This is a series of short excerpts from my comments on last issue of POD that may be of general interest.

On why Japan didn't attack the Soviet Union in late 1941:As to the Japanese option of going north, I reread the relevant portions of the book Nomonham and noticed a few things that I didn't catch the first time. First, far from being intimidated by their defeat by the Soviets in 1939, the Japanese on the ground in Manchuria were eager for a rematch. They wanted to be ready for an October 1941 offensive. As a matter of fact, many of the survivors are still bitter that the home government didn't support that option. The home government made the call that they would head south rather than north, and sent a very tough outsider named Umezo to Manchuria to insure that the Kwantung army didn't simply stage an incident and start a war with the Soviets on their own. He was helped out to some extent in that endeavor by a rather curious incident.

On August 2, 1941, the Japanese noticed that Soviet radio traffic across the border had gone silent. That is usually a sign of imminent military action, and the Japanese feared a Soviet pre-emptive strike, though some officials felt that the apparent radio silence was due to atmospheric disturbances or was even a Kwantung army ploy to start a war. During the period of radio silence, a chain of explosions destroyed a huge Japanese logistics and storage dump in Manchuria. The Japanese suspected sabotage but found no evidence of it. The destruction of fuel and munitions stocks probably didn't make it impossible for the Japanese to attack, but they presumably curbed the independence of the Kwantung army a bit.

On the German/Soviet pact of 1939 and the Soviet/Japanese border war at Nomonham:: As the book Nomonham points out, the Japanese counted on Germans to counterbalance Soviet power. They had been counting on that since Hitler took power and German rearmament began. The Japanese were defeated in the Nomonham battles, though not as badly as some people think.  The battle cost Japan the equivalent of at most a division dead-and almost certainly considerably less. The exact number of Japanese dead will probably never be known, but the official Japanese count of 18,000 total casualties, of which a little over 8,000 died is not too far off. The real number of Japanese dead was probably somewhat over 10,000. The Japanese also inflicted a considerable number of casualties on the Soviets-at least 9,000 dead. Zhukov's victories were never cheap in terms of Soviet lives.

What shocked the Japanese about Nomanham was the high proportion of casualties to the number of soldiers involved-over 10,000 dead out of maybe 75,000 Japanese soldiers and airmen involved.

The Nazi-Soviet pact to divide Poland had considerable impact on the Nomonham fighting. First, the fact that Germany was courting the Soviets meant that confronting the Japanese and moving some of the best Soviet equipment and divisions east was far less risky than it would otherwise have been. The fact that they were facing the best Soviet men and machines was a key factor in the Japanese defeat. Second, the fact that in our time-line Poland was being destroyed and the Germans were apparently allied with the Soviets meant that the Japanese would face the Soviets without allies if the Japanese decided on trying for a rematch, or escalated the war. In the absence of an agreement between the Germans and Soviets, the Japanese would not be isolated if they decided on a rematch or an escalation-either at the home government level or locally within the Kwantung army.  That would make Japanese escalation of the conflict more likely.

The Soviet Army in 1939 and 1940--Not As Modern or Mechanized as You Might Think: While the Soviets were building Ford trucks under license, they had a long ways to go in motorization in 1940. Their order of battle in September 1939 still contained 30-odd horse cavalry divisions if my memory serves me correctly. Granted they mechanized a lot of those units by mid-1941 in our time-line, at least on paper.  Even by the time the war with Germany broke out in June 1941 though, the Soviets had far fewer motor vehicles than their organizational structure called for. For example, the 20+ Soviet mechanized corps in the western Soviet Union averaged less than 40% of the vehicles their establishments called for. The Soviets were short by over 60,000 vehicles in those mechanized corps alone.

By the way, as I mentioned earlier, the Soviets actually dismantled their large mechanized formations in November 1939 in our time-line, based on their experience in the Spanish Civil War. They only started reconstituting those forces after the German victory over France in May-June 1940. 

