Panoply of Panay Possibilities

[lordroel]

Jul 27, 2022 19:10:23 GMT gillan1220 said:

Jul 27, 2022 18:57:17 GMT lordroel said:

Well they will learn the problems of the Mark 14 torpedo not denoting against their targets soon enough.

By 1939-1940, the USN would have sorted out this torpedo problem. The USN was ahead of the IJN in submarine warfare.

But not long range torpedoes I remember.

[miletus12]

Jul 27, 2022 18:49:09 GMT gillan1220 said:

Jul 27, 2022 16:13:26 GMT miletus12 said:

This is mostly true. Time hampered them as well as manpower. They could ship-build if they had the time and given two years, they would have, but they did not get those two years. That is where the American submarine campaign came in. Just think of what could have happened if the American submariners had their 1944 in 1942?

The problem with subs was the torpedo. Took until 1943 for the USN to sort that out. In 1937, it would have been plagued with problems.

I probably know more about the Mark 14 and the problems with the Mark 6 influence mechanism in the Mark V exploder than many realize.  In simplified form the angle of incidence of flux lines in the earth's magnetic field sort of "tilt" as the "torpedo" sees a ship disrupt it and create a "bubble", so when the signal drop which occurs, meets the pickup coil, what happens is that as one heads further north toward the magnetic north pole, the signal drop gets STRONGER setting off a positive function in the detonation circuit prematurely. In other words, the "hole" the steel ship causes in the magnetic field is physically MUCH larger as one goes toward the magnetic pole. 

The cure for this is to map those flux lines,



and then to create a rheostat and insert into the exploder circuit, to gain rate the signal according to the map by latitude/longitude tables to compensate for the effect as Ralph Christie suggested to Bu-Ord in 1934 after the USS Indianapolis function of device tests. Guess who was Bu-Ord Actual?



This gentlemen was the man who nixed it Egeli even catches that "vacant" not connected with the real world at all stare Stark wore.  

It would "cost too much money." Stark said. Same excuse he used for not testing the new torpedoes in war-shots to proof them.   
        
Why he was not court martialed as this came to light in early 1942, when Roosevelt fired him for incompetence, has always amazed me.

[miletus12]

Jul 27, 2022 19:17:12 GMT lordroel said:

Jul 27, 2022 19:10:23 GMT gillan1220 said:

By 1939-1940, the USN would have sorted out this torpedo problem. The USN was ahead of the IJN in submarine warfare.

But not long range torpedoes I remember.

The Long Lance (Morison fiction, that one.) Type 93 routinely missed at the same run outs beyond 10,000 meters as other torpedoes. The Battle of the Java Sea, the nose wander was so bad, that the Japanese fired some 120 torpedoes and scored 4 hits. At Second Guadalcanal they fired 60 fish at ranges of 4000 meters or less and scored 3 to 5 hits. Their torpedoes were used to deadly effect by a few Japanese skippers (Tanaka, Raizo especially in massed volleys) at ranges of 5,000 meters or less in MASSED volleys .  Tassafaronga was a one time fluke and even then only 1 in 5 hit. 

The Mark 15 destroyer torpedo when it did not run deep or when the exploder worked was twice as accurate over the same effective 10,000 meter range as the Type 93. Same is true for the Mark 14 and Type 95 submarine torpedoes at 4,000 meters or less. 
   

[raharris1973]

Jul 27, 2022 20:45:09 GMT miletus12 said:

Jul 27, 2022 18:49:09 GMT gillan1220 said:

The problem with subs was the torpedo. Took until 1943 for the USN to sort that out. In 1937, it would have been plagued with problems.

I probably know more about the Mark 14 and the problems with the Mark 6 influence mechanism in the Mark V exploder than many realize.  In simplified form the angle of incidence of flux lines in the earth's magnetic field sort of "tilt" as the "torpedo" sees a ship disrupt it and create a "bubble", so when the signal drop which occurs, meets the pickup coil, what happens is that as one heads further north toward the magnetic north pole, the signal drop gets STRONGER setting off a positive function in the detonation circuit prematurely. In other words, the "hole" the steel ship causes in the magnetic field is physically MUCH larger as one goes toward the magnetic pole. 

The cure for this is to map those flux lines,



and then to create a rheostat and insert into the exploder circuit, to gain rate the signal according to the map by latitude/longitude tables to compensate for the effect as Ralph Christie suggested to Bu-Ord in 1934 after the USS Indianapolis function of device tests. Guess who was Bu-Ord Actual?



This gentlemen was the man who nixed it Egeli even catches that "vacant" not connected with the real world at all stare Stark wore.  

It would "cost too much money." Stark said. Same excuse he used for not testing the new torpedoes in war-shots to proof them.   
        
Why he was not court martialed as this came to light in early 1942, when Roosevelt fired him for incompetence, has always amazed me.

Captain miltetus12 - 

Your 'prosecutorial' tone and passion for it sounds kind of familiar to me.  You weren't known as McPherson on another discussion board, were you?

[raharris1973]

OK, I am going to develop my projection out from the most dovish idea on the spectrum first:

To remind y'all, that's:

raharris1973 said:
VI. Para-Pacifistic Panic & Profligate Pan-Asian Pullback

Same withdrawal from China, plus accelerated independence of Philippines without a residual naval base or defense commitment.
In this TL, what happens is that the Panay incident is coupled with the US sailors happening to get a lucky shot, the "golden BB" shooting down one of the attacking Japanese fighters, and this is captured on film. Other than this alteration of the Japanese aircraft being brought down, the events of the day still unfold as in OTL, with higher Japanese command intervening to stop the attack and the Japanese ultimately apologizing and paying reparations. However, the knowledge that there is dramatic, two-sided battle footage makes it impossible to censor all copies of the Panay film, and the wide availability and viewing of the scene in American theaters (and cheers erupting from Chinese and Chinatown theaters) ....
raharris1973 said:
creates a groundswell of public and congressional opinion that China is a dangerous war zone and certainly not a place of business as usual,
...and that the ...
raharris1973 said:
the prudent call may be for the withdrawal of US patrol boats and Marines from the country, perhaps back to the Philippines, and a warning to Americans in China that they travel there strictly at their own risk. The US would no longer keep up the legal fiction that the China Incident is not a war, and so would end up applying the neutrality acts against both China and Japan, thus denying both belligerents weapons, credits, and war materiel, and forbidding Americans from traveling on belligerent ships. Commodities as basic as crude oil, scrap iron, standard gasoline and rolled steel probably wouldn’t be excluded from trade under the ‘war materiel’ category.

Under those existing neutrality laws, it would be illegal to compromise neutrality by discriminateing between an aggressor and defending nation and treating them differently, so no financial support for China would be possible. China would have to look elsewhere, like to the Soviet Union and Britain, for aid.


Furthermore, this strongly felt and argued isolationist push for the US to get out of China, which enjoys plurality or majority support...
raharris1973 said:
also leads to a somewhat more comprehensive consideration of American obligations and vulnerabilities in the Asia-Pacific, which widens the discussion from China to the Philippines.

The hearings and discussions by Congressional isolationists which point out the distance of America’s small stakes in China from the US, and difficulty of defending them, show the same thing applies to the Philippines. Discussion with the military on strategy shows that the realistic outer edge of any American defensive perimeter is Alaska-Hawaii-Panama.

Congress had already committed to Philippine independence by 1944 with the Tydings-McDuffie Act.

Focused discussions on the relevant issues lead Congress to vote to accelerate the Filipino independence timetable a few years to 1941 or 1942 and foreswear a post-independence US naval
presence. The US emphasis in decolonization also switches to handing over defense responsibility to a Filipino Army.


With regard to the now-acknowledged Sino-Japanese War...
raharris1973 said:
Under the existing US neutrality laws, it would be illegal to compromise neutrality by discriminating between an aggressor and defending nation and treating them differently, so no US financial support for China would be possible. China would have to look elsewhere, like to the Soviet Union and Britain, for aid.

The global knock-on effects of the abject US retreat from China could be substantial however.

Japan would be emboldened in its course in China and may be encouraged to more broadly stereotype westerners as weak-willed.

Chamberlain would see confirmation of his views of America as unreliable and of the necessity of appeasement.

As 1938, 1939, and 1940 wear on, Japan could easily be tempted to put heavy pressure on British and French concessions and personnel in China in the form of blockades, harassment, and murders if they see that as serving their purpose of weakening western cooperation with Chiang Kai-shek.

These pressures could potentially succeed in forcing an appeasement of Japan policy on Britain and France, their breaking with Chiang, and recognition of Japan’s puppets. Or, alternatively, a retreat from their concessions in China to their Southeast Asian colonies, likely still including Hong Kong.

Japan will likely feel it can flexibly pick on western powers one-by-one, without assuming taking on one means taking on all. So, with America regarded as a weak-willed non-factor, Japan later on is more likely to think it “safe” to try to seize Malaya or the Dutch East Indies (should it ever have the desire or “need”) without feeling attacking the Philippines, Guam and Hawaii are necessary parts of the attack package.


In Internationalist or hawkish circles, especially Democratic ones, there will definitely be complaints about FDR's timidity, with Democratic believers in that tendency thinking, but probably not publicly saying, "Mr. Roosevelt, I knew Woodrow Wilson, Woodrow Wilson was a friend of mine. Sir, you are no Woodrow Wilson" - and their implication would be perjorative not complementary. Republicans may go through the same mental exercise just substituting, "Franklin Roosevelt, you're no Theodore Roosevelt". But the public will be primarily consumed with domestic issues and believe FDR is making the right call, even as it keeps a permanent residue of hate for Japan.

The Soviet Union I believe for now will stay committed to its course of providing practical support to the Chinese United Front resistance to Japan, being steadfast in sending weapons, aircraft, pilots, and advisors to help the Chinese Nationalist forces even more than the Communists in the 1938 summer-autumn battles over Wuhan and Guangzhou. It will also propagandize for China's cause using the international left.

France will have divided internal counsels, with leftist forces arguing for solidarity with China and Soviet Union, and working to keep Indochina ports and railways open for the supply of munitions to China, while other on the French right will call for ditching China if a rapprochement and non-aggression deal with Japan can be had. This call will come from right-wing "Better Hitler than Blum" types as well as sensible Europe-first centrists and conservatives. The May and September crises over Czechoslovakia's Sudetenland, by bringing the specter of war in Europe forward, end up uniting most of the French political spectrum behind a timid posture in China, leading to French withdrawal of non-essential personnel, and its troops and its ships from the concession areas in China, in imitation of the Americans. The difference in the French case is, the French concentrate these assets in their Indochina colony to protect it. The French also decline to traffic arms to either the Chinese or Japanese using Indochinese ports and railways, which over the long-term as South China's ports are occupied, leaves China in a worse position and more dependent on the Soviet Union and its limited logistical capacity.

The Dutch remain studiously neutral and silent of Chinese questions, insisting on keeping commercial and political questions separate, while increasingly nervous about Japanese aggressiveness, and the accelerated US departure.

Chamberlain, seeing the British position in China now more exposed by American and French withdrawals, will explore an appeasement posture toward Japan and the concept of a grand bargain with Japan oriented against the Soviet Union and Chinese Communism while trying to preserve the security of Britain's imperial possessions and its large economic stake in China, especially from the Yangzi valley on south. His people will try overtures along Navy to Navy lines and court circles around Prince Chichibu. But, because of the scale of British stakes in China, for the moment in 1938, Britain will continue and increase financial aid and allow arms sales to Chiang Kai-shek's regime, not pulling back unilaterally.

When Roosevelt makes noises trying to dissuade Chamberlain from any deals with Japan, threatening to make separate arrangements between the US and the Dominions, Chamberlain acidly writes off the threat as empty, the Americans having no credibility with any of the Dominions, much less Australia and New Zealand, after signaling their broad retreat from the western Pacific.

The British feelings of insecurity in the Far East become far more acute with the Japanese campaign to seize Guangzhou from Oct-Dec 1938. And that will be spoiling Chamberlain's post-Munich high.

Meanwhile, for the Japanese, while apologizing and paying reparations to the Americans certainly doesn't feel glorious, the completion of withdrawal of US Marines and partrol boats from Chinese waters and minimization of diplomatic staff, complete by the summer, are positive developments. By October 1938, with the victory in Wuhan in hand, Chamberlain looking eager to bargain, the Americans out of China, and the Americans speeding their timetable for Filipino independence, and the French beginning to follow suit, the Japanese can look back on the first 15 months of the China War, and even the fallout of the Panay Incident, with a degree of satisfaction that things are going Japan's way.

In fact, to the Japanese, western potential opponents, like Americans, French, and British seem weaker willed than eastern ones, like Chinese, or Soviets.

As fighting approaches the southern end of the China coast and the borders of Hong Kong in late 1938, the Japanese become more convinced that pressure on western interests is a useful path for deterring and removing support for China.

Behind the headlines, for the US, in 1938, US military, especially naval, spending, is still actually increased. Indeed, more resources than OTL go for arming up the forces of the Philippine Commonwealth, and for improving the defenses of Hawaii, and moves to enhance to permanent ship-basing capabilities at Pearl Harbor are improved. Pro-naval spenders are able to make pro-jobs and industry arguments in favor of their bills, and among each other, and the right kind of audiences, they are energized by and can subtly appeal to a sense of wiping away humiliation stemming from the US withdrawal from China in the face of local Japanese superiority and national will for conflict/aggression. This counter-trend continues with greater strength in 1939 and 1940.

