World War ll Questions.

[DemocratSinceBirth]

I just saw The Great Raid yesterday . It was a decent flick but the story it told of the liberation of the prison camp at Bataan was of more interest...

How did a nation like Japan conquer and occupy nations that had vastly greatly populations and more resources?

Was Japanese occupation more brutal than German occupation?

Did the Axis power jointly plan strategies like the Allies?


I just can't see Tojo, Hitler, and Mussolini planning together though DeGaulle, Churchill, Stalin and FDR made an odd pairing too...

[Fire Walk With Me]

1. "We will kill 10 for any 1 who disobeys us" is effective

Saw it yesterday as well. Brutality can be effective; then they call everyone cowards for surrendering and not fighting to the death.

If you enemy believes in fighting to the death, you've got a problem. The price of peace being victory over those who don't want it, to try and quote jms of Babylon 5 fame.

[DemocratSinceBirth]

2. Sun Tzu

Sun Tzu said it's best to leave your enemy an escape route to discourage him from fighting to the death...


The movie was of special interest to me because my girlfriend is from the Phillipines...

And it was the last "uncomplex" war we fought in imho... If there ever was a tale of white hats and black hats that was it...

She told me that when her dad was eight years old he hit a Japanese soldier with a slingshot and almost got killed for his efforts.. She said he was only spared because of his resemblance to the commander's son...

[achtung_circus]

3. There's a simple topic.

How did a nation like Japan conquer and occupy nations that had vastly greatly populations and more resources?

Religious fervour- the Emperor was God. Ruthless efficiencies. Aggressive modernization. The nations Japan conquered were primarily (at that time) colonial possessions of countries who were busy elsewhere. Burma, Malaysia, Singapore- UK, Indonesia- Holland (Dutch East Indies). China had it's own set of problems.

Was Japanese occupation more brutal than German occupation?

It's hard to compare. Neither has much to be proud of. Murder of "lesser" people was common. I suppose nothing compares to the industrial efficiencies of the Nazi death camps, Japanese camps, well, you saw the movie. <http://www.fatherryan.org/holocaust/holocaust77/rapenanking.htm>

Did the Axis power jointly plan strategies like the Allies?

Only sort of. Japan and the European members were separated by too much distance to coordinate effectively. Mussolini was primarily a windbag and his government collapsed the moment Allied troops entered Italy. Italy was defended mostly by Germans. Hitler spent a lot of time and wasted effort pulling mussolini's irons from the fire, viz: Greece, Yugoslavia.


I just can't see Tojo, Hitler, and Mussolini planning together though De Gaulle, Churchill, Stalin and FDR made an odd pairing too...

The "Axis" was more a political than an integrated military alliance. Call it window dressing to support each dictator in whatever he wanted to do in his own backyard.

[DemocratSinceBirth]

7. TY

I did see on this board that there was a much greater percentage of Americans being mistreated and killed in Japanese captivity than in German captivity...


I know anecdotally we treated our prisoners well which makes Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo so disappointing...

My anecdotal story is the Italian man who cut my hair as a child was a POW and he became so enamored of Americans he emigrated here after the war...

[Kipling]

4. Okay. Do my best:

How did a nation like Japan conquer and occupy nations that had vastly greatly populations and more resources?
Superior tactics and technology. The strong centralised leadership of the Empire and it's good communications meant that strong, flexible plans could be made. The Chinese never had a unified plan for their war effort. Their armies merely wandered around, defended their local area, or deserted en masse. A lack of air power and decent artillery meant that even when the Chinese did bring their superior numbers to bear they were often slaughtered. Well into the 40's, Chinese troopers from some areas still fought with swords and crossbows.

Was Japanese occupation more brutal than German occupation?
Yes, unless you were Jewish. Japanese violence was less systematic and more widespread. Officers, for example, would hold beheading competitions on captured peasants, often killing 200 or so in a single contest. Rape, slaughter, and torture were all seen as enjoyable leisure pursuits for the occupiers, and were totally justified by fierce national pride and long-instilled cruelty.

Did the Axis power jointly plan strategies like the Allies?
They tried occasionally, but were never as effective. Their relations were as close as the US and Russia, not the US and Britain. Physical meetings were not possible due to their lack of air control and geographic distance, except between Hitler and Mussolini early in the war. These meetings did have some success and troops in Africa were successfully co-ordinated.

[FloridaPat]

5. Ever visit England? It's about the size of Wisconsin and ruled about

half the world at one point in history. It still has quite a clout left.

[rockymountaindem]

6. Let me try to keep this simple...

Japan conquered those nations you mention for several reasons. Their primary conquest was China. At the time, China was suffering from internal division between Maoist communists and western-leaning types like Chang Kai-Shek. Furthermore, China had never been industrialized to any significant degree except by foreign investment. Their military was horribly disorganized, particularly compared to the rigidly diciplined Japanese forces. Chinese equipment was antiquated and in poor repair, and morale was very very low.

