What is this? Are you taking showers with this guy now?TIMJOT wrote:Mdiehl is absolutely correct, secureing the SRA should not be a cake walk. Frankly just matching the Japanese time table should be the best anyone could hope to do and that should be very hard. It took tremendous effort, impeccable timeing, and a little luck for the Japanese to accomplish what they did in the time they did it.
Of course the SRA is a virtual "cakewalk" for Japan. Of sorts at least. There's nothing there to oppose them to speak of! It must fall by default. The real question is how fast and how economically can this conquest be affected (in game terms) so as to allow the Japanese player to consolidate his position further both economically and strategically with regard to his geographical positioning in the Pacific.
Hold it with what?If a player doesnt put the same amount of effort and into secureing the SRA then there should be good chance that the Allies can hold the Malaya Barrier.
As for planning: frankly I doubt many players will put the same time and effort into capture of the SRA as did Japanese planners. If they do not, and assuming the model's conceived correctly (and from Mogami's report with re to the need for good organizational planning prior to this move by the Japanese player in the game it would seem that it is, or headed in the right direction) then this will have to result in lost time and thus less ability for the Japanese player to expand into and adequately fortify the Central Pacific, as well as any lost time concerning his industrial base back in Japan (I assume all of that needs the resources of the SRA to even survive past 1941, let alone expand).
As it happened historically Japan proved incapable of achieving the latter goal of setting up a viable "perimeter defense" so called, which is why the Gilberts and Marshalls fell into the bag, and rather easily at that, once the United States had had a couple years to prepare its counterstrike.
Are we talking about the Allies before the war or Japan in 1942 after Pearl Harbor?Many people do not seem to realize the holding the Malaya Barrier had been made a priority in early 42 and consequently a significant amount of resources were in the pipeline heading that way when the SRA fell.
This is crazy. The SRA was theoretically speaking gone in 1941 . . . as in poooff! . . . due to decisions of national policy made earlier in our country--indeed, a case might be made by logical extension that this area of the world was doomed to Japanese hegemony due to decisions taken at the conclusion World War I.
By the late 30's the only way to have forestalled Japan's excursion into the SRA was to have either bowed to its economic and political demands (and still Japan might have made the move--and I think that likely in the long run) or confronted Japan with superior force after it invaded China, and that was a commodity (force) which no one on the Allied side happened to have in that area of the globe. Indeed, America didn't possess real "power" in any form west of San Francisco other than the Pacific Fleet, which at that time was no match for the IJN in a straight fight of any description, meanwhile our AAF was "up in the air" and our Army was basically decimated; as for Great Britain, it had all it could do to contain Germany much less fight Japan, too. Besides, a military confrontation with Japan of any kind would have led to outright war with Japan then and there as the country was ruled by the Army and the Army was headed by incredible fanatics.
But even all that is absurd when one considers the political realities of the time: by the end of 1939 FDR had all he could do to figure a way to bring America into the war raging then already in Europe. It's true that polls had begun swung away from strict isolationist feelings vis-a-vis Japan at least by late 1940 or early 1941, but still there was that little item of having the military force to back up one's bluff in the international arena of global power politics, and America just didn't have that force on the table. The card America did have and did play was our country's international cachet to the extent that our country's potentiality for war, assuming a total war footing on our part down the road, was immense, and our industrial base extant, not to mention exports of war products and materiel to Japan, gave us some (little enough as it turned out) leverage with the real Japanese decision-makers, but that was about it. Until America decided to bring a bigger gun to the game than the bad guys had nothing we said was likely to move anyone very much--the Teddy Roosevelt "stick" didn't mean much in Axis circles anywhere, and least of all in the Empire called Japan.
