I came away from this book with very mixed emotions. On the one hand, there were some very good, well-researched divergences where Japan did significantly better than it did in reality. On the other hand, I felt a little cheated. The most realistic scenarios tended to involve spectacular but rather limited Japanese victories that are reversed later in the war. They are well written, well-researched, and actually quite good, but they generally don't lead to the result that the title appeared to promise. The ones that do lead to Japan actually winning the war do so at a severe cost in terms of plausibility.

I enjoyed Peter Tsouras's scenario where the Japanese attack the Soviet Union in 1941 for the most part. I have some problems with the ending of that scenario though. Even without active involvement in the war, the United States would have been enormously stronger in say April or May of 1942 than it was in December 1941. The US was gearing up for exactly the situation that this scenario has developing-the Soviet Union knocked out of the war and the US and Britain facing both Germany and Japan without the Soviet Union to counter-balance them. 

I can't see the US standing by while the Japanese followed their victory over the Soviets with an attack on the British and Dutch. After all, Malaysia supplied an enormous percentage of the world's rubber-80 or 90 percent I believe, and there were no guarantees that the US would be able to produce a synthetic rubber industry as quickly as it did. I can't see Roosevelt giving the Japanese a stranglehold on something that looked as vital to the US economy as rubber without a fight. 

I also can't see the Japanese by-passing the Philippines. In late 1941, the US was trying to build the Philippines up as an offensive as well as a defensive base, with a fleet of submarines and B17 bombers that were supposed to dominate the sea routes south. That build-up wasn't finished when the war started in our history, and many of the weapons didn't work as advertised-the submarines had essentially unusable torpedoes and the B17s for the most part were caught on the ground, but given 4 more months, the US forces in the Philippines would have been much more formidable, and a major threat that the Japanese would have been very reluctant to have behind them, especially since the US buildup could have continued into the second half of 1942. The US could have built up the Filipino army, moved in more land-based air power, then gradually moved in more and more powerful naval units until the sea route from Japan south remained open only as long as the US wanted it to.

I have more problems with the next scenario, Be Careful What You Wish For: The Plan Orange Disaster, by Wade G. Dudley. The premise of this piece is that US war plans that called for focusing on the European theatre and essentially abandoning the Philippines for the first couple of years of a war are leaked to US newspapers in 1940, and become an issue in the US presidential elections. Wendell Willkie makes the planned "abandonment" a political issue. As a result, the Roosevelt administration pledges to defend the Philippines and goes to a more aggressive strategy of moving the US Pacific fleet out to relieve the Philippines and challenge the Japanese fleet early in the war-essentially as soon as the fleet can get underway. The Japanese get wind of that plan, and decide to let the US implement it, because it pretty much plays into their hands. I don't want to spoil the scenario for you, and I have to be careful not to reveal too much about the resulting battle in my criticism.

I have some problems with the results of that battle, but my primary problem with the scenario lies in the premise. Roosevelt was far too adept a politician to be trapped into doing something he didn't want to do by this situation. He would have probably turned the Willkie attack to his advantage by immediately bringing out a package of planned improvements to Philippines defenses that would have caused Willkie problems with isolationist Republicans in the congress. Roosevelt would have also probably transferred an old battleship or two to the Far East Fleet, and asked congress to fund naval expansion to fill the resulting gaps. He would have probably then very publicly asked Willkie to support those increases in military spending. 

At that point Roosevelt has Willkie in a no-win situation. Either the Republican candidate looks like a total hypocrite, or he alienates the still-large isolationist wing of the Republican party by endorsing a Roosevelt-led military buildup. That counter-attack would have been politics 101 for a guy like Roosevelt. Even if somehow Roosevelt had been forced to pledge a defense of the Philippines, there is no reason to believe that he would have felt bound by it after the elections, and even if he did, he would have probably built up defenses and arms stockpiles in the Philippines to allow a prolonged defense rather than forcing the Pacific fleet into a risky early engagement with the Japanese fleet.

Pearl Harbor: Irredeemable Defeat, and Nagumo's Luck: The Battles of Midway and California are both pretty good, with the first one making a very good case that as bad as Pearl Harbor was, it could have been a lot worse. Other essays involve Japanese invasions of Australia and India. The Japanese Indian invasion essay is not bad, but it produces a frankly improbable negotiated peace of exhaustion between Japan and the US in 1946. The problem is that once the US knew that an atomic bomb was possible, negotiated settlements that gave the likes of imperial Japan continued military autonomy simply weren't an option. 

 

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Copyright 2001 By Dale R. Cozort

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