Was an invasion of India ever really possible?

[Heeward]

[font="times new roman"]Maybe I was a bit subtle in my post.[/font]
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[font="times new roman"]I believe Japan could invade India in the May / August of 1942 window but only as a raid or at best a occupation of Assam. They were incapable in logistically sustaining them selves in India. [/font]
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[font="times new roman"]I believe the IJA could have pushed through the monsoon right after the conquest of Burma with consolidating. This would have wrecked the IJA in the theater, but the political value would have been worth it.[/font]
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[font="times new roman"]The IJA has superman / jungle fighter myth still going for them, with the British Army this may have lasted into 1944 despite the (mis)adventures of the Chindits. Britain was incapable of successful fighting in this environment (Burma Jungle) until 1944, and using the early part of the Imphal / Kohima  campaign of 1944 and the Arkan battles of 1943 as an example. [/font]
[font="times new roman"] [/font]I am glad of the additional discussion my prior post has brought about

[castor troy]

ORIGINAL: Mike Scholl

ORIGINAL: castor troy
I agree 98% here. What we see in AARs and what people "can" achieve with the Japanese is far from what the Japanese Empire was able to do in real life. But much comes down to the players also. A couple of mistakes (perhaps only one or two) and you lose "places" like China, or Russia, or India or Australia. Would the Japanese side be reduced to something that is not able to achieve what people report in their AARs then it would probably go the other side around. US divisions marching through Tokyo in early 43. Even with the TOTALLY ahistoric, impossible to achieve in real life conquers we see in a couple of AARs (for sure the most AARs are not ones where we see China, India, Russia and Australia fall) in most cases, by the end of 44 or early 45, the Allied are knocking on Japans door.

Do you honestly believe the historic Chinese or Russian or British or American or Japanese leadership didn't make more than "a couple of mistakes" during WW II? It would take virtual collusion in the real world to create some of the events possible in the game. And I am not maintaining that all of the designers errors help only the Japanese. Some of what I've seen on the Allied side of AAR's is pretty far-fetched as well.

they made a dozen mistakes. A hundred mistakes? Depends on the scope of command. The problem is here, that there´s only one person in command of the whole theatre. And if this person makes one or two or three mistakes it leads to the loss of the whole country, no matter if India, China or Russia.

It may sound exagerated, but it takes a far better Japanese player to be in a better position against me as the Allied player in 44 than vice versa. And I´m playing far more games as the Japanese. So in fact, if the Allied player knows what he´s doing, he has no problems to take care of the Japanese in stock, BigB or Nikmod. I´ve never tried CHS or RHS though. The Allied player did make a LOT more mistakes than the Japanese if he´s not able to advance big style in mid 43-45.

[Mike Scholl]

ORIGINAL: castor troy
It may sound exagerated, but it takes a far better Japanese player to be in a better position against me as the Allied player in 44 than vice versa. And I´m playing far more games as the Japanese. So in fact, if the Allied player knows what he´s doing, he has no problems to take care of the Japanese in stock, BigB or Nikmod. I´ve never tried CHS or RHS though. The Allied player did make a LOT more mistakes than the Japanese if he´s not able to advance big style in mid 43-45.

You seem to have more experiance than I do in head-to-head play.., so I certainly won't argue the conclusion above with you. Fact is that I wouldn't have anyway.., because overall in the game the Allies are more able to make use of "hindsight" than the Japanese simply because they have more to make use of it with. And in most of the versions you seem to have played, they too benefit from design errors (like the super-abundance of B-17's from stock),

But remember the original question. "Could the Japanese have conquered India IRL?" On that I think we can both agree that the answer is NO.

[JWE]

Question for Joe – but everybody else feel free to pile on; know nothing about this, so I’m a good target.

Was thinking about a sentence in Evans & Peattie (Kaigun, USNI Press, 1997) in Reflections on the IJN, page 511. “At its worst the martial spirit led to an arrogance that ignored or discounted enemy capabilities, to an unfounded confidence that than the enemy would act or react as the Japanese expected, and to a blindness to material realities that bordered on the irrational.”

I too believe the entire decision for war was irrational, from start to finish. Given this, isn’t it possible that militant irrationality might have overcome practical voices in IJAGHQ? Yes, the martial “soul” was directed to Russia, but, in the heat of the ‘moment’, irrational people make irrational decisions for immediate gratification.

If the opportunity opened, and they couldn’t get a good tee time on the links that day, maybe they just might have gone for it, in one form or another ??

[Nikademus]

ORIGINAL: JWE

Question for Joe – but everybody else feel free to pile on; know nothing about this, so I’m a good target.

Was thinking about a sentence in Evans & Peattie (Kaigun, USNI Press, 1997) in Reflections on the IJN, page 511. “At its worst the martial spirit led to an arrogance that ignored or discounted enemy capabilities, to an unfounded confidence that than the enemy would act or react as the Japanese expected, and to a blindness to material realities that bordered on the irrational.”

