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HOI IV Seriously ?

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knul said:
how could the Japanese continue
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Japan was a pretty medieval country back then - except for their technology. Traditional strategic bombing had even less influence to Japanese public morale than it had to German public morale - dying for the emperor was popular amongst the regular population as well.

knul said:
with no chance of even denting American forces
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Yankee commanders of that time weren't fearing a coordinated army - they were fearing dozens of suicide attacks in every village. And that fear was just true - why use a Panzerfaust, if you can knive the guy walking aside the tank instead?
 
the myth about the Japanese will to carry on fighting is common in the US because it helps to justify the fact that it has been the only country which has dropped nuclear bombs on fellow human beings, that the army lied to the scientists who developed it etc.

The Japanese were already on the brink of collapse and ready for capitulation. The main reason for dropping the nukes was not to defeat Japan but to deter the Soviets. The Japanese cities were already burned down by regular bombing before, the main reason why the Japanese capitulated was that they were betrayed by the Soviets who destroyed million Kwantung army in a month and planned to invade Japan. The wow effect of nukes allowed the US to become the only occupant of Japan while Germany was divided between all 4 powers, including France.

Japan hoped that USSR would not attack them and help them mediate peace. They knew the US was reluctant to invade Japan or Manchuria. When USSR broke the non-aggression pact, all hopes were soon lost.

The nukes played a role in making Japan surrender but it is vastly exaggerated. The Japanese leadership hardly noticed it was nukes at first due to dysfunctional C3 and massive damage sustained before by regular bombing. It would have taken months for the US to get additional bombs and if it had not been for the Soviet backstab, Japan would have been ready to take the risk that Truman was bluffing when he spoke they have got many of those. And he indeed was bluffing. The US could not drop any more nukes any time soon, not before the Soviets would have seized Japan for themselves.
 
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Well we are going off-topic, but using the nukes was a no brainer.

The Japanese strategy was a continuation of making allied gains costly and there is no reason to believe that would not have continued. In fact it was their only viable strategy. The Japanese were certainly preparing for it. An invasion would have cost large numbers of servicemen and financially would have strained the US. Plus the Soviets would have entered the equation. The same could have been achieved by massive bombing raids - but a single bomber with a single bomb was cheaper and risked fewer lives. It was a gamble to end the war and it worked - bravo. Had they not used it people would have been more aggrieved by the waste of life involved in forcing Japans unconditional surrender when two, potentially war ending weapons, were available.

Whilst the nukes failed to convince the Japanese govt to surrender, they did convince the Emperor and so were very effective indeed.
 
mbabbs said:
Well we are going off-topic, but using the nukes was a no brainer.

The Japanese strategy was a continuation of making allied gains costly and there is no reason to believe that would not have continued. The Japanese were certainly preparing for it. An invasion would have cost large numbers of servicemen and financially would have strained the US. Plus the Soviets would have entered the equation. The same could have been achieved by massive bombing raids - but a single bomber with a single bomb was cheaper and risked fewer lives. It was a gamble to end the war and it worked - bravo. Had they not used it people would have been more aggrieved by the waste of life involved in forcing Japans surrender when two, potentially war ending weapons, were available.

Whilst the nukes failed to convince the Japanese govt to surrender, they did convince the Emperor and so were very effective indeed.
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Agreed. Once the weapons had been developed, there was no question of them not being used whilst the war continued, anymore than there were questions surrounding the use of 1000-bomber fleets to pound cities into rubble with a torrent of bombs whose TNT-equivalent was of roughly the same order of magnitude as that of the atomic weapons. Consider Operation Gommorrah, the RAF's assault on Hamburg:

"Operation Gomorrah killed 42,600 people, left 37,000 wounded and caused some one million German civilians to flee the city. The city's labour force was reduced permanently by ten percent. Approximately 3,000 aircraft were deployed, 9,000 tons of bombs were dropped and over 250,000 homes and houses were destroyed. No subsequent city raid shook Germany as did that on Hamburg; documents show that German officials were thoroughly alarmed and there is some indication from later Allied interrogations of Nazi officials that Hitler stated that further raids of similar weight would force Germany out of the war. The industrial losses were severe, Hamburg never recovered to full production, only doing so in essential armaments industries (in which maximum effort was made). Figures given by German sources indicate that 183 large factories were destroyed out of 524 in the city and 4,118 smaller factories out of 9,068 were destroyed."
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It's worth asking whether the impact on production described above is modelled properly in-game in HOI3, where infrastructure and province-buildings recover automatically and relatively quickly. A system like that seen in AoD, where province improvements require the spending of IC to repair, would be much more realistic.
 
