Comments by "Nattygsbord" (@nattygsbord) on "Why Japan had NO Chance in WW2" video.
-
1. Japan could not get the resources it needed for its own industry. So it needed to steal them from other Asian countries, and Japan did not have enough transport ships to transport all plunder to Japan.
2. Japan was technologically inferior to America and the early victories was won much thanks to outdated equipment the Americans had. But soon things changed and America would get superior aircrafts, and American tanks would outclass all armour the Japanese had. And the Americans had access to the Japanese codes.
Winning in the Philippines against America might be easy when you have the element of surprise and fight a lightly equiped enemy. But fighting without the element of surprise against an enemy with superior tanks is much harder.
3. The Japanese army was involved in wars on multiple fronts against Vietminh, China, Russia, Australia, Britain and the USA. And troops were spread out on so many islands that there was not enough transport ships to supply them - especially not when the industry also wanted the same transport ships so that oil, aluminium, coal, copper, rubber, cotton, sugar, rice and other things could be shipped to Japan.
4. America produced more aircrafts in 1943 than Japan did during the entire war (including the years of war they fought in China). And the American planes were also much better than the old outdated junk the japanese had. And America had plenty of oil and trained pilots, while japan did not.
5. Even if Midway had ended in a total victory for Japan, it would hardly change anything. Japan would never been able to take Australia, India or California in 1942 anyways. Japan was already overextended and could at best only spend their time to consolidate their earlier gains.
But meanwhile would America build up a new fleet in the pacific. And British and American ships would be transfered from the Atlantic and the mediterranean in the meanwhile to stabilize the situation.
6. America realized that the war was won in 1943 so they stepped down military production even before the war ended. Had the Japanese won at Midway, then America would probably have increased military production instead of decreasing it.
And we could have seen Montana class battleships become reality - instead of being disbanded before they could enter service, as what really happened.
7. The co-operation between Japan and the Axis powers were nearly non-existant. While the allies had superior co-operation and huge land masses of resources. Japan might have 5 million men in China. But so what?
Those men were poorly equiped 3rd world infantry. And good fighting morale only go so far when you have to fight against Russian troops with IS2 and ISU152 tank support. Or American troops with superior amounts of artillery and tank support and excellent radios. American troops were better fed, they had more ammo to waste, they had better firearms. And Americas population was much larger than Japans. USA had 12 million men in uniform and they could easily call upon even more millions of manpower if needed to defeat a crappy japanese army.
But I doubt America would even bother. They would just use artillery, airpower and armour instead of wasting their own blood in fighting the japanese. Or give China or Russia some surplus weapons to deal with the japs.
Even junk like M3 Lee and Stuart tanks would outclass most of the armour Japan had in 1944 and 1945. Indeed, Japan did barely have any tank support at all.
2
-
"Now do a video explaining why Vietnam had NO chance in the Vietnam war"
While I agree that economic power in itself cannot determine the outcome of a war, I do however think that it can say a lot about the likelyhood of a certain outcome.
Usally does an industrial country defeat an unindustrial economy - as with for example the American civil war.
In the case of Japan vs USA I would say that USA had such a crushing superior industrial strenght that it more likely to win on the lottery than seeing Japan winning a war against USA while simultanously fighting wars against China, Russia and the British empire.
The reason why the Vietnam war ended in a failure for America was because they failed to create any realistic war goals. The thought that body counts was a goal in itself to win the war - but that is just a stupid idea of economifying warfare.
War is not about killing enemies in a faster rate than they can be replaced. Only idiots think that.
Both the American military and political leadership lacked basic understanding what war is. And they also thought that winning wars by economic means would be enough - because WWII was much won that way, as they saw it.
But Vietnam was not some stupid economic game, and nor could the enemy be understood by game theory. Ho Chi-Minh was not a typical Communist, even if the CIA and the political leadership of America thought so.
Ho Chi-Minh was most of all a nationalist. And after that he was a democrat. And after that he was a leftwinger. Indeed, he even got support from the CIA when Vietminh fought a guerilla war against Japan and was seen as a close friend to America.
But when the war with Japan ended things changed, because France wanted their colony back while Ho Chi Minh wanted independence for Vietnam. And USA had to pick side, and choosed to support France over some unimportant unknown farmer in Vietnam. So when America refused to sell him arms, he had to turn to the Chinease communists instead to get weapons - and after that he was begun to be seen as a Communist by America, despite all what he really wanted was a unified independent Vietnam with democratic rule. And only after the west had turned against him did he go into the Communist camp.
The next big mistake by America was to back the unpopular, despotic and corrupt regime in South Vietnam after the French indo-China war had ended.
This South-Vietnamese regime was hated by almost everyone for many different reasons. But once again did America have this ignorant view that it was simply a battle between Communism and liberal-democratic capitalism.
So America had no understanding for their enemy and how they could win over the people to their side.
The people in Vietnam fought for many other reasons than to promote communism. Poor farmers hated rich landlords that stole 80% of their incomes and treated them like medieval serfs. Some people hated the corruption and the power abuse of the rich landlord class that ruled South Vietnam. Some people hate the south Vietnamease regime because it was ruled by a catholic leadership (Ngo Dinh Diem). And some people were just nationalists that wanted to unify both Vietnams into a single country. And some minority people had been mistreated by the South Vietnamase government and therefore took up arms against it.