I too believe the entire decision for war was irrational, from start to finish. Given this, isn’t it possible that militant irrationality might have overcome practical voices in IJAGHQ? Yes, the martial “soul” was directed to Russia, but, in the heat of the ‘moment’, irrational people make irrational decisions for immediate gratification.

If the opportunity opened, and they couldn’t get a good tee time on the links that day, maybe they just might have gone for it, in one form or another ??

IMHO, any tendancy for higher Japanese commanders to underestimate enemy capabilities and intentions would not have overridden the IJA's desire to not be led around the nose by the Navy that might lead to a major commitment on their part. At least two of the books i've read have suggested that the Army's tendancy to claim "inadequate shipping resources" was at times a convenient excuse to veto such ideas from the Navy. (yet at the tail end of the Lunga campaign the Army seemed to finally wake up to the threat posed and suddenly the resources magically appeared to mass a considerable amount of troops) The Army, as Joe mentioned previously, had it's own agenda and set enemies and didn't want to get overstretched unless it benefited them directly. Russia, despite their strict adherence to the non aggression pact, remained a primary IJA obcession. Some elements did warm to the idea of a Hawaii invasion but thats a far cry from the investment needed towards either India and Oz in even a limited campaign as most envsion in this scenario.

[JWE]

Fair enough. Can definitely understand that.

You are a lot smarter than you look, behind that fence. Ciao.

[pasternakski]

ORIGINAL: JWE

Fair enough. Can definitely understand that.

You are a lot smarter than you look, behind that fence. Ciao.

No, he's not. In fact, the dawg looks pretty intelligent by comparison to this hamsterhead.

One thing that emerges from study of Japanese high command in World War II is a degree of hesitancy and caution that one would not expect from just relying on general understanding (notwithstanding a lot of operational and tactical bravery and brilliance).

Even when this tendency was overcome, those in charge (even the brilliant Yamamoto) of operations would complicate (or permit complication of) plans with contingencies, redundancies, diversions, and reservations that often almost doomed the undertaking before it was even executed.

Midway is a perfect example. There was no firm pre-war intention to take Midway. It was outside the defensible perimeter that was to be set up against American counterattack. It was the Tokyo strike by Doolittle and company that prompted a more aggressive stance in the high command and formulation of the Midway adventure.

I don't want to go on at essay length, but the Midway operation was such a dissipation of resources that its failure was more something to be expected than it was any "miracle" for the Americans. Yes, a lot went wrong, but how much of that can be seen as having been made possible, with benefit of hindsight, in the shortcomings of Japanese strategic planning? For example, to what degree can you make strategic success dependent on a dozen or so shipborne naval search aircraft? Historical events depict the fallacy inherent in this element of planning.

There are many other examples, but I am getting wordy here (sorry). When this tendency is combined with the already-chronicled overconfidence, lack of inter-service trust and cooperation, and elsewhere-detailed shortage of men and materiel that hamstrung Japanese expansion from the very beginning of the war, is there any wonder that the eventual end was only a matter of living until the actual date of surrender established itself?

The way I see it, a Japanese move into India might have been as big a disaster as any that could even remotely be imagined to have visited itself on Japanese arms in this period.

Might have been...

[jwilkerson]

ORIGINAL: JWE

Question for Joe ...

... the martial spirit led to an arrogance that ignored or discounted enemy capabilities ...

... maybe they just might have gone for it, in one form or another ??

As always, the devil is in the details. A read of Coox's Nomonhan (which Nik and I recently read/re-read) shows an interesting picture of the Japanese Army's command structure during 1939. At the comany and battalion command levels, you have an abundance of aggreesion, but we also see prgamatism and an occasional overly agreessive nut (like the recon commander). At the regimental level we see perhaps the greatest variation. Some folks being what I would characterize as solid, aggresive infantry commanders, with an occasional incompetant. The specialist commanders, like Engineers and Artillery seem to show much more consistency and a much more solid grounding in terms of what is possible and what is not. Both the senior engineering officer and the assistant (who was effectively the real Arty cdr) to the senior artillery officer raise a number of issues and suggest a number of alternative courses of action, that were far more reality based than the courses their supperiors wound up adopting. I was surprisingly impressed by the technical officers reality base.

The senior commanders (Division and above), do reflect perhaps the more sterio-typical "mystical faith" in their troops being able to do the impossible. Though it is not clear from this one detailed study, that we can extrapolate this across the entire Army, we would need more data to do that.

The interesting thing I took away from re-reading Nomonhan was that the Japanese Army had decent, effective tactics, in area of Infantrys and Artillery. Their Armor attack doctrine was very poor, and the results at Nomonhan say all that needs to be said on that point (the Armored brigade was effectively destroyed by its unsupported charge into a Russian combined arms defense). The infanty and artillery however, could have possibly gotten different results, were different decisions made.