The Japanese also violated rules of warfare by denying food supplies to civilian populations, and they also used biological and chemical warfare which the Chinese could not defend against.

Japanese occupation was probably equally brutal to German occupation, but it was on a less organized basis. Japanese troops were given free range to execute any Chinese person at will. The Japanese were extremely brutal in China, Korea (which they had controlled since 1910) and Indochina.

Yes, the Axis powers did plan jointly, though Japan was left out of the loop. Most of the European-Japanese exchange was limited to technology transfer. The European axis powers did collaborate closely. German, Italian, Romanian, Slovakian and Finnish troops operated very closely in most theaters where they were deployed.

[Ready4Change]

8. Japan conquered via technology, manuever, naval and air dominance.

- The Japanese naval and air forces were top notch, and ruled their domains. With control of air and sea, ground forces were "leveraged" to be more effective than their sheer numbers would indicate.

At that point the excellent training, equipment and fanatical zeal of the Japanese soldiers of that era took care of the rest. They were tough mo-fu's, and they were fighting, in effect, peasant armies.

- I'd call the Japanese occupation brutal, and the German occupation outright horrifying.

- Axis powers cooperated more by sharing information than directly joining forces. Japan, for example, got the plans for lots of Germanys advanced technologies shipped to them via submarines.

IMO, the Allies would have never cooperated as well as they did, had they not been facing a true evil. No matter what you may think of our current world, it's a far sight better than it would have been, had the Axis powers not been stopped.

[Freedomfried]

12. Not to mention that the Japanese were also Asians in Asia

With money and food for collaborators, and bullets for those not so inclined.

Our farm here on Negros island is on the battlefield where the Japanese made their last stand in the Visayas.

I have a most interesting collection of war artifacts that I have found.

FF
Philippines

[DemocratSinceBirth]

14. Did You See My Anecdote....

My girlfriend is from the Phillipines...


Kamusta...

[Freedomfried]

16. My Wife's a Philippina, I'm a "mail order husband"

We sold our stuff in 2000 and moved here for good.
And I have never regretted it.

Delaga na lang!

[AlGore-08.com]

9. They conquered those territories only for a very brief period

The Nazis and the Japanese (fascist government) were allies because both saw Communism as a threat - - both eventually invaded the Soviet Union (the Japanese invasion was a short lived disaster), and the Japanese battled the Chinese communists as well as other Chinese factions. The first Nazi/Japanese pact was the Anti-Commintern pact of 1936.

The Nazis broke it when they signed the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact in 1939, which divided up Eastern Europe between the Nazis and the Soviets.

The Nazis renewed it in 1941 when they invaded Russia. Since, by this time, World War II was in full swing, there were a lot more signers - - most of them countries which the Nazis had invaded: Italy, Hungary, Spain, Manchukuo (the Japanese puppet state in Manchuria), Bulgaria, Croatia, Denmark, Finland, Romania, Slovakia, and the Nanking regime in China.

Here's a basic overview of the Pacific theater in WWII:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pacific_War

And IMNSHO here's the most important paragraph in the article:

Japan's policies in the 1930s are remarkable for their disastrously self-defeating nature. Japan's grand strategy was based on the premise that it could not survive a war against the European powers without secure sources of natural resources, yet to secure those resources it decided to undertake the war that it knew it could not win in the first place. Moreover, Japanese actions such as its brutality in China, and its practice of first setting up, and then undermining, puppet governments in China, were clearly antithetical to Japan's overall goals, and yet the country continued to persist in them anyway. Finally, this march to self-destruction is remarkable in that many individuals within the Japanese political and military elite realized these self-destructive consequences, but were unable to do anything about the situation. Also, there appears to have been no debate over policy alternatives which might have enabled Japan to further its goals in China.

[Jim Sagle]

11. Sounds like us today.

:cry:

[K-W]

10. Resources and men dont equal power, military forces do.

Japan built and trained the best military.

Throughout history large populations with great wealth are destroyed by militarily superior foes. In fact that is basically history.

And if you want to know why Japan happened to build the best military force at the time, the answer lies in Japan's ability to maintain some independence and avoid the great plague of colonialization that destabilized the rest of the region.

[punpirate]

13. Everyone provides good examples...

... but, there are a couple of additions to make. China was badly weakened by Western forces when they used the Boxer Rebellion as an excuse to weaken the strength of the empress and a fairly strong central government. From that point on, the country effectively broke into warlords' fiefdoms, so it can't be thought of, through the 1910-1937 period, as the more unified country that it is today.

