Posted on 11/29/2011 6:45:45 PM PST by Free ThinkerNY
“Eventually Hitler would have taken on the Soviet Union, but he might have consolidated his gains in Europe and subjugated the British first.”
Hitler had no designs to rule the world, only Europe; no aircraft carriers, few long-range bombers, no power to project. How Stalin was a preferable alternative is beyond me; before the war started he’d already killed millions. It was a war between 2 evils; no reason for the US to do anything but clean up after they’d reduced each other to nothing.
I know they worked mines in Korea; I don’t know what minerals they needed from Australia (I really plead ignorance on this).
http://www.nationmaster.com/graph/geo_nat_res-geography-natural-resources
And it’s not just that Australia has so much it’s also that Japan literally has negligible resources. They are dependent on the US keeping the sea lanes open and mineral resources flowing in or they’d be in serious economic trouble.
Interesting, especially that Australia has 29% of the world’s coal exports.
Thanks for the info & link; I knew that the Japanese had few resources, so even today they won’t sign on to whaling treaties and such because of what they use them for.
Looking at their equipment (wrapped puttees, LONG rifles, local dependence on supplies instead of prepackaged rations) and tactics (banzai charges against machine guns, minimal artillery), I still think they hadn’t learned a lot from WW1. But then, as Nomonhon demonstrated in 1940, they were very good at conveniently ignoring unpleasant truths.
I think their primary advantage in 1941 was that they had been fighting for five years already, they were up against comparatively modest and quiescent colonial armies that couldn’t be resupplied or reinforced, and they had the advantages of surprise and years of planning. Of course, even that didn’t always help them, as General Homma learned the hard way with the Bataan campaign.
Their biggest failure, of course, was that they had planned on a quick conquest of the resource-rich Indochina and Malaya/Dutch East Indies region, which forced them to take a lot more territory (i.e. Burma, the Philippines and Central Pacific islands) as buffer zone. Not only did they manage to overextend themselves, but they got drawn into a long, logistically-impossible-to-support war, which was the last thing they were prepared to deal with.
Yes...of all our Army divisions, on December 7th, 1941 only three of them were at full fighting strength, and none of them had had any actual combat experience since 1918.
That is true that like the Axis in Europe, their military was geared to a “blitzkrieg-type” war, fought for a short time over short distances. For both of them, were bled dry by conflicts that dragged on longer over greater area; while the Axis was slowly ground down in the Soviet Union, Japan at the time of its surrender still had over a million troops tied up in China (and came nowhere near defeating it).
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