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Nothingtoseehere
Nov 11, 2010


Ah yes, I'm zure Iran and the USSR totally have the logistics to triple throughput on that route, and sailing to Iran from eastern US is just as easy as sailing to Vladisvokistock.

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Solaris 2.0
May 14, 2008

I mean the Japanese defeated the Russians before without needing to take Moscow so it stands to reason why they think they could do it again.

PittTheElder
Feb 13, 2012

:geno: Yes, it's like a lava lamp.

Nothingtoseehere posted:

Ah yes, I'm zure Iran and the USSR totally have the logistics to triple throughput on that route, and sailing to Iran from eastern US is just as easy as sailing to Vladisvokistock.

Yeah it seems really dubious that all that traffic could have been rerouted. If it was possible, I don't know why they would have bothered continuing the Arctic convoys.

SlothfulCobra
Mar 27, 2011

I know when I read about the Comanche I didn't get the impression that they particularly had much of an idea of how to conserve the buffalo, and definitely since they had an almost entirely meat diet, they would've had much less options for scaling back on hunting even if they did. Apparently during their decline they also started selling hunting rights on their land, which seems like a terrible decision for conserving their food supply.

Their lack of an actual centralized imperial administration with temporary independent pseudo-states specifically for raiding seems almost tactically designed to be impossible for more centralized authorities to negotiate with in good faith, although there's a lot of cultures throughout history that have developed similar setups that lasted for a couple centuries.

Slim Jim Pickens
Jan 16, 2012

Nothingtoseehere posted:

Ah yes, I'm zure Iran and the USSR totally have the logistics to triple throughput on that route, and sailing to Iran from eastern US is just as easy as sailing to Vladisvokistock.

It just takes longer. You'd never do it if Vladivostok was an option, but it wasn't as if the US couldn't spare the fuel or crews for it.

The Brits and Soviets took over Iran to use the railways, the ports involved were all over Western Asia. I don't think it was at capacity at any point. Besides, the biggest bulk of lend-lease came in 1943, by which point there's no way the Soviets could lose.

Solaris 2.0 posted:

I mean the Japanese defeated the Russians before without needing to take Moscow so it stands to reason why they think they could do it again.

The problem is that they don't want or need Vladivostok, but the Soviets had already demonstrated in 1918, and during the numerous border skirmishes of the '30s, that they could project significant forces in the area and were willing and capable of fighting there. The stuff Japan wants is deeper in the Far Eastern Military District, so how much are they going to enjoy duking it out in Siberian wasteland with an equivalent Soviet force for god knows how long?

In comparison ,Russo-Japanese war was only possible because the Japanese knew that the Trans-siberian railway wasn't finished. It ended like in Irkutsk or something, so they knew the Russians would be hard-pressed to respond by land because they had to trek armies 600km by foot. They also lucked out with the 1905 Revolution, the Russian Empire was preparing to just brute force the supply problem before that happened.

Slim Jim Pickens
Jan 16, 2012

PittTheElder posted:

Yeah it seems really dubious that all that traffic could have been rerouted. If it was possible, I don't know why they would have bothered continuing the Arctic convoys.

Because they were shortest, and during the Winter, they were reasonably safe. Summer convoys were cancelled after PQ 17.

Tulip
Jun 3, 2008

yeah thats pretty good


SlothfulCobra posted:

I know when I read about the Comanche I didn't get the impression that they particularly had much of an idea of how to conserve the buffalo, and definitely since they had an almost entirely meat diet, they would've had much less options for scaling back on hunting even if they did. Apparently during their decline they also started selling hunting rights on their land, which seems like a terrible decision for conserving their food supply.

Their lack of an actual centralized imperial administration with temporary independent pseudo-states specifically for raiding seems almost tactically designed to be impossible for more centralized authorities to negotiate with in good faith, although there's a lot of cultures throughout history that have developed similar setups that lasted for a couple centuries.

Yeah, actual intentional management of wild populations is...really tough? As far as I know not even really resolved?

