War Without End
There are some issues with it...
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Very few “what if” discussions about Axis “victory” in World War Two address a crucial point: what would Axis victory have looked like to them? Could the German/Japanese Axis have “won” victories that would have made sense to them?
Conquest without limits.
Neither Japan nor Germany's visions of a New World Order had any real geographical limits. Germany's "living space" stretched from the Atlantic to...somewhere in Russia; from the North Cape of Norway to....somewhere, maybe in Africa. Japan, to her credit, at least had a plan on paper: it had figures for Japanese colonies from Madagascar to California, and from Siberia to Australia. The "war aims" of both Germany and Japan were visions of internal order, peace, harmony and prosperity, albeit gained by conquering or liquidating, enslaving, or eliminating everyone that got in their way or had something they wanted. In their view, everyone that they could not conquer outright would be cowed into submitting to their supremacy. Internal enemies were to be crushed.
And enemies they had.
For the Germans, the hit parade started with Jews and communists and extended to those of certain nationalities, physical types and deformities. For the Japanese, it was everyone who wasn't Japanese, and those who had everything that they didn't, including respect. The two major Axis powers were not necessarily "natural allies." Geographic distance aside, neither of them had a great deal of resources to add to an alliance. Neither one controlled any territory—or could reach it in a reasonable time—that both could benefit from.
Germany’s goals.
The Nazis fostered Germany’s impetus for her ambitions and their nearly unfettered race-supremacy propaganda, which provided little in the way of limitations. To make matters worse, before 1933 she had a government foreign to her sensibilities. The Weimar republic was a democracy that had no democrats, for the idea was alien to Germans. First, it demilitarized her middle class for the first time in two hundred years. Then, that same middle class had their savings wiped out—twice—in economic shocks that rocked Europe but devastated Germany. The Nazis said they could fix it all, and their marching, uniformed brawlers singing and shouting about the purity of the Nordic, Aryan race promised order for all those of pure heart and courage: all Germany and everyone else had to do was agree…and obey.
Japan’s goals.
In Japan, it was a similar situation, though the economic shocks weren't so hard. Her demand for food, labor and raw materials turned Japanese foreign policy into a self-perpetuating war for resources and reparations. Like Germany, Japan resented feeling weak (although she wasn’t), and she resented the onerous restrictions placed on her by the Great Powers despite her contributions to WWI (which were modest but not meager). She feared her neighbors (especially China and the Soviet Union) and envied the resources they had. By 1930, Japan’s military demand for labor and materials far outstripped the domestic supply (and ability to buy them). This compelled them to secure the "protectorate" of Manchuria (momentarily independent in 1932) and later to invade China proper. The samurai-driven military leadership and industrial base provided about one job in five in 1920; probably one in two by 1941. But, like Germany, Japan had a racial element in their ambitions: the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere was not entirely eyewash for the pseudo-liberation of the oppressed and colonized Asians. It was a device for her post-“liberation” exploitation, because she genuinely believed that Japan was to be the guiding force and protector of the Orient. They filled their non-English propaganda with racial imagery that glorified the "Seventy Million" (an early version) or "One Hundred Million" of Japan as the "natural" rulers of the Pacific Rim.
Oops! We're at war! Now what?
As cavalier as it may sound, one could characterize the 1939-45 conflicts as the culmination of a series of miscalculations that amounted to accidents. When Germany invaded Poland in 1939, they were not expecting Britain and France to actually go to war because of it, and certainly not in such a way that couldn't be settled at another Munich. While history usually holds that Hitler was a shrewd gambler whose bluff was finally called, his generals were more than happy to take advantage of whatever "gambler's luck" their leader had for as long as he had it. Beyond Poland, the Germans had no proper plan of operation, no contingencies to meet invasion on their western borders, and very little in the way of plans to break or evade another naval blockade. There were staff-created contingency plans, but these were hypothetical exercises based on forces that (largely) did not exist. Traditionally, German plans were like that: the Polish operation, for example, ran on a shoestring and was short 20,000+ trucks at the outset.
Then came the invasions of Denmark, Norway, the Low Countries and France.
They fell one by one, expecting each would fold quickly and be out of the war for good. But nearly all resisted; more than that, they resisted from Britain, which similarly did not give it up as Berlin planned. The Luftwaffe was a poor strategic attack instrument that lacked the depth and the doctrine to weaken Britain's defenses enough to enable an invasion. The Kriegsmarine came closer with the U-boat campaign, but ultimately lacked the numbers to maintain their stranglehold on Perfidious Albion.
The invasions of the Balkans, Greece, and Russia were supposed to be quick knockout blows.
But each burned up Germany's resources without adding to them, and occupation was expensive in both blood and treasure. The extension into the Mediterranean and northern Africa (that Italy was supposed to be dominating) made things worse. With more and more resources being used to defeat their internal enemies in death camps, and defending against the growing Allied air armadas and fleets, no one in Germany had any notion of how to end the conflict, let alone “win.”
Japan pulled for Germany, but that was about it.
Despite having signed the Anti-Comintern Pact with Germany and Italy, the Japanese were too far away and resource-poor to offer any real military help to either. Their long border war with the Soviets and Mongolians that ended in 1939 had shown their weaknesses in ground warfare, and they wanted no part in actually attacking Russia, distracted or not. After the US turned off the oil, scrap metal and credit spigot in 1941, Japan decided that war with the West was the answer—as long as it was short, like a sword match. It certainly had to be quicker than the endless bloody slog in China. Planning the 1941 offensive—which would encompass a third of the world's surface—took all summer 1941, but it was also a waiting game: waiting for the Soviets to fold as “everyone knew” they would. Without the Soviets allied to Britain, they reasoned, the bulk of the Japanese Army's strength in China could be used for fighting, instead of watching the long Manchurian frontier.
