Japan does not attack USA in 1941

[islington]

I've been pondering this.

Suppose Japan had entered WW2 at the same time as she did, in December 1941, but had merely attacked the Far Eastern interests of Britain and other European powers (French, Dutch), as well as carrying on the existing war in China, and had left the USA severely alone.

I ask this because 'Don't pick a fight with the USA' strikes me as generally sound advice and I wonder what would happen if Japan had been guided by it.

[Defenestrated Fipplebox]

Japan attacked The Philippines in 1941, it was a US possession. The US would have been dragged in, unless Japan avoided every single US possession, which was never going to happen. War may have been delayed in a another scenario but the clash between the US and Japan was inevitable.

[islington]

Well, I meant more if Japan had gone out of her way to avoid action against any direct US interest (therefore including the Philippines, Guam, &c).

Look at Japan's approach regarding the Soviet Union. Even though there were plenty of potential flashpoints in the Soviet Far East, and there had been a number of quite serious skirmishes in the previous few years, and despite the fact that in December 1941 the Soviet Union was already at war with Germany and Italy, Japan made strenuous efforts to avoid war.

What I am asking is what would have happened if Japan had taken a similar approach to the US.

This would still have left her with plenty of opportunities for military aggression: in China, against Australia and NZ, and against British, French and Dutch possessions in the Far East. She wasn't short of people to fight: would it not have made sense, from her point of view, to avoid adding the US to her list of enemies if she could?

I'm sure in this scenario the US would have lent strategic support to Britain in the Far East, as she was already doing in the Atlantic. But would the US have gone to war herself?

[jamesg]

Japan went for the Philippines because attacking the British and Dutch possessions further south would have left those adventures exposed in the flank between Formosa and Malay/Singapore/Brunei/Dutch East Indies. That was how they saw the matter. So they had to hit the Philippines, and thus Hawaii too, once there was a commitment to having to strike against the Americans: why give one jab on the nose when two punches in the face could be done?
It could have been possible to ignore the Philippines, from a technical point of view, but that wasn't how decades of Japanese military strategy had gone. Their naval history was welded to the idea of one big naval battle in the vein of Tsushima... what they got at Midway in fact. They believed that should they just attack in the south, US naval forces would gather in strength around the Philippines, supported by air cover from there, and then attack them at the American's moment of choosing. No way would they allow that. They didn't want to give the US the chance to gather its naval strength and come at them in the middle of their stretched lines of communication.
What they actually launched against the US - not the British and Dutch - was a pre-emptive war, in their thinking anyway. They were stopping a sure-fire US later attack by lashing out first. To not do that would mean junking decades of experience and thinking on warfare. It was far easier to go with what they knew, what had always worked, than risk something new.
Personally, I have always been of the view that Japan should have ignored the Philippines and risked it all if they really wanted to win. They went to war for the resources in the south, not what little was in the Philippines. FDR would have aided the British and Dutch but without an excuse, he would have had a lot of trouble getting the US into a war without being attacked first. 

[Richard Cromwell]

The more likely "Japan does not attack the US" scenario results either from a successful coup d'etat by the Kodoha faction in 1936 or a Japanese victory at Khalkhin Gol in 1939, leading to Japan following the "Strike North" policy of an invasion of Siberia and avoiding the pacific entirely.

If hypothetically, however, the Japanese still decided to fight a pacific campaign, judiciously avoiding US possessions then the result, I imagine, that WWII becomes an even more horrifying, drawn-out and gruelling slog - and the US enters in the mid-to-late forties to put an end to it.

[J.G.Harston]

Jun 19, 2021 15:28:19 GMT Richard Cromwell said:

The more likely "Japan does not attack the US" scenario results either from a successful coup d'etat by the Kodoha faction in 1936 or a Japanese victory at Khalkhin Gol in 1939, leading to Japan following the "Strike North" policy of an invasion of Siberia and avoiding the pacific entirely.