From December 1938, the Japanese begin a series of intermittent blockades of the landward approaches to the British concession areas in China, notably at Beijing, Tianjin, Shanghai, and Hong Kong. The stated objectives of the Japanese are to secure full cooperation of concessionary police and troops, mainly controlled by Britain, with the Japanese military and Chinese collaborators against agents of the Chinese Nationalists and Communists, the handover of Chinese silver reserves located in vaults in Tianjin, establishing direct relations and acknowledgement between the concessionary powers and Japan's puppet Chinese authorities, and an end to arms for Nationalist China and anti-Japanese publications within the concessions.

The British threaten and impose some unilateral economic sanctions in retaliation, and the US gives six months notice of intent to terminate the US-Japanese trade treaty, but does not immediately impose trade restrictions - so Chamberlain barely notices. The Dutch remain studiously neutral and do not apply any sanctions. The French hesitate to act out of fear of causing conflict or endangering Indochina.

Ultimately in February 1939, Chamberlain reaches a "small bargain" with Japan - a neutrality treaty, a 'de facto' recognition and agreement for concession authorities to deal with whatever adjacent Chinese administration exists next to British concession areas in China, an agreement to maintain the separation of political and commercial questions, to not supply arms to a power Japan is at war with on the mainland of Asia and for Japan not to supply arms to a power Britain is at war with on the mainland of Europe, and protection of British lives, property, and freedom to trade in areas under Japanese control.

This "Far Eastern Munich" is great blow to Chinese prestige and morale, and is denounced by Chiang, Mao, and the Soviet Union, and criticized by many quarters in the American, French, Commonwealth, and even British press.

Then events in Europe intrude, with Hitler's sudden occupation of Prague in March 1939. Britain extends security guarantees to Poland, Romania, Greece, and Turkey in response, drawing a line against Hitler. But, with the Japanese committing no similar new outrage or breach of an agreement, just their ongoing atrocious war with China, there is no parallel reversal of policy in the Far East for Britain.

Japan tries to exploit weakened Chinese morale with attacks on Changsha, and then Guangxi province in later 1939, but like in OTL, these do not succeed.

Japanese forces also clash with the Soviets and Mongolians on the Manchukuo-Mongolia border over the summer, and the Soviets attain local superiority and smash them there.

By late summer 1939, pent up irritation in the US over the democracies' retreats in the face of bullying dictatorships is supporting defense spending slightly above OTL levels, and has permitted delivery of arms to belligerents, if they can be done on a cash and carry basis. The US, now free from the Japanese-American trade treaty, can now implement an embargo on aviation fuel and high-octane gasoline.

In the last week of August, 1939, the announcement of the Nazi-Soviet pact shocks the world.

On September 1, Germany attacks Poland, and WWII begins, with Britain and France declaring war on Germany.

....to be continued...

[stevep]

  raharris1973 ,

   That looks interesting and if you get that initial US reaction the rest could all follow.  Which might end up being either good or bad for the western democracies but is likely to be bad for the Chinese, even worse than OTL.  The key things would probably be the Japanese reaction to the M-R Pact and then - assuming it still occurs - the sudden fall of France, along with the US reaction as well in the latter case.  The former is likely to make them look for a deal with Moscow as OTL and alienate them from the European axis which, coupled with western acquiescence in their action in China could make them less likely to attack European possessions.  However you still have their intense racism and that once France falls and Britain is on the defensive - assuming it fights on - the fact they would rather seize those possessions than have to pay for their goods.

  A unilateral US embargo on Japan will hurt them but may not be too critical as long as they can get most items, especially oil and rubber, from elsewhere.  Which does assume that they can and are willing to pay for them.

  How the US will react to Britain and France basically copying them could be interesting.  Plus if after it becomes independent what happens to the Philippines here?

  The dark horse event as mentioned above is assuming France still falls does Britain fight on in this scenario.  It was actually the allied failure in Norway that brought Churchill to power so if that was avoided for some reason then it could be Chamberlain in change when France and the smaller western democracies are suddenly overrun.  Going to be a ton of other butterflies.

  One other point that comes to mind.  With a more isolationist US determined to avoid war and Roosevelt being seen as weak internationally does he stand again in 1940 and if not who becomes the new President?

  Steve

[raharris1973]

Aug 8, 2022 18:07:13 GMT stevep said:

  raharris1973 ,

   That looks interesting and if you get that initial US reaction the rest could all follow.  Which might end up being either good or bad for the western democracies but is likely to be bad for the Chinese, even worse than OTL.  The key things would probably be the Japanese reaction to the M-R Pact and then - assuming it still occurs - the sudden fall of France, along with the US reaction as well in the latter case.  The former is likely to make them look for a deal with Moscow as OTL and alienate them from the European axis which, coupled with western acquiescence in their action in China could make them less likely to attack European possessions.  However you still have their intense racism and that once France falls and Britain is on the defensive - assuming it fights on - the fact they would rather seize those possessions than have to pay for their goods.

  A unilateral US embargo on Japan will hurt them but may not be too critical as long as they can get most items, especially oil and rubber, from elsewhere.  Which does assume that they can and are willing to pay for them.

  How the US will react to Britain and France basically copying them could be interesting.  Plus if after it becomes independent what happens to the Philippines here?

  The dark horse event as mentioned above is assuming France still falls does Britain fight on in this scenario.  It was actually the allied failure in Norway that brought Churchill to power so if that was avoided for some reason then it could be Chamberlain in change when France and the smaller western democracies are suddenly overrun.  Going to be a ton of other butterflies.

  One other point that comes to mind.  With a more isolationist US determined to avoid war and Roosevelt being seen as weak internationally does he stand again in 1940 and if not who becomes the new President?

  Steve

Thanks - You will see a few developments in line with your conjectures, although you may not have guessed the specific ways.  I am trying to be creative while not going *overboard* with having any leaders or countries lean too hard or implausibly so into character stereotypes but have it flow from events.

[raharris1973]

The signing of the Nazi-Soviet pact, simultaneous with the Soviet victory on the Manchukuo frontier, leads to the fall of the Army supported cabinet Japan, and instantly deflates the clamor in Japan for an all-around alliance with Germany that would have deepened the Anti-Comintern Pact into a true anti-Soviet alliance and made it into an anti-British and anti-French instrument as well.

The new Japanese Cabinet takes a more diplomat approach towards the western powers while achieving an armistice with the Soviets, and keeping the Kwangtung Army firebrands who are looking for early revenge on the Soviets, in check.

The Japanese still press on with their merciless bombing and occupation and blockade of China however, especially its capital city of Chongqing. Asernoted earlier their autumn offensive in Changsha, to seize the South China Hunan "rice bowl" region fails although Japanese forces loot and live off the land. Their invasion from Hainan island into western Guangdong province's peninsula and Guangxi province also has mixed and indecisive results over the winter, opposed by tough local generals in tough terrain with good local administration and popular support.

However, in part as a result of lesser total arms supplies and diplomatic setbacks, including British appeasement of Japan on Chinese matters, unlike OTL, Chiang Kai-shek does not rally his forces for an intended nationwide offensive in winter 1939-1940. Nor do the Communists launch their somewhat parallel 1940 "Hundred Regiments" campaign. These are symptoms of lower morale, but not war enders, since neither of those offensives were successful in OTL either. However, their absence puts the Japanese under less pressure and allows the collaborationist regime of Wang Jingwei and the Japanese occupation to get somewhat better ensconced in occupied areas through 1940.

......

Meanwhile, back in Europe, Poland is crushed by the Nazis in a six-week "blitzkrieg" campaign, with the western allies, pretty much an entirely French force, only responding with a desultory offensive into the Saar that doesn't get very far and is abandoned as German troops from the victorious Polish campaign begin to reinforce the western defenses of Germany. As for Poland, per the secret protocol of the Molotov-Ribbentropp pact, the Soviet Union advances to occupy eastern Poland starting September 17th.

Thereafter, Europe settles into a "phony war" except at sea, where the Allies implement a tight blockade of Germany, and the Germans score some lethal submarine sinkings in the North Sea and eastern Atlantic. Both sides show restraint in the air war, only "bombing" each other's cities and troop front lines with propaganda leaflets,, not actual bombs.

The Soviet Union soon compels the Baltic States to make defense treaties with the USSR and lease military bases to her, also in line with the M-R Pact secret protocol. The compliant Germans begin the evacuation of German minorities from those three countries.

By late October the Soviet Union has started making similar demands of Finland, as well as demands for territorial cessions and exchanges, ostensibly to improve there defenses of Leningrad. But the Finns refuse. By the end of the month Stalin has run out of patience and the USSR has declared war on Finland, and the world sympathizes the Finns who miraculously hold out week after week. The Finnish War becomes the more exciting show to watch in Europe than the rather static war between German and the Franco-British alliance, and even in Eurasia writ large, since the Sino-Japanese war has, at least compared to its early years, settled into a smaller scale, rather grim routine.

....

Back in Asia, the Chinese are frustrated, and discouraged that they see no near or medium term opportunity to drive the Japanese invaders out, that the west has abandoned them, and that they can depend on only one external ally, the two-faced Soviet Union. The only hope for a foreseeable expulsion of the Japanese would be a major Soviet invasion. The Chinese Communists would have no problem with that, but it would be a double-edged sword for Chiang Kai-shek. In any case, this ends up not being a problem. Soviet aid begins a steady drop from the moment there is a common Nazi-Soviet border in Europe and the Soviet's attention is increasingly focused on European security. Even with all the frustration, Chiang has no reason to quit yet, and indeed it would be political suicide, although some of his colleagues and Cabinet members begin to make suggestions about peace negotiations in private with Japan.

In Japan, the Emperor is dissatisfied with the prognostications of the hawks, who suggested China would never turn into a full war, and then that it would be over and capitulation would be around the corner. He was disappointed in the results on Nomonhan. He was disappointed in Army and limited diplomatic circles who put their faith in Germany. But nobody in Japan could advocate for just backing down from the Holy War in China, not even him. One relative bright spot is that the western powers, America, France, and Britain, while certainly not friendly, have not been too much trouble, and do not appear interested in war. A second relative bright spot, though more fleeting, is while the other powers are untrustworthy, most them are keeping themselves busy - the British and French in a stand-off with the Germans, the Soviets now embroiling themselves in Scandinavia at the other side of their empire.

Pressure to bring about conclusive and satisfactory results abroad, ends up causing intensified interservice rivalry at home. The Army claims first call on resources as the service doing the heavy lifting in China and facing off with the Soviets, asking what good all the Navy's expensive ships are doing to finish the war, and how many tanks and artillery tubes and aircraft could be built with the steel instead. The Navy retorts citing the contributions of its ships to the blockade, its Special Naval Landing Force (SNLF) to coastal campaigns, and its aircraft to the China War. It also chides the Army for being unable to finish the China incident, while attributing the American and French retreats from China and Britain's appeasing posture to the IJN's strength. The Army retorts back that only it can equip the country to deal with challenges of today (China) and tomorrow (Russia), and the Navy was built against the fading challenges of yesterday, like America and Britain. The Navy cites America's continued Naval build-up but the Army tells the Navy guys they can't have it both ways, if they already scared off the Americans, the IJN is becoming less relevant, they may be building ships to help their capitalists, but they are still on track to release the Philippines, so they don't seem to have the will to use them. The Navy cites America's limited sanctions on strategic goods as a sign of hostility, but the Army calls that an example of American cowardice and lack of will and asks what the Navy is going to do about it anyway.

Interservice rivalry, plus geopolitical opportunity, stoke a great desire in the IJN to steal a march on the IJA and prove its relevancy. Naval planning had remained overwhelmingly focused on war with the United States from 1906 through the 1930s, but after the cancellation of the Anglo-Japanese alliance, there had been a minor second line of planning focused against the Royal Navy and Singapore. After the withdrawal of the US from China during 1938, the anti-US planning focus remaining, but anti-British planning against British positions in the China Seas, so in Chinese waters, Hong Kong, Malaya, Borneo, the Gilberts, the Bismarcks, the Solomons, gained relatively more prominence. These studies continued, albeit with less urgency, after the "small bargain" with Britain in early 1939.

However, many of the operational concepts of this earlier planning for southerly advance ended up recycled in plans directed against the IJN's new obsession starting in November 1939, the Dutch East Indies.

The IJN's rationale for moving on the DEI is to attain secure sovereign control over oil and additional food resources in an increasingly warlike world where these resources are in greater demand and scarcer. US "economic warfare" its moral embargo on aviation gasoline is taken as proof that Washington could cut off other raw material supplies, so Japanese physical control is essential. A bilateral move against the colony of the Netherlands, a stubbornly neutral country, is seen as geopolitically low risk at this time in particular. The Dutch are a small, weak country to begin with. Because they sit next to warring powers in Europe, they can spare little more force to send to the Indies. Other powers, having retreated from China and disengaging from the Philippines, have not demonstrated past behaviors indicating they would militarily/navally intervene. And they are nearly all pre-occupied. Britain (and France) are formally at war with Germany. The USSR is at war in Finland, and getting heavily criticized in the western democracies and Italy. The Americans, while having a small Asiatic fleet based in the Philippines, and access to ports and airfields, and a growing Filipino force and growing Pacific fleet, have so far shrunk from actual military conflicts and avoided multilateral alliances. They also face intense and public lobbying from the Filipino Commonwealth government to avoid tensions with Japan.