Soviets versus the Germans without the Western Allies--Good Luck:  The Allies gave the Soviets around 450,000 Lend-Lease trucks during the war.  Without Lend-Lease, the Soviets might have built more trucks in this time-line than they did in our time-line, but

• Then they wouldn't have been able to build the swarms of light tanks that they built in truck plants in our time-line.
• They would have had to find some way of importing the rubber for the tires. Rubber plants don't grow well in Siberia, and while the Soviets might have been able to build a synthetic rubber industry, the manpower and materials involved would have had to come from somewhere-resulting in fewer tanks or aircraft or machine guns. In our time-line the Soviets had access to synthetic rubber from the plants we built using confiscated German patents, but they still at times had to resort to desperate measures like making T34s with all steel road-wheels. That resulted in vibrations that quickly destroyed the drive train of the tank, not to mention doing nasty things to the crew. The British might have still had control of the rubber plantations of Malaysia, and they would have probably been willing to export to the Soviets as long as the Soviets had hard currency. Of course, getting the rubber to the Soviet Union wouldn't have been that easy, and the Soviets could well have run short of hard currency if they had to replace the value of all of the Lend-Lease stuff they got in our time-line. Lend-Lease agricultural products alone would have cost more than $1.5 billion in 1940s dollars. Add in the cost of millions of Lend-Lease uniforms and boots, 2000 Lend-Lease locomotives that the US sent when the Soviets wore out their railroad system to the point of near-collapse, US-built radios, US-refined aviation gas, and US aluminum, and I suspect that foreign exchange would have run out rather quickly if the Soviets imported the stuff necessary for a comparable military effort without Lend-lease.
• Those trucks would be built to Soviet quality standards, and while it worked to build tanks that were worn out after a few hundred miles (they were usually flaming wrecks by that time anyway), that philosophy wouldn't work so well with trucks.

The Soviets did some miraculous things in terms of production and keeping armies in the field, and nothing I've said here is intended to minimize that. The Allies would have had a very hard time defeating the Axis if the Soviet Union or something like it had not been there to blunt the German edge.

At the same time, the Allied victory was a team thing, with the western Allies filling gaps and opening bottlenecks in the Soviet effort. Even if you disregard the actual Allied soldiers fighting in North Africa, then Italy and France, and even if you disregard the Lend-Lease, the west still had a major impact on the balance between the Soviets and the Germans. The Germans had the bulk of a million soldiers and workers doing air defense work. They had hundreds of thousands of men hard at work building the fortifications of Hitler's "Atlantic Wall". They had ten thousand 88mm aircraft guns tied down in a flack role, when they could have really used those guns in their anti-tank role on the eastern front. Take away the Allies, and a Soviet victory would by no means be assured in our time-line, certainly not after Stalingrad and probably not until mid-to-late 1944.

 

The Nature of Nationalist China: I see the Nationalists, and some times individual Nationalists as a complex mixture. They can reasonably be seen as "the last and most powerful of the warlords", as a bunch of ruthless crooks, as a genuine movement to unify and modernize China, and as the beginnings of a truly nasty police state with some very formidable and ruthless people in charge. I tend to regard the last two views as more important in understanding the period from about 1929 to 1941, and the first two views as becoming more and more important from 1941 to 1949.

I also suspect that if we had as much information on the internal politics, financial activities, and personal foibles of the Chinese Communists as we do of the Nationalists, we would probably see far fewer differences between them and the Nationalists in the level of corruption and tendency toward warlordism. The victors don't just get to write the history books. They also get to keep their records secret, and in this case kill or imprison people that try to reveal unflattering facts. You could actually apply all of the descriptions of the Nationalists in my last paragraph to the Chinese Communists of 1945, though the mix of elements was certainly different.

No Munich for the Poles: Even without French or English support Poland would have probably fought a German invasion in 1939.  Here's why.   The most likely of Hitler's targets would involve a small part of Poland's land area, but they included all of 1939 Poland's seacoast, and some of it's most important industrial areas. The seacoast was vital to Polish independence. During the 1920's, Germany waged economic war on the Poles from time-to-time, simply by closing their border. That disrupted the Polish economy at least partly because it forced them to route their imports and exports on a circuitous trip through Romania. The Poles developed a port on the Baltic (busiest on the Baltic by 1939) so they could import and export without being dependent on the Germans.

Look at it from Poland's standpoint:

They were being asked to give up strategically valuable parts of their country, and a considerable Polish population. What would they get in return? The same thing the Czechs got at Munich-Hitler's word that he wouldn't go ahead and take the rest of the country when he felt like it. Even if he meant it this time, how could the Poles know that? That's one problem with breaking your word in a major way too early in the game. It makes it hard to come to an agreement with anybody involved later, even if you mean it this time.

