WW2: The Composition and Capabilities of the Japanese Military

[Agent Miles]

The Japanese failure in WW2 is a failure of strategy. All of the forces that were directed at sandy beaches and jungle swamps should have fallen on the U.S. alone. The strike at PH should have been coordinated with a simultaneous assault on Midway. The IJN had enough carriers to do this. Then take Hawaii with all the divisions that can float backed up by ten carriers vs. three U.S. The U.S. military was totally unprepared to defend the West Coast in 1942. FDR would have to sign a truce on the deck of the Yamato in the Japanese colony of Los Angeles. With the U.S. knocked out, taking the rest of the Pacific would have been a fait accompli. Boom baby!

[Husar]

That is similar to what I always thought.
when the japanese attacked the US had almost nothing but a few ships in the theatre.
Actually loads of ships but almost no planes and the ones there were mostly old so the japanese could probably have secured air superiority easily and the rest would have been securing the craters, similar to the modern US strategy.

[Strike For The South]

The Japanese failure in WW2 is a failure of strategy. All of the forces that were directed at sandy beaches and jungle swamps should have fallen on the U.S. alone. The strike at PH should have been coordinated with a simultaneous assault on Midway. The IJN had enough carriers to do this. Then take Hawaii with all the divisions that can float backed up by ten carriers vs. three U.S. The U.S. military was totally unprepared to defend the West Coast in 1942. FDR would have to sign a truce on the deck of the Yamato in the Japanese colony of Los Angeles. With the U.S. knocked out, taking the rest of the Pacific would have been a fait accompli. Boom baby!

Thats what the civilians in Los Angeles thought. There is no way this would happen. For the simple fact of the resources it would've cost. Not to mention the Japanese couldn't had committed land forces and kept supply lines open.

The Japanese mistake was attacking the USA in the first place.

[Sarmatian]

The Japanese failure in WW2 is a failure of strategy. All of the forces that were directed at sandy beaches and jungle swamps should have fallen on the U.S. alone. The strike at PH should have been coordinated with a simultaneous assault on Midway. The IJN had enough carriers to do this. Then take Hawaii with all the divisions that can float backed up by ten carriers vs. three U.S. The U.S. military was totally unprepared to defend the West Coast in 1942. FDR would have to sign a truce on the deck of the Yamato in the Japanese colony of Los Angeles. With the U.S. knocked out, taking the rest of the Pacific would have been a fait accompli. Boom baby!

Maybe in an alternate universe. They didn't have the manpower or the resources to do that. Their oil reserves couldn't last a year.

The reason they invaded all those islands was to get oil (and other resources, not just oil). The best Japan could have hoped for was crippling US fleet, getting withing striking distance of American Pacific coast and pray that US would sue for peace rather than let its western cities be bombed. Their entire strategy was that US act similar to Russia in 1905.

But an actual invasion of continental US across the Pacific??? Impossible... That would have been more ludicrous than trying to reach Moscow through Siberia...

[Don Esteban]

As I understand it the plan was to knock out all the US' aircraft carriers at Pearl Harbour so that they couldn't defend the Pacific. With freedom to cruise around the pacific Japan would be able to threaten the west coast with bombing raids rather than a land invasion and this should have been enough to make the US come to terms.

Yamamoto predicted that the Japanese could invade freely for a year and then would be in trouble and he was fully aware that Japan would lose once they failed to catch the aircraft carriers at Pearl Harbour. Also he was supposedly against declaring war on the US in the first place but was overulled.

[Agent Miles]

The Japanese eventually got around to a very possible Midway invasion, so that they could invade Hawaii. Nothing less than miraculous luck really made it impossible even that late in 1942. All of the supplies and fuel that were used to gobble up empty islands should have been directed right from the start at the U.S. The Japanese seemed to have the supplies to overrun the south Pacific from their logistics base at Truk so I think that they could have done the same to the West Coast from a base in Hawaii.
Remember, The U.S. was totally unprepared to defend the West Coast. The Japanese army that had raped Nanking is most likely going to take L.A., even if they will run out of supplies. Now you assure FDR that the Japs don’t have the logistics to win a protracted war and so what if one quarter of the U.S. aircraft industry is in or around L.A. The President would have to choose to watch California undergo a destruction that would have made Sherman’s march to the sea pale in comparison, just to win this logistics war. In the meantime, Britain and Russia would surely starve as the U.S. was fighting for its life. PH was a tragic embarrassment. This would have been a disaster that could only be avoided by a truce.
"L'audace, l'audace, toujours l'audace!"

[CBR]

And this article shows the logistical impossibility of invading Pearl Harbor. http://www.combinedfleet.com/pearlops.htm

But one Japanese error at Pearl Harbor was that they did not send in a third wave to hit the fuel depots and machine shops. Another error was not using their submarines to hit US freighters and tankers when they had a good chance at doing a lot of damage in the first months.

