What if the US/UK have until spring?

[el cid again]

Well - it is quite true that we must program mobilization into the mod in a non-variable sense. I am going to use the following principles unless persuaded the time period should be different:

a) Units in place on Dec 7 1941 are in place

b) Units en route on Dec 7 1941 are en route

c) Units scheduled to complete/deploy on Dec 7, 1941 (e.g. the BBO schedule) are scheduled to complete/deploy

d) Units sent to PTO in REACTION to the war are delayed six months exactly

e) Units planned/ordered after June 1, 1942 use the CVO schedule vice the BBO schedule.

I bet almost no games actually delay hostilities until June 1, 1942 - so this may be too conservative. For example, 5 months may be a more reasonable assumption - as the US thinking was "in the spring" - and 1 May is surely that.

If in your game war starts on 1 January - it won't change the schedule a whit. If it does not start for a year - it won't change it either. We must assume that thinking went over to CVO because of ETO lessons in the latter case, or that institutional inertia and bureaucratic red tape slowed down lessons learned in the former case. The CLOSER players get to war on the date of my assumption, the better the reinforcements will fit the game. But note that EVERYTHING in place is in place - and that is the main thing. After that, WHERE you put what you have in place and en route matters a big deal. So reinforcements are at the margins anyway. Either way you are going to get CVO/BBO replacement/production levels - the Two Ocean Navy bill is in place - etc.

[el cid again]

ORIGINAL: Capt. Harlock

The beauty of this mod concept is I don't have to decide. PLAYERS have to decide. All you need do is convince the Allied player he cannot move US units - or whatever - and that is that. Not that it is something I would agree to as an Allied player. But you don't need my agreement - just the one you are playing with. Cut whatever deal you wish - make house rules to your heart's content. I just give you the vehicle to play it out - whatever it is.

I don't think you read my post carefully enough. If you study it closely, you will note that I agreed with you that the actual Dutch units on the ground (and at sea) could be expected to resist an attempted Japanese occupation. But even more important is what needs to happen to the mod. My scenario envisions a substantial cost in morale, political will, and economic mobilization to the Allies, especially the U.S. I don't think that can be simulated by house rules alone. A Japanese attack outside the NEI should trigger the standard mobilization levels of WitP, but if the Allies have to declare war, then there should be "hard-wired" penalties. (Think of it as something like the activation of the Soviet Union.)

I do not entirely understand your thinking here. The US was IRL really handicapped in terms of political will - UNTIL events reversed that.
But THAT events were going to reverse that is pretty must cast in stone. In spite of our normal (Western) political/historical point of view, the truth is that the real choice to fight a Pacific War was made by the USA, together with the UK and Netherlands, in the SUMMER of 1941 - in the decision to (very belatedly) impose an embargo on oil, iron ore and rubber. That this was nominally conditional on Japanese change in war policy is only spin: it might even have worked in 1937 or 1938, but by 1941 - you have the problem of most wars: Japan has lost too much blood to give in. There is the broader strategic problem: if the Allies could dictate terms to Japan this once, there would never be an end to it. Everyone who mattered on both sides understood Japan was not going to lay down for an embargo: it was just posturing. Everyone on both sides knew that Japan could not sustain its war effort in the medium term without these imports either. So the decision to impose the embargo was de facto a decision for war - and it was just assumed / hoped that war would take long enough to come we would be ready. That thinking, in turn, was based on assumptions and intelligence which were significantly flawed - many things were not known - and there was no Allied equal to the Andromedon report to read about Japanese forces. Nor was thinking changed enough to benefit from such a report if it could have existed. The thinking was based on assumptions like "Ki-27s are the main JAAF fighter plane, their best, supplimented by Ki-10s - AND their pilots can barely fly - never mind keep formation." [This was a deception - wash outs were sent to air shows - which then naturally had horrible flying and spectatular crashes.]