The Poles were also unlikely to go for that deal for a couple of historic reasons. The death of Poland as a country in the 1700's started with a 'first partition' that just took a little off the edges and that the Poles didn't oppose militarily. Poles know their history, and they know that last time the first partition just made the aggressors stronger and more aggressive, leading to a series of partitions that ended with the elimination of Poland as an independent country. No Polish politician would survive repeating that mistake. Also, from 1921 until about the middle of 1938, Poland had been able to act as 'the smallest of the great powers or the greatest of the small powers'. The dramatic imbalance of power between Germany and Poland was a new thing-less than a year old, and something that had not impressed itself on the people of Poland.

Also, the imbalance of power only existed if blitzkrieg worked. The Germans didn't have the natural resources for a long war, and they couldn't get those resources from the Soviets without going through Poland first-not that the Soviets would automatically send them resources if the Soviets didn't think those resources would be used against the west. The Germans had to defeat Poland quickly or a victory wouldn't happen.

The Poles didn't think they could be beaten quickly. They had ample reasons to be skeptical of blitzkrieg. The Germans, Soviets and Italians had almost three years to pull off a blitzkrieg during the Spanish Civil War. None of them did (although the Italians did fail at it rather spectacularly early in the war, and succeeded in a small-scale approximation of blitzkrieg late in the war). Every major army on the continent of Europe studied the Spanish campaigns. Only the Italians and Germans came away convinced that massed armor formations could provide a quick victory. Even the Germans weren't really sure blitzkrieg would work. The Spanish Civil War lasted nearly three years, and that alone argued against the next war being one of lightning campaigns. So did the fact that it took over two years for the Nationalists to get from the suburbs of Madrid to capturing the city. The Soviets actually disbanded their large armor formations in November 1939, based on the Spanish experience (and ignoring the Nomonham and Polish experiences.)

Obviously, blitzkrieg did work. My point is that the Poles had no way of knowing that, and no incentive to give up valuable real estate in the absence of that knowledge.

The Poles were eager to fight, even to the point where Poles who for one reason or another weren't called up flocked to the front and begged to be armed.

Poland would have almost certainly fought, with or without French and English help, and with or without a fighting chance, just as they fought the Russians in the 1830's, and 1846, and 1848, and the 1860's, and 1905. The Poles have a history of bravery, though not necessarily of calculating the odds very well.

To be honest, the 1939 Poles might well have done better without French and English help. Let's face it, the French waited a week or two until the war had been decided, then sent an army consisting of two boys named Maurice and a French poodle into Germany while the English argued over whether or not they could bomb private property. More seriously, the English pressured the Poles not to mobilize, even after the Germans had completed their mobilization. The Poles only had about one-half of their army mobilized and one-quarter of it armed and in place when the Germans invaded, which made the results much more lop-sided than they otherwise would have been. (It's sort of like the difference between fighting an 8-year old boy-at maybe 60 pounds, and fighting him as a 20-year-old, 240 pound man.)

The nature of time and the potential for alternate histories--Floodplains and valleys:  It seems to me that there are periods where history is very delicately balanced, and others where significant deviations are very hard to produce. I visualize it as a river running through deeply cut banks at times and meandering over a wide flood-plain at others.

The course of a few wars illustrates the point. In the American Civil War, the period between 1859 and about 1862 was a floodplain period. There was the potential for a lot of things happening. Little actions taken or not taken in the border states could have delivered whole states to the Confederacy, or to the Union, especially during the period when Lincoln had been elected but not yet inaugurated. Imagine a civil war with Maryland starting out in Confederate hands, or with Virginia staying in the Union. The period between mid-1862 and 1865 saw the river of time going into a deeper and narrower channel, with the banks getting higher and the possibility of the river taking alternate channels decreasing month-to-month.

In World War I, 1914 was a floodplain year-lots of wide open possibilities there. 1915 to late 1918 were deep channel years. In late 1918, the river of time reached one of the widest floodplains it had seen in nearly a century. Every border in Central and Eastern Europe was up for grabs, and most of them changed at least once in the next two or three year.

In World War II, I see the period between about 1937 and mid-1942 as the flood-plain years. Things really could have gone in a lot of different directions, with apparently minor decisions fueling major changes in the way the world turned out. By mid-1942, the river of time was heading into a deep channel that dramatically restricted the options available until at least 1953, when the death of Stalin began opening up new possibilities.

 

If you enjoyed this section, or if you are disappointed with it, please let me know. I always read and enjoy any feedback I can get.  

Note: I'm still planning to start an 'e-mail to the editor' section soon if I get enough responses.  Please feel free to e-mail me.  I'll only use your comments in the 'e-mail' section if you specify that it is okay to do so.