The Comanche system did get closer to an actual centralized imperial administration, but this ran into a number of limitations quite fast and it's realistic to think that the whole thing would have fissioned if there had been no 1850s collapse (and it fissioned VERY rapidly and extremely once that collapse happened). And for what it's worth it's not like their competitors/peers were able to muster up significantly better centralization until very late in this story - the Spanish Empire wasn't able to even keep all of New Mexico on the same page, and New Mexico, Texas, Mexico, and Spain all frequently had different diplomatic relationships with the Comanche. The US had a brief period where they were sending US troops to fight the Comanche in Texas while arming the Comanche in Arkansas, took them a minute to wise up to that one.

The diplomatic history of the book was extremely confusing for this reason. Other than the Osage, every country seemed to have subunits that would overrule their central government on diplomacy pretty regularly.

Nessus
Dec 22, 2003

After a Speaker vote, you may be entitled to a valuable coupon or voucher!



Tulip posted:

Yeah, actual intentional management of wild populations is...really tough? As far as I know not even really resolved?

The Comanche system did get closer to an actual centralized imperial administration, but this ran into a number of limitations quite fast and it's realistic to think that the whole thing would have fissioned if there had been no 1850s collapse (and it fissioned VERY rapidly and extremely once that collapse happened). And for what it's worth it's not like their competitors/peers were able to muster up significantly better centralization until very late in this story - the Spanish Empire wasn't able to even keep all of New Mexico on the same page, and New Mexico, Texas, Mexico, and Spain all frequently had different diplomatic relationships with the Comanche. The US had a brief period where they were sending US troops to fight the Comanche in Texas while arming the Comanche in Arkansas, took them a minute to wise up to that one.

The diplomatic history of the book was extremely confusing for this reason. Other than the Osage, every country seemed to have subunits that would overrule their central government on diplomacy pretty regularly.
Once you're managing wild populations you're getting to the point of, how wild are they really? I am sure it would have been better for the buffalo's health if their population nadir was more like "thirty thousand" than "six hundred," though.

Count Roland
Oct 6, 2013


Thanks for the detailed response.

wins32767
Mar 16, 2007

Slim Jim Pickens posted:

It just takes longer. You'd never do it if Vladivostok was an option, but it wasn't as if the US couldn't spare the fuel or crews for it.

Fuel, and crews, and hulls, and escorts...

It's 4871 nautical miles from LA to Vladivostok, or about 50 days for a round trip. It's 6789 nm from New York to Cape Town and then another 5189 nm from Cape Town to Abadan for 124 days for a round trip. You need two and a half times the resources and there is a much longer lag time between when the Russians ask for say, more spare parts for their 5 ton trucks, and when they get them.

SerCypher
May 10, 2006

Gay baby jail...? What the hell?

I really don't like the sound of that...
Fun Shoe
Beyond logistics, it's not like the Chinese front was closed.

How many troops would be needed to be diverted to make a meaningful difference against the Soviet Union? The Ichi-Go offensive used half a million and still didn't knock China out of the war.

If they're sending several hundred thousand of their best troops to the soviet union instead, there's a chance the nationalists make some real gains.

Yvonmukluk
Oct 10, 2012

Everything is Sinister


Does anyone know if that new Samurai documentary on Netflix is any good?

Notahippie
Feb 4, 2003

Kids, it's not cool to have Shane MacGowan teeth
The historical wargames thread had a conversation about how wargames model artillery vs armor and the psychological impacts of getting shelled even if your tank is (probably) safe. I told a story about my granddad that somebody said would be of interest here, so here it is with a bit more detail.

My grandfather did an accelerated college degree at an rotc university (one of the Citadel/VMU/TAMU kind of schools) and ended up as a tank platoon commander in the 13th Armored "Black Cats" division. The 13th is interesting because it's a late-war division that only came in at the tail end of the war- they arrived in Europe on 29 Jan 1945, saw combat starting 19 March, and then left Europe 14 July. Officially according to Army history they are credited with 16 days of combat but in that time they captured 27,827 prisoners of war. They were part of the drive through southern Germany and Austria, and are probably most famous as the division that captured the town Hitler was born in.

Like a lot of WWII veterans my granddad didn't talk about it much, but from what he said it sounds like absolute chaos - from one turn in the road to another you never knew if German soldiers were going to surrender or shoot when they saw you, and he once admitted but didn't elaborate that at least once they had a bunch of Wehrmacht EPOWs riding on the tanks when they got ambushed by Germans - maybe SS - with antitank weapons.