My mod proposal is to cut PLAYERS in on the pre war maneuvering. It is an alternate to "you get one attack, programmed by the modder" and simply gives you the forces - letting you devise a strategy - and implement it - in competition with the other side. The political assumptions are mainly whatever you want them to be. You are military leaders - you place units - issue orders to them. Not for you is the politics of the affair - except to the extent senior officers have political dimensions to their responsibilities in forward areas. I also proposed that the war be in CHINA - because it was. When and how it expands is up to you. That INCLUDES fighting over NEI - but such an inclusion will involve the UK and the US - in practice (whatever the politics). Japan came to that conclusion - the Philippines is far too dangerous a forward base to leave on your vital SLOC to the South. So you cannot leave it. Japanese officers could properly read a map - and I don't think any gamers will fail to come up to a similar standard. You cannot play a political trick safely - and to try is going to let the Allies have the opportunity to hurt Japan badly. And the game will let players proove me wrong if they want to try. [Not invading the Philippines gives the initiative to the Allies - a dangerous thing - they pick when, with what, how they attack a strung out SLOC with inadequate escorts and little air cover. It won't be pretty.]

[Mike Scholl]

ORIGINAL: el cid again

ORIGINAL: Mike Scholl
All well and good, Cid. But the question was "Once the US Oil Embargo is triggered by Japanese Expansion into IndoChina, doesn't it basically set a timer on the Japanese ability to go to War? With their stockpiles dwindling, could they afford to wait past December? They knew that even if they siezed the SRA it was going to take a couple of years to get full production up and flowing back to Japan.

Yes. Japan has a 30 month oil stock pile clock - starting from July 1941. It is not that bad in WITP - for various reasons - and the pace of operations matters a lot. Several things went differently than that seems to say:

a) Ops took more than expected. A LOT more..., and that's just the "historical" figure. The way most players operate they should be "sucking air" by the end of 1942.

b) Oil fields came up 100% far faster than expected - due to local native help - which neither Japan nor the Europeans believed possible - in spite of a shipload of Japanese experts getting sunk en route to Balikpapan. True, but not that much faster. The "estimates" guessed a little over 5,000,000 tons production in 1942, and the "actual was about 12,500,000 tons. By 1943 "actual production" was somewhere in the middle of the "planned" figures. The extra 7.5 million tons in 1942 sounds good until you compare it with the "consumption" figures. Then you find that the very highest "estimated consumption" figure is not quite 34,000,000 tons..., but the "actual usage" figure is almost 52,000,000! So the "increase" of 7.5 m tons is swamped by the "excess usage" of 18 m tons. And with WITP players driving everything they can get all over the Pacific (just compare the number of historical "bombardment missions" with the number in your average AAR); the situation should be worse.

But essentially you do have a window of time - and your oil stocks will go down the longer you wait to start building them back up. I don't think Japan can wait two years - but it can wait one. Six months is definitely in the cards. Maybe 6 months..., but it seems to me that it would be pressing it...

[el cid again]

ORIGINAL: Mike Scholl

ORIGINAL: el cid again

ORIGINAL: Mike Scholl
All well and good, Cid. But the question was "Once the US Oil Embargo is triggered by Japanese Expansion into IndoChina, doesn't it basically set a timer on the Japanese ability to go to War? With their stockpiles dwindling, could they afford to wait past December? They knew that even if they siezed the SRA it was going to take a couple of years to get full production up and flowing back to Japan.

Yes. Japan has a 30 month oil stock pile clock - starting from July 1941. It is not that bad in WITP - for various reasons - and the pace of operations matters a lot. Several things went differently than that seems to say:

a) Ops took more than expected. A LOT more..., and that's just the "historical" figure. The way most players operate they should be "sucking air" by the end of 1942.

