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While I commend you for voicing your thoughts on potential scenarios in the distant future, I do not see a feasible situation where we could or should entangle ourselves with yet another war.
 
...there are some points which are simply unacceptable.
I do not see a feasible situation where we could or should entangle ourselves with yet another war.

Exactly. Which is why my aforemention preferance is to not embroil ourselves any more.

Comment was made to the capture of Malaya to resolve future resource issues, and numerous times it has been suggested we have contingancy for an Allied attack agaist us. This is the purpose of preliminary fessibility planning to see what kinds of assets would be needed to take the fight to the south pacific.

Some of those points stand as unchangables. The IJN will not be substialtially increased in the comming years, so any operation of scale in the south pacific will require some assets to go unguarded. This is an unalienable but unfortunate fact. The greatest threat from the RN and USN is if they are allowed their 'ports of choice' in the pacific, restricting operational zones by naval base denial is the only way our smaller more professional navy can be on station everywhere it is needed. Leaving Indonesia in enemy hands puts our entire merchant fleet supply convoys at risk, and thus makes all pacific assets liabilities.

The second is the greater threat to Japans interests, but rectifying it requires an operation of scale, and that is why we cannot have our navy everywhere at once. The only rational decision is to gamble that the RN, USN and Commonwealth navies can't themselves be everywhere at once, and use that as the basis for a mass attack. With which comes speed, and thus mitigated threat from need of repairs, or the Americans or the Allies to launch their own rapid attacks in the pacific or in the Siamese Penisular. Hence there is actually great chance of successes even from our unescorted assets.

The point boils down to this; If we fight the Allies we can't be everywhere at once in strength, and nor cna they, therefore gambles have to be made, or we take hits from delaying, since they can be in more places than us overall. The plan aims for a war won at outset, with possible battles lost, rather than battles won, at the expense of a deteriating position in the war as time drags on.

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Attacking the Soviets is less risky, we don't need to gamble, but there is also no rewards in actually attacking them. There are not large resource deposits within reach, no industrialised urban centres and both a front of thousands of kilometres opened up, and a large army of equal measure to match us for those meger gains.

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Hence I repeat, I do not prefer these options in order that we may claim a lasting victory. However since nobody else has publically looked into how we might go about fighting both the RN and USN as part of the Allies it seamed prudent to do so.
 
Well, if this is Your contingency plan, then it's extremely optimistic. It may work well as an attack plan, but NOT as the contingency plan. Basically, you assume that we will be in a position to concentrate our forces quickly and capture and hold massive areas without suffering excessive losses. You also ignore the outcome of the war in China and disregard the readiness levels of our armies, ships and aircraft. The reality is that if the British attack us, they will most likely choose the date of their attack carefully. We may still be fighting in China and most of our fleets may be protecting our convoys going to various South American ports... or we may be busy with ship repairs and army reorganisation.

In such cases, it would take at least a month to organise our assets properly. We can also be certain that we would have to face at least one major British task force and that our poorly escorted transport groups would be intercepted by British or Australian patrol fleets. Every engagement would force us to escort damaged ships back to port, so our effective strength would be gradually decreasing. Moreover, if we left the Americans unchecked in the Pacific, they would almost surely strike at one of our Pacific possessions. It is also highly possible that we would have too few divisions to guard occupied territory properly.

It really does not take a genius to spot these potential problems, Admiral.
 
You misunderstand it is not a contingency plan, it is a feasibility plan; "to see what kinds of assets would be needed" and how we might go about doing battle with known strategic concerns.

Therefore the state of the armies, or china etc. is irrelevant. It is 'assumed' for all purposes, that the Chinese theatre does not impact naval movements in the south pacific, and that three armies would be available for Burma, (since I estimate that is the number that will be needed without a mountain infantry corps). It is 'assumed' that we have fleets of some strength (hence why no named ships; we won't know their strength until up until such a plan may be called into action).

If non of these are available, in much the same way that if named assets in requirement list are not available, then we would be unable to prosecute such a plan. It shouldn't take a genius to understand if we don't have the assets, the plan cannot be enacted. I'm surprised that this needs to be spelt out for you. I never claimed it was possible to enact with current assets or at a moments notice.


You will note in the introduction, the risks put forwards from being at war with the Allies, this feasibility plan notes those and that the only real way to act in such a position is to attack forward for enemy port denial.

You will note that in much the same way, we can't deal with an attack on the order of a month, neither will the Allies, Americans or Commonwealth. This plan calls for speed, and so numbers of naval engagements will be small and only needed long enough to put troops ashore to capture ports*, the RN should not have sufficient time to rebase to Singapore (although there is a gamble here), and USN should not have time to deal damage to the PDP. Therefore your concerns are accounted for, and mitigated by the operational stance.