The one story he did tell, because he kind of had to, was the story of how he got injured since it was something that was still relevant to his family later. Apparently his tank (an M4 - he *loved* the Sherman his whole life, he had models and art all around the house about it and custom license plates too) was lead tank when they got ambushed by German troops with an antitank gun. The shell penetrated his tank and injured him and his loader but neither so critically as to knock them out of service. His driver, though, seeing the hit, dropped out of the tank (from my granddad's stories I always understood this to be through an escape hatch below the tank, but I don't know if that actually existed or if I misunderstood). The driver ran back to the next tank, under fire from the Germans, and yelled "The Lt is dead, let's get out of here" so my granddad eventually emerges from his hatch to find his platoon assaulting through the ambush and driving on in pursuit of the Germans. At which point he realizes that it's him and his injured loader and his gunner too, miles from base. All of them are hosed up to some degree - granddad had shrapnel in his face and eyes so he couldn't see well, and his loader was injured enough to not be able to get around much, so they sent the gunner running back to tell base that they need relief and granddad and the loader waited with plans for the loader to shout which direction he needed to shoot if he had to. They got out okay, though. Granddad did not think highly of his driver, and I don't know what happened afterwards but I imagine he got latrine duty for a while.

His eye injury meant that he needed to see a specialist, so they sent him back to Paris - he was injured enough that he needed the specialists, but not so badly injured that he couldn't get around, so he basically had a couple of weeks in Paris. We have pictures of him grinning ear to ear, looking cocky as all hell in his uniform sitting with his legs stretched out in front of him at one of those tiny tables in the street in Paris with a giant beer in front of him, and I heard him once comment wistfully on "those Paris girls" but my grandmother (an extremely reserved German-American Catholic woman, they were dating while he was in Europe) gave him an absolute death stare when he did.

This bit him in the rear end though, later. The Paris doctors took out some of the shrapnel but left some splinters in his eyes where they would have caused more damage to try and remove. 50-ish years later, he went in for an MRI for some medical issue and the VA doctors didn't do a great job of checking his chart. He was at the door of the MRI room and asked the tech if the 50 year old metal in his eyes was going to be an issue. The tech said "you don't have any meaningful amount of metal in you, there's no way they'd schedule you for an MRI if you did." Granddad told him to check his records, and he says the tech turned white as a sheet when he realized how close they had gotten to some full-on body horror poo poo. He got an x-ray instead.

SerCypher
May 10, 2006

Gay baby jail...? What the hell?

I really don't like the sound of that...
Fun Shoe

Yvonmukluk posted:

Does anyone know if that new Samurai documentary on Netflix is any good?

I liked it!

It starts off with 5 minutes about how Katana are cool, and then it goes "BUT GUNS ARE BETTER"

Also how Samurai would betray each other at the drop of a hat.

It doesn't fall into typical "Last Samurai" samurai honor trope stuff.

Count Roland
Oct 6, 2013

Notahippie posted:

This bit him in the rear end though, later. The Paris doctors took out some of the shrapnel but left some splinters in his eyes where they would have caused more damage to try and remove. 50-ish years later, he went in for an MRI for some medical issue and the VA doctors didn't do a great job of checking his chart. He was at the door of the MRI room and asked the tech if the 50 year old metal in his eyes was going to be an issue. The tech said "you don't have any meaningful amount of metal in you, there's no way they'd schedule you for an MRI if you did." Granddad told him to check his records, and he says the tech turned white as a sheet when he realized how close they had gotten to some full-on body horror poo poo. He got an x-ray instead.

I guess he was pretty together to insist the tech actually double check that. Good for him.

You mentioned a historical wargames thread-- would you mind linking to that? I also liked your post.

G1mby
Jun 8, 2014

Notahippie posted:

His driver, though, seeing the hit, dropped out of the tank (from my granddad's stories I always understood this to be through an escape hatch below the tank, but I don't know if that actually existed or if I misunderstood).

There was an escape hatch - you can see one here : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0PS1Pka7lBQ&t=1439s

Notahippie
Feb 4, 2003

Kids, it's not cool to have Shane MacGowan teeth

Count Roland posted:

I guess he was pretty together to insist the tech actually double check that. Good for him.

