@variance:
Axis must hold any 3 of the following for 1 complete round:
1) Western USA
2) New South Wales
3) India
4) all territories originally controlled by China (total extermination; includes Kwangtung) 5) any 20 islands on the Pacific map (“islands” include the island of Japan, Hawaii, Philippines, DEIs, New Zealand, and all the little islands; Dutch New Guinea plus New Guinea counts as 1 island). Â Note: please count the islands on the map and consider which ones are usually easy or hard for Japan to get.
These are all historically reasonable goals for Japan in WWII. Â
I respectfully disagree that these goals were historically reasonable for Japan. By December 1941, the war in China had been going on continuously for four years, was absorbing huge amounts of Japanese manpower, and had to a large extent bogged down for Japan. Japan also had to maintain appreciable forces along Machuria’s borders with the USSR and Mongolia, where there had been a couple of shooting wars in the late 1930s. These situations all reflected the strategic ambitions of the Japanese Army, which favoured a “north and west” expansion strategy for Japan, in contrast with the Japanese Navy, which wanted to expand “south and east.”
Objectively, the Navy’s plan made more sense because that was where Japan would be able to find the resources it needed, notably the oil of the DEI. The Navy’s plan also had the advantage (from the Navy’s point of view) that expanding south and east would require a very heavy involvement of the Navy – unlike the war in China, which by its land-based nature was an Army show. Japan’s naval forces were available for a campaign south (towards the DEI, Malaya and New Guinea) and east (towards Hawaii and the Gilberts), but the Army was so heavily commited to the war in China that the campaigns launched by Japan in December 1941 had to be carried out with the comparatively few Army divisions that could be scraped together for the job, plus a few SNLF units.
Japan initially had the advantage of surprise and proximity, so it was able to take the Philippines, the DEI, Malaya, the Bismarck Archipelago, Burma, Hong Kong, Wake, Guam and the Gilberts in short order. But as the war reached New Guinea and the Solomons, Japan started becoming seriously overextended because the oceanic distances were becoming too large and because Japan simply didn’t have enough troops available to take and hold that much territory in the face of serious opposition (which is exactly what they started facing as the Americans recovered from their initial defeats and found ways to hold the line until they had built up enough strength to start driving the Japanese back across the Pacific). Given that Japan didn’t manage to complete its conquest of Guadalcanal and New Guinea, never got past Burma, captured just two useless islands in the Aleutians, and didn’t even bother to snap up the easy prize of the Ellice Islands, it would have been quite unrealistic for Japan to imagine that it could conquer all of India or parts of Australia, let alone capture and occupy parts of the continental United States across 6,000 mile of ocean. I think that the most ambitious conquest the Japanese might have credibly added to their actual vistories was the Hawaiian Islands – and even that one is a bit of a stretch, given Japan’s spectacular failure to set foot on Midway Island, which was minuscule in comparison to the main Hawaiian Islands and appreciably closer to Japan.
