Tell me about Japan in WW2, and what they were trying to achieve

Tell me about Japan in WW2, and what they were trying to achieve.
Any suggestions of books would be nice too.

Other urls found in this thread:

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greater_East_Asia_Co-Prosperity_Sphere
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Sorge
operationbarbarossa.net/the-siberian-divisions-and-the-battle-for-moscow-in-1941-42/
twitter.com/SFWRedditImages

Arr rook arike.

"Japan" isn't something that can exactly be said to exist in WW2. Unlike most of the other major players in the war, the internal divisions within the Japanese government were great enough to preclude strategy in the classical sense. You can't really speak of "what was Japan trying to achieve" so much as "What was the Japanese army trying to achieve" and what the Japanese navy was trying to achieve, and what this, that, and the other competing interest groups were trying to achieve.

I remember reading something about their being a divide between those trying to expand southward, and those trying to expand westward. Is that what you refer to?

>and what they were trying to achieve.

do to Asia what Germany was doing to Europe.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greater_East_Asia_Co-Prosperity_Sphere

TL;DR they wanted to become a great nation, and they needed more clay to accomplish this.

Their plan was a "Greater Asia Co-prosperity Sphere" consisting of them and a bunch of countries they raped.

Once they invaded China, they got bogged down, and the US eventually decided to stop selling them oil, and convince the UK and Netherlands to do the same.

They realized no oil means no GACPS or whatever the acronym is.

They decided their best bet at delicious oil and delicious clay was to attack the weakened colonial powers in the region and dig in enough so that the western democracies would sue for peace rather than bother to push the Nips back.

Pearl Harbor was intended to weaken the US Navy long enough to allow this to happen

Unfortunately for the Nips, Pearl Harbor pissed off the US so completely that they pushed all the way to the home islands and ended the Japanese Empire's pathetic, evil existence in nuclear hellfire.

The funniest part the US had a "Germany first policy" and the Japs still got rekt by what was left over from the European theater.

Conflicting plans of expansion were a symptom, not a cause, OP. Quite simply, there was no one unified clearinghouse of ideas for Japan that decided "Here is what we want as a nation".

Even more important to a lot of these groups than whatever happened to Japan overall was making sure they wound up on top of each other in the next round of bureaucratic infighting. In such an environment, you can't even really make an assertion that there was a national strategy to achieve anything. Yes, you had a divide over a northern expansion vs a southern expansion, but the real reason for the divide is a northern expansion would be primarily a land war and mean that resources have to be given to the army; an expansion south would be a naval war and mean resources would have to go over to the Navy. That was what drove people to various plans, not a notion of how Japan as an abstraction benefits from it.

Their main objective was to bust a nut

>what they were trying to achieve

Oil.

>and what they were trying to achieve.
Empire.
That was the only unified goal of Japan in WW2. Everything else was basically a war between the Japanese Arm who wanted to go West and North against the Japanese Navy who wanted to go South.

It was the navy's genius idea to do pearl harbour while the army basically said "that's retarded you dumbass"

There was no objective. They were batshit insane and thought conquest for the sake of conquest was the answer to all their problems.

There are times in my life where I genuinely wonder what could've happened if Operation Downfall was ever carried out under US-Soviet co-operation.

>if Operation Downfall was ever carried out under US-Soviet co-operation.


Why would it? The cooperation part, that is. Soviet forces have no sealift worth mentioning, so any ability to get forces to Japan proper would involve begging the U.S. to send more transports through Hula or some other continuation program.

But given the Soviet complete lack of amphibious experience and how their divisions had roughly half the firepower of a U.S. or CW division, it's far from clear what operational objective would be served by coordinating with the Soviets, especially since it would carry significant post-war costs in terms of expanding Soviet influence.

If the war continues, it's far more likely you'll see a U.S. and British invasion of Japan, while the Soviets pour into China, and each kind of doing their own thing.

it should be noted that Pearl Harbor was just one part of this giant major attack by the Japs. They also invaded Hong Kong and The Philippines at the same time.