The Japanese ruthlessly exploited that fracturing by doing something like what Hitler had done to Austria, Czechoslovakia and Poland--Blitzkrieg. Their equivalent was known as the Rape of Nanking. Nanking at the time was the capitol city of China, and the Japanese invaded with superior weapons and tactics and executed a four-month-long reign of terror against Nanking during 1937-1938, in which 370,000 civilians and many prisoners of war were systematically butchered. That campaign enabled them to effectively control much of the country, even though they were of inferior numbers.

The Rape of Nanking was one of the most horrific periods in the pre-WWII period.

[rasputin1952]

15. For one thing, Japan had been prepping for war far longer most

other nations. It took vast amounts of resources, but the payoff, at least in the '30's was huge.

When the Japanese stormed into Manchuria, Nanking, etc, the target populations were not prepared for war. The horrific ways the japanese treated the occupied countries made it plain for everyone to see, Japan was playing for keeps.

The Japanese were the Pacific Juggernaut, and it took incredible willpower and resources to defeat them; just as in Europe it took the same willpower and resources to defeat Germany.

Oddly enough, hitler used Mussolini as a template for how he came to power. Hitler actually admired Mussolini in the beginning, and used many of his tactics to gain power and root himself into the "hero" mold. Mussolini came to be terrified of Hitler, and tried to distance himself....din't work.

It was the closing of the age of empires. Just as the British had forged an empire w/less troops etc, Japan hoped to do the same. It was not to be in the long run....but in the beginning, they were winning, and with horrid consequences for those that were conquered....:(

[DemocratSinceBirth]

17. Mussolini

Mussolini came to be terrified of Hitler, and tried to distance himself....din't work.


I know Mussolini didn't share Hitler's virulent anti-semitism...

[DemocratSinceBirth]

18. Thank You...

You guys are great...


Of course I knew the big story of WW2 but you guys gave me a nice, complete picture...

[Postman]

19. You think you know WW II?

try reading "Trading With The Enemy" author - Charles Higham.

You won't think WW II was so black and white.

Corporate America traded and supplied the Nazi's with war material right through the war. Ford, GM, Standard Oil(Exxon-Mobil today), ITT, the Texas Company, Sterling Products to name a few.

[HawkerHurricane]

20. I'll do my best.

How did a nation like Japan conquer and occupy nations that had vastly greatly populations and more resources?
Japan occupied parts of China, French Indochina, the Phillipines, the Dutch East Indies, Singapore, Malaya, Thailand, Northern New Guinea, and many islands.

China was NOT a unified country, being divided between the Nationalists, the Communists, and numerous warlords... Japan practiced a divide and conquer stratagy there; niether the Communists nor the Nationalists wanted to waste strength fighting Japan.

French Indochina was a colony, the locals were already restive, and France itself occupied by Germany. It was actually occupied before the war vs England and the U.S. began. Funny thing is, the anti French guerrillas rapidly became anti-Japanese guerrillas, while the pro-French locals quickly became pro-Japanese. Many of the problems with the later South Vietnamese government can be traced to the fact that many of the members were collaborators with the French and Japanese.

The Dutch had the same problem in the East Indies, as the French did in Indochina, with a twist. The locals formed both collaborationist and guerrilla units, who cooperated against the Japanese, and later would cooperate against the returning Dutch.

Thailand, the only country in the area still independent, was no match for the Japanese, and quickly surrendered, and just as quickly changed sides when the Japanese left.

Singapore and Malaya were British colonies, but Britain had many problems closer to home. The inablity of the British to free up land, air and sea units meant swift defeat in Singapore and Malaya, but they were able to hold India and constest Burma.

The Phillipines were a U.S. colony, but the U.S. was unprepared for war... given the smashing of the Battle Line at Pearl Harbor, MacAurther's incompetence, and a second wave of troops freed up from the successful Malaya and Singapore campaign...

By building thier military to a impossible to maintain peak, and catching thier opponents weak and/or off guard they were able to grab enourmous amounts of territory.

Question two... were the Japanese more brutal than the Germans... I'd call it a tie. The Germans were more organized in thier brutality, the Japanese were more random about it. And the intentional murder of European Jewry was above and beyond anything anywhere else.

Question Three... Nope. There was almost no coordination between the two powers. Japan did not inform Germany of thier intent to attack the Americans and British. Germany attempted repeatedly to get Japan to attack Russia... but after Kulkin Gol, the Japanese did NOT want to face the Red Army.

Tojo never met with Hitler or Mussolini. Tojo ruled because he was the senior officer in the Army, not because of any political skill. And, in fact, he had little real control... the Army chiefs of staff were running the country, and often ignored Tojo... the Japanese Navy also refused to coordinate with the Army. Tojo was more the 'face man' to the Japanese Parliement for the Army than a true ruler.

This is late because I was interuppted mid post... so your question has probably already been answered.