So geopolitically, a move on the DEI in the winter of 1939-1940 could be a viable fait accompli for Japan. In operational terms, it would be bold and innovative, involving the use of carriers and support of initial landings beyond the range of land-based Japanese air power. But it is doable, especially with starting bases in the Mandates (the Palaus and Carolines) to support ops against eastern DEI, and bases in Hainan to support ops against Dutch Borneo-Kalimantan. Once the Japanese SNLF seizes the initial islands, ports, and airfields, these become stepping stones for rapid sequential advance to quickly overrun the remain isles of the Dutch East Indies. Against this one opponent, the IJN's SNLF provides a more than adequate infantry force.

Japan's D-Day for the assault on the DEI is January 10th, 1940. The Japanese conquest progresses rapidly through January and February. Britain is greatly disturbed by this development and considers declaring war and ordering its limited Far Eastern forces into action against the the Japanese, alongside the Dutch. A few British and French, with Europe on their mind even more than Southeast Asia, advocate an intervention in DEI to establish co-belligerency with Netherlands they hope to extend to Europe, and then use that to pressure Belgium into cooperation. But the Dutch are wary of any such Europe-focused suggestions or implications.

The Americans are also bothered and initiate an oil embargo on Japan - a case of closing the barn door after the horse ran out. Ultimately the British and Americans discuss intervention, but do not agree to take action. The British do not want to make a definite anti-Japanese move without the Americans also committing, but the American President, FDR, does not feel he can ask Congress or the public to moved beyond economic measures and go to war over the Dutch colony.

The fall of the DEI to Japan is a great coup for the Japanese Navy.

It is also a great cause of consternation to Australia and New Zealand. They are shocked and appalled at Britain's inaction in the face of Japan's audacious advance into their own neighborhood.

As a result of this increased sense of fear and isolation, Prime Minister Robert Menzies of Australia rules out sending Australian armed forces for services outside of Australia and its immediate neighborhood of New Guinea and nearby archipelagos. No Aussies will be released for service in Palestine, or Africa or Europe.

...Meanwhile in the United States, defense spending had been boosted throughout 1939, and arms were being sold to the British and French since the summer on a "cash and carry" basis. US aircraft and armored vehicle and shipbuilding is getting somewhat ahead of OTL's schedule by Jan 1940. From the beginning of the war in September 1939, President Roosevelt has also declared a "Pan-American Security Belt" including the Western Hemisphere countries and Hawaii. While advocates of entering wars in Europe are few, Roosevelt's hemispheric defense policy is generally well-regarded.

...Back in Europe, the Soviets finally force territorial concessions on the Finns. Then, in April, the phony war abruptly ends as the Nazis invade Denmark and Norway. They follow this up with invasion of the Low Countries and France in May.

The Norway debacle sees Neville Chamberlain ushered out of office and replaced with Winston Churchill.

With superior doctrine, tactics, and use of radio, the Nazis defeat the Allies and compel French capitulation by the end of June 1940.

American aircraft ordered by the French that unfortunate did not arrive in time to stiffen French resistance nevertheless help add to RAF reserves during the Battle of Britain.

The Fall of France shocks the United States into the Two Ocean Navy Act, enlargement of the Army, additional major defense spending, and eventual movement toward conscription. It also convinces FDR to publicly announce his intent to run for election to unprecedented third term.

....to be continued...

[stevep]

  raharris1973 ,

   Sorry about the slow response but been on minimal activity for a few days due to the heatwave which is hopefully finally abating.  Hence trying to catch up here and elsewhere.

  That grab for the DEI is something I didn't expect.  Not sure that Britain and France would sit back and allow it - the French also having interests in the region while also allowing it to happen not only worries the ANZ region but also makes Malaya and Singapore much, much harder to defend.  After all during the Winter war the allies were thinking of supporting Finland including bombing Baku.  It could well be that between racial viewpoints at the time and seeing Japan as a lesser power than the Soviets the allies could decide to intervene.  Even if the Japanese had somehow managed a large scale of surprise at their action.  However given how weak the assorted democratic powers have been in TTL its definitely a possibility.

  With Japanese control of the DEI Britain will need to reinforce Malaya and probably also some other regions as well as look to defending against attacks into the Indian Ocean, although the ANZ forces are likely to be available for some of that as its in their interests as well.  Of course when France falls and Mussolini throws his hat into the ring how many forces stay there, especially since a lot more forces would be needed for any realistic defence, if at all possible for Malaya and British Borneo. 

  It also leaves the Dutch in an awkward limbo as their at war with both Japan and Germany whereas any allies they have won't - let anyway - be at war with the latter.

  The question in this scenario is does Britain make peace with the Nazis?  If so on what terms and what do they do afterwards?  It would definitely be the wisest move in this scenario but could leave the Soviet screwed.  Hitler wanted some peace agreement but are there terms on which both sides could agree?  If they continue to fight on against both Germans and Italians with their eastern possessions so much more vulnerable to Japan now its going to be a virtually impossible situation, especially with the US far deeper into isolationism.

  Steve

[raharris1973]

Aug 16, 2022 16:30:35 GMT stevep said:

That grab for the DEI is something I didn't expect.

Ha-ha - No one expected it ! I surprised myself ! In timeline the Dutch, French, and British (and Americans, and Soviets, and Germans, and Japanese Army) are all surprised too!

Aug 16, 2022 16:30:35 GMT stevep said:

Not sure that Britain and France would sit back and allow

It sure is painful to watch! And they sure think and talk about "doing something".

Aug 16, 2022 16:30:35 GMT stevep said:

After all during the Winter war the allies were thinking of supporting Finland including bombing Baku.

Well that's just it, between this, the submarine war, patrolling the skies, watching the Siegfried and Maginot Lines, London and Paris are a bit...overwhelmed.

Aug 16, 2022 16:30:35 GMT stevep said:

It also leaves the Dutch in an awkward limbo as their at war with both Japan and Germany whereas any allies they have won't - let anyway - be at war with the latter.

Well between Jan 10 1940 and May 10, 1940, Netherlands is at war with Japan but not Germany, and Britain and France are at war with Germany not Japan. And Netherlands is effectively routed out of contact with the Japanese enemy, lucky survivors interned in British Borneo and Australian New Guinea and perhaps other Imperial ports.

From May 10 Netherlands is at war with Germany and Japan, now allied with Britain and France against the former, Germany, but not the latter, Japan, but that can change at almost any time. Yikes!

Aug 16, 2022 16:30:35 GMT stevep said:

The question in this scenario is does Britain make peace with the Nazis?  If so on what terms and what do they do afterwards?  It would definitely be the wisest move in this scenario but could leave the Soviet screwed.  Hitler wanted some peace agreement but are there terms on which both sides could agree?  If they continue to fight on against both Germans and Italians with their eastern possessions so much more vulnerable to Japan now its going to be a virtually impossible situation, especially with the US far deeper into isolationism.

These are all million dollar questions. I would be careful about how exactly to characterize the US position though. The US had taken moves far deeper into isolationism in prior years, and that has left a legacy that persists into 1940, but one can't say it's ATL 1940 policy is uniformly more isolationist than OTL. The progress towards Filipino independence is further along, and this actually means Filipino forces are larger and better armed than OTL 1940. But it also means the Filipinos have more of a say about what the US can and cannot do with its bases remaining in the islands until scheduled independence in July 1941. - and for now the Filipino pressure is, don't make waves towards Japan. The US has not been aiding China during its war. However, the US naval rearmament and buildup of base infrastructure in the eastern Pacific has proceeded a bit faster than OTL, and revision of US neutrality legislation, to permit arms sales on a cash & carry basis, proceeded a few months earlier than OTL) shortly before the start of the war in Europe rather than after like OTL, and the intent was to have a helpful effect towards France and Britain.

The USA is taking all the same steps as OTL to declare a hemispheric security zone and patrol it, meaning it is primed to begin creeping it across the Atlantic to locations like Iceland if and when it deems it necessary. So these moves are all match-matchy with OTL's timeline.

[raharris1973]

Scenario VI Continued, from the Fall of France, and Two Ocean Navy Act, a few posts above:

Shortly after his re-election, FDR wins approval for his Lend-Lease policy of subsidized aid to Britain.

The US also explores a policy of aiding China as well, but does not announce any changes in policy because there is no apparent route to supply aid to China. Britain, remember, is still formally barred, based on a legacy Chamberlain policy, from aiding Chiang Kai-shek’s China and so the Burma Road is quite underdeveloped compared to OTL. Of course, Britain and Australia actually reestablished informal contacts and top secret covert aid program for the Chiang regime in the aftermath of the Japanese invasion of the DEI, which made them decide appeasing the Japanese is fruitless, and that supporting the Chinese is a useful to tool divide Japanese efforts and prevent them from concentrating against Australia and other British possessions like Malaya, Borneo, Singapore, Burma or India. The bottom-line for the Americans too on China is they begin a covert aid program also, and its physical delivery path is a much more rudimentary than OTL version of the Burma Road.

With Lend-Lease, the US serves as the Arsenal of Democracy (and Communism too, after Germany invades the Soviet Union) with the ever expanding Lend-Lease program to the UK. During 1941 the US gets into an undeclared naval war with the Germans in the Atlantic as it extends its hemispheric defense zone where ‘shoot on sight’ orders against Axis submarine apply. This, and the aid program, increasingly frustrate Hitler.

He is irritated by that ‘rank hypocrite Rosenfeld’ in particular when FDR orders US Marines to occupy Iceland in July 1941 saying he’d ‘try to put Hamburg under the Monroe Doctrine’ if you turned your back on him.

And indeed, FDR authorizes and orders the US occupation of the Azores and Madeira in the eastern Atlantic in early August, leaving Hitler determined to retaliate.

The occasion Hitler uses to announce his declaration of war on the United States, and simultaneous unlimited submarine campaign across the Atlantic and Caribbean to US waters, is the day after he learns of the victorious encirclement of the Kiev pocket, which underlines for him that the Soviet Union is doomed to go under in 1941.

The Japanese, while happy to see the US and UK under a new campaign of German pressure, and with some advocates of joining hands in war against the Anglo-Americans about, because of anger over severed economic ties, in the midst, are in the main happy to observe from a distance. Japan’s scavenging policy has allowed it to occupy the Dutch East Indies, mitigating the oil embargo, without war. It has also permitted peaceful occupation of French Indochina in the year since metropolitan France fell to Germany. Would Singapore, Malaya, Burma, the Philippines, India, Guam be nice to possess - certainly. But the Philippines is nearing independence and Japan is appearing to find its politicians ready to take bribes to not cooperate with America or obstruct Japan’s plans in Asia, just as Japan is finding in Thailand. Guam is a minor speck in a Japanese sea. The fate of Singapore will be decided in the Atlantic by Germany as much as by anything Japan does.

Plus, with Chinese forces decaying under blockade and China facing inflation, and a new major IJA campaign planned against the Hunan Rice Bowl and city of Changsha, there is unfinished business in China.
This all adds up to a formidable set of arguments for ‘letting the persimmons ripen’ in the South Seas while ‘cutting down ripe permissons’ in China.

Japan’s Changsha offensive, initiated in September, finally takes the city in November 1941 from Chinese forces weakened by two years of comparative underfunding and isolation compared to OTL. Success at Changsha encourages the Japanese to continue their offensive.

It continues over the winter, taking the rail junction of Hengyang, from there forces continue to march south to meet with another prong go Japanese forces attacking north from Guangzhou in February 1942, giving Japan secure control of the whole Beijing-Wuhan-Guangzhou railway line for the first time in the war, and cutting off Chinese forces to the east. By April 1942, Japanese columns take Guilin in Guangxi province and reach the Indochinese border, providing a continuous zone of Japanese occupation in mainland Asia from the Amur river to the Mekong River Delta, from Harbin to Saigon.

The United States mobilizes and places forces on alert and begins joint global planning with the British.

Although the war has gone global, with Germany, and not Japan, having declared war, America’s strategy isn’t just Europe-first, it’s Europe-only.

The US has a stronger focus on the Battle of the Atlantic, and there is no Pacific campaign, but the U.S. and UK prudently keep up their guard in their Pacific possessions like Hawaii, Midway, Wake, Singapore, Port Moresby and Burma. Garrisons are maintained, but not really reinforced or particularly upgraded in Guam and Hong Kong since those positions are considered indefensible in the event of hostilities with Japan.

While clearly wanting to contain Japan, and to keep Chinese resistance afloat, the clear preference of the Allied powers at this moment is to avoid an open clash with Japan while focusing on containing and then rolling back and defeating Germany.

The greater concentration of naval, air, and shipping resources in the Atlantic, combined with the somewhat earlier overall US build-up, hastens the pace of the war against U-Boats, and ensures enough Allied shipping is enough for the Allied North Africa landings of June 1942 to seize all the Vichy French held ports of Morocco, Algeria, and Tunisia, trapping the Africa Korps, and preventing any German response or reinforcement in Africa.

This ITTL Operation Torch is mainly administrative, followed by combat, which the British 8th Army bears the brunt of, to finish off a trapped Afrika Korps and Italian Army in Libya, which only a few American units get to ephemerally participate in as a blocking force.