Oliver Twopence said:
Apparently it is quite a big deal for some.

I learned that in this thread, where SirMaru features as well.

It is not a non-issue, but i think it is blown out of proportions.
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LOL, that thread was so over the top. No, fonts are not the only reason (or even in the top 50 reasons) why games like Civ out-sell games like EU and HOI.
 
Im looking forward to HOI 4 and I will gladly pay the full price if it be polished version like CK2.

btw.
"The Japanese strategy was a continuation of making allied gains costly and there is no reason to believe that would not have continued. The Japanese were certainly preparing for it. "

Im not so sure about this one. From what Ive heard Japan government had no interest in continuation of war in 1945. The problem was they wanted Americans to guarantee untouchability of the emperor, which they did only after Hirosima and Nagasaki. I think the main reason why Americans nuked Japanesse was demonstration of atomic bomb to the Soviets.

I still dont get why Americans simply did not cut off Japanesse from their resources which were vital for them.
 
LodovicoAriosto said:
the myth about the Japanese will to carry on fighting is common in the US because it helps to justify the fact that it has been the only country which has dropped nuclear bombs on fellow human beings, that the army lied to the scientists who developed it etc.
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Couldn't disagree more; having relatives that were likely to be a part of the first-wave into Tokyo harbor, I can confidently say that they expected fierce resistance to an Allied invasion. Many of the Japanese were fanatical in their resistance of far-flung islands; how much more so would they defend their own homeland? The Battle of Okinawa, which took place on "Japanese soil," took 3 months to complete alone, for an area of only 463 miles.

The world-view you're advocating is very misleading.
 
shierholzer said:
They did. Inter-island shipping was pretty much shut down by summer '44 - let alone shipping lanes to their overseas holdings.
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Indeed the US submarine campaign against Japanese shipping was devastating effective, even in 1942! But that was more due to Japan's already stretched industry being unable to cope with all the production demands (with merchant shipping and convoy escorts being low on their priorities) than US submariners being more efficient then, say, German U-boat commanders.
 
Mr_B0narpte said:
Indeed the US submarine campaign against Japanese shipping was devastating effective, even in 1942! But that was more due to Japan's already stretched industry being unable to cope with all the production demands (with merchant shipping and convoy escorts being low on their priorities) than US submariners being more efficient then, say, German U-boat commanders.
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The only reason US submarines had such a devastating effect was that Japan never even bothered to invest in ASW warfare, the believed in their superior skills and that carriers and their superior beliefs would win them the day.

That is why the cost to Japan from US subs was calculated to be 40 times the cost of building a sub, while Germany's ratio was calculated to be 10 times the cost of building a single sub.

Simply looking at that figure alone doesn't give enough credit to German submarines, which alone by themselves required the US to spend 66% of its entire naval building capacity to stop. The US threw 70 escort carriers alone at the German submarines, not including the UK and other allied contributions.
 
oribiasi said:
Couldn't disagree more; having relatives that were likely to be a part of the first-wave into Tokyo harbor, I can confidently say that they expected fierce resistance to an Allied invasion. Many of the Japanese were fanatical in their resistance of far-flung islands; how much more so would they defend their own homeland? The Battle of Okinawa, which took place on "Japanese soil," took 3 months to complete alone, for an area of only 463 miles.

The world-view you're advocating is very misleading.
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it is not a worldview. it is an assessment which can be debated. Read the classic first account on Manhattan project - "Brighter than a thousand suns" by Robert Jungk. then ask Japanese historians or more recently even US historians. Or both at the same person: Racing the enemy (2006) by Tsuyoshi Hasegawa based in UCSB. Some interesting revisionist articles online have been popping up for a while, for example on foreignpolicy.com http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2013/05/29/the_bomb_didnt_beat_japan_nuclear_world_war_ii if you cannot access the article and do not want to sign up you can bypass by slowing down your internet connection (using e.g. netlimiter) and stop loading the page after the article loads but before the signup window loads. Pretty useful at many sites with limited acess lol. alternatively, you can also download the page to your harddrive and open it while being offline.