There have been other threads on this, but I don't think it would have been. The Soviets would have been entirely reliant on US sealift capacity, and I really think by the time the war in Europe was over, the American leadership was wary enough of the soviets not to give them half of Japan after just racing them to secure spheres of influence in Germany/Europe.

That being said, it would have been interesting to see what happens if Japan hand initially gone with a northern plan. Their great success in the Russo-Japanese war, after all, was what gave them the confidence that if they hit the US hard enough, the US would cut their losses and sue for peace. (entirely plausible, as Vietnam, etc. prove). I think Khalkhin Gol pretty decisively prover they would've gotten roflstomped by the USSR in any larger confrontation, but a total rout of Japanese forces, and even driving them out of China would have left the Soviets unable to affect the home islands and force a surrender. Neverthelessm the Soviets didn't have much of an air force and effectively no navy at all, especially in the Pacific. They probably had the industrial capacity to change that, but that takes time, especially for a navy. Not only are ships slower builds than tanks and planes, but a navy even more than an army requires experience, doctrine, and training to be at all effective. I'm not saying the Soviets actually were zergs (Deep Battle is actually brilliant) but relying on quantity is far less effective in main naval warfare. (submarines and commerce raiding may be different). They would have had to contend then with what was at least at the start of the war one of the most modern and powerful navies around. Of course, it's entirely possible the Navy would have entirely regarded any Soviet threat as an Army problem, but I doubt they would have let the home islands be invaded.

I don't know what the next geopolitical moves would have been, but I doubt we would have modern Japan today.

Daily reminder that this nigga probably saved the soviets in ww2
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Sorge

>(Deep Battle is actually brilliant)

Only once you get away from Tucachevsky's multi axial attacks over an area as large as Russia's width.

>en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Sorge
Daily reminder to pull your head out of your ass, as most of the "Siberian divisions" were transferred away before his report,, and that they were a relatively tiny force, far outweighed by the troops who were raised from closer in.

operationbarbarossa.net/the-siberian-divisions-and-the-battle-for-moscow-in-1941-42/

1) To establish Japanese hegemony over East and Southeast Asia.
2) To remove Western imperialism and influence from Asia.

I should point out, though, that the sout here strategy was actually the "better" choice if the objective was oil. (the best choice objectively probably would have been to back off and try to get the sanctions lifted, but the honorrabur samurai decided that becoming involved in a war of superpowers was better than losing face.) Attacking the Dutch East Indies was a calculated gamble that they lost, but it wasn't entirely unreasonable to hope they could come out unscathed.

At least the Indies had accessible oil, though, and Southeast Asia overall had rubber and, critically, rice/agricultural imports. The northern strategy, in contrast didn't offer much. Sure, today we know there is vast oIL and mineral wealth in Siberia, but at the time it was mostly undiscovered and/or technologically too hard to extract. This is Japan we are talking about after all, and theseven resources are utterly remote, in a hostile and freezing climate, with absolutely no logistical infrastructure.

(China, meanwhile, seems to offer better resources without drawing in major foes, but I think it was so infested with guerilla war/civil war that it ultimately wasn't the money source the Japanese hoped it would be.)

Well, also, they had been fighting for years in China and they had a very America-in-Vietnam esque experience. They kept winning battles and not actually getting any further to putting down the major warlords, Chi-Coms, or KMT.

As a side note, I often wonder what would have happened if the Soviets had managed to exploit Siberia and the Russian arctic to a greater extent. They certainly did do so (see for instance the gulags and secret cities, they were up there for a reason) but the oil, gas, and mineral exploitation has hugely increased these last 20 years. It may be that that influx of capital (the billions upon billions today in the hands of Moscow oligarchs) was exactly what the 1980s Soviet Union needed to stave off economic decline, resulting social problems, and massive out spending by the West and avoid it's so unexpected downfall, or at least have lead to a more protracted (for better or worse) dissolution. Of course, it may have been that the Soviets lacked the starter capital to finance such massive projects in the first place (and now foreign investment has allowed it.) Also, although huge strides were obviously made between the 30s-40s and the 80s-90s, there has still been significant changes from then to today in drilling/mining tech, scanning/prospecting tech, and even modularization of housing, construction techniques, and outdoor gear for tough environments, so that may have helped the boom too.