REPLY: Yes, but WITP mitigates this by obscuring what oil is used for. Also - it is difficult to use much oil (ships fuel) in a campaign in CHINA! This is a limited war and I think it will be possible to go until the end of 1942 - if you are careful.


b) Oil fields came up 100% far faster than expected - due to local native help - which neither Japan nor the Europeans believed possible - in spite of a shipload of Japanese experts getting sunk en route to Balikpapan. True, but not that much faster. The "estimates" guessed a little over 5,000,000 tons production in 1942, and the "actual was about 12,500,000 tons. By 1943 "actual production" was somewhere in the middle of the "planned" figures. The extra 7.5 million tons in 1942 sounds good until you compare it with the "consumption" figures. Then you find that the very highest "estimated consumption" figure is not quite 34,000,000 tons..., but the "actual usage" figure is almost 52,000,000! So the "increase" of 7.5 m tons is swamped by the "excess usage" of 18 m tons. And with WITP players driving everything they can get all over the Pacific (just compare the number of historical "bombardment missions" with the number in your average AAR); the situation should be worse.


REPLY: Well - this scenario is not going to have high consumption - because there are not many ships sailing to China - and the other routes are short by comparison to what was required for the distant campaigns of 1942. The REAL problem IRL was not oil production - but MOVING the oil where it was needed. This was never done sufficiently.

But essentially you do have a window of time - and your oil stocks will go down the longer you wait to start building them back up. I don't think Japan can wait two years - but it can wait one. Six months is definitely in the cards. Maybe 6 months..., but it seems to me that it would be pressing it...

I think 5 months was what was likely to occur sans a Japanese PH type plan. And I too think 6 months is reasonable. But I think 12 months is possible. It might require players be circumspect about fuel use. Makes sense if so. And perhaps the scenario will show that there are problems - that the Strike South option was correct in some sense.

[Mike Scholl]

ORIGINAL: el cid again
I think 5 months was what was likely to occur sans a Japanese PH type plan. And I too think 6 months is reasonable. But I think 12 months is possible. It might require players be circumspect about fuel use. Makes sense if so. And perhaps the scenario will show that there are problems - that the Strike South option was correct in some sense.

It's your scenario, Cid. Just pointing out what looked to me to be a problem. Have fun with it.

[el cid again]

This is a trial balloon - it is like CAIO - easy to do fast. But is anyone interested? This is DIFFERENT - sort of "passive Russians writ large." It is really for all those who don't like "first turn surprise" or just "always the same opening." Here YOU define the opening - mutually - with uncertainty. But do gamers really want that? Or down deep - do they want everything scripted for a particular start H Hour of a particular D Day?

I must admit there seems mild interest - strong only in a couple of cases - and the answer is not clear to me? Even a quick scenario = a man-week of work - and I won't do it unless someone wants to play it.

[Capt. Harlock]

I do not entirely understand your thinking here. The US was IRL really handicapped in terms of political will - UNTIL events reversed that.
But THAT events were going to reverse that is pretty must cast in stone. In spite of our normal (Western) political/historical point of view, the truth is that the real choice to fight a Pacific War was made by the USA, together with the UK and Netherlands, in the SUMMER of 1941 - in the decision to (very belatedly) impose an embargo on oil, iron ore and rubber.

Actually I more or less agree with you. However, the precise nature and sequence of those events made an immense difference. The U.S. essentially became a centrally planned, almost communist economy during WWII, something that would not have been possible without the outrage over Pearl Harbor. I don't know if you remember some of the Simulations Canada naval games of the 1980's but they often featured built-in costs for player decisions. (e.g. -100 points for declaring war, -150 points for escalating to tactical nuclear warfare.) IMHO the accident of history that had the Japanese note delivered after the bombs began falling was worth an extra 10,000 warplanes produced for the U.S.

That this was nominally conditional on Japanese change in war policy is only spin: it might even have worked in 1937 or 1938, but by 1941 - you have the problem of most wars: Japan has lost too much blood to give in. There is the broader strategic problem: if the Allies could dictate terms to Japan this once, there would never be an end to it. Everyone who mattered on both sides understood Japan was not going to lay down for an embargo: it was just posturing. Everyone on both sides knew that Japan could not sustain its war effort in the medium term without these imports either.