Using examples of stranded Japanese soldiers proves nothing about the subject of Japanese policy towards the end of the war. There were isolated Germans fighting WW2 up to the 1950s, what does it say about German leadership and policies a decade before that? The fact that battle of Okinawa took long also has nothing to do with actual reasons why Japan surrendered when it did, not earlier, not later. It is high time to end WW2 stereotypes about Japanese.

I do not deny that nukes played a role in making Japan surrender, I only deny the narrative which says that it was necessary to drop the nukes on civilian targets, not demonstrate it first at sea which the scientists were promised; that japan would have not surrendered otherwise (it would - either due to Soviet invasion or internal coup, massive starvation etc.), that its sole purpose was to defeat Japan and that Japan at the time cared more about 2 more cities burned to ashes rather than about being backstabbed by USSR and losing an army of million soldiers in less than 2 weeks.
 
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I had read somewhere that the Japanese had in fact communicated their desire to come to terms many times prior to the A-bombs. And that the huge cost involved with the development of said bombs could not justify leaving them on the shelf, as it were.

Maybe nonsense I don't know.


And on the topic of HOI4 Seriously? I have to admit I was a little surprised myself. It screams 'silent admission of failure' when a product gets a sequel so soon.
 
Hopefully the first version of HOI4 won't have a continuous, worldwide hurricane going on like HOI3 did. They promised realistic weather but I guess they forgot to mention that it was realistic weather from Jupiter's red spot.
 
LodovicoAriosto said:
I only deny the narrative which says that it was necessary to drop the nukes on civilian targets, not demonstrate it first at sea which the scientists were promised
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Tee hee is that true? Yeah right, course they were going to drop it into the ocean. So the scientist knowingly creates a weapon of mass destruction and then requests it be dropped on a load of fish. duh.
 
HMS Enterprize said:
HOI4 Seriously? I have to admit I was a little surprised myself. It screams 'silent admission of failure' when a product gets a sequel so soon.
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well, if you take a look at release history of major PDS franchises you can deduce that it is kind of HoI's turn to get a sequel after EU4. Vicky 2 is more recent than HoI3. Considering the growth of the studio, they are able to speed up the whole cycle because it is no longer just 1 team switching between development of 4 franchises.

HoI3 has its flaws and its birth and childhood was painful. I think the devs have been quite open about that. But yeah, if HoI3 was better, perhaps they would release one more expansion and aim for 2016 as a release date of HoI4.
 
mbabbs said:
Tee hee is that true? Yeah right, course they were going to drop it into the ocean. So the scientist knowingly creates a weapon of mass destruction and then requests it be dropped on a load of fish. duh.
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you know, scientists had morals back then. their numbers were very limited at that time, they had more freedom because physics was not understood as something particularly useful before. Nuclear physics from Curie to Rutherford to Fermi had as much practical use as string theory has today - weird mumbo jumbo to ordinary people, let alone military minds. Can you imagine that situation? The physicists shared their results rather then keeping them secret from each other etc. It all started in Gotingen in Germany but the scientific community was more international than after the war. I suggest you read that book by Robert Jungk, it is the most detailed description of development of nukes told by scientists themselves. Many details about conversations between general Groves (in charge of Manhattan project) and Oppenheimer are included. The scientists wanted the bomb to be used as demonstration at sea, to sink some ships, later, after some pressure, they preferred purely military target, there was even a poll organized in which vast majority rejected the idea of causing civilian casualties. Remember, those scientists were international community, many of them from Germany and Italy. When they were told that the bomb was dropped on a city most of them felt uttterly shocked and deceived. Not everybody though. For example Edward Teller was more aggresive and later turned into an active Cold warmonger while others withdrew from science after the war.

the reason why they agreed to develop a nuke was that they were worried that germany could get nukes first. It is how the whole project Manhattan started - Otto Hahn who discovered chain reaction contacted Einstein because Einstein was already famous in the US at that time. Nobody would believe some alarmist talk from a random guy called Hahn, let alone trust him with superexpensive project. Einstein contacted the banker Sachs who was close to FDR. Sachs managed to convince FDR to launch the project using an analogy - if Napoleon had trusted steam ships as a technology of future he could have invaded Britain. FDR agreed.

Only after the war it was confirmed that the German nuclear program was years behind the American program. In later stages of the war the scientists were fed false info which nurtured their worries.
 
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