* The threat from ships becoming damaged and no longer avalible is mitigated the fewer engagements we fight/the less time we are fighting. A protracted campaign will see many more engagements, then your fear would be more reasonable that our navy will 'bleed out'. Because it will have been doign 'more fighting'.
 
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Then Your plan is too general. It simply is not feasible to create just one plan that covers ALL situations, i.e. when we attack the British, when they attack us, when China is conquered or when it is still fighting... These instances make our life easier or harder and require different approaches to the same problem and prioritisation of different objectives.

Moreover, I think that in case of the South Pacific the access to naval bases will never be a big problem for the Allies, unless we conquer Australia, which would be more trouble than the island is worth. We can capture BIG naval bases like Singapore quickly, but I think that we should accept the fact that the enemy will always be able to rebase to an another base a bit farther away (which is inconvenient at best).

Also, I am wondering how do you know what assets the British have at their disposal in the area?
 
To IGHQ,

The most important operations in the coming months, barring unforeseen dows from other nations, are

1. Capture of Honolulu
- any needed operation to support that goal while the US Navy is still reeling from its defeat.
- this needs to be done before any other nation dows us.
- followup operations to take every other US island in the pacific
2. Defeat the Chinese
- all free IJA assets should go toward this goal
- prerequisite for further operations
- followed by improving the west china rail trunk.

Following the defeat of the Chinese we would need the following boarder guards even if we don't go to war with any more.
2-3 Homengun in Manchuria
1 in the east Gobi desert gap
1 in the west Gobi gap
2-3 in West China against the Soviet border
1-2 in West China against the Indian border
1-2 in the Burma gap in Yunnan
1-2 against the treaty harbours and Vietnam.
Around 11-12 Homengun in all leaving very little assets for anything else, meaning we need a substantial expansion of the army.
 
Fighting the Soviets would seem to be the most logical choice from a political point of view. However, who is currently being viewed as the greater threat in London; Hitler or Stalin? And if we should entangle ourselves with the Soviets, we'd need guarantees from the Allies that they'd not stab us in the back. In a perfect world, we'd not be at war with the USA any more, too.

From a naval point of view, I do not see a possibility to fight the USA and the Allies at the same time. We simply do not have the number of ships neccessary.
 
The UK is at war with Germany and France is occupied by Germany, so it is obvious that they consider the Germans a more immediate threat.

From a naval point of view, I do not see a possibility to fight the USA and the Allies at the same time. We simply do not have the number of ships neccessary.
But we may be forced to fight both the UK and the Americans at the same time, so you will have to find the way of beating them! In the worst case scenario, the Soviets will attack us, too, but this will mostly be the Army's business.
 
More to the point, it'd be the army's business too if the Allies should attack us, since we'd have to take the fight to them and the navy lacks the numbers to attack and hold their ports.
 
The Army lacks the numbers, too. We would have to transfer troops from China and limit our offensive operations in the region.

We are simply not ready, but we were not ready for the Americans and look how it worked out for them!
 
The Army lacks the numbers, too. We would have to transfer troops from China and limit our offensive operations in the region.

We are simply not ready, but we were not ready for the Americans and look how it worked out for them!


Victory Disease, anybody?

We were lucky that the USA did so poorly and could have lost a lot more ships easily if they had had the brains to use their assets properly. Likewise was their invasion of Saipan premature and handed us the opportunity to strike at them at a time of our choosing. Do not presume that the British will make the same errors.
 
Admiral, you should know me well enough by now to realise that I am highly critical of excessive optimism. However, we may HAVE TO fight with both the British and the Americans in the near future whether we like it or not. That's why it's even more important to finish the war in China as soon as possible, but realistically, that will not happen before mid- to late 1942.
 
As I said, the US made some fatal errors. Not one, several. We can not hope that the Commonwealth will act similarily stupidly. Do we know anything regarding the success of the Axis navies against the Allies? It'd be important to know if they managed to sink some RN vessels and it'd also be important to know how sizable their (Axis) fleets still are.

Whether we like it or not, we can not force the USA into submission by force. Their country is simply too large and we just do not have the means to subdue them. Hence I doubt that we will be able to force them into submission in '42 or '43, simply because they'll rely on their new fleets which are currently under construction.

Even worse, the only viable source of resources seems to be the Commonwealth area, although it'd be politically more benefitting to face down the Soviets. I think only time will tell where we have to go, simply because we have to take into account the situation at that time.


Message to Admiral Yamamoto:
Please forward plans for port strikes along the US west coast with land and / or sea based planes. Do we have the ability to strike at strategic targets as well? If we manage to threaten the US west coast, their shipyards there will become useless for shipbuilding purpose, at least when it comes to capital ships.
 
The resources of Malaya and Indonesia are not viable as my fessibility plan shows. The only feasible option in the near future is to conquer all of China and improve techniques.


