ALAMO wrote:And it is worth adding that even if we consider a war in the Pacific, there is one thing obvious to anyone who ever studied the subject.
Japan was a second-rate enemy for the European standards, or we can consider them even a 3rd grade, as the Reich allies were 2nd rate.
That does not apply to the individual soldiers, who were brave, resistant, and fought till the end, but to the general strategy, squad training etc.
The myth created by the Hollywood presents them as super soldiers, charging with samurai swords in banzai attacks.
The truth is, that this behavior was an act of desperation, in a face of total technical overwhelming.
There was a very interesting Russian military archeology expedition to the Kurils, and an extremely interesting conclusions.
First, they found the Japanese army artefacts extremely rare, and in extremely severe conditions.
Why ? Well, because facing a lack of functionally any strategic resources, the quality of that equipment was extreamly low. For example the helmets turns out to be made of iron, as they lacked steel. Military vehicles were made with wooden frames, that did not survive to this day, and made them much less resilient back then.
Japanese strongpoints and bunqers were made of ... wood.
As long as they occupied Indochina, they have access to a species called "ironwood", extreamly hard. This was used for fortifications, still, even that "iron" wood was not even close to the concrete fortifications made by the Germans, or in Europe in general.
And as they lost the land relatively early in the war, they didn't have access even to that material, making the fortifications of the regular wood&dirt.
This Is "the mighty Japan Imperial Army" in it's real shape.
And Soviets proved that several times, starting from 1936, and ending in Mongolia in 1945 ...
With all respect ALAMO I've never heard such a load of baloney about WW2 (with the exception of Nazi revisionism)
The Japs had an under-developed land-army, that much is true. Their tanks and armored vehicles were certainly 2nd-rate, their artillery and AT guns were outdated, while their infantry weapons tended to vary - they had a perfectly good rifle (in fact one of the best during the early war), but their machine-guns were again obsolete by that time. As for their tactics and organization I'm not read up on this but I can easily believe that it was behind the European practices of the time.
This assessment might be true of the army though, but certainly not of the navy and air force, where the Japanese poured in their resources, and this is that which ultimately expelled the Dutch and the British, and tied up the Americans for so long.
And even for the army - one can point to Khalkin-Gol or to the Soviet invasion of Manchuria at the end of the war against the by-then thoroughly depleted and ill-equipped Manchukou Army; but this ignores several important details.
Firstly the Japanese held their own fine in Khalkin-Gol and against any other foe they would probably have emerged victorious. They were just outmatched by Zhukov and the very modern equipment the Soviets had stationed earlier in the theater, such as the BT-7s. Unlike the BS Wikipedia article, I am pretty sure they had a superiority of air-power and artillery throughout the campaign, the Soviets having the advantage in tanks and manpower. They also lost more in terms of casualties + captured, but the difference was not so great; the Soviets (an overwhelmingly land-based power) had a real fight on their hands.
Secondly, it shouldn't escape notice that the Japs had most of their army stationed in China throughout the war, and were tied down by the huge amount of men the Chinese were throwing at them. In the Chinese theater, the Japs were regularly severely outnumbered, albeit certainly they had far superior equipment and better training. The Japanese took over the entire Chinese coast yet never knocked China out of the war, most of their divisions had to be kept there.
The Japanese army therefore, was perfectly adequate for its primary adversary in China. It's fight meanwhile in Singapore and Indonesia was a cakewalk, against the same European armies, steel-helmets and all. In the Philippines, the Japs captured no less than 17 US Generals, and mopped up the combined Philippine-US forces across the whole territory in 3 months. In Burma the Japanese had a little more difficulty, but again emerged victorious not too much worse for wear.
Can we say that the Japanese army was not a match for the US Marines? Well no, they put up a ferocious fight against them and eventually convinced the Americans to drop nukes on them rather than go through the same ordeal dialed up to 10 on the Japanese home islands as compared to what they witnessed on the Pacific islands. It's easy to dismiss Japanese tanks and infantry tactics and so on. But who were they up against? Also an enemy who came at first, with M3 Stuarts (the USMC wasn't re-equipped with Shermans until 1944!), and without much experience in land warfare. During the first land engagement of the Japs against the Yanks, in the Philippines, the US forces there were equipped mostly with Enfields rather than M1 Garands, and so did not even enjoy the advantage in terms of infantry small-arms.
The fortification stuff meanwhile is beneath serious discussion. If the Nazis had occupied the Pacific Islands, would they have ringed them with concrete defenses? Dirt stops bullets and shells fine. The Soviets also relied mostly on dirt and wood defenses. The Brits and US didn't really build them at all (except in Singapore, where they proved futile), but when and where they needed some quick defenses, they relied on the same trenches and dug-outs as everyone else.
The only ones who massively used concrete defenses and bunkers were the Nazis, but that's because they had the time and resources to work on them years ahead of where they knew the enemy would have to approach them.
True, the Japanese Army would have been inferior to the Soviet one. But they succeeded in avoiding war with the USSR until the end, so that's a moot point.
The Japanese lost the naval war to the US, but then anyone would have, the US was another naval power but just a superior one, and crucially with more industry and more access to resources, which the Japanese lacked.
As mentioned, they also lost the industrial war, and the political war with them eventually being surrounded by victorious allied powers - the US, USSR and British
And then they were just nuked
None of this made them a 2nd rate much less 3rd rate military power. They took over half of Asia while operating under severe resource constrictions and never needed to be bailed out by anybody. This isn't Romania or even Italy we're talking about.
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