You mentioned a historical wargames thread-- would you mind linking to that? I also liked your post.

Wargames thread is here, it's a good thread and often takes milhist detours: https://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=3248082

Granddad died a couple of years ago, and up to his death was one of the most together people I've ever known. He retired from the Army Reserves as a Colonel and was an absolutely squared-away guy. He had his rules about what was right and what he was supposed to do and he did them no matter what - he'd roll out of bed and do pushups, situps, and I think some other exercises equal to the year so he was up to 110-something of each when he decided he was getting too old and stopped. It made him a little hard to know as a person - he was kind of formal with everyone, and in my family we called him and grandmother "Grandfather [last name] and Grandmother [last name]" instead of Opa & Oma or anything like that. But he was absolutely a straight arrow and I learned a lot from him when I was old enough to work with him clearing brush on his land and stuff like that.

Notahippie
Feb 4, 2003

Kids, it's not cool to have Shane MacGowan teeth

G1mby posted:

There was an escape hatch - you can see one here : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0PS1Pka7lBQ&t=1439s

That's awesome, for some reason that detail stuck with me when I heard his story but it's been long enough that I was starting to doubt my memory.

ChubbyChecker
Mar 25, 2018

cool granpa posts

FastestGunAlive
Apr 7, 2010

Dancing palm tree.
Thanks for sharing that story, nota

mllaneza
Apr 28, 2007

Veteran, Bermuda Triangle Expeditionary Force, 1993-1952




Slim Jim Pickens posted:

Because they were shortest, and during the Winter, they were reasonably safe. Summer convoys were cancelled after PQ 17.

Arctic convoys also deliver very close to Leningrad and Moscow. Those supplies were more readily available than those that went to any other port of entry.

PittTheElder
Feb 13, 2012

:geno: Yes, it's like a lava lamp.

And speaking of the Chinese front in the Pacific War, what was the main impediment to a peace settlement for the Japanese in China? Did the Japanese government think victory was possible? Were the Chinese refusing to come to the table? Were junior IJA officers assassinating any government official opposing the war?

SerCypher
May 10, 2006

Gay baby jail...? What the hell?

I really don't like the sound of that...
Fun Shoe

PittTheElder posted:

And speaking of the Chinese front in the Pacific War, what was the main impediment to a peace settlement for the Japanese in China? Did the Japanese government think victory was possible? Were the Chinese refusing to come to the table? Were junior IJA officers assassinating any government official opposing the war?

China had spent the last 100 years losing wars and trading off pieces of itself for peace.

Chiang Kai Shek and the KMT's entire raison d'etre was to stop that process. They would have rather died choking on their own blood (and most of them did) rather than sign one more unequal peace treaty.

There was no way they were going to sign a peace treaty while the IJA was occupying the most populous and valuable parts of the country.

Edit: And the IJA had also lost hundreds of thousands of troops taking that territory, so it was in no way politically viable to just give it back and walk away.

Jobbo_Fett
Mar 7, 2014

Slava Ukrayini

Clapping Larry

PittTheElder posted:

And speaking of the Chinese front in the Pacific War, what was the main impediment to a peace settlement for the Japanese in China? Did the Japanese government think victory was possible? Were the Chinese refusing to come to the table? Were junior IJA officers assassinating any government official opposing the war?

IIRC it was a matter of subjugating China entirely, but knowing they would never be able to completely control the entire country without help from within. So, much like other, smaller, "liberated" nations in the area, they established a puppet government with the eventual goal of enriching themselves via natural resources, among other things.

Tulip
Jun 3, 2008

yeah thats pretty good


PittTheElder posted:

And speaking of the Chinese front in the Pacific War, what was the main impediment to a peace settlement for the Japanese in China? Did the Japanese government think victory was possible? Were the Chinese refusing to come to the table? Were junior IJA officers assassinating any government official opposing the war?

Basically the Kwantung Army was a rogue army and the GHQ was unwilling to formally cut them off.

There were also some attempts at settlements but the sides couldn't come to agreement. At core the Japanese won so many battles and took so many high population cities in the early phases of the war that they thought they could demand extremely generous terms, which prior to Taierzhuang the KMT might have accepted but after that battle the KMT thought they could get...somewhat more equitable terms, and the KMT were increasingly justified in this belief by mounting victories after Taierzhuang such as Suixian-Zaoyang and Changsha.