That could have set back the US effort maybe a year back or more. Of course one can doubt if it would have changed the overall outcome.


CBR

[Agent Miles]

And that article by a PC gamer discusses an invasion after the conquest of all the jungles that the Japanese wasted their effort on. That probably is true, except, that I ‘m talking about a DoW on the U.S. only, followed by a blitzkrieg aimed at the West Coast. Every bit of logistics that was used to move troops thousands of miles to take places like Rabaul, etc., instead is aimed at Midway and then Hawaii. The entire IJN focused on one immediate goal, Invasion U.S.A. We can be very jaded today about how incredibly lucky we were, but that doesn’t change the situation as it really was. The Japanese had the best fighter in the world, pilots with thousands of combat hours, more carriers and battlewagons, better optics, heavy cruisers with killer torpedoes, a light infantry army that didn’t need miles of trucks to supply it, and years of experience at the business at hand. Somehow it takes more logistics to take L.A. than to do all the other conquests that the Japanese managed instead? That’s everyone’s point, right?

[CBR]

Somehow it takes more logistics to take L.A. than to do all the other conquests that the Japanese managed instead? That’s everyone’s point, right?

A quick look on a map (Google maps will do just fine) will show you the difference in distance from Japan-US west coast compared with Japan-Indonesia.

Not only do you need to have shipping capacity to transport the units you also need shipping to supply them. Japan barely had capacity enough to take its objectives in SE Asia.


CBR

[Strike For The South]

And that article by a PC gamer discusses an invasion after the conquest of all the jungles that the Japanese wasted their effort on. That probably is true, except, that I ‘m talking about a DoW on the U.S. only, followed by a blitzkrieg aimed at the West Coast. Every bit of logistics that was used to move troops thousands of miles to take places like Rabaul, etc., instead is aimed at Midway and then Hawaii. The entire IJN focused on one immediate goal, Invasion U.S.A. We can be very jaded today about how incredibly lucky we were, but that doesn’t change the situation as it really was. The Japanese had the best fighter in the world, pilots with thousands of combat hours, more carriers and battlewagons, better optics, heavy cruisers with killer torpedoes, a light infantry army that didn’t need miles of trucks to supply it, and years of experience at the business at hand. Somehow it takes more logistics to take L.A. than to do all the other conquests that the Japanese managed instead? That’s everyone’s point, right?

There is no way the Japanese step foot on the US mainland. I wish they had tried the war would've been over by '42.

Besides what does the US offer anyway? A longer front ? Broken supply lines? Do you really think FDR would've negotiated with the sub-human japs? It would've been a disaster complete and utter.

[Meneldil]

The error of Japan was not to attack the US or to not try a land invasion of the west coast, but to think that this war was similar to 19th-century wars.

They expected the US to surrender right after PH, just like Russia did in 1905 after losing (badly) its Eastern navy.
The thing is, the US were contempting entering the war against Germany, and FDR perfectly knew that what was going on was a total war on a global scale. Not some 'I defeated you once so you have to accept my peace treaty" old kind of war, but a "We'll fight till one of us is almost dead and beg for his life" one.

Unlike Germany, Japan wasn't ready for a total-full-scale war. Things got out of hands in China because the Kuomintang (and later, the CCP) were too stuborn to give up, and because the local japanese generals went crazy (against the IJA headquarters' opinion), not because Japan wanted to conquer whole China and exterminate the Chinese population. They did it because they couldn't force the nationalists to accept peace, and thus, had to fight to death.

I'm pretty sure that even a land invasion in California wouldn't have been enough to impose a peace treaty to the US. Japan would likely have had to invade the whole country, and completely defeat the will of the american population, which is probably even more impossible than invading Russia.

[Agent Miles]

After the war, Stalin confided in his daughter that at one point, his staff raced out to his dacha, where normally he was never disturbed, to tell him that German scout units had been sighted near Moscow. Stalin told her that he was initially certain that his staff had come out to shoot him and surrender to the Fascists. What if his staff had done this? If Stalin was fearful, then it came that close. A smug plan to defeat a nation over several years by burying them with numbers doesn’t work if you are beaten in several months.
FDR wanted to beat Hitler first, perhaps because of Einstein’s expressed fear that the Nazis were developing the bomb. A Japanese invasion would certainly monopolize U.S. resources. T-34’s may have stopped the Wehrmacht, but lend-lease fed the Russians and the UK. To stop the Japanese in the U.S., FDR would have to turn his back on Stalin and Churchill. The Japanese don’t have to cross the Mississippi and take D.C. FDR could not afford an invasion and a protracted war in the U.S. Imagine a Bataan death march by millions of Californians.