Talk:Rising Sun
From Alternative History
This is currently my first alt-history,a pet project and, most importantly, still a work in progress! Expect more massive updates to this page soon!
In keeping with my vision for this piece, I had to nuke the Moff's contributions and start again. Sorry, dude! Judgement 01:47, 11 April 2006 (UTC)
[edit] POD
The current POD is during the Battle of Midway, where instead of the US winning the battle, the Japanese did. I think this is not very probable, since at this point the US is in a better advantaged position than the Japanese. The main reason for this is that due to US intelligence, the Americans knew of the attack on Midway before hand, and had prepared accordingly, while the Japanese thought they were launching a surprise attack. In fact, the Japanese emphasized so much on steath on this mission that Yamamoto's supporting forces of battleships and cruisers trailed Vice-Admiral Chuichi Nagumo's carrier Striking Force by several hundred miles, so by the time the battle started none of their formations was mutually supporting.
A better POD would be that prior to planning the battle, the Japanese invented a new cipher to encode their radio transmissions. That way, the Americans would not have intercepted Japanese plans for attack, and Japan carried out the invasion as planned.
The Japanese plan , which included an attack on the Aleutian Islands in Alaska as well, was to lure the American carrier fleet into a trap and destroy it. In and ideal situation (for the Japanese) the invasion of Midway would succeed and America would rush to defend it, running into a trap.
Greekmythfan 15:34, 19 April 2006 (UTC)
I'll have to disagree with you on this. Midway was, as of the battle, the last major American naval base in the Pacific that wasn't on the U.S Coast. While it is true that the Japanese's emphasis on stealth was key to their loss, the only reason that the U.S was able to defeat them was because they had sufficient numbers to do so; something that could not be achieved without the support of the Yorktown. As you can see by my althist, the Yorktown was available for the battle, and U.S forces were severely hindered by this. Judgement 03:15, 14 May 2006 (UTC)
1) Midway was not a "major American naval base"; it was a little sandspit with an airstrip. Oahu was the major American naval base".
2) The Japanese had no possibility whatever of capturing Oahu. By mid-1942 there were about 500 aircraft stationed there - more than the entire Japanese carrier fleet could carry. There were also about 200,000 troops. Japan's feeble logistical capacity was stretched to the limit supporting about one division of troops on Guadalcanal, even with control of the rest of the Solomons and a base at Rabaul, only 1,200 km away. Oahu was 4,000 km from the nearest Japanese outposts, just as close to California.
3) The Japanese had no possibility whatever of occupying Australia. They could have landed a modest force at Darwin, and probably taken it. But from Darwin to, say, Brisbane, is about 2,700 km, through barren desert and mountains. About the same distance as San Francisco to Chicago. Japanese troops were good light infantry, but they never had the capacity for large scale overland operations. If the U.S. was completely out of the war, then the Japanese could have sent naval forces to bombard coastal cities and perhaps force Australia to capitulate, but an actual occupation was never possible.
Sorry to rain on the parade, but violent unrealism is not interesting.
This is not to say that Japan couldn't win at Midway. If Japan had changed cipher keys a month earlier, the U.S. would not have the intelligence that made victory possible. The Japanese could have sunk ENTERPRISE and HORNET (YORKTOWN probably would be left under repair), and captured Midway, without losing their four carriers. This would have seriously crimped Allied operations in the Pacific. But even this would not give Japan the huge additional capacities required to take Oahu and conquer Australia.
Rich Rostrom rrostrom.21stcentury@rcn.com
p.s There was no Japanese Admiral Chiuchi. There was an Admiral Chuichi Nagumo. Japanese would call him Nagumo Chuichi; perhaps that's the confusion.