That is correct Hokkaido provide biggest part of coal in homeland (total 50 million tons per year).BBfanboy wrote: Fri Feb 04, 2022 11:00 amIf I were playing as Japan, I would agree that Allied landings on the four main home islands delayed until 1946 would be a Japanese victory.ORIGINAL: JanSako
players must instead agree on what victory means. And everyone will have a different take on that.
That is the crux of the matter!
Points are just counters, they are fine & all & the designers needed some mechanic to measure who is winning. But I think we should leave point counts and what they mean entirely off this discussion.
This is my 'measure of victory':
If the Japanese HQ IRL would be in a similar position than what I see on the map, would they have sued for peace?
- If the answer is NO, then I have achieved a measure of victory.
- If the answer is Yes, and the date is past 8/45, then I 'did well', but still lost.
- If the answer is Yes, and the date is before 8/45, then I lost & no 2 ways about it.
Now, given two players of equal skill, is it logical to I expect a 1/3 chance of achieving any of those or is it more like 5%-10%-80%?
Sure, planes can fly on rice & one can have tons of HI points stockpiled to continue producing but if all you have left of the Home Islands is Hokkaido, then you lost & that is that, never mind that you still hold half of China.
Operation Olympic was supposed to happen in November 1945. The Allied nations were running short on money to continue the war - Britain was already deeply in debt and people in the US were not investing in Victory Bonds as readily as they were earlier. The US had to wrap things up quickly.
On the Japanese side, their people were starting to starve, not just getting skinny but showing signs of malnutrition. They could grow food in the country side but had no fuel to transport it to cities, and not enough horses or oxen to pull cartloads there! Not sure if they had coal for trains or if that was all used up powering industry. Most of their coal (I think) was on Hokkaido anyways and that required ships to get it to Honshu. Having lost control of the sea they could not do that more than a trickle.
And then there were the cut-off troops - able to scrounge some food from the local countryside at the point of a gun, but not able to get munitions and medical supplies. Japanese leaders may have feared for the survival of their race if their men were slaughtered and the "barbarians" took over their country. If they did not stop Operation Olympic cold, or delay it, they would have to capitulate to save their population.
Japan also imported over 200 million (no one knows exact number) tons of coal from Manchuria. Coal is always the biggest par of shipping through out the war feeding their industry. They built a specialized wharf near Port Arthur for coal transport which was the most modernized in east Asia at that time.
Historically Japan by no means would survive to next year if they did not surrender after A-bombing. Food and Coal were totally cut off from Manchuria and Korea （import 2 million tons food per year) by Operation Starvation. Japan has about 60K km2 of rice field in homeland at that time. US planned to burn most of them with 200K tons of incendiary bombs or simply petrol when the field is dry at harvest time. There is no doubt the whole country would get into great famine. Their food supply was already reduced to minimum in 1944. US provided Japan with 600K tons food in just 5 months in 1946 after the war to avoid starvation.
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