Yes we can attack the US West Coast by air, however we would need to put a mass invesement into four engined strategic bombers. The likely industrial costs to this noting neglect in the field, will likely be 28IC for 280days or so, we would also need to improve the range of our aircraft, to compensate for more modern bombs, and it would be prudent to improve our instilation stike doctrines too.

But yes we could highly damage the US shipyards along the South-westen coasts.

Using our CAG groups would be far less effective and would only seek to have them shot up for minimal effect. We could not take out the ports with out CAG groups.

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If we have to fight the allies it shall be a stalemate without aformentioned assets, with us slowly loosing since we cannot protect our mechant fleets. The garrisons would become a liability to us, like I mentioned a long time ago I was in favour for not garrisoning the islands. Attempting to protect the merchant fleets shall see us slowly loose our navy until it is lost and cannot act anymore. At which point the pacific is in general lost.

You can see my concern. The only way to counter the Allies is to move forward, just like against the Americans and create bottlenecks. If we don't do that, I cannot give you plans for victory.


I concur with Gen. Surt that the Chinese theatre will need garrisons, however we must consider their supply on the border will be costly. I would rather we make the Three Ma's our puppet and become our 'Mongolian guards', yes the Burmese railway across china will be needed.
 
I specifically asked for the abilities of the CAGs and land based aircraft. We must to with what we have. There is no way we can divert resources to strategic bombers in this situation, neither for their construction nor for their techniques.

The garrisons have proved to be an asset already. Without the garrison on Saipan fighting the US invaders, we wouldn't have had the time to reorganize our fleets and sink that many US vessels. It should also be noted that we already managed to sink an astonishing number of US submarines (12 of their SS fleets), so your panic regarding the US threatening our supply lines seems to be out of proportion.
 
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Only a fool would leave islands unprotected. Garrison troops are cheap and if they have enough ammunition, they can hold out long enough so that the Navy can come up with a reaction plan. Without garrison divisions, we are essentially asking for trouble.

The merchant fleet needs to be protected, because it is our freaking life-line!
 
To Admiral Yamamoto,

Making any of the western warlords to our puppets will effectively prevent us from ever attacking the Soviets, so I'm opposed to such plans.
 
Influence Levels

Air assets

IJA

9 H-FTRs
3 LBs

IJN
11 CAGs
1 NAV
1 MB

Common
4 L-FTRs
2 HBs
1 TRAN

One new CAG and one new HFTR were formed.

IJN Land Troops

1 SNLF Corps - 5 MAR divisions (15 brigades)
25 GAR divs

IJA Reserve

We have 3 infantry divisions in reserve. The IJN took full control over the Philippines, so most of the Army GARs have been transferred to China, but 2 are still stationed in Japan.

Other
We lost 3 convoys and 2 convoy escorts. Our subs managed to sink 3 US convoys. Thanks to our victories, the US submarine threat has been reduced, but since we control many new islands now and started trading with Peru, Argentina and Mexico, our supply and trade lines require many more convoys.

All important Chinese airfields are now garrisoned and new Kempeitai formations were dispatched to resource-rich areas (this helped a bit).
 
Chapter Four, Part Five: Sino-Japanese War / Japanese-American War
Nov 1941 - Jan 1942

Previously in the Influence Wars...

Saipan was liberated and the Japanese marines captured the Wake Island. The US Navy lost many ships in the process and the IJN became the dominant force in the Pacific Ocean. Meanwhile, back-and-forth action continued in China...

And now, the conclusion...


The Pacific Campaign






After Saipan and the Wake Island, the USN was clearly broken and disorganised. We believe that the enemy simply lacked strength to oppose the Japanese advance, which resulted in quick victories at Midway and Johnston. The easiness of these battles were such a stark comparison to the ferocity of the previous engagements that many sailors thought that the war had already been won. In fact, reorganisation of the fleets took much more time than the battles themselves.





A minor but interesting event occurred in early December. One of our patrol groups finally managed to locate and engage the enemy submarines. This was the first time when a Japanese ASW group encountered the American submarines - in all previous cases the engagements involved one of the main Japanese fleets. Unfortunately, the battle was largely inconclusive, as no vessels were sunk on either side.





The biggest success was the conquest of the Hawaiian Islands. The Americans constructed several forts there, but judging from their rather poor state, they were largely unfinished. The Administration believes that the enemy did not expect to be forced to conduct a defensive warfare and that fort construction began after our victory at Saipan. It now seems clear that the Americans greatly underestimated the power of the Imperial Japanese Navy.

Yet again, the Japanese losses were quite low.





However, because of the strategic importance of the Hawaiian Islands, a larger force had to be left there as a safeguard against the potential American counter-attack. Since most garrison divisions were still thousands of kilometres away and the Admirals did not want to give the enemy too much time for providing reinforcements for his other Pacific possessions, only 2 naval infantry divisions were available for post-Hawaii operations. Therefore, our losses at Palmyra were relatively high.





