Posts made by bigbadgoo

The context here is that one cannot assume that an attack on the Soviet Union would have brought either British or American intervention.  The Japanese would have chosen a war with Russia over attacking the Dutch, British and American possessions in Asia.  The British wanted the Soviet Union to fight on against Germany, but if it meant risking all of her far flung colonies in the East to declare war on Japan for such an attack, they would have hesitated to declare over a Russo-Japanese conflict.  On the US side Roosevelt couldn’t sell a war to the public over the Sino/Japanese war, even after the fall of Shanghai.  He couldn’t even sell an intervention in the European war even with the fall of France.  The anti-Soviet feelings in America were as high as the anti-interventionist feelings.  So, in this scenario, Japanese ambitions in China have to be more limited, but they can clearly hold their early takings.  Certainly they would have had to limit their war in China, but given the ineptitude of the Chinese military to mount major offensives…even in late 1944 when so much of the Japanese war material was already depleted, there is really not much risk of the Chinese gaining any territory.  If the bulk of the Japanese airforce was allocated to the war with Russia, not having to contend with the Americans or British or Dutch, many of their non-mechanized shortcomings could have been made up.  For Japan, the decision to bring the United States into the war seems like a decision that could have no other end but defeat.  Jeffrey Parrett points out in his book, that within a month of the attack on Pearly Harbor, American factories were producing more airplanes in a month than the Japanese were in an entire year.  So the Russian option was one that would have prevented US intervention.  Even the crippling American embargo only followed on the heals of the Japanese takeover of bases in French Indo China, which of course were for the purpose preparing for war against the Western powers.  Of course, while it did contain some resources, and really more than the Axis and Allies board game lays out, the Soviet Far East could not provide the resources of the Dutch East Indies and the interior of China.  Several of you have rightly pointed out the distances involved and the logistical nightmare a wider war in Russia would have been.  At the same time, some of you have also point out that the shock troops that drove the Germans back after the failure of Operation Typhoon were in fact some of these Eastern forces that had made their way back to Moscow because of the lack of Japanese threat in the East.

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@Adlertag:

If Spain had joined Germany, then Portugal would had joined the Allies, and then the Allies would have attacked and utterly destroyed Spain. And even if Germany had won the battle, what was the benefit ? No oil in Spain. No oil in UK. In 1940 UK was a little island short of resources, actually the brits was dependet on convoys to survive. So if Germany did conquer UK, they would only get 50 000 000 more hungry mouths to feed, and a poor island with a lot of fog. Only USA would benefit from a weak UK. So what would be the big idea ?

I doubt Portugal would have joined the the Allies.  If you recall, Salazar, the right-wing dictator was in power there and had sent over 10,000 troops to fight with the Nationalists in the Spanish Civil War.  He would have certainly followed Franco’s lead and either joined as well, looking for some tempting colonial exploits in Africa or at the very least remained a fairly hostile neutral to the Allies.

Japanese military leaders spent a great deal of time arguing over whether or not to break their Non-Aggression Treaty with the Soviets and invade the back half of the Soviet Union.  Several Army leaders saw the Soviets, and not the Americans, as the real threat to their control of East Asia (and probably harbored deep-seated ill-will since the Russo Japanese War)  In the end, those favoring the attack on the Western Powers won out and Japan never did attack the Soviet Union.  If they had joined the war against the Soviets in mid 1941, would it have made a decisive difference?

I have to go with Spain, though neither country would have ultimately tipped the balance.  Turkey is an intriguing alliance because one might think with the added Turkish pressure on the Caucasus front, that the Russians might have been permanantly driven from the area around the Crimea.  But there are a lot of negatives there as well.  Turkey was even less stable at the time than Spain, if thats possible, and its under equipped armies would not just have been fighting the Russians on that front.  The Allies were very quick to regain Vichy French Syria, put down the revolt in Iraq and Persia was occupied as well.  Turkey would then have been assailed on all fronts.  Perhaps it would have diverted some more forces, and maybe in the very early stages that could have made the difference, but I think Spain offers the tantalizing aspect of a conquest of Gibralter as well as further U-Boat bases for the Battle of the Atlantic.  It made the territory the Allies would have to capture in the West that much more comprehensive, plus the Spanish Nationalists had already been fighting with German and Italian planes, tanks, and artillery anyway.  Spain may not have held out long if invaded, but neither did Italy, yet it would have been, like Italy, extremely difficult to capture, with a great deal of mountain fighting and stretched supply lines.  All of this would have helped buy time for the Germans to press home a technilogical advantage like the Jet fighters.  Of course, the A-bomb is going trump all of those things, and the common consensus is the Germans were pretty far away from achieving a workable atom bomb of their own.