Japan’s plan unwound like a spring in December 1941 and had to function like a clock, depending on sparse resource allocations.
Smaller setbacks like Wake Island set the plan back slightly, but bigger ones, like the delay in securing the Philippines, were a veritable nightmare for Japanese planners. When the plan was more or less done, with Port Moresby in sight and Japanese ships cruising the Indian Ocean, they asked themselves: now what? According to their plan, it was about now that the Americans, British, Dutch and French should seek negotiations…but they weren’t. Japan did not foresee and could not survive continued US and British Empire/Commonwealth resistance. The United States could build more ships in a month than Japan could in a year, and that was before the American wartime industrial mobilization that started in 1939. Japan's industry had been operating at almost full capacity since 1937, yet it could barely keep up with the industrial output of France (about 10% of American output).
Then Japan expanded its horizons, in part because of the April 1942 Doolittle raid.
This pinprick deeply embarrassed the samurai leadership. They planned to threaten Australia and Hawaii directly with small amphibious forces. This (they predicted) would compel the Allies to use their (still) thin resources to respond. This (they planned) would fail, at which point, the Allies would ask for an armistice. Japan would then dictate peace in the Pacific, keeping the oil of the Dutch East Indies while colonizing the Philippines, New Guinea and southeast Asia up to the Indian frontier, thus permanently cutting China off from outside aid.
The Coral Sea and Midway checked that “plan.”
Both were barren ambitions that most historians chalk up to “victory disease.” While hubris had something to do with the two strategic defeats, they were also “hail Mary” plays because the Japanese couldn't figure out how else to get the West to stop fighting, and they needed to find a way quickly. They could not replace the pilots they lost at the Coral Sea and Midway with anyone comparable for years. To repair damaged ships, they had to stop new construction of a like number. Every ship sunk was a tragedy to the Allies, but a catastrophe to Japan, which started the war with only nine million tons of shipping capacity (compared to Britain's 110 million and America's 80 million). The samurai leadership had not foreseen that their enemies, like China, just would not stop fighting.
Both Germany and Japan were at a loss for how to end it by the end of 1942.
Stuck in a war of their own making, the people of Japan and Germany are not entirely blameless for the actions of their leaders and the minorities that dominated them. The samurai and the Nazis sprang from within their respective societies; they were not foreign plants. Though their "societies" were not directly to blame for the horrors of Auschwitz and Nanking, they allowed them by not imposing credible restraint, and sometimes, they even profited from the atrocities. Neither the German nor the Japanese armies were armies of slaves. Among the many conscripts were many true believers in the causes that they thought they were fighting for. But as the war continued and doom foreshadowed them, their enthusiasm waned.
The people believed what they were being told by the loudest voices.
So they followed, as they always had. They didn't look where they were going, for there was little there to guide them. They strove ahead because they were told to, and because they believed they would be better off if they did. With their economies ruined, their cities devastated, their towns and fields sacked and burned, and the best of their youth dying far from home, "winning" the 1939-45 conflict for their leaders’ avowed demands for “purity” and “equality” was nothing like how the people themselves might have defined it, given the chance. But their societies had trained them to simply to obey, with methods and for reasons that were alien to their most of their enemies.
What did they want?
The Germans wanted a fairly nebulous “pure” ideal of order and prosperity that even they would compromise on, but their frontiers were so vulnerable and their economy so riven with shortages they kept getting overrun. The Japanese wanted to look like the rest of the world, but needed foreign policy tools other than war; they also needed to liberate parts of their society that had never had an authentic voice, which was most of it. Their failings as societies required that the rest of the world provide them with solutions in the only way that they could accept it: by annihilating what they had before the wars started. The Anglo/Soviet/American-led alliance knew precisely what they wanted: what they had before all the noise started (although Stalin had other ideas). After millions of dead and billions of treasure spent, their enemies were happy to oblige them by destroying the very fabric of their societies. “Victory” for Germany and Japan looked different for the leaders than it did for the led.
Without a coherent vision of victory, the war spelled doom for them both.
The Safe Tree: Friendship Triumphs
The Safe Tree has nothing to do with any of that, but everything to do with friendship without limits.
The Trilogy wraps up from here, with the friends overcoming threats from those who simply don’t want to quit or leave them be. Available from your favorite bookseller or from me if you want an autograph.
Coming Up…
Six Ways to Rewrite History V
Coronel 1914: The Zenith of the Armored Cruiser
And Finally...
On 12 October:
1950: Pyongyang, Korea, falls to UN forces driving north from their landing at Inchon a month before. While this was exceeding the UN mandate to eject North Korean forces from south of the 38th parallel, President Truman allowed the invasion, which alarmed the Chinese. Just a few weeks later, the consequences of this action would become apparent.
1954: Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury is first published by Ballantine Books, New York. Bradbury’s dystopian version of a future without not just books but reading of any kind, while amusing, presaged the future of amusement and information transmission, with today’s reliance on videos and recordings.
And today is NATIONAL WHOLE HOG BARBECUE DAY. Cooking the whole gutted and stripped hog over an open fire is quite traditional, going back to the origins of barbecue in Mongolia (yep, that’s where it was invented). I can take it or leave it, frankly.
The Man in the High Tower comes to mind. Yeah, just fiction, but interesting.