This operation is followed up by Allied landings in October 1942 in Sicily and Crete, where they face more stubborn German resistance. This breaks Italian morale, and leads to an invasion of Italy in late December and the invasion/occupation of Sardinia and Corsica by February 1943.

By the beginning of 1943, even as the Italian campaign continues, the prime Anglo-American focus shifts to preparation for the cross-channel invasion of northern France.

Meanwhile the Soviets are grinding the Nazis and their allies back off their territory after defeating the Stalingrad campaign. Unlike OTL, with the vigorous and successful Allied operations in the Mediterranean in 1942 and 1943, Germany cannot even contemplate a strategic offensive like Citadel for the eastern front in 1943.

The Western Allies launch an invasion of the French Riviera at the beginning of June 1943 to seize essential southern French ports, while the Italian offensive liberates Rome.

On August 1st, the Western Allies storm Normandy, and rapidly break out towards Paris.

By New Years Day 1944, all of France and Belgium are liberated, along with all of Italy south of the Po River, while Soviet forces have liberated Crimea, reached Lake Peipus and the Estonian border, the southern Dvina, and the Dnepr river.

A Soviet offensive in January surges across the Dnepr to liberated Ukraine up to the 1938 Soviet border, followed by ops in February liberating Belarus and Estonia and northern Latvia to the Dvina.

In March 1944, the Western Allies, now joined by a revived French army, resumes the offensive and smashes through the Netherlands and Rhineland, gaining bridgeheads across the river, as the Soviets push against Finland, Romania and over the prewar (1938) Polish border. Heavy Allied bomber raids pound Germany against increasingly debilitated Luftwaffe resistance.

By June of 1944, the Western Allies and Soviet forces meet just east of the city of Danzig, at the junction of the Vistula river and Baltic Sea, which leaves the Baltic States, East Prussia, and a section of northeast Poland in Soviet hands. The Allied/Soviet division continues along the Vistula river through Warsaw, and continues south along the San river in Poland at the point where the Vistula river turns abruptly west. Czechoslovakia and Hungary are liberated entirely by western forces, while Soviet forces take the Carpatho-Ukraine, and liberate Romania and Bulgaria. Yugoslav partisans largely complete the liberation of Yugoslavia on their own while this is going on, while British forces dispatched from Crete liberate Greece as the Germans begin their withdrawal. Finland also sues for peace.

At the war’s end in Europe, the Soviet sphere consists of a USSR that restored its June 22, 1941 borders, plus Carpatho-Ukraine, and puppetized buffer states in Bulgaria, Romania, East Poland, an East Prussian German state and Finland. The Western Allies have liberated the conquered Low Countries, Scandinavia, Czechoslovakia, West Poland and Austria, and conquered Germany and Italy.

Meanwhile, since Japan seized contiguous north-south rail corridors through China in April 1942, things have been grim for Nationalist China. Inflation soared, various provinces have suffered from famine, and military action became lethargic. This was despite a rising trickle of western aid offsetting the cancellation of Soviet aid as the Soviets became absorbed in their own defense. By summer 1942 Chinese Nationalists and Japan were in secret talks and in a de facto truce with both concentrating more on anti-communist anti-guerrilla operations. This further weakened Chiang’s prestige and Nationalist morale. The Japanese could never quite offer Chiang suitable terms for capitulation however, so sinking into a phony war with side deals and collusion is all the Sino Japanese war degrades to.

The only other dramatic move the Japanese make is overthrowing the Vichy French administration of French Indochina in August 1943, and the establishment of formally independent, puppet nationalist states in Indochina. Tokyo’s cue to make this move is the end of the last vestiges of Vichyism with the liberation of France.

As WWII ends in Europe in June 1944, the Japanese were successful bandits having gathered loot by small, easy war in the case of the East Indies, peaceful occupation in the case of French Indochina. In China, results have been more mixed. The Japanese, with their puppet regimes, occupy all the most economically important parts of the eastern half of the country. The free zone of China suffers from lethargy, low morale, division, and high inflation. But neither Chiang nor the Communists formally surrendered, and Japan’s long slog to get to this point took way longer than expected.

Post-war, the US and USSR have tensions in Europe over whose Poles, the London Poles, now based in Poznan, or the Soviet-backed Communist Poles, now-based in Lublin, represent Poland. The US also complains about Soviet exclusion of several parties from Romanian, Bulgarian, and Finnish elections. The Soviets have their own complaints about final surrender procedures for various Nazi armies and the administration of occupied Italy which took place without their consultation or participation.

However, these are not the biggest complaints of the leading powers of the United Nations (USSR, UK, USA). Japan’s bloated empire, and its ongoing invasion and occupation of China is.

All the big three Allied powers, now calling themselves, the United Nations, agree Japan should cough up its territories occupied since 1931. All support the restoration of Chinese sovereignty over China, including Manchuria. Britain, backed by France and the Netherlands, supports the restoration of Indochina and the Dutch East Indies to those powers - at most agreeing to a compromise formula where a United Nations inspectorate would oversee their administrations.
The USA and Soviet Union have no interest in restoring the French or Dutch, and prefer UN trusteeships over Indochina and Indonesia, followed by independence.

The new Dewey and Attlee administrations and the government in Australia, while sending cash and surplus weapons to Chiang, are dealing with domestic war-weariness and post-war reconversion and are not eager to cross the threshold into outright coercive war against Japan, even while concentrating naval force in the Far East for a campaign of strong pressure against Japan. The British, and Americans in particular, from their earlier invasions and fight through more of Europe, suffered higher casualties than in OTL’s WWII.

The Soviet Union, while suffering great losses in 1941 and 1942, suffered comparatively lighter losses in 1943, 1944, and of course, with the war being over, 1945. By the spring of 1945, Stalin is eager for the war of payback, the Rasplata, against Japan. The build-up for this begins from the conclusion of the war in Europe in summer 1944.

In early April 1945, Soviet forces launch a grand offensive against Japanese forces facing them. A massive prewar buildup of ground and air power in northern Sakhalin ensured that Soviet forces had the power to not only overwhelm Japanese forces in the southern part of the island, but also to subsequently hold the island against any and all Japanese landing attempts in subsequent months. Similarly, reinforcement to Kamchatka, Khabarovsk, and Primorye provinces made their coastal defenses impregnable.

However, most stunning is the Soviet offensive campaign on the mainland. From April through October, 1945 this unstoppable juggernaut, although occasionally pausing or bypassing strongpoints, works with Chinese forces, Communist and Nationalist, to drive out the Japanese, sweeping them from Manchuria, Korea, and China, from Beijing, all the way south to Guangzhou, Hanoi, and Haiphong, where the Soviets and Chinese link up with the native fighters of Ho Chi Minh.

Facing this military humiliation, and in order to get its economic isolation lifted, Japan sues for peace, and agrees to also cede offshore Choushan and Hainan island back to China and pledges to transition the East Indies to a UN trusteeship aimed at independence. As part of this Australian and Nordic representatives are allowed to enter the East Indies as inspectors.

The western nations are first glad to see China relieved but then frightened to see the sweep of Soviet advances, and outrage at Japan dissipates as its conquests, at least its bloodiest ones in China are torn away from her. So by the end of 1945, the west is looking for an excuse to compromise with and rehabilitate Japan.

This is underlined by the establishment of a Communist regime in Korea in late 1945, Communist regimes accepting a Soviet-led UN “trusteeship” in early 1946 in Indochina, and a Chinese Communist Party coup to seize total power throughout China in 1946, that leaves Chiang Kai-shek and his Nationalist supporters only surviving on the island of Hainan after pulling off a fighting retreat from the mainland.

[raharris1973]

Here is an Additional scenario -

VII. Precocious Panay Problem
An incident, very similar in kind to the Panay incident, happens many years earlier, with possibly different effects, and a longer time horizon for effects to sink in.

The best opportunity for something like this would be during Japan's abortive invasion of Shanghai in January-March 1932, also called "the January incident". en.wikipedia.org/wiki/January_28_incident

That was the only time before September 1937 that there was Sino-Japanese fighting in the busy shipping lanes of the international port of Shanghai.

The 1932, the US was plunging into Depression fast. Banks were failure. Stock markets crashed years before, the 1930 midterms were a wipeout for Republicans. Some were still saying at the beginning of the year that "prosperity was just around the corner" but fewer were believing it, and that was despite the fact that the economy and banking system had *a lot* more distance to fall from January 1932 to January 1933.

This ever-worsening economic crisis makes me think that US responses towards an attack on a US ship in China would lean towards the dovish end, retreat and retrench rather than fight. It simply costs less. People then didn't know that military Keynesianism was a thing, and it tends to be authoritarian and out-and-out reactionary regimes, no honest conservatives in small 'l' liberal democracies, who have the cynicism to think of war as an escape from domestic political difficulty, and the leverage to pull that trick off. Quaker Herbert Hoover wasn't likely to do it. Also, Japan is even more likely than in the OTL Panay incident to pay compensation, and to apologize, with more sincere feeling even among military/naval personnel in 1932 than in the more radicalized later 1930s.

Between Hoover and the transition into the Roosevelt Administration, the US may quietly, but rather briskly, remove the US Marine and Asiatic fleet presence from China. When the Sino-Japanese war expands later on in the 1930s, that will leave Britain and others none too confident in US resolve. Even more, the residue of the warlike clash in the Yangtze may influence the impending Tydings-McDuffie terms for the independence of the Philippines, setting up a faster timetable for those islands independence, and putting in doubt a long-term US fleet presence. Ultimate withdrawal of a US permanent military presence from the Far East may be considered, from a 1933-1934 point of view, to be a logical extension of the demilitarizing 'Good Neighbor' policy also being applied to Latin America at this time. 



[As noted, in this scenario, the incident against a US patrol boat occurs in February 1932 in the waters of Shanghai, and is captured on film, this includes the close in attack on the boat, its sinking, and crew member gunners (who do not survive the attack) downing a Japanese aircraft. Over the ensuing month or so, the Japanese and Americans negotiate a Japanese apology and reparations/compensation to the USA, and the Japanese eventually end the Shanghai incident as they historically did, even while persisting in the takeover of Manchuria. This incident and publicity about it does cause a bit of a sensation in the United States. The Hearst Press and Progressive Senators denounce some media outlets and media interests for promoting “war hysteria” in a lame attempt to prop up stock prices and heavy industrial orders. Many ask what the hell we were doing in China with our country falling apart at home. President Hoover orders a withdrawal from China, and Congress people order a broader review of our forward deployed Navy, Marine, and Army posture in the Pacific, in particular. This review continues through and beyond the 1933 election as the collapse of the banking system and swift rise of nationwide unemployment monopolizes lawmakers attention more and more.
Here is where the timeline can branch a few ways.

In the happy, shiny branch, Japanese mortification over the war scare with America and shame over the ‘accidental’ incident endangering peace among ‘civilized people’, not just war on Chinese bandits, causes the Japanese public and government to criticize and condemn the actions of military extremists and the Kwangtung Army in Manchuria, causing the Tokyo government to wrestle back control of policy and negotiate an end to the Manchurian incident restoring the pre-September 1931 status quo in China and Manchuria, essentially a withdrawal to proper railroad garrisons and a restoration of the province to Zhang Xueliang’s authority, and no establishment of separatist Manchukuo. 1930s Japan, despite a bunch of riots, assassinations, and attempted coups, ends up basically behaving itself internationally for the rest of the 1930s. The riots, assassinations, and attempted coups damage the public reputation of the military over time. Chiang Kai-shek’s policy focus in China is anti-communist rather than anti-Japanese in any case. The new Roosevelt administration’s focus is domestic and not foreign, so naval buildup is not on the American agenda either. The hearings on US overseas military deployments, prompted by the clash in Shanghai in ’32, conclude in ’33, and recommend significant retrenchment of US military activities and deployments around the world, in the Caribbean, Pacific, and especially western Pacific, for reasons of economy and preservation of peace and recommend reliance on non-military instruments to maintain world order and peace. The Roosevelt Administration finds these conclusions simpatico with its ‘Good Neighbor’ policy of disengaging from the Banana Wars and military interventions in the Caribbean, although the US still maintains its control over the Panama Canal Zone, Guantanamo Bay, and Puerto Rico. The effects of the study conclusions are felt in the Pacific where Hawaii, Midway, and Wake Island, and Alaska are named the western bastions of US defense. The withdrawal of the China patrols and Marines are retroactively justified, and a goal of post-independence military self-reliance for the Philippines is recommended. The impact is felt as the Tydings-McDuffie Act, formalizing the process for Filipino independence is designed and passed in 1933-34. As finally written, sentiment to pull back from potential exposed flashpoints in the Pacific leads to a hastened timeline for Filipino independence, 5 years, July 4th 1939, instead of 10 years. In turn the combination of speedier American decolonization, and Japanese disengagement from day-to-day skirmishing in Manchuria, and the lack of success and positive hype about military valor in Manchuria, helps keep Japan from relapsing into an expansionist mindset later in the 1930s. Japan occupies itself with industrial development and ever tighter assimilation and integration of its core empire of Korea, the Guangdong peninsula, Taiwan, and the mandates.

Basically, the net effect of the US-Japanese incident and war scare of 1932, was to frighten, embarrass, or shame both countries, and cause them both to back off from forward policies, and the beneficiaries end up being Chinese Nationalists and Filipino Nationalists.