Every invidual that mattered, perhaps. But the average American voter did not understand this -- and collectively they mattered very much. I compare the situation to the stand-off over Fort Sumter: that the North and South would fight was almost certain after Major Anderson occupied the fort. But who fired the first shot made a great political difference. It may even have kept an extra state in the Union. (Kentucky was balanced on a knife-edge for weeks.) As it happened, there was a chance that the Union garrison would be starved out peacefully. If Lincoln had sailed in with fresh troops, weapons, and ammunition he would have looked like the aggressor. The brilliant stroke of announcing that he would send only "food for hungry men" put the onus on the South.

What I am suggesting is that Japan could begin its war more gradually, which would have a cost in not being able to disable so much of the Allies' forces by surprise, but have great political benefits. (And I'm sure you've heard that war is politics carried out by extreme means.) The problem is that those benefits cannot be properly modeled by simple house rules.

[el cid again]

ORIGINAL: Capt. Harlock

I do not entirely understand your thinking here. The US was IRL really handicapped in terms of political will - UNTIL events reversed that.
But THAT events were going to reverse that is pretty must cast in stone. In spite of our normal (Western) political/historical point of view, the truth is that the real choice to fight a Pacific War was made by the USA, together with the UK and Netherlands, in the SUMMER of 1941 - in the decision to (very belatedly) impose an embargo on oil, iron ore and rubber.

Actually I more or less agree with you. However, the precise nature and sequence of those events made an immense difference. The U.S. essentially became a centrally planned, almost communist economy during WWII, something that would not have been possible without the outrage over Pearl Harbor. I don't know if you remember some of the Simulations Canada naval games of the 1980's but they often featured built-in costs for player decisions. (e.g. -100 points for declaring war, -150 points for escalating to tactical nuclear warfare.) IMHO the accident of history that had the Japanese note delivered after the bombs began falling was worth an extra 10,000 warplanes produced for the U.S.

What happened was a bit strange, indeed. For example - a Japanese "sneak attack" (never mind we knew about it - AND we knew they intended to deliver the notice BEFORE the attack - we didn't admit it - to maximize impact) does NOT mean the US is at war with GERMANY. But - lo - Hitler solved that problem for us - by declaring war on the USA! [Sort of like Spain in 1898 - declaring war on the USA was very foolish then as well] OTH we have FDR's view that a SINGLE small incident - a technical warship - being fired upon - was all he needed (hence the orders to Isabel, Lanokai and one other vessel which never did get converted for the role due to insufficient time] There is also the order to Kimmel and Short - "Japan must commit the first overt act" - apparently ANY overt act would do - at least if FDR had it right.

I don't think there is any chance of a Japanese "Strike South" that leaves the Philippines unmolested. But if YOU think there was - go ahead and try it. Leaving the Americans free to attack at a time of their choosing. The scenario does not require the Americans become belligerent at the same time other nations do. On the contrary, it starts with only China bellegerent on the Allied side, and each other nation may become active whenever the (Allied) player thinks is reasonable.

[el cid again]

ORIGINAL: Capt. Harlock

[

That this was nominally conditional on Japanese change in war policy is only spin: it might even have worked in 1937 or 1938, but by 1941 - you have the problem of most wars: Japan has lost too much blood to give in. There is the broader strategic problem: if the Allies could dictate terms to Japan this once, there would never be an end to it. Everyone who mattered on both sides understood Japan was not going to lay down for an embargo: it was just posturing. Everyone on both sides knew that Japan could not sustain its war effort in the medium term without these imports either.

Every invidual that mattered, perhaps. But the average American voter did not understand this -- and collectively they mattered very much. I compare the situation to the stand-off over Fort Sumter: that the North and South would fight was almost certain after Major Anderson occupied the fort. But who fired the first shot made a great political difference. It may even have kept an extra state in the Union. (Kentucky was balanced on a knife-edge for weeks.) As it happened, there was a chance that the Union garrison would be starved out peacefully. If Lincoln had sailed in with fresh troops, weapons, and ammunition he would have looked like the aggressor. The brilliant stroke of announcing that he would send only "food for hungry men" put the onus on the South.