The "results" at Nomonhan are considered by even the Japanese, to represent a Japanese defeat. Yet's analysis of both Japanese and Russian casualties figures from the campaign, indicate that losses were almost dead even. Yet the Japanese to not quibble in declaring that they were defeated. One must ponder that their expectations were much higher than getting a "draw" in terms of man power losses.

So, can we say the IJA high command disounted enemy capabilities and hence might have made a somewhat "random" decision (not indicated by the data) to invade India?

Of course anything is possible, but as I have argued in previous posts, the "soul" of the IJA was oriented against Russia and all senior commanders (at least) were embarrassed by the China side show. So no matter who is in power, Tojo or otherwise, the vast bulk of the IJA officer corps will be thinking about Russia first and China second. Their involvement in WITP was "reactive" in the strategic sense. They reacted to IJN requests initially and they reacted to an eventual realization that the nation was threatened by the US counterattacks.

I still believe that on an evaluation of the "intentions" dimension of the IJA invading India that the possibility was epsilon. A number greater than zero, but otherwise smaller than we can estimate.

[JWE]

ORIGINAL: jwilkerson
As always, the devil is in the details. <....>

“epsilon” … spoken like a true mathematician.

I too put Alvin Coox in my pantheon of heroes. My Nomonhon is probably as well thumbed and dilapidated as yours. Hey .. you are from CA, did you know there’s an Alvin Coox papers repository in the UCSD library?

Anyway, I was thinking about some of the snippets in the last chapter in Frank, where the irrationality quote came from. Some of the other ones that got my attention went something like … The Japanese did not develop a national policy, only a series of ‘agreements’ between the services as to their objectives of the moment. They did not prepare for ‘war’, rather they prepared for ‘battle’. They confused tactics for strategy, and strategy for national policy.

Given this, the little worm in my brain can conceive of an opportunistic ‘victory disease’ based irrationality that says ‘Ceylon? why not?”; kind of a “moto, moto, moto”, self gratification thingy, and Sugiyama wasn’t exactly known as a ‘thoughtful’ person.

Completely agree that any realistic threat to India/Ceylon would involve desire, intelligence, planning, troops, and transport – none of which the IJA had. I was just thinking in terms of irrationality.

[mdiehl]

was more something to be expected than it was any "miracle" for the Americans. Yes, a lot went wrong, but how much of that can be seen as having been made possible, with benefit of hindsight, in the shortcomings of Japanese strategic planning? For example, to what degree can you make strategic success dependent on a dozen or so shipborne naval search aircraft? Historical events depict the fallacy inherent in this element of planning.

Exactly. The really inexcusble part of the Midway operation was that it REQUIRED that the USN do exactly that which was most convenient for the IJN, and when it became apparent that the USN might not be doing that which was required to make the IJN plan a success, they went ahead with MI despite that.

In 1942, EVERYBODY knew that CVs could not linger for long with range of a well established land base if enemy CVs might also be around. It was very well understood that even a few operational strike a.c. could do serious damage to a CV or to invasion transports (and some of the lesson of the importance of that was reindorced by IJN losses in the Java campaign). Japanese operational planners absolutely KNEW that the Midway base had to be rendered inoperational and that they had to do this BEFORE any USN CVs might react. Indeed, the whole reason for seizing Midway was to try to lure the USN into reacting with CVs, forcing these CVs to be used to suppress Japanese units on a captured Midway, thereby allowing the IJN CVs to strike the USN force in the flank.

It was, in effect a "rope a dope" plan. Midway was the rope, and the person trying to seize Midway HAD to pound the dope on the rope, dissipating operational strength and readiness -- hence the requirement that the USN CVs stay away during the critical phase of the invasion.

In the real event, the IJN had losses thrust upon them in EXACTLY the way that they intended to use Midway against the USN. The USN victory at Midway was not only NOT a "miracle," it was in fact the most likely outcome under the circumstances.

The odd thing is that apart from the absence of US CVs in Pearl Harbor on the critical date, the Japanese simply ignored a whole bunch of facts that should have tipped them off that the US knew all about op. MI.

[Alfred]

ORIGINAL: jwilkerson

The "results" at Nomonhan are considered by even the Japanese, to represent a Japanese defeat. Yet's analysis of both Japanese and Russian casualties figures from the campaign, indicate that losses were almost dead even. Yet the Japanese to not quibble in declaring that they were defeated. One must ponder that their expectations were much higher than getting a "draw" in terms of man power losses.

I would suggest that the Japanese expected a similar success to that enjoyed the previous year against Marshal Blucher. As far as Soviet casualties go, for Zhukov those at Nomonhan would have been considered as being light.

Alfred