The increased sway of Chiang Kai-shek’s central government over China as he marginalizes warlords and Communists ends up growing the Chinese economy and increasing Japanese export opportunities, especially as European countries begin to focus on rearmament from 1937-38 on.

The lack of an aggressively expanding Japan on the Asian mainland affects the security calculations of other great powers. It allows Britain and France, whose concessions in China and colonies south of China are less menaced by Japan, to focus defense planning more against Germany and Italy. The pressure relief is greatest for the Soviet Union, which from 1933 on only needs to deal with relatively weak forces of Zhang Xueliang, local warlord generals, and detachments from Chiang Kai-shek all swearing allegiance to the Chinese national government on the Amur river, rather than Japan’s more formidable Kwangtung Army. This allows the Soviet Union a greater focus on the German threat after the rise of the Nazis in Germany.

Unenthusiastic for war, even with little fear of war in the Far East, Britain will be trying on appeasement with the Germans at first on issues like rearmament, the Navy, the Rhineland, and Spain.

The USSR, without the need to bulk up its Far Eastern defenses as much as OTL, or to provide support to China’s United Front in a Sino-Japanese War (that isn’t happening ITTL, can throw more support behind the Spanish Republic, to keep up with German and Italian support for the Spanish Nationalists. This will prolong the Spanish Civil War beyond February 1939. It can also concentrate more of its military build-up in its western military districts and offer more robust assistance to Czechoslovakia during the Sudeten crisis if Czechoslovakia is willing to fight.

Ultimately, Czechoslovakia backs down and surrenders the Sudetenland when the west abandons it at Munich, which excludes the Soviet Union. However, the Soviets, angry at their exclusion from conference, redouble their commitment to the Spanish Republic and prevent the splitting of the Republican pockets of Madrid and Barcelona, further tying down German and particularly Italian resources.

The western reaction to the German occupation of Bohemia is more severe however, the French, and the British promptly declare war on Germany, as does the Soviet Union, and the three impose a blockade and embargo. The French immediately begin a program to provide direct aid to the Spanish Republic from across the border and to deploy colonial troops in support of Spanish Republicans and against Nationalist Spanish Morocco in order to prevent Axis encirclement of France.

France is not ready immediately for an attack on Germany, nor is Germany ready for an immediate attack on France in March 1939, and no BEF is ready for deployment on the continent, so a “phony war” ensues.

Poland holds to a tenuous neutrality, not wanting to become a battlefield or to invite Soviet or German troops onto its lands.

Faced with isolation, blockade, and the western powers and Soviets mobilizing and now reaching the point of rearming faster than him (and humiliating him by overwhelming his Spanish allies and German Condor Legion over the spring and summer), Hitler is determined to assault the Low Countries and France by August 1939. Mussolini meanwhile has been ousted by the Italian King, who was angered by the loss of the Italian volunteer corps in Spain.

The German attack takes the Netherlands and most of Belgium before it bogs down for the winter.
Continued high-cost, low-reward, German attacks that Hitler orders through the winter of 1939-1940 cause the Wehrmacht to launch a coup killing and overthrowing Hitler in early 1940, which leads to Germany suing for peace, withdrawing from the Low Countries, Czechoslovakia, and Austria.
……

Second variant

So much for the happier, shinier, more boring scenario. The likelier event is that the Japanese persist in their Manchukuo shenanigans, become addicted to them, intimidate opponents of militarism with assassination and get on a gradual track leading step by step to all-out war with China.

However, all the conflict-averse steps I mentioned on the US side remain the same.

However, like OTL, the path to all-out Sino-Japanese war is interrupted by the truces of the years 1933-1937, where Japan exercises authority over only Manchukuo, eastern Inner Mongolia (Mengjiang) and compels China to respect a demilitarized zone in Hebei province between Beijing and Tianjin and the Great Wall.

The French meanwhile have found the US abrupt withdrawal from Shanghai disturbing. The British do not like it either. The broader American intent to retreat regionally, signaled by the Tydings-McDuffie Act in 1934 is even more unwelcome, especially to the French, who sitting in Hanoi across the South China Sea from Manila, see impending Filipino independence as weakening the white man’s position in Asia, and as a stimulus for Vietnamese independence agitation, alongside Russian Communism, Japanese militarism, and Chinese nationalism.

The British are a little bit less panicked.

Events in Europe are really agitating the French however, notably German rearmament and the reestablishment of a German air force. But what takes the cake is the lack of British reliability as an ally. The June 1935 Anglo-German Naval Agreement seems to kick the legs out from under the anti-German Stresa Front when it is barely two months old.

This combination of allied (American) weakening and desertion in the lower priority area of the Far East, and allied (British) unreliability and double-dealing with France’s greatest potential threat in its zone of vital interest in Europe, and the late and brutal onset of the Depression in France prompts a ruthless prioritization and rebalancing of French global assets and liabilities.

This leads to Franco-Japanese secret negotiations in autumn 1935 for the sale of French Indochina to Japan. The shocking deal involves an enormous lump sum of gold and hard currency, with additional portions of the balance to be paid off in raw materials and labor services. The transfer transition, and installment payments, are set to be carried out between October 1935 and October 1937.

France aims to use the proceeds primarily to support rearmament against Germany, and Italy. The evaporation of need for naval protection against Japan indeed allows France to soon begin relocating more naval ships from Indochina to Djibouti, Tunisia, and Algeria to watch over Italy in the Red Sea and Mediterranean.

The graduated acquisition of all Indochina, and the expense of it, encourages the Japanese civil government and Army and Navy high commands to keep their field forces around the Manchukuo-China buffer zone and in Chinese waters on a tight leash to prevent escalation to outright war over this time.

Japanese Army and Navy budgetary outlays are less than OTL over 1935-1937. But by 1937 there are several new Army garrison and Fleet base command positions available in Indochina, plus opportunities for civil bureaucrats and zaibatsu.

Absorption of Indochina, and lesser frontline combat strength, encourages the relatively cautious status quo policy of not pressing on further into China. The most hotheaded commanders in the IJA are sent to the border with a softer target, Siam. In 1938, a Japanese campaign occupies Bangkok and the entirety of the Siamese Kingdom, extending Japanese power to the Indian Ocean via the Kra Isthmus.
Spared immediate Japanese pressure in 1935-1937, continued Chinese Nationalist offensives drive Chinese Communist forces further northwest into Gansu and Xinjiang provinces.

In Europe, diplomatic events in the 1930s unfold similarly to OTL. France has more funds to invest earlier in defense however.
The Allies appease as long as OTL.

In July 1939, the Philippines become independent.

In 1939, war breaks out over Poland.

In early 1940, with the US out of the Philippines, the Soviets bogged down in Finland, and the western European powers wrapped up in the phony war, the Japanese Navy takes the opportunity to attack the East Indies colony of the neutral country of the Netherlands, in a short, private war.

In spring 1940, Hitler launches a bold attack on Scandinavia. A month later, on the Low Countries and France. Here the French hold the Germans off at the Meuse because of earlier mobilization, better training, and earlier purchasing and integration of aircraft and radios into the force. The strong French persistence holding the line in western Belgium and northern France deters Italy from joining the war.

Germany is ultimately rolled back and beaten by spring 1943, with a Soviet force liberating Poland, Czechoslovakia, eastern Germany, and Hungary, an Anglo-French force liberating western Germany, and an Italian force liberating Austria and Bavaria south of the Danube.

The democracies consider Italy a minor rogue actor and thief with a minor ill-gotten imperium of Ethiopia, Albania, Austria, and southern Bavaria.

The Soviets are a much more formidable dictatorial menace whose power now extends to Prague, Budapest, and Berlin.

The Japanese were quite the successful bandits having gathered loot by legitimate purchase in Indochina, and by small, easy wars in the case of Manchuria, Siam, and the East Indies. They are currently in a state of high tension with a rising China.



…..

Third variant of VII

So much for the happier, shinier, more boring scenario. The likelier event is that the Japanese persist in their Manchukuo shenanigans, become addicted to them, intimidate opponents of militarism with assassination and get on a gradual track leading step by step to all-out war with China.

However, all the conflict-averse steps I mentioned on the US side remain the same.

The Japanese full-scale war with China begins about the same time as OTL, the summer of 1937. There is no 1937 Panay incident because there are no US gunships to be hit. The British and French for the moment feel obliged to maintain their concessionary rights in China, including their limited numbers of ships and troops. They lament they lack US support, absent since 1932, but it is not felt as a sudden desertion in the midst of the present war in 1937. The overall shrinkage of the US Asiatic Fleet is considered an unfavorable factor also. But the British and even French feel they have inescapable colonial stakes in East Asia, and the Japanese aim their aggression initially squarely at the Chiang Kai-shek regime, so they keep their presence, and provide aid to the Chiang regime.

In 1938, the Sino-Japanese war spreads to Wuhan and Guangzhou. In 1939, to help complete the blockade of China, Japan seizes Hainan island. The summer of 1939 sees the Japanese have dual crises with Britain and the USSR. With Britain in the spring and summer they have the Tianjin blockade, to pressure Britain on numerous China policy disagreements. This is resolved by compromise in early August. With the USSR they have the Nomonhan incident, which balloons into a border war that the USSR wins decisively, leading to Japanese restraint on the border, and Japanese near-term estrangement from Germany. July 1939 also sees the granting of Filipino independence, and the Filipino President and Congress’s declaration of the Philippines as a ‘perpetually neutral’ state, declining any overtures for a continued US naval base.
In September 1939, WWII breaks out.

Germany defeats France in May-June 1940. This revives German popularity in Japan, inspires Japan to sign the Tripartite Pact, and encourages Japan to occupy northern Indochina to block supplies to China. The US launches scrap iron sanctions in response.

In July 1941 Japan occupies southern Indochina, and the US puts Japan under total embargo and financial freeze with the UK and Netherlands following suit. Japan goes to war against the British Empire and DEI in December 1941, but does not attack the US. Japanese Army and Navy planners do not regard US involvement in war between Japan and Britain and Netherlands inevitable, and so choose to bypass US Pacific possessions like Hawaii, Midway island, Wake Island and Guam. Guam is held under observation from surrounding Japanese mandated archipelagos. The Philippines are observed closely from the Japanese held Taiwan, Palaus, and Spratlys, and its political leaders are told that any deviation from neutrality or naval collusion with the American, British or Dutch will compel a Japanese occupation. The lack of American bases and routine access in the Republic of the Philippines causes the Japanese to consider the threat from a neutral US manageable, not requiring the risk of a preventive strike.]

The US serves as the Arsenal of Democracy (and Communism too) with the ever expanding Lend-Lease program to the UK, USSR, and China. It is in an undeclared naval war with the Germans in the Atlantic and extended its hemispheric defense zone to Iceland.
By no later than April 1942, after multiple naval clashes in the Atlantic, and the US escorting Lend-Lease convoys all the way to Londonderry and Liverpool, Hitler unleashes his U-Boats for unlimited warfare across the entire Atlantic and declares war on the United States.

The United States mobilizes and places forces on alert and begins joint global planning with the British.

The United States issues a demand for Japanese evacuation of British Imperial territorial, and Japan responds by declaring war and storming Guam, and attacking Wake Island.

However, Japan does not attempt a fleet strike on Pearl Harbor because it appears too alert and well guarded.
Although the war has gone global, with Germany having been the first Axis power to go to war with the USA, US strategy, is noticeably more “Europe-first”.

The Japanese also launch an attack on the Philippines after issuing an ultimatum insisting on an alliance and acceptance of Japanese forces use of Filipino facilities. The Filipinos reject the ultimatum, insisting on their neutrality, for the record, and engage in token resistance for about a week before capitulating to Japanese terms, in a manner somewhat similar to Siam/Thailand in December 1941.

The US has a stronger focus on the Battle of the Atlantic, and without the MacArthur factor and ‘I Shall Return’ vow in the Philippines, there is no substantial Southwest Pacific campaign. There is aeronaval skirmishing and raiding around the Japanese perimeter, while the Americans are building up their fleet train to be ready to launch a Central Pacific drive by the beginning of 1944.

The greater concentration of naval, air, and shipping resources in the Atlantic hastens the pace of the war against U-Boats, and ensures enough Allied shipping is enough for the Allied North Africa landings of January 1943 to seize all the Vichy French held ports of Morocco, Algeria, and Tunisia, trapping the Africa Korps, and preventing any German response or reinforcement in Africa.

This ITTL Operation Torch is mainly administrative, followed by combat, which the British 8th Army bears the brunt of, to finish off a trapped Afrika Korps and Italian Army in Libya, which only a few American units get to ephemerally participate in as a blocking force.

This operation is followed up by Allied landings in April 1943 in Sicily and Crete, where they face more stubborn German resistance. This breaks Italian morale, and leads to an invasion of Italy in late June and the invasion/occupation of Sardinia and Corsica by August 1943.

By the fall of 1943, even as the Italian campaign continues, the prime Anglo-American focus shifts to preparation for the cross-channel invasion of northern France.

In Asia, the focus for 1944 is on an American supported British and Chinese effort to open to Burma road, and in the Pacific, on the launching of a Central Pacific drive through the Marshalls and Marianas.

Meanwhile the Soviets are grinding the Nazis and their allies back off their territory.