Basically they both thought they could extract better terms from the other than the other side was willing to agree to, and after the early phases of the war the whole thing settled into a stalemate after the early phases.

SerCypher
May 10, 2006

Gay baby jail...? What the hell?

I really don't like the sound of that...
Fun Shoe

Tulip posted:

Basically the Kwantung Army was a rogue army and the GHQ was unwilling to formally cut them off.

There were also some attempts at settlements but the sides couldn't come to agreement. At core the Japanese won so many battles and took so many high population cities in the early phases of the war that they thought they could demand extremely generous terms, which prior to Taierzhuang the KMT might have accepted but after that battle the KMT thought they could get...somewhat more equitable terms, and the KMT were increasingly justified in this belief by mounting victories after Taierzhuang such as Suixian-Zaoyang and Changsha.

Basically they both thought they could extract better terms from the other than the other side was willing to agree to, and after the early phases of the war the whole thing settled into a stalemate after the early phases.

Was there ever any actual consideration of peace terms by the KMT?

Obviously Chiang had to be dragged into the conflict at literal gunpoint, but after that I've never read of any actual negotiations that got beyond initial unrealistic offers.

Edit: Answering my own questions here, but the KMT did actually accept one proposal.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trautmann_mediation

But as you say by the time they accepted it the Japanese didn't want to honor it anymore and gave a counter offer that was way worse, and the KMT couldn't accept it.

SerCypher fucked around with this message at 03:57 on Mar 19, 2021

White Coke
May 29, 2015
Supposing Japan accepted the first Trautmann proposal and made peace with China, is there any way to know when Japan would have gone after the Soviet Union? Did they have a date they thought they'd be ready by before the Marco Polo Bridge Incident? Of course whatever they had planned wouldn't have necessarily come to pass since so much of their foreign policy seems to have been forced upon them by the Kwantung Army, so from a counter factual perspective you can posit a war starting at almost any time. And once Chiang Kai Shek thinks the CCP have been dealt with he'll probably look for any opportunity to reconquer Manchuria, especially if the Japanese are fighting the Soviets.

SerCypher
May 10, 2006

Gay baby jail...? What the hell?

I really don't like the sound of that...
Fun Shoe

White Coke posted:

Supposing Japan accepted the first Trautmann proposal and made peace with China, is there any way to know when Japan would have gone after the Soviet Union? Did they have a date they thought they'd be ready by before the Marco Polo Bridge Incident? Of course whatever they had planned wouldn't have necessarily come to pass since so much of their foreign policy seems to have been forced upon them by the Kwantung Army, so from a counter factual perspective you can posit a war starting at almost any time. And once Chiang Kai Shek thinks the CCP have been dealt with he'll probably look for any opportunity to reconquer Manchuria, especially if the Japanese are fighting the Soviets.

They did go after the soviet union two years later and got their asses handed to them at Khalkhin Gol in 1939.

PittTheElder
Feb 13, 2012

:geno: Yes, it's like a lava lamp.

What even was the Japanese enthusiasm level for fighting the USSR? Obviously that's that Germany wanted to do, but it doesn't seem to achieve many of their economic goals.

P-Mack
Nov 10, 2007

PittTheElder posted:

What even was the Japanese enthusiasm level for fighting the USSR? Obviously that's that Germany wanted to do, but it doesn't seem to achieve many of their economic goals.

They were terrified of the Soviet Union, more so than wanting anything from it, is the impression I get.

SerCypher
May 10, 2006

Gay baby jail...? What the hell?

I really don't like the sound of that...
Fun Shoe

P-Mack posted:

They were terrified of the Soviet Union, more so than wanting anything from it, is the impression I get.

Having Zhukov show up with 500 tanks does make an impression yes.

feedmegin
Jul 30, 2008

SerCypher posted:

Having Zhukov show up with 500 tanks does make an impression yes.

Especially given the quality of Japanese tanks compared to Russian by late war. Imagine fighting an IS2 in a Chi-Ha

P-Mack
Nov 10, 2007

feedmegin posted:

Especially given the quality of Japanese tanks compared to Russian by late war. Imagine fighting an IS2 in a Chi-Ha

That's the thing that gets me, is even if their pacific and Chinese wars had gone as well as they possibly could have, they still haven't improved their position relative to the Soviet threat in any meaningful way. It seems the strategy was to just let Germany take care of the problem for them, but that's a strat that doesn't really need the co-prosperity sphere.