So the perhaps easiest way for America to win the Vietnam war would have been to throw the corrupt South-Vietnamease government under the bus and force the ruling class in Vietnam to agree to a landreform so all poor Vietnamese farmers could get their own piece of land to farm so they wouldn't have to be treated as slaves by some landowner.
But America could not agree to this. If they twisted the arms of their allies they could become accused of US-imperialism, and that would look very bad to the world. America needed allies in the Cold war, so they rather kept the impopular South Vietnamease regime in place and fought a long war to try to keep it in power.
But America lacked any ideas how to win this war. They thought that "body counts" would be the way to go. But the American solidiers didn't fail to see the insanity of this stupid doctrine that the military leadership promoted.
Hamburger hill was captured from Vietnamease troops after heavy casualties, but as soon as the hill was captured the Americans abandoned this hill - because the body count job had been done. And only after a few months did the Vietnamease retake the hill again.
So all the losses of lives had been for nothing. American solidiers had died for nothing while while high ranking personnel got their medals for wasting their own mens lives.
The solidiers made something akin to a working class revolt against their superiors. And fragging and threats became commonplace, so that American unit leaders would know that they will have a hadgrenade thrown at them and be killed by their own troops if they ever tried to waste their solidiers lives in pointless attacks.
So by 1970 had the fighting morale of US Army fallen apart and the leadership had lost control, and no American solidier wanted to be the last man to die in this pointless war. Corruption was rampant in South Vietnam where South Vietnamese generals sold military equpiment on the black market that America had given them. Mortars, grenades, rifles and even tanks could be bought by anyone.. and American troops started to find lots of American weapons in the hands of Vietcong. And drug sales were also a part of this rotten economy.
America had won the battles in the tet-offensive and regained control over the cities. But on the other hand had the large vietnamease countryside all been lost to the enemy. And people had lost trust in all the fake statistics produced by the military about everything from body counts to sorties flown - as a measurement of progress and effictiveness.
People lied about everything either to get promotions or to get home so they could survive the war. And even the accounting metodology idea in itself was flawed. If a dead vietnamese body was found after a battle, then both the infantry, the artillery and airpower would want to claim it as their kill - so there would be no complaints about their unit not fullfilling their monthly quota of kills, and that they therefore next month would be sent out to much more dangerous missions so the monthly kill quota could be boosted.
2
-
Even with this definition of victory Japans way of acting still remains increadibly retarded. I can understand japans feelings of frustration and anger over unfair treatment from the west. But that doesn't change the fact that Japans decision to start a war with USA was stupid and suicidal.
Yamamoto knew that this would never end well. But the rest of Japans leadership was naive and thought that all what was needed was a hard punch to knock out the American fleet and the war would be over, because America would just be okay with a sneaky suprise attack from a country of an inferior human race.
As I said. This was just wishful thinking. America would never accept such dirty tactics, and especially not in a time period when racism was mainstream. There would also be too much national pride and prestige loss to surrender to a developing country in Asia.
Pearl Harbor would never be forgotten or forgiven.
And this idea the japanese had that combat experience against shitty armies in Asia, and fanatical combat morale could fully compensate for Americas industrial superiority is also naive.
The japanese racist stereotype of Americans as materialistic and afraid of death were also far from true. Just like Hitler and the nazis did the japanese leadership know nothing about America and its industrial might. And the consequences of that would become equally devastating.
The war Japan started was just a mess of miscalculations on so many levels. And the lack of a Plan-B seems typical for the caotic japanese regime. They just started wars everyware and landed troops on islands everyware even if they didn't have any logistical capabilities to support small garrisons on every goddamn island in the pacific.
They were nowhere near victory in China, and yet they started new wars with France, the Netherlands, Britain, Australia, USA and New Zeeland. As if the problems with China and Russia was not enough. And they also managed to piss off the local population in every land they occupied, and they lacked any economic plan on how rule their many stolen colonies so the local economies took severe damages and suffered from shortages of everything, higher prices and massive inflation.
The war could never have ended well in the long run - as you said. But the war didn't even run well in the short run. The turning point of the war came only half a year after Japan had attacked Pearl Harbor.
And the battle of Coral Sea was an indecisive small loss for Japan. And the battle of
Pearl harbor never became any knockout punch, but instead could many ships be repaired and brought back to service within a few months.
And if Japan could not do better the first months of the war, then what says that they would do better the next coming months and years when America would get more modern planes to combat the Zero fighters with?
The next big disaster for Japan came only months after Midway, when the battle of Guadacanal costed Japan hundreds of aircrafts and enormous amounts of transport ships that it would never be able to replace.
And after that did Japan lose the iniative in the pacific theather over to the Americans.
And the massive sea battle at the Philliphines in 1944 could at best only have won Japan a little time before defeat. Japan was at that point starving and the merchant navy laid at the bottom of the ocean. And the industrial production was stopped by the lack of raw materials.
And even if the resources had been there so would the japanese production been too little to save the country. America was producing more aircrafts in 1943 than Japan did during the entire war. And Japans aircraft designs were comparably outdated and the pilots was badly trained.
And with the end of the war in Europe would any prospects of peace on good terms be over with as Britain, USSR, USA and China would gang up on Japan. America had never even used their industrial muscles 100% during the war - and yet were they able utterly outproduce rest of the world.
And one can only imagine what would happen if America full hearted attempt if Japan somehow managed to win some battles in the pacific. The US Navy even canceled the orders of new battleships after the victory at Midway in 1942. So had the battle of Midway ended differently then the Montana monster-sized super-battleships could still would have been under construction.
1
-
1
-
1