The Western Allies launch an invasion of the French Riviera at the beginning of April to seize essential southern French ports, while the Italian offensive liberates Rome.

On May 1st, the Western Allies storm Normandy.

The Western Allies and Soviet forces meet along the Oder River and the Bohemia-Slovakia junction and Lake Balaton in Hungary west of Budapest in early December 1944.

Meanwhile in the Pacific, the Japanese fleet has been heavily damaged and the US has taken Saipan in the Marianas, and is now launching bombing raids on Japan from there.

The liberation of Burma quickens in the winter of 1944-45. The USSR declares war on Japan on April 1, 1945, launching a massive offensive on Manchuria, northern China, and Korea.

Further campaigning in 1945 sees the USA take Okinawa and begin invasion preparation. In territorial terms, the British have more sweeping success in Thailand, Malaya, Sumatra and Borneo, and the Soviets also do so in liberating all of Sakhalin, the Kuriles, all Korea, and China down to the cities of Shanghai and Wuhan, and the Chinese liberate their own southeastern provinces.

Japan is battered and discouraged and offering peace by the summer but *not* on terms the Allies cannot take seriously. The use of the atomic bomb in early August gives the Japanese the excuse to accept surrender on Allied terms.

[stevep]

Aug 26, 2022 12:20:38 GMT raharris1973 said:

Scenario VI Continued, from the Fall of France, and Two Ocean Navy Act, a few posts above:

Shortly after his re-election, FDR wins approval for his Lend-Lease policy of subsidized aid to Britain.

The US also explores a policy of aiding China as well, but does not announce any changes in policy because there is no apparent route to supply aid to China. Britain, remember, is still formally barred, based on a legacy Chamberlain policy, from aiding Chiang Kai-shek’s China and so the Burma Road is quite underdeveloped compared to OTL. Of course, Britain and Australia actually reestablished informal contacts and top secret covert aid program for the Chiang regime in the aftermath of the Japanese invasion of the DEI, which made them decide appeasing the Japanese is fruitless, and that supporting the Chinese is a useful to tool divide Japanese efforts and prevent them from concentrating against Australia and other British possessions like Malaya, Borneo, Singapore, Burma or India. The bottom-line for the Americans too on China is they begin a covert aid program also, and its physical delivery path is a much more rudimentary than OTL version of the Burma Road.

With Lend-Lease, the US serves as the Arsenal of Democracy (and Communism too, after Germany invades the Soviet Union) with the ever expanding Lend-Lease program to the UK. During 1941 the US gets into an undeclared naval war with the Germans in the Atlantic as it extends its hemispheric defense zone where ‘shoot on sight’ orders against Axis submarine apply. This, and the aid program, increasingly frustrate Hitler.

He is irritated by that ‘rank hypocrite Rosenfeld’ in particular when FDR orders US Marines to occupy Iceland in July 1941 saying he’d ‘try to put Hamburg under the Monroe Doctrine’ if you turned your back on him.

And indeed, FDR authorizes and orders the US occupation of the Azores and Madeira in the eastern Atlantic in early August, leaving Hitler determined to retaliate.

The occasion Hitler uses to announce his declaration of war on the United States, and simultaneous unlimited submarine campaign across the Atlantic and Caribbean to US waters, is the day after he learns of the victorious encirclement of the Kiev pocket, which underlines for him that the Soviet Union is doomed to go under in 1941.

The Japanese, while happy to see the US and UK under a new campaign of German pressure, and with some advocates of joining hands in war against the Anglo-Americans about, because of anger over severed economic ties, in the midst, are in the main happy to observe from a distance. Japan’s scavenging policy has allowed it to occupy the Dutch East Indies, mitigating the oil embargo, without war. It has also permitted peaceful occupation of French Indochina in the year since metropolitan France fell to Germany. Would Singapore, Malaya, Burma, the Philippines, India, Guam be nice to possess - certainly. But the Philippines is nearing independence and Japan is appearing to find its politicians ready to take bribes to not cooperate with America or obstruct Japan’s plans in Asia, just as Japan is finding in Thailand. Guam is a minor speck in a Japanese sea. The fate of Singapore will be decided in the Atlantic by Germany as much as by anything Japan does.

Plus, with Chinese forces decaying under blockade and China facing inflation, and a new major IJA campaign planned against the Hunan Rice Bowl and city of Changsha, there is unfinished business in China.
This all adds up to a formidable set of arguments for ‘letting the persimmons ripen’ in the South Seas while ‘cutting down ripe permissons’ in China.

Japan’s Changsha offensive, initiated in September, finally takes the city in November 1941 from Chinese forces weakened by two years of comparative underfunding and isolation compared to OTL. Success at Changsha encourages the Japanese to continue their offensive.

It continues over the winter, taking the rail junction of Hengyang, from there forces continue to march south to meet with another prong go Japanese forces attacking north from Guangzhou in February 1942, giving Japan secure control of the whole Beijing-Wuhan-Guangzhou railway line for the first time in the war, and cutting off Chinese forces to the east. By April 1942, Japanese columns take Guilin in Guangxi province and reach the Indochinese border, providing a continuous zone of Japanese occupation in mainland Asia from the Amur river to the Mekong River Delta, from Harbin to Saigon.

The United States mobilizes and places forces on alert and begins joint global planning with the British.

Although the war has gone global, with Germany, and not Japan, having declared war, America’s strategy isn’t just Europe-first, it’s Europe-only.

The US has a stronger focus on the Battle of the Atlantic, and there is no Pacific campaign, but the U.S. and UK prudently keep up their guard in their Pacific possessions like Hawaii, Midway, Wake, Singapore, Port Moresby and Burma. Garrisons are maintained, but not really reinforced or particularly upgraded in Guam and Hong Kong since those positions are considered indefensible in the event of hostilities with Japan.

While clearly wanting to contain Japan, and to keep Chinese resistance afloat, the clear preference of the Allied powers at this moment is to avoid an open clash with Japan while focusing on containing and then rolling back and defeating Germany.

The greater concentration of naval, air, and shipping resources in the Atlantic, combined with the somewhat earlier overall US build-up, hastens the pace of the war against U-Boats, and ensures enough Allied shipping is enough for the Allied North Africa landings of June 1942 to seize all the Vichy French held ports of Morocco, Algeria, and Tunisia, trapping the Africa Korps, and preventing any German response or reinforcement in Africa.

This ITTL Operation Torch is mainly administrative, followed by combat, which the British 8th Army bears the brunt of, to finish off a trapped Afrika Korps and Italian Army in Libya, which only a few American units get to ephemerally participate in as a blocking force.

This operation is followed up by Allied landings in October 1942 in Sicily and Crete, where they face more stubborn German resistance. This breaks Italian morale, and leads to an invasion of Italy in late December and the invasion/occupation of Sardinia and Corsica by February 1943.

By the beginning of 1943, even as the Italian campaign continues, the prime Anglo-American focus shifts to preparation for the cross-channel invasion of northern France.

Meanwhile the Soviets are grinding the Nazis and their allies back off their territory after defeating the Stalingrad campaign. Unlike OTL, with the vigorous and successful Allied operations in the Mediterranean in 1942 and 1943, Germany cannot even contemplate a strategic offensive like Citadel for the eastern front in 1943.

The Western Allies launch an invasion of the French Riviera at the beginning of June 1943 to seize essential southern French ports, while the Italian offensive liberates Rome.

On August 1st, the Western Allies storm Normandy, and rapidly break out towards Paris.

By New Years Day 1944, all of France and Belgium are liberated, along with all of Italy south of the Po River, while Soviet forces have liberated Crimea, reached Lake Peipus and the Estonian border, the southern Dvina, and the Dnepr river.

A Soviet offensive in January surges across the Dnepr to liberated Ukraine up to the 1938 Soviet border, followed by ops in February liberating Belarus and Estonia and northern Latvia to the Dvina.

In March 1944, the Western Allies, now joined by a revived French army, resumes the offensive and smashes through the Netherlands and Rhineland, gaining bridgeheads across the river, as the Soviets push against Finland, Romania and over the prewar (1938) Polish border. Heavy Allied bomber raids pound Germany against increasingly debilitated Luftwaffe resistance.

By June of 1944, the Western Allies and Soviet forces meet just east of the city of Danzig, at the junction of the Vistula river and Baltic Sea, which leaves the Baltic States, East Prussia, and a section of northeast Poland in Soviet hands. The Allied/Soviet division continues along the Vistula river through Warsaw, and continues south along the San river in Poland at the point where the Vistula river turns abruptly west. Czechoslovakia and Hungary are liberated entirely by western forces, while Soviet forces take the Carpatho-Ukraine, and liberate Romania and Bulgaria. Yugoslav partisans largely complete the liberation of Yugoslavia on their own while this is going on, while British forces dispatched from Crete liberate Greece as the Germans begin their withdrawal. Finland also sues for peace.

At the war’s end in Europe, the Soviet sphere consists of a USSR that restored its June 22, 1941 borders, plus Carpatho-Ukraine, and puppetized buffer states in Bulgaria, Romania, East Poland, an East Prussian German state and Finland. The Western Allies have liberated the conquered Low Countries, Scandinavia, Czechoslovakia, West Poland and Austria, and conquered Germany and Italy.

Meanwhile, since Japan seized contiguous north-south rail corridors through China in April 1942, things have been grim for Nationalist China. Inflation soared, various provinces have suffered from famine, and military action became lethargic. This was despite a rising trickle of western aid offsetting the cancellation of Soviet aid as the Soviets became absorbed in their own defense. By summer 1942 Chinese Nationalists and Japan were in secret talks and in a de facto truce with both concentrating more on anti-communist anti-guerrilla operations. This further weakened Chiang’s prestige and Nationalist morale. The Japanese could never quite offer Chiang suitable terms for capitulation however, so sinking into a phony war with side deals and collusion is all the Sino Japanese war degrades to.

The only other dramatic move the Japanese make is overthrowing the Vichy French administration of French Indochina in August 1943, and the establishment of formally independent, puppet nationalist states in Indochina. Tokyo’s cue to make this move is the end of the last vestiges of Vichyism with the liberation of France.

As WWII ends in Europe in June 1944, the Japanese were successful bandits having gathered loot by small, easy war in the case of the East Indies, peaceful occupation in the case of French Indochina. In China, results have been more mixed. The Japanese, with their puppet regimes, occupy all the most economically important parts of the eastern half of the country. The free zone of China suffers from lethargy, low morale, division, and high inflation. But neither Chiang nor the Communists formally surrendered, and Japan’s long slog to get to this point took way longer than expected.

Post-war, the US and USSR have tensions in Europe over whose Poles, the London Poles, now based in Poznan, or the Soviet-backed Communist Poles, now-based in Lublin, represent Poland. The US also complains about Soviet exclusion of several parties from Romanian, Bulgarian, and Finnish elections. The Soviets have their own complaints about final surrender procedures for various Nazi armies and the administration of occupied Italy which took place without their consultation or participation.

However, these are not the biggest complaints of the leading powers of the United Nations (USSR, UK, USA). Japan’s bloated empire, and its ongoing invasion and occupation of China is.

All the big three Allied powers, now calling themselves, the United Nations, agree Japan should cough up its territories occupied since 1931. All support the restoration of Chinese sovereignty over China, including Manchuria. Britain, backed by France and the Netherlands, supports the restoration of Indochina and the Dutch East Indies to those powers - at most agreeing to a compromise formula where a United Nations inspectorate would oversee their administrations.
The USA and Soviet Union have no interest in restoring the French or Dutch, and prefer UN trusteeships over Indochina and Indonesia, followed by independence.

The new Dewey and Attlee administrations and the government in Australia, while sending cash and surplus weapons to Chiang, are dealing with domestic war-weariness and post-war reconversion and are not eager to cross the threshold into outright coercive war against Japan, even while concentrating naval force in the Far East for a campaign of strong pressure against Japan. The British, and Americans in particular, from their earlier invasions and fight through more of Europe, suffered higher casualties than in OTL’s WWII.

The Soviet Union, while suffering great losses in 1941 and 1942, suffered comparatively lighter losses in 1943, 1944, and of course, with the war being over, 1945. By the spring of 1945, Stalin is eager for the war of payback, the Rasplata, against Japan. The build-up for this begins from the conclusion of the war in Europe in summer 1944.

In early April 1944, Soviet forces launch a grand offensive against Japanese forces facing them. A massive prewar buildup of ground and air power in northern Sakhalin ensured that Soviet forces had the power to not only overwhelm Japanese forces in the southern part of the island, but also to subsequently hold the island against any and all Japanese landing attempts in subsequent months. Similarly, reinforcement to Kamchatka, Khabarovsk, and Primorye provinces made their coastal defenses impregnable.

However, most stunning is the Soviet offensive campaign on the mainland. From April through October, 1945 this unstoppable juggernaut, although occasionally pausing or bypassing strongpoints, works with Chinese forces, Communist and Nationalist, to drive out the Japanese, sweeping them from Manchuria, Korea, and China, from Beijing, all the way south to Guangzhou, Hanoi, and Haiphong, where the Soviets and Chinese link up with the native fighters of Ho Chi Minh.

Facing this military humiliation, and in order to get its economic isolation lifted, Japan sues for peace, and agrees to also cede offshore Choushan and Hainan island back to China and pledges to transition the East Indies to a UN trusteeship aimed at independence. As part of this Australian and Nordic representatives are allowed to enter the East Indies as inspectors.