Nenonen
Oct 22, 2009

Mulla on aina kolkyt donaa taskussa
Conversely, imagine being a Soviet tank officer that fought in the west against German anti-tank tactics, Panzerfausts and schrecks, heavy PaKs and the occasional JagdPanzer until May. Then getting sent to the Far East to fight the Japanese who have no idea of what will come and no means to fight it.

Nenonen
Oct 22, 2009

Mulla on aina kolkyt donaa taskussa

P-Mack posted:

That's the thing that gets me, is even if their pacific and Chinese wars had gone as well as they possibly could have, they still haven't improved their position relative to the Soviet threat in any meaningful way. It seems the strategy was to just let Germany take care of the problem for them, but that's a strat that doesn't really need the co-prosperity sphere.

Assuming that Japan had emerged victorious in the Pacific, they would at least have an intact and probably superior air arm instead of Soviet air supremacy. As it were, Russians were able to conduct the last airborne landings of the war in Manchuria and southern Sakhalin.

axelord
Dec 28, 2012

College Slice

P-Mack posted:

That's the thing that gets me, is even if their pacific and Chinese wars had gone as well as they possibly could have, they still haven't improved their position relative to the Soviet threat in any meaningful way. It seems the strategy was to just let Germany take care of the problem for them, but that's a strat that doesn't really need the co-prosperity sphere.

They need the resources of Manchuria to remain a great power. To secure Manchuria they need to control China and the Russian far east territories. Attacking China leads to the US Embargo.

They need the resources of the European Colonies to the south so they can maintain their position in China, so they can secure Manchuria and remain a great power.

They need to attack the US and secure islands in the Pacific to secure the resources held by the European Colonies in the south, so they can maintain their position in China, so they can secure Manchuria and remain a great power.

Fascism or any kind of exceptionalism is really bad at admitting limits.

Tulip
Jun 3, 2008

yeah thats pretty good


White Coke posted:

Supposing Japan accepted the first Trautmann proposal and made peace with China, is there any way to know when Japan would have gone after the Soviet Union? Did they have a date they thought they'd be ready by before the Marco Polo Bridge Incident? Of course whatever they had planned wouldn't have necessarily come to pass since so much of their foreign policy seems to have been forced upon them by the Kwantung Army, so from a counter factual perspective you can posit a war starting at almost any time. And once Chiang Kai Shek thinks the CCP have been dealt with he'll probably look for any opportunity to reconquer Manchuria, especially if the Japanese are fighting the Soviets.

It'd be incredibly speculative and for very, very big reasons, unless somebody in here is an expert on Japanese military thought during the period which, if you are please save us.


From my very crude knowledge of what was going on inside Japanese GHQ and foreign policy decision making, China itself was only moderately inticing. Manchuria was a useful thing to seize for a number of reasons, but getting into the more densely populated Han regions the main thing that's there is just absolute shitloads of people who all hate each other and hate you, so holding the land was not a big priority. It'd basically be getting a ton of labor in exchange for massive increases in policing expenses at home and abroad. The trouble was that the Chinese Communists kept organizing and doin some direct action inside Manchuria, which really pissed the Japanese off because it 1) reduced their ability to exploit the region and 2) they really hated communists in particular.

So in the most generous case (and I'll talk about why I don't think its credible) to Japanese starting from Marco Polo Bridge Incident: Japan leads a punitive expedition into China, captures a couple of the major coastal cities in 1937 and gets the Chinese government to accept terms. The big term the Japanese want at this point is full-throated anti-communist action by the KMT, paired with recognition of Manchukuo. Probably some extension of Japanese rights under the Boxer Protocol. This would probably cover from July to November maybe December 1937 (Trautmann mediation starts in November).

