetoed the India and Australia invasions (and thought they'd vetoed the Hawaii move) because they'd be massive sinks of manpower when the IJA had very little manpower to spare. The consolidation and fortification plan was dismissed by both the IJA and IJN because it was cowardly and unglorious. The IJN and IJA thought they'd agreed to advance southeast into the rest of the DEI to cut off Australia until Yamamoto threw his tantrum. Note that despite this, Imphal still happened.
|
# ? Jun 5, 2018 12:37 |
|
Alchenar posted:Note that despite this, Imphal still happened. It's not really comparable, unless by Imphal you mean the invasion of Burma in 1942.
|
# ? Jun 5, 2018 13:03 |
|
HerraS posted:drat, why didnt the Japanese think of having two and a half million Indians fight their wars for them? They just had millions of Koreans, Taiwanese and Chinese forced into doing their industry for them instead.
|
# ? Jun 5, 2018 13:27 |
|
once again i take the time out of my busy schedule of nothing in particular to combat a harmful myth:Hieronymous Alloy posted:
|
# ? Jun 5, 2018 16:03 |
|
HEY GUNS posted:
I sometimes wonder how the founding fathers would react to the near hero worship of the military in modern America. Washington would probably be down but Jefferson would be beyond horrified.
|
# ? Jun 5, 2018 18:46 |
|
Two hundred years of time and a couple economic/technological revolutions will shuffle around a few values and underlying assumptions
|
# ? Jun 5, 2018 19:12 |
|
Don Gato posted:I sometimes wonder how the founding fathers would react to the near hero worship of the military in modern America. Washington would probably be down but Jefferson would be beyond horrified.
|
# ? Jun 5, 2018 19:25 |
|
HEY GUNS posted:That verse is about soldiers, who are either paid to be there (hirelings) or forced to be there (slaves). Francis Scott Key, like all americans of the time I know about, was really, really anti-standing-army. Is this so clear-cut? What I have come to understand is that there were escaped slaves serving under the British and participated in the attack on Baltimore. Francis Scott Key of course kept his own slaves. Regardless, Hieronymous Alloy gets bonus points for mentioning that the song is "three-fifths good." I totally missed that when I first saw it this morning.
|
# ? Jun 5, 2018 19:32 |
|
In my uninformed opinion, Japan could have probably come out on top in a war against the US, but that sort of war wasn't the one they got.
|
# ? Jun 5, 2018 19:44 |
|
Rocko Bonaparte posted:Is this so clear-cut? What I have come to understand is that there were escaped slaves serving under the British and participated in the attack on Baltimore. Francis Scott Key of course kept his own slaves. Slave owners did not refer to what they were doing as keeping slaves. Those were "servants." The most common use of the word was as a metaphor. This is squarely within the contemporary discussion of what it means to have a longterm army. HEY GUNS fucked around with this message at 19:49 on Jun 5, 2018 |
# ? Jun 5, 2018 19:47 |
|
HEY GUNS posted:fingers crossed a bunch of scottish/irish dudes halberd erik prince Don't stop
|
# ? Jun 5, 2018 20:02 |
|
HEY GUNS posted:Slave owners did not refer to what they were doing as keeping slaves While I don't think the song refers to actual slaves either, some of them at least did - http://www.ushistory.org/us/27f.asp https://archive.org/details/christiandoctrin00lcarms They specifically justified it using biblical and classical slavery in fact.
|
# ? Jun 5, 2018 21:42 |
|
|
# ? Jun 5, 2018 21:42 |
|
What? What the gently caress? What? Why?
|
# ? Jun 5, 2018 21:45 |
|
Look out for the Hamführgler
|
# ? Jun 5, 2018 21:51 |
|
And Obersturmmann McCheese.
|
# ? Jun 5, 2018 22:03 |
|
Unit cuff title:
|
# ? Jun 5, 2018 22:06 |
|
Cessna posted:Unit cuff title:
|
# ? Jun 5, 2018 22:09 |
|
Hey, at least you know the place has good grills.
|
# ? Jun 5, 2018 22:10 |
|
|
# ? May 27, 2024 02:04 |
|
|
# ? Jun 5, 2018 22:12 |