The western nations are first glad to see China relieved but then frightened to see the sweep of Soviet advances, and outrage at Japan dissipates as its conquests, at least its bloodiest ones in China are torn away from her. So by the end of 1945, the west is looking for an excuse to compromise with and rehabilitate Japan.

This is underlined by the establishment of a Communist regime in Korea in late 1945, Communist regimes accepting a Soviet-led UN “trusteeship” in early 1946 in Indochina, and a Chinese Communist Party coup to seize total power throughout China in 1946, that leaves Chiang Kai-shek and his Nationalist supporters only surviving on the island of Hainan after pulling off a fighting retreat from the mainland.

  Well a lot of developments here.  My main concern is the US allowing such a level of activity into the Med rather than being committed to N France as their preferred/only operation.  It took a lot of work and Britain in a more powerful position as they had more units involved to get the US to agree to a truncated Torch operation.  Which since this ruled out an invasion of N France in 43 they then somewhat reluctantly agreed to the operations in Sicily and then after its early capture S Italy. 

  Here the US has a more advanced military development and also is fully committed to Europe with no distraction in the Far East so I suspect they would be likely to push for N France earlier.  Which in 43 without a wearing down of the German air and ground forces is likely to fail.  However its possibly they accept the importance of securing the Med and important strategic and economic interests there and hence fighting in places like Sicily and S Italy.  Not sure they would agree to landings in Crete in the same period however.  Then likely N France with S France as a 'supporting' activity when resources allow.  True there would be a lot more amphibious forces available without the Pacific war and a lot of those used in the Pacific OTL were probably more useful in the Med than the Atlantic so could prompt a more Med-centric approach.  Although a lot would depend on how heavily the German forces are worn down.  Without Kursk, compared to which any campaign in Italy would be relatively minor its likely to be a lot more powerful.  Coupled with less experience in amphibious activity I'm concerned about how successful this would be.  Also August 43 may be pushing it a bit for a landing in N France, especially if no Mulberries. 

  That aside I could see a lot of the rest lasting although I think that given their sizeable role in the war Stalin would insist that the USSR gets a bigger occupation zone than the former Prussian provinces.  Plus if they keep them as a rump German puppet and presumably still insist on maintaining their 1939 gains from Poland what happens to the German-Polish border?  Is it still moved west to the Oder as OTL with major population movements - ditto but on a small scale with the Sudetenland Germans?  If it doesn't then Poland is split between two pretty small states and the vast bulk of Germany is unified under western control - even if Berlin itself is partitioned as OTL.

  I think you have a typo in having the war end in June 44 but the Soviets attacking Japan in April 44 - suspect you mean 45.  See further down you do refer to the war with Japan lasting April-October.  Which given the sheer distances involved and the terrain could be pushing it.  While the western powers are more war weary - as the US especially will have had markedly more losses and quite probably Britain as well - their likely to give a lot of support to the KMT once the size of the Soviet offensive is seen.

  However overall an interesting and good TL.

  One issue not mentioned is what happens with respective nuclear programmes?  Could say a US one be seriously delayed by cuts in funding once the war ends or would it still be seen as significant.  Britain is likely to continue its own one as a necessary precaution against the Soviets, especially with possible concern about another US retreat from Europe.  However limited resources would be an issue here while also the Soviets have spies in both camps.

[stevep]

Aug 26, 2022 12:25:58 GMT raharris1973 said:

Here is an Additional scenario -

VII. Precocious Panay Problem
An incident, very similar in kind to the Panay incident, happens many years earlier, with possibly different effects, and a longer time horizon for effects to sink in.

The best opportunity for something like this would be during Japan's abortive invasion of Shanghai in January-March 1932, also called "the January incident". en.wikipedia.org/wiki/January_28_incident

That was the only time before September 1937 that there was Sino-Japanese fighting in the busy shipping lanes of the international port of Shanghai.

The 1932, the US was plunging into Depression fast. Banks were failure. Stock markets crashed years before, the 1930 midterms were a wipeout for Republicans. Some were still saying at the beginning of the year that "prosperity was just around the corner" but fewer were believing it, and that was despite the fact that the economy and banking system had *a lot* more distance to fall from January 1932 to January 1933.

This ever-worsening economic crisis makes me think that US responses towards an attack on a US ship in China would lean towards the dovish end, retreat and retrench rather than fight. It simply costs less. People then didn't know that military Keynesianism was a thing, and it tends to be authoritarian and out-and-out reactionary regimes, no honest conservatives in small 'l' liberal democracies, who have the cynicism to think of war as an escape from domestic political difficulty, and the leverage to pull that trick off. Quaker Herbert Hoover wasn't likely to do it. Also, Japan is even more likely than in the OTL Panay incident to pay compensation, and to apologize, with more sincere feeling even among military/naval personnel in 1932 than in the more radicalized later 1930s.

Between Hoover and the transition into the Roosevelt Administration, the US may quietly, but rather briskly, remove the US Marine and Asiatic fleet presence from China. When the Sino-Japanese war expands later on in the 1930s, that will leave Britain and others none too confident in US resolve. Even more, the residue of the warlike clash in the Yangtze may influence the impending Tydings-McDuffie terms for the independence of the Philippines, setting up a faster timetable for those islands independence, and putting in doubt a long-term US fleet presence. Ultimate withdrawal of a US permanent military presence from the Far East may be considered, from a 1933-1934 point of view, to be a logical extension of the demilitarizing 'Good Neighbor' policy also being applied to Latin America at this time. 



[As noted, in this scenario, the incident against a US patrol boat occurs in February 1932 in the waters of Shanghai, and is captured on film, this includes the close in attack on the boat, its sinking, and crew member gunners (who do not survive the attack) downing a Japanese aircraft. Over the ensuing month or so, the Japanese and Americans negotiate a Japanese apology and reparations/compensation to the USA, and the Japanese eventually end the Shanghai incident as they historically did, even while persisting in the takeover of Manchuria. This incident and publicity about it does cause a bit of a sensation in the United States. The Hearst Press and Progressive Senators denounce some media outlets and media interests for promoting “war hysteria” in a lame attempt to prop up stock prices and heavy industrial orders. Many ask what the hell we were doing in China with our country falling apart at home. President Hoover orders a withdrawal from China, and Congress people order a broader review of our forward deployed Navy, Marine, and Army posture in the Pacific, in particular. This review continues through and beyond the 1933 election as the collapse of the banking system and swift rise of nationwide unemployment monopolizes lawmakers attention more and more.
Here is where the timeline can branch a few ways.

In the happy, shiny branch, Japanese mortification over the war scare with America and shame over the ‘accidental’ incident endangering peace among ‘civilized people’, not just war on Chinese bandits, causes the Japanese public and government to criticize and condemn the actions of military extremists and the Kwangtung Army in Manchuria, causing the Tokyo government to wrestle back control of policy and negotiate an end to the Manchurian incident restoring the pre-September 1931 status quo in China and Manchuria, essentially a withdrawal to proper railroad garrisons and a restoration of the province to Zhang Xueliang’s authority, and no establishment of separatist Manchukuo. 1930s Japan, despite a bunch of riots, assassinations, and attempted coups, ends up basically behaving itself internationally for the rest of the 1930s. The riots, assassinations, and attempted coups damage the public reputation of the military over time. Chiang Kai-shek’s policy focus in China is anti-communist rather than anti-Japanese in any case. The new Roosevelt administration’s focus is domestic and not foreign, so naval buildup is not on the American agenda either. The hearings on US overseas military deployments, prompted by the clash in Shanghai in ’32, conclude in ’33, and recommend significant retrenchment of US military activities and deployments around the world, in the Caribbean, Pacific, and especially western Pacific, for reasons of economy and preservation of peace and recommend reliance on non-military instruments to maintain world order and peace. The Roosevelt Administration finds these conclusions simpatico with its ‘Good Neighbor’ policy of disengaging from the Banana Wars and military interventions in the Caribbean, although the US still maintains its control over the Panama Canal Zone, Guantanamo Bay, and Puerto Rico. The effects of the study conclusions are felt in the Pacific where Hawaii, Midway, and Wake Island, and Alaska are named the western bastions of US defense. The withdrawal of the China patrols and Marines are retroactively justified, and a goal of post-independence military self-reliance for the Philippines is recommended. The impact is felt as the Tydings-McDuffie Act, formalizing the process for Filipino independence is designed and passed in 1933-34. As finally written, sentiment to pull back from potential exposed flashpoints in the Pacific leads to a hastened timeline for Filipino independence, 5 years, July 4th 1939, instead of 10 years. In turn the combination of speedier American decolonization, and Japanese disengagement from day-to-day skirmishing in Manchuria, and the lack of success and positive hype about military valor in Manchuria, helps keep Japan from relapsing into an expansionist mindset later in the 1930s. Japan occupies itself with industrial development and ever tighter assimilation and integration of its core empire of Korea, the Guangdong peninsula, Taiwan, and the mandates.

Basically, the net effect of the US-Japanese incident and war scare of 1932, was to frighten, embarrass, or shame both countries, and cause them both to back off from forward policies, and the beneficiaries end up being Chinese Nationalists and Filipino Nationalists.

The increased sway of Chiang Kai-shek’s central government over China as he marginalizes warlords and Communists ends up growing the Chinese economy and increasing Japanese export opportunities, especially as European countries begin to focus on rearmament from 1937-38 on.

The lack of an aggressively expanding Japan on the Asian mainland affects the security calculations of other great powers. It allows Britain and France, whose concessions in China and colonies south of China are less menaced by Japan, to focus defense planning more against Germany and Italy. The pressure relief is greatest for the Soviet Union, which from 1933 on only needs to deal with relatively weak forces of Zhang Xueliang, local warlord generals, and detachments from Chiang Kai-shek all swearing allegiance to the Chinese national government on the Amur river, rather than Japan’s more formidable Kwangtung Army. This allows the Soviet Union a greater focus on the German threat after the rise of the Nazis in Germany.

Unenthusiastic for war, even with little fear of war in the Far East, Britain will be trying on appeasement with the Germans at first on issues like rearmament, the Navy, the Rhineland, and Spain.

The USSR, without the need to bulk up its Far Eastern defenses as much as OTL, or to provide support to China’s United Front in a Sino-Japanese War (that isn’t happening ITTL, can throw more support behind the Spanish Republic, to keep up with German and Italian support for the Spanish Nationalists. This will prolong the Spanish Civil War beyond February 1939. It can also concentrate more of its military build-up in its western military districts and offer more robust assistance to Czechoslovakia during the Sudeten crisis if Czechoslovakia is willing to fight.

Ultimately, Czechoslovakia backs down and surrenders the Sudetenland when the west abandons it at Munich, which excludes the Soviet Union. However, the Soviets, angry at their exclusion from conference, redouble their commitment to the Spanish Republic and prevent the splitting of the Republican pockets of Madrid and Barcelona, further tying down German and particularly Italian resources.

The western reaction to the German occupation of Bohemia is more severe however, the French, and the British promptly declare war on Germany, as does the Soviet Union, and the three impose a blockade and embargo. The French immediately begin a program to provide direct aid to the Spanish Republic from across the border and to deploy colonial troops in support of Spanish Republicans and against Nationalist Spanish Morocco in order to prevent Axis encirclement of France.

France is not ready immediately for an attack on Germany, nor is Germany ready for an immediate attack on France in March 1939, and no BEF is ready for deployment on the continent, so a “phony war” ensues.

Poland holds to a tenuous neutrality, not wanting to become a battlefield or to invite Soviet or German troops onto its lands.

Faced with isolation, blockade, and the western powers and Soviets mobilizing and now reaching the point of rearming faster than him (and humiliating him by overwhelming his Spanish allies and German Condor Legion over the spring and summer), Hitler is determined to assault the Low Countries and France by August 1939. Mussolini meanwhile has been ousted by the Italian King, who was angered by the loss of the Italian volunteer corps in Spain.

The German attack takes the Netherlands and most of Belgium before it bogs down for the winter.
Continued high-cost, low-reward, German attacks that Hitler orders through the winter of 1939-1940 cause the Wehrmacht to launch a coup killing and overthrowing Hitler in early 1940, which leads to Germany suing for peace, withdrawing from the Low Countries, Czechoslovakia, and Austria.
……

Second variant

So much for the happier, shinier, more boring scenario. The likelier event is that the Japanese persist in their Manchukuo shenanigans, become addicted to them, intimidate opponents of militarism with assassination and get on a gradual track leading step by step to all-out war with China.

However, all the conflict-averse steps I mentioned on the US side remain the same.

However, like OTL, the path to all-out Sino-Japanese war is interrupted by the truces of the years 1933-1937, where Japan exercises authority over only Manchukuo, eastern Inner Mongolia (Mengjiang) and compels China to respect a demilitarized zone in Hebei province between Beijing and Tianjin and the Great Wall.

The French meanwhile have found the US abrupt withdrawal from Shanghai disturbing. The British do not like it either. The broader American intent to retreat regionally, signaled by the Tydings-McDuffie Act in 1934 is even more unwelcome, especially to the French, who sitting in Hanoi across the South China Sea from Manila, see impending Filipino independence as weakening the white man’s position in Asia, and as a stimulus for Vietnamese independence agitation, alongside Russian Communism, Japanese militarism, and Chinese nationalism.

The British are a little bit less panicked.