What I am suggesting is that Japan could begin its war more gradually, which would have a cost in not being able to disable so much of the Allies' forces by surprise, but have great political benefits. (And I'm sure you've heard that war is politics carried out by extreme means.) The problem is that those benefits cannot be properly modeled by simple house rules.

I am a student of von Clausewitze - and prefer the entire paragraph to the partial sentence usually quoted (no normal English writer could produce a sentence like that). I think he is right - and I also think Napoleon has the right idea in saying "in war the moral is to the physical as 3 is to 1" (or on another occasion "as 10 is to 1"). Sun Tzu says "the greatest generals are never renowned, because they do not fight battles: they achieve the ends of their prince by other means." Certainly psychology matters in politics - for as Ceasar says "an enemy is not defeated until he is defeated in his mind; then he is defeated utterly". I approach a military campaign targeting the mind of the opposing leader(s) - trying to convince them they cannot win. It does not matter if they have the means or not. It does not matter if I have the means or not. It matters what they think. So in some fundamental sense, I agree with you.

Yet the problem remains, not engaging the US at start comes with a much worse penalty than "no losses to a surprise attack." Indeed, IRL the Philippines was NOT surprised. Weather delayed the attacks - and the US had the better opportunity to launch air strikes first (and blew it). The lack of surprise did not change the ultimate outcome. But if Japan leaves those forces and bases in place, and permits their build up - the price must be fatal to the Japanese in terms of the impact on their primary SLOC and irreplaceable transport shipping.

[m10bob]

Seems an interesting premise, limiting the war initially to China. So many nations had sent "advisors" and arms there for years as observers, instructors, mercenaries,and a test bed for weapons.
Had PH not happened, that war may well have continued into the fifties,(as its' offshoots surely did).
It is interesting and tragic that even now, the Chinese war has such little interest and the western world lost many opportunities to learn some of the harsher lessons of that war.
In time, it is easy to imagine foreign brigades and divisions fighting there as "volunteers", ala Spain...
The depression the world suffered was the catalyst for much economic frustration and idleness which had to be stifled, and for many, the military was a welcome relief, providing food and shelter for many of the unemployed.
Even the well off adventurers like Errol Flynn and Ernest Hemingway had to seek whatever might make their blood rush.

Yes, I can see this as a workable scenario.....

[Capt. Harlock]

I don't think there is any chance of a Japanese "Strike South" that leaves the Philippines unmolested. But if YOU think there was - go ahead and try it. Leaving the Americans free to attack at a time of their choosing.

I both agree and disagree with you there. There is no way the Japanese can afford to leave the Phillipines alone in the long run. BUT -- they can afford to wait until the U.S. declares war before they attack. (FDR might have ordered one or two subs to attack "through misunderstanding" but a full mobilization could not have been done secretly, and would have had the whole world screaming hypocrisy -- with MAJOR costs on the home front.) Once war is declared, the U.S. has only two instruments in the PH capable of causing trouble: the subs and the B-17's. The subs turned out to be incapable of seriously threatening the invading Japanese fleet (those good ol' unreliable torpedoes) and the B-17's weren't that useful against ships underway. The question is whether Yamamoto would have figured out that the PI would only be a small threat unless reinforced, and could be neutralized before reinforcements could fight their way across from Hawaii. And then, could he have convinced the rest of the Japanese High Command of it?

[el cid again]

The game is not going to let the B-17s be ineffective enough. And they can base other planes there too.

RHS imitates reality - and so many subs in PI have GOOD torpedoes - they don't carry the wonderful "new" ones which don't work.

Not that Japan can act on information it does not have.

And an attack from the Philippines would be horrible on undefended ships in transit. Japan cannot defend them - lacking the escorts and CVEs in numbers required.