Now we enter into wild speculation, because Japan's not at war and this means that they're almost certainly back to trading with the US since the Neutrality Acts don't apply. If we're just operating off the belief that Japan will invade the USSR since it's the premise of this whole exercise, "when" becomes a very open question. Best case for Japan is that they coordinate their timetables with Germany and do it simultaneously, never attacking the US, so we end up with a diplomatic situation of Germany and Japan against the USSR and the UK. I don't know if that's an even fight but it's certainly closer than Japan by itself against the USSR and ROC. It does run into the very fundamental problem that both Japan and Germany are oil starved, and those Neutrality Acts will kick back in once Japan goes up against the USSR, but who knows, maybe the USSR struggles with a two-front war way worse than they did with Barbarossa and one or the other side manages to seize fields somewhere before running out of gas.


Now, I still think this is a very dubious counterfactual for one big reason: it expects the Japanese and German governments to coordinate pretty closely and maintain international discipline, when both countries struggled to maintain discipline among their major war leaders and frequently found themselves making strategic decisions to rationalize military decisions rather than making military decisions that followed from their strategic goals. The fundamental reason this didn't happen is because the Kwantung Army was too busy hootin an hollerin at the KMT to listen to higher orders, and fixing that problem is both a necessary precondition to this whole line of thought and outside the control of individual actors.

The factor in favor of this scenario is the Anti-Comintern Pact, but that had been weakened considerably by Molotov-Ribbentrop. But y'know the whole thing is off the rails before then so who knows! Maybe this timeline the Germans keep Japan in the loop on the "there's no way we're actually going to honor this for more than a few years." Maybe they don't and they both invade the USSR piece meal, or one invades before the other and the other does a haphazard rush job invasion.

Raenir Salazar
Nov 5, 2010

College Slice
In The War That Came Early a Japanese victory and capture of Vladivostok was apparently a painful enough experience for Japan that it ended up being analogous to Kalkin Gol, leading to a Soviet-Japanese non-aggression pact and the USSR being able to put its full attention to swinging at a Germany that could never get to Smolensk before stalling. Which is pretty interesting because it's actually kinda reasonable, where even if Japan were to do absurdly well, just like counterfactuals w.r.t Midway, things would still be pretty dire.

White Coke
May 29, 2015

Raenir Salazar posted:

In The War That Came Early a Japanese victory and capture of Vladivostok was apparently a painful enough experience for Japan that it ended up being analogous to Kalkin Gol, leading to a Soviet-Japanese non-aggression pact and the USSR being able to put its full attention to swinging at a Germany that could never get to Smolensk before stalling. Which is pretty interesting because it's actually kinda reasonable, where even if Japan were to do absurdly well, just like counterfactuals w.r.t Midway, things would still be pretty dire.

Do they revert to the status quo antebellum or does Japan keep any Soviet territory? Because it seems like Japan has an all or nothing path ahead of it if it fights the Soviets: either they carve them up with the Nazis, or they make a separate peace in exchange for limited gains, which the Soviets take back at their earliest convenience, so they’re better off not fighting or making a white peace.

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Gnoman
Feb 12, 2014

Come, all you fair and tender maids
Who flourish in your pri-ime
Beware, take care, keep your garden fair
Let Gnoman steal your thy-y-me
Le-et Gnoman steal your thyme




Raenir Salazar posted:

In The War That Came Early a Japanese victory and capture of Vladivostok was apparently a painful enough experience for Japan that it ended up being analogous to Kalkin Gol, leading to a Soviet-Japanese non-aggression pact and the USSR being able to put its full attention to swinging at a Germany that could never get to Smolensk before stalling. Which is pretty interesting because it's actually kinda reasonable, where even if Japan were to do absurdly well, just like counterfactuals w.r.t Midway, things would still be pretty dire.

His Pacific War duology shows a similar effect. They successfully conquer Hawaii after Pearl Harbor, but they can;t effectively supply it and are crippled by shortages even after winning major fleet actions.

White Coke posted:

Do they revert to the status quo antebellum or does Japan keep any Soviet territory? Because it seems like Japan has an all or nothing path ahead of it if it fights the Soviets: either they carve them up with the Nazis, or they make a separate peace in exchange for limited gains, which the Soviets take back at their earliest convenience, so they’re better off not fighting or making a white peace.

The series ends with the war in Europe. There's implications that the Soviets are going to resume their war with Japan, and the Americans are even angrier than real history due to bioweapon attacks on the mainland US, but that's all left in limbo.

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