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The Best They Could Do: Japan November 1941
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Could they have done it? How long would it have taken? Alternate History Miscellaneous Challenges
Could you do better than the Japanese leadership? POD is an amateur press magazine and also a forum for discussing AH and AH-related ideas. A lot of the comments don't make sense unless you've following the dialogue. Here are some of my general-interest ones. |
Tojo
shuffles off this mortal
coil and you’re now in his hot seat. The plans for an attack on the
western Allies are well in train. You have the advantage of hindsight
so you know that the path you’re on will destroy Japanese military
power.
Let’s assume that victory in your eyes is to maximize Japanese military power and that you have considerable powers, though no more than Tojo did. You are under the same economic and political constraints that he was. Your Japan will run out of oil in less than a year unless the oil embargo ends. It will run out of money to buy that oil sometime in 1942 if the embargo is lifted. You are under political constraints that prevent too much in the way of concessions to China. Time is not on your side. Japan is temporarily militarily powerful because the US is occupied in the Atlantic and doesn’t have its army trained or equipped yet. The Soviets are occupied fighting the Germans, which frees up a large number of Japanese divisions that would otherwise have been tied up in Manchuria. None of that will last, and you know it. If Japan goes through with its attack on the western Allies, it frees up the tough, well-equipped Soviet divisions that led the Soviet counter-offensive that historically pushed the Germans back from Moscow in December 1941. You can’t postpone the Japanese offensive by an arbitrary number of days or weeks without consequences. For example, postponing the attack on Pearl Harbor by a month would mean crossing the north Pacific in late December/early January, which would be problematic. Pushing the offensive against Malaysia back a month or two would risk pushing the offensive into the monsoon season, which would make it much more difficult. The US buildup in the Philippines is also a constraint. When the historic Japanese attack happened, the US was frantically building up fighter airpower in the Philippines, as well as bringing in B17s. They were also bringing in additional ground forces, including a substantial contingent in the “Pensacola convoy” which was actually on its way to the Philippines when war broke out. Wait too long and the Philippines would become a tougher nut to crack. The attack can’t be pushed forward much either without consequences. The Pearl Harbor attack required special military ordinance like special torpedoes and special armor-piercing bombs that were barely ready in time for the historic attack. Japan is dependent on imported raw materials. As soon as you declare war you are short of merchant ships to supply the Home Islands, even if you can capture sources of raw material because the Japanese merchant marine is too small to supply the islands, and a considerable percentage (25% from old and possibly faulty memory) of the tonnage coming into the home islands is on foreign flagged ships. Shipping will become even more of a bottleneck in the war, because every new foothold your army takes is one more drain on scarce cargo shipping. You don’t have enough tankers to ship enough oil to the home islands, even if you can take enough oil wells. Speaking of oil, if you’ve done your homework you know that Japanese estimates of their oil requirements during the war are way too low. You’ll run out of oil if you don’t go to war. You’ll run out of oil if you do. Low-Hanging Fruit: You can know a few things: (1) Not to fritter away the Japanese advantage in carrier numbers in the lead-up to Midway. (2)That you need to expand the Japanese pilot training program to replace their wartime losses. That’ll take a maybe two years to pay off, but it will make a huge difference when it does pay off. (3) Protecting and optimizing the use of the merchant marine is key to keeping Japan in the war. (4) Expanding the Japanese defensive perimeter deeper into the Pacific is counterproductive because you’ve got to supply these guys and once the US builds up a big enough fleet of carriers, land-based air power on the islands can be suppressed and the Japanese forces on most islands can be bypassed to wither away for lack of food and ammunition. So, what do you do? Can you start in November 1941 and do better than the Japanese did historically? If you want to push your takeover back a month or two, feel free, but the more you push it back, the more constraints you run into. Among the constraints, you don’t want to start hostilities until as many Japanese merchant ships as possible are back in Japanese-friendly waters.
Posted on March 26, 2010.
More Stuff For POD Members Only What you see here is a truncated on-line version of a larger zine that I contribute to POD, the alternate history APA. POD members get to look forward to more fun stuff.
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