If hypothetically, however, the Japanese still decided to fight a pacific campaign, judiciously avoiding US possessions then the result, I imagine, that WWII becomes an even more horrifying, drawn-out and gruelling slog - and the US enters in the mid-to-late forties to put an end to it.

I think 1940 was set in stone decades earlier by the failures to keep Japan in the British sphere of influence. In the 19th century there was recipricol Japanophillia and Anglophillia, the UK was the favoured destination for Japanese overseas students, engineers and political reformers. We were seen as similar island nations, standing offshore from a larger continent, similar histories of founding a nation from welding together island kingdoms with a centuries-long monarchy.

However, Prussia and Germany was the favoured destination for the military. During WW1 the Japanese were on "our" side, but the Japanese delegation was frozen out of the Versailles discussions, a Japanese proposal for a founding principle of the League of Nations to be equality of nations regardless of race or religion was thrown out by the chair even though it had been approved by a majority of delegates. This lead to the reformist government in Japan being seen as failures and led to support for movement towards militarism and turning against westernisation.

Ironically, a lot of the failed 1918 reformist government's home and international policies were implemented in the post-1945 constitution and the founding of the United Nations.

[adlai52]

Jun 18, 2021 10:49:11 GMT islington said:

I've been pondering this.

Suppose Japan had entered WW2 at the same time as she did, in December 1941, but had merely attacked the Far Eastern interests of Britain and other European powers (French, Dutch), as well as carrying on the existing war in China, and had left the USA severely alone.

I ask this because 'Don't pick a fight with the USA' strikes me as generally sound advice and I wonder what would happen if Japan had been guided by it.

A move South - against the British, French and Dutch Far Eastern Empires - is hard to imagine without the Japanese attacking the United States in the Philippines. After all this approach was favoured by the Japanese Navy - in contrast to the Army which favoured an attack against the Soviet Union - and it is difficult to see the likes of Yamamoto effectively turning their back on the US Pacific fleet. 

At the same time the United States is already heavily involved in supporting the Chinese against the Japanese invasion and offering support to them through British controlled Burma. The US will also still want to heavily supply Australia through the South Pacific, support that historically led to the Battle of the Coral Sea in early 1942 and the Japanese attempt to isolate Australia.

Imagining the Japanese are content to ignore the United States - perhaps figuring that Roosevelt would not be able to turn around US public opinion without an open attack from the Axis - it's hard to see how the British, Australians and Dutch do anyt better than they did in reality.

Without direct US involvement you don't have any Battle of the Coral Sea, but you still have US supplies flowing into Australia. You could also probably expect a Japanese attack against Australia in the second half of 1942, with the Japanese Navy (including it's carrier fleet) free to attack British holdings in the Indian Ocean.

I think its likely that sooner or later the US would get drawn into any war in the Pacific - it's too hard for Japan to work around US territory in the Far East, both the US and Japanese militaries see the other as too big of a threat and China is too important to the US.

However, if the Japanese do get a 'free hand' in the Pacific for the whole of 1942 it's easy to imagine a serious attempted invasion of Australia and much deeper incursions into the Indian Ocean, as well as an attack through Burma into India itself. The Japanese Navy could raid as far as Madagascar - which was an early Japanese target due to it's potential as a submarine base.

In this world, you could even imagine the Japanese raiding up the Gulf or Red Sea, with the aim of supporting the German invasion of Egypt and an attack towards the Suez Canal. But the end result is probably still an overly extended Japanese Empire that the US is able to beat at sea and on land, perhaps more easily than they did in reality.

It's unlikely to change much in the Atlantic or on the Easter Front in the short term. Germany will still priorities the attack into the Caucuses, even if there is the chance that a better supplied force in North Africa could link up with the Japanese somewhere in the Middle East. However, the British could be so over extended by the threat to India and Australia that the forces defending Egypt and supplying Malta are weakened - with knock on implications for the support flowing to the Soviet Union.