Victorious Japanese Arms

Updated Sunday 15 May, 2011 12:18 PM

©Final Sword Productions, 2003

The POD for this one is the Doolittle Raid. In our TL it led to the Midway operation, which was a disaster for Japan, producing rough naval parity in the Pacific. We will make the following changes:

1. Have the Emperor take an active hand [possible if you buy the revisionist theory that he was actively in charge of the war effort], and insist the initial war plan be kept. This plan was essentially seize a perimeter, entrench and bleed the US till it is willing to negotiate.

2. So Coral Sea will be a full fleet operation with all 6 carriers instead of the two carrier group as in OTL.

3. Have some German naval attaché prevail on the Japanese to use German submarine tactics [going after merchant shipping] instead of the Japanese insistence of chasing warships or serving as fleet scouts. Australia, New Zealand and Oceania have VERY few major ports. Targeting gets very easy if you concentrate on interdicting these.

4. As a byproduct of this change in submarine tactics, have the Japanese pay attention to anti-submarine warfare. In OTL they built few escorts, didn’t use their small carriers for anti-sub work, didn’t in the main use convoys and had no ministry to coordinate shipping. Commercial, navy and army transports sailed partially full rather than take cargos from anyone else. The RN worked out all the elementary answers in 1917-18 when Japan was allied to the UK. Just dig out some older naval officers who were posted to the Admiralty in that period.

The first obvious change comes at the Coral Sea. The US loses both carriers and the landings are a success. So Australia will lose its remaining piece of New Guinea very quickly.

The Japanese now follow plan, stop and entrench. The battle of the Atlantic in OTL delayed the Normandy invasion by over a year. The Pacific is bigger than the Atlantic. The Atlantic was the priority for the Allies. The UK is a much stronger base than Oceania. So the South and Southwest Pacific offensives from OTL do not happen.

In OTL the South – Southwest Pacific essentially resulted in the mutual destruction of both carrier fleets plus large numbers of planes, men, material and surface ships. This attrition in turn made possible the Central Pacific offensive that beat Japan together with the US submarine blockade.

Here the attrition doesn’t start until late 43 when the Essex class carriers, etc. start to arrive in force. The US is still vastly outproducing Japan. So let us make the attrition phase a year instead of the year and a half in OTL.

The dates now get important. The attrition phase will just be ending in December of 1944. Japan will have lost the Solomons, Tarawa and Paupa – New Guinea. West Irian, the Philippines, the rest of the Mandated Territories, and the Marianas will still be Japanese. They will be fortified and garrisoned far more heavily than in OTL. So when the great scare to the West comes in the Ardennes, FDR will have some hard choices to make. In OTL the final strategic reserve in the US was stripped and sent to Ike. Doing so here will mean postponing the Philippines or Marianas till after the end of the war in Europe.

My presumption is that Ike still gets the divisions, replacements, etc. Europe is the priority. The Philippine offensive gets scrapped. This in turn means staking everything on the Marianas. So we hit them in January of 1945. However, they are an Okinawa type campaign. Two hundred thousand Japanese die. There are one hundred thousand US casualties. [The Iwo / Okinawa ratios were 1 US casualty [not death, casualty] for every 2 Japanese defenders]. In OTL the Japanese Army was very late paying attention to the navy’s war in the Pacific instead of ‘their’ war on the mainland. Here we have them paying more attention faster.

The cost of the Marianas makes it impossible to continue the Pacific offensive till after the fall of Hitler. The air campaign is getting started half a year later. It will not have fighter cover from Iwo. The submarine campaign is less effective by fiat, see above. We are doing major damage but Japan is not anywhere near starvation or collapse.

Let us now jump to May of 1945. The war in Europe ends. In OTL there were riots and mutinies in the US Army Europe over men refusing to be shipped out to the Pacific. In this TL we would be looking at no demobilization till the fall of Japan. Given the domestic political realities and the rapidly darkening relations with Stalin my guess is that Truman gets a cabinet consensus to begin negotiations with Japan. Japan gives up the remaining Pacific Islands and the Philippines. The East Indies is probably divided. Japan is left with its holding on the Asian mainland and [hypothetically Sumatra and Java]. Without a US – Japanese War, Stalin probably does not choose to attempt to take Manchuria.