Events in Europe are really agitating the French however, notably German rearmament and the reestablishment of a German air force. But what takes the cake is the lack of British reliability as an ally. The June 1935 Anglo-German Naval Agreement seems to kick the legs out from under the anti-German Stresa Front when it is barely two months old.

This combination of allied (American) weakening and desertion in the lower priority area of the Far East, and allied (British) unreliability and double-dealing with France’s greatest potential threat in its zone of vital interest in Europe, and the late and brutal onset of the Depression in France prompts a ruthless prioritization and rebalancing of French global assets and liabilities.

This leads to Franco-Japanese secret negotiations in autumn 1935 for the sale of French Indochina to Japan. The shocking deal involves an enormous lump sum of gold and hard currency, with additional portions of the balance to be paid off in raw materials and labor services. The transfer transition, and installment payments, are set to be carried out between October 1935 and October 1937.

France aims to use the proceeds primarily to support rearmament against Germany, and Italy. The evaporation of need for naval protection against Japan indeed allows France to soon begin relocating more naval ships from Indochina to Djibouti, Tunisia, and Algeria to watch over Italy in the Red Sea and Mediterranean.

The graduated acquisition of all Indochina, and the expense of it, encourages the Japanese civil government and Army and Navy high commands to keep their field forces around the Manchukuo-China buffer zone and in Chinese waters on a tight leash to prevent escalation to outright war over this time.

Japanese Army and Navy budgetary outlays are less than OTL over 1935-1937. But by 1937 there are several new Army garrison and Fleet base command positions available in Indochina, plus opportunities for civil bureaucrats and zaibatsu.

Absorption of Indochina, and lesser frontline combat strength, encourages the relatively cautious status quo policy of not pressing on further into China. The most hotheaded commanders in the IJA are sent to the border with a softer target, Siam. In 1938, a Japanese campaign occupies Bangkok and the entirety of the Siamese Kingdom, extending Japanese power to the Indian Ocean via the Kra Isthmus.
Spared immediate Japanese pressure in 1935-1937, continued Chinese Nationalist offensives drive Chinese Communist forces further northwest into Gansu and Xinjiang provinces.

In Europe, diplomatic events in the 1930s unfold similarly to OTL. France has more funds to invest earlier in defense however.
The Allies appease as long as OTL.

In July 1939, the Philippines become independent.

In 1939, war breaks out over Poland.

In early 1940, with the US out of the Philippines, the Soviets bogged down in Finland, and the western European powers wrapped up in the phony war, the Japanese Navy takes the opportunity to attack the East Indies colony of the neutral country of the Netherlands, in a short, private war.

In spring 1940, Hitler launches a bold attack on Scandinavia. A month later, on the Low Countries and France. Here the French hold the Germans off at the Meuse because of earlier mobilization, better training, and earlier purchasing and integration of aircraft and radios into the force. The strong French persistence holding the line in western Belgium and northern France deters Italy from joining the war.

Germany is ultimately rolled back and beaten by spring 1943, with a Soviet force liberating Poland, Czechoslovakia, eastern Germany, and Hungary, an Anglo-French force liberating western Germany, and an Italian force liberating Austria and Bavaria south of the Danube.

The democracies consider Italy a minor rogue actor and thief with a minor ill-gotten imperium of Ethiopia, Albania, Austria, and southern Bavaria.

The Soviets are a much more formidable dictatorial menace whose power now extends to Prague, Budapest, and Berlin.

The Japanese were quite the successful bandits having gathered loot by legitimate purchase in Indochina, and by small, easy wars in the case of Manchuria, Siam, and the East Indies. They are currently in a state of high tension with a rising China.



…..

Third variant of VII

So much for the happier, shinier, more boring scenario. The likelier event is that the Japanese persist in their Manchukuo shenanigans, become addicted to them, intimidate opponents of militarism with assassination and get on a gradual track leading step by step to all-out war with China.

However, all the conflict-averse steps I mentioned on the US side remain the same.

The Japanese full-scale war with China begins about the same time as OTL, the summer of 1937. There is no 1937 Panay incident because there are no US gunships to be hit. The British and French for the moment feel obliged to maintain their concessionary rights in China, including their limited numbers of ships and troops. They lament they lack US support, absent since 1932, but it is not felt as a sudden desertion in the midst of the present war in 1937. The overall shrinkage of the US Asiatic Fleet is considered an unfavorable factor also. But the British and even French feel they have inescapable colonial stakes in East Asia, and the Japanese aim their aggression initially squarely at the Chiang Kai-shek regime, so they keep their presence, and provide aid to the Chiang regime.

In 1938, the Sino-Japanese war spreads to Wuhan and Guangzhou. In 1939, to help complete the blockade of China, Japan seizes Hainan island. The summer of 1939 sees the Japanese have dual crises with Britain and the USSR. With Britain in the spring and summer they have the Tianjin blockade, to pressure Britain on numerous China policy disagreements. This is resolved by compromise in early August. With the USSR they have the Nomonhan incident, which balloons into a border war that the USSR wins decisively, leading to Japanese restraint on the border, and Japanese near-term estrangement from Germany. July 1939 also sees the granting of Filipino independence, and the Filipino President and Congress’s declaration of the Philippines as a ‘perpetually neutral’ state, declining any overtures for a continued US naval base.
In September 1939, WWII breaks out.

Germany defeats France in May-June 1940. This revives German popularity in Japan, inspires Japan to sign the Tripartite Pact, and encourages Japan to occupy northern Indochina to block supplies to China. The US launches scrap iron sanctions in response.

In July 1941 Japan occupies southern Indochina, and the US puts Japan under total embargo and financial freeze with the UK and Netherlands following suit. Japan goes to war against the British Empire and DEI in December 1941, but does not attack the US. Japanese Army and Navy planners do not regard US involvement in war between Japan and Britain and Netherlands inevitable, and so choose to bypass US Pacific possessions like Hawaii, Midway island, Wake Island and Guam. Guam is held under observation from surrounding Japanese mandated archipelagos. The Philippines are observed closely from the Japanese held Taiwan, Palaus, and Spratlys, and its political leaders are told that any deviation from neutrality or naval collusion with the American, British or Dutch will compel a Japanese occupation. The lack of American bases and routine access in the Republic of the Philippines causes the Japanese to consider the threat from a neutral US manageable, not requiring the risk of a preventive strike.]

The US serves as the Arsenal of Democracy (and Communism too) with the ever expanding Lend-Lease program to the UK, USSR, and China. It is in an undeclared naval war with the Germans in the Atlantic and extended its hemispheric defense zone to Iceland.
By no later than April 1942, after multiple naval clashes in the Atlantic, and the US escorting Lend-Lease convoys all the way to Londonderry and Liverpool, Hitler unleashes his U-Boats for unlimited warfare across the entire Atlantic and declares war on the United States.

The United States mobilizes and places forces on alert and begins joint global planning with the British.

The United States issues a demand for Japanese evacuation of British Imperial territorial, and Japan responds by declaring war and storming Guam, and attacking Wake Island.

However, Japan does not attempt a fleet strike on Pearl Harbor because it appears too alert and well guarded.
Although the war has gone global, with Germany having been the first Axis power to go to war with the USA, US strategy, is noticeably more “Europe-first”.

The Japanese also launch an attack on the Philippines after issuing an ultimatum insisting on an alliance and acceptance of Japanese forces use of Filipino facilities. The Filipinos reject the ultimatum, insisting on their neutrality, for the record, and engage in token resistance for about a week before capitulating to Japanese terms, in a manner somewhat similar to Siam/Thailand in December 1941.

The US has a stronger focus on the Battle of the Atlantic, and without the MacArthur factor and ‘I Shall Return’ vow in the Philippines, there is no substantial Southwest Pacific campaign. There is aeronaval skirmishing and raiding around the Japanese perimeter, while the Americans are building up their fleet train to be ready to launch a Central Pacific drive by the beginning of 1944.

The greater concentration of naval, air, and shipping resources in the Atlantic hastens the pace of the war against U-Boats, and ensures enough Allied shipping is enough for the Allied North Africa landings of January 1943 to seize all the Vichy French held ports of Morocco, Algeria, and Tunisia, trapping the Africa Korps, and preventing any German response or reinforcement in Africa.

This ITTL Operation Torch is mainly administrative, followed by combat, which the British 8th Army bears the brunt of, to finish off a trapped Afrika Korps and Italian Army in Libya, which only a few American units get to ephemerally participate in as a blocking force.

This operation is followed up by Allied landings in April 1943 in Sicily and Crete, where they face more stubborn German resistance. This breaks Italian morale, and leads to an invasion of Italy in late June and the invasion/occupation of Sardinia and Corsica by August 1943.

By the fall of 1943, even as the Italian campaign continues, the prime Anglo-American focus shifts to preparation for the cross-channel invasion of northern France.

In Asia, the focus for 1944 is on an American supported British and Chinese effort to open to Burma road, and in the Pacific, on the launching of a Central Pacific drive through the Marshalls and Marianas.

Meanwhile the Soviets are grinding the Nazis and their allies back off their territory.

The Western Allies launch an invasion of the French Riviera at the beginning of April to seize essential southern French ports, while the Italian offensive liberates Rome.

On May 1st, the Western Allies storm Normandy.

The Western Allies and Soviet forces meet along the Oder River and the Bohemia-Slovakia junction and Lake Balaton in Hungary west of Budapest in early December 1944.

Meanwhile in the Pacific, the Japanese fleet has been heavily damaged and the US has taken Saipan in the Marianas, and is now launching bombing raids on Japan from there.

The liberation of Burma quickens in the winter of 1944-45. The USSR declares war on Japan on April 1, 1945, launching a massive offensive on Manchuria, northern China, and Korea.

Further campaigning in 1945 sees the USA take Okinawa and begin invasion preparation. In territorial terms, the British have more sweeping success in Thailand, Malaya, Sumatra and Borneo, and the Soviets also do so in liberating all of Sakhalin, the Kuriles, all Korea, and China down to the cities of Shanghai and Wuhan, and the Chinese liberate their own southeastern provinces.

Japan is battered and discouraged and offering peace by the summer but on terms the Allies cannot take seriously. The use of the atomic bomb in early August gives the Japanese the excuse to accept surrender on Allied terms.

  Some interesting alternatives here and it also shows how small variables to the start position can have significant changes very quickly.

[oscssw]

Great idea for an ATL.  As you folks know I have long been interested in the River Rats of the USN Yangtze Patrol.

I think I have mentioned that I actually worked for one, all be it a very, very late member of that illustrious group of "China Sailors". It was not until I came across The Sand Pebbles Novel that I began to understand the man.  Hell, I even wore my white hat Steve McQueen PacFleet style, when on liberty.

Now my two bits FWIW on your possible scenarios

 
I. Pugilistic Path to Primacy

Now we get to see what a real Jutland style BB action might be like.

Yup War Plan Orange would be used initially but it would be interesting to see with forced CV building and development if the climactic BB battle would look like.    The Naval aircraft would not benefit from the hothouse expedited development an ongoing European war would bring.  So we have TBDs and F3Fs as mainstays of the US carrier force?
No radar advantage to the USN and ours fish would still be disastrous.

The US would become a cobelligerent of China, offering it credits and weapons, and the US would start industrial mobilization and enlargement of the fleet.

That is very probable under FDR.

The Japanese would try to draw out the Americans into early decisive battle on favorable terms, attriting them on their way to the interior of the Japanese held Pacific.

They might try but the USN 1937 Fleet train was no way up to supporting such a cross pacific thrust, without advancing logistic bases and that means both sides would be using up their prewar fleets and trained sailors.

II. Pugnacious Posturing Promoting Political Propositions

I think that is all too possible. At least that is what I'd put my money on in real life.

The US people are still very isolationist and quite frankly the loss of a two bit gunboats the Christian churches have long deplored and a few disreputable US sailors most of the population does not give a damn about

would give the Pols an easy out.  Especially if the Japanese paid reparations to the families of the US sailors.   We were still in the tghroes a great depression and sand bowl etc.

III. Purposeful Proxy Prop-Up

Aid to China

Here, the US would not be seeking to go to war or to significantly increase its chances of getting into one, but it would seek to “stand up” in a material way to Japanese aggression to counter its affects, by aiding the principal victim of Japanese aggression, China, with credits and arms. The motivations who ould be moral, and practical (to keep the Japanese unsuccessful and busy)

Good Possibility but it all has to be paid for in a depression.  I'd still bet on II.
IV. Petroleum Prohibition
     Severe economic sanctions

Nope the US depression era economy needs those export dollars badly.  The GOP could really stick it to FDR.  Politically a bad idea.  II is much better.

V. Prudently Pusillanimous Partial Pullback

   A pull-out of Marines, Naval flotillas, concession protection from China and a travel at your own risk advisory

      No. There are American citizens and legitimate, politically powerful commercial interests in China that need that Jarhead presence. See II   The American Ego of that time would be bruised if the Little Brown "Monkeys" kicked us hearty, white pioneering Americans out of China..... IAW political very, very risky for FDR.

VI. Para-Pacifistic Panic & Profligate Pan-Asian Pullback

No I don't think the powers that be in the USA would be willing to go along with American abdication in the Western Pacific.

 Being the blood thirsty fellow I am I'd say I. would be the most fun ATL

but that's just me.....I'm funny that way.