Comments by "Sar Jim" (@sarjim4381) on "Alternate History Special 001" video.

  1. On the question of the Japanese invading Hawaii, the main question is define Hawaii. If it really means Oahu, the island with Pearl Harbor, that's one thing. However, the Hawaiian island chain is about 300 miles across, and trying to occupy and hold all of the seven main islands would have been impossible without the Japanese moving something on the order of 45,000 to 60,000 troops and all their equipment and supplies while conducting amphibious landings on all the islands pretty much at once. The Japanese tried this with the Aleutians and succeeded, but only for a relatively short period of time. They had to dig in and hope they could repel the invasion they knew was coming. Their best hope with Hawaii was to occupy the largest mostly undefended islands of Maui, Hawaii, and Kauai. Once they had established air bases by using the existing civil airports, and naval bases using the existing harbors, they could bomb and starve the Americans into submission, the same tactics they used in the Philippines. The Japanese also would have needed a victory at Midway instead of losing four carriers. They would have had to wiped out the American carrier fleet and then occupied Midway to protect their flanks. The estimates I've read is that it would have taken until August of 1942 to replace the aircraft and crews needed for an attack on Hawaii. Oahu wouldn't have been a walkover either, with 100,000 regular Army troops and the ability of American convoys with more aircraft, man, and equipment to reach Oahu for the almost seven months after Pearl Harbor, largely hindered by the Japanese. Even if all this would have succeeded, the problem of logistics remains unsolvable. Just as in the Aleutians, the Japanese may have succeeded for a short period of time, but the idea of foreign troops occupying American territory would have galvanized the American public and American production. The Japanese Navy and Army would have been destroyed even faster if they had attempted an invasion of Hawaii.
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  2. Indeed. It is sometimes forgotten that the extensive oil resourced of the Netherlands East Indies were by far a greater prize to the Japanese than Hawaii. A reliable supply of oil was vital to the Japanese conducting any kind of fleet operations far from home. There was sufficient doubt among the High Command about being able to take and hold all of the NEI without throwing Hawaii into the mix. If all the 29 US submarines present at Manila on December 8 had reliable torpedoes, the NEI campaign may have had a different outcome.
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  3. Electro boats put in service a year earlier and in numbers certainly had the chance to prolong the war. The two that made it into combat areas in March of 1945 remained undetected until the end of the war. If construction had begun in 1942 instead of 1943, not only could more boats have been able to put to sea, they would have been manned by better trained crews and more experienced officers. Maybe the most important point is German crews, instead of being demoralized by their inability to get into convoys and sink ships and essentially waiting until their boat was sunk, would now be able to slip undetected in a convoy, sink some ships, and sprint away from the escort vessels. Germany still would have been in extremis trying to fight off the Russians, but gaining maybe another year would have seen a a new range of guided weapons in service. Electro boats are the only thing I can see that might have prolonged the war enough for that to happen.
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