Further advance was halted, mostly for logistical reasons. Our victories came so fast that there were simply not enough garrison troops in the region to cover all conquered islands, which meant that marines were forced to perform garrison and occupation duties. Moreover, a direct strike at the Christmas Island was deemed strategically irrelevant. In fact, many officers of the Navy were confused by the strategic implications of the fall of Honolulu. Those who believed that the Americans would sue for peace after losing Pearl Harbour were severely disappointed. The commonly asked question was "And what now?". An invasion of the US mainland cannot really be considered as a realistic goal and even the Panama Canal is outside of our logistical reach. It was only at this point that many young officers finally accepted the prospect of a long, exhausting conflict. The aura of invincibility and overwhelming optimism that had been surrounding the naval staff since the battle of Saipan was replaced by a purely pragmatic approach.

However, since Christmas Island's port was in range of our bombers and our aircraft were not needed elsewhere, it would be a waste of an opportunity to leave the enemy unmolested. Orders were given to bomb the American port and several enemy submarines were damaged.






Much to our surprise, the Americans organised the first counter-attack against our Hawaiian garrisons in January 1942. It was believed that they would not be capable of doing this until May or June. The fleets were recalled from Palmyra as soon as first bombs fell on Hana, so our response was quick. Our patrol bombers spotted a carrier and several cruisers, so it was clear that this was not just a diversionary attack.

The enemy fleet was led by Admiral Nimitz himself and our sailors quickly realised that he was a worthy opponent. Despite being outnumbered in aircraft and leading an invasion, he regularly outmanoeuvred our forces. The enemy's main intention was to actually sink our ships, not just damage them. Even though the Americans were eventually repulsed and lost many ships during the engagement, we lost 2 light cruisers and 1 destroyer flotilla. Additionally, several of our ships were badly damaged, including such mighty vessels as battleships Yamato and Ise. The battlecruiser IJN Haruna barely escaped the battle floating and the AA fire of American cruisers was devastating to our aircraft. Some believe that the American leadership realised that their counter-attack was doomed from the start and conducted it only to provide fuel for their propaganda machine by showing that the war is not yet over. This theory seems validated by the fact that the event received more publicity in the US media than the fall of Honolulu.






Nevertheless, it is hard to be disappointed by the results of the Pacific Campaign. In the matter of months, the Empire of Japan became the dominant force in the Pacific Ocean, scoring victory after victory. Now the main question is how to force the Americans to accept their defeat and win the war.


War in China





In China, there were few reasons to celebrate. The Chinese counter-attack in the South was gaining momentum throughout November and the enemy was capturing territory at a worrying pace. It quickly became apparent that the Chinese were preparing this offensive for months, as it was one of the largest ones they have ever conducted.





The enemy continued to advance in December and was largely successful. It came as a shock to our allies that Gullin itself became threatened. Morale among the pro-Japanese Chinese was clearly at its lowest. The situation looked so grim that General Tojo was forced to transfer another corps to Southern China.





In January the frontline became more static. Many of our troops in the region are exhausted, but the same must be true of the Chinese. The supply situation seems stable, so it may be possible to send even more divisions to the South. The commander of the Canton HQ also requested additional air support. Many Japanese soldiers miss the days when the skies were full of Japanese bombers.





In Northern China, only limited land-grab took place. Harsh terrain and strained supply lines made large-scaled offensives very difficult. In some places the frontline has been static for months now. General Tojo was frustrated by lack of progress in Northern China and personally changed the targets of Japanese heavy bombers. Instead of bombing communist strongholds and villages, our airmen were ordered to bomb Chongqing and Kunming, with some visible results, as apparently the Chongqing's factories were reduced to rubble.


Other matters





In Europe, little progress was made during winter. This is hardly surprising, since neither side managed to gain the upper hand even during spring and summer months. However, in North Africa, the Italians managed to push the Commonwealth forces back a bit, which was unexpected, but welcomed.





In order to alleviate our resource shortages, several trade agreements with Mexico, Peru and Argentina were signed. While not very significant yet, the Japanese businessmen welcomed additional coal, metal and oil with open hands. It is expected that the protection of our trade lines will gradually become more and more important for the Japanese economy.

Construction of several new warships will be finished during 1942. Currently ship construction consumes as much as 38% of the budget reserved for production and remains the top-priority of the Japanese industry, followed by aircraft production.

List of researched techs: Advanced Aircraft Designs, Light AA Armament, Special Forces Training, Light Cruiser Main Armament, Jungle Warfare Equipment, Tank Crew Training.


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*Holy.Death joins the game as the member of the IJA's Strike South faction!
 
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