The seizure of Indo China by Japan, the final step to war

There's no "cherry picking" Opana, I've found about a dozen polls that are most relevant to the war overseas, at least 75% is unrelated stuff, mostly endless opinion polls about the 1940 election.

i

Well then you heard it here first.
It could be described as neutral (unfriendly neutral perhaps)

It was a complicated relationship.
How would you describe the current EU or US relationship with say, China or Pakistan? Neutral, friendly or hostile?


We trade with them, but China is occuping Tibet, claims Taiwan and is making aggressive moves in the South China Sea.
Pakistan's security service was(is) sponsering the Taliban & anti-US groups, and likely aware of Osama's hideout.
Both have nukes, and are dangerous. Both are accused of rampant corruption & civil rights abuses.
Pakistan's governments are far from stable.

They would both be classed as "neutral" (and dangerous & possibly hostile)

Are you asking me for my opinion? Or Churchill's opinion?

I'll put on my Churchill hat and answer from his PoV.

But I'll modify your question.
Will Britain supply Japan's war in China to avoid war with Japan?. Are you willing to stand by and not intervene against the Japanese aggression on the mainland?

If in the beginning of '41 the choice (in Churchill's opinion) were:

1.) Active opposition to Japan's war in China, which would result in Japan attacking a weakly defended Burma/Malaya
or
2.) Stay neutral so as not to antagonize the Japanese


It's pretty clear that the interests of the Chinese nationalists would be "shoved under the bus" by W.S.C., with strong support from Whitehall & the public.

At the biginning of '41, Britain & allies are at war with Germany, Italy, intermittent war with the Vichy, and are simply in no position to take strong action against Japan.

It wasn't unntil Churchill's agreement with FDR (regarding the embargo) that things changed.

 

My argument regarding British attitude is that with the seizure of Indo-China it completely changed. With the new bases Japan now had bases in which they could easily attack Malaysia. How easy would it be for Japan if they did not have the airbases near Saigon to cover the invasion beaches. What if the PoW and Repulse did not have to deal with the air attack and if Japan did not have Saigon as a major deembarkation point for convoys.

 

Freebird, I read the 1939 HTML and said as much. The HTML versions didn't give the specific dates of the questions. And I was surprised that Britain seemed to take a more dim view of Japan than the U.S., though maybe I shouldn't have been. That said, my reading of the polls was hardly comprehensive. I searched for "Britain" in a ctl+f fashion, thus if it wasn't near the word "Britain" I didn't even look at it. (Which is to say I was skimming for the British take on Japan. And one poll that gave the U.S. view [and French view] was in close proximity, and thus I saw it.)

 

OP, it's certainly worthy of careful scrutiny, but I was looking for specific information, so I played seek and find. Also, I was trying to recommend a tool for seeking specific information to freebird. Didn't mean to suggest this was the only way to do it, or even the best. Just confessing to my own sins, if you will.

To refer back to some earlier points: While freebird and others have already said some of this I beg your indulgence. I was going to post a couple of days ago, but I was a little steamed at the time and decided to pull back and wait until at least my own head had cooled off a bit. But OP thought some of if was worth consideration, so I put it up now.

per OP

We considered Britain our main rival in the Atlantic. That's just common sense. We made war plans against all possibilities and war with Japan was always conceivable. (To be fair, not all war plans are created equal, and "orange" was a little more well developed than "red" or "black.") Yes, there were tensions during the T. Roosevelt administration, but I seem to recall he also gave them a much more favorable immigration status than any other Asian nation. (I'd thought this was in War Plan Orange, but at a glance it would appear I read that elsewhere. Which means there's a real possibility it was Flyboys. (Which is an . . . interesting book. But not what I would call a careful history.)

Certainly there was, in many places, considerable prejudice against Asian Americans, but I've always been under the impression that it was worst in California and that the Japanese in particular were more tolerated elsewhere. (Much as prejudice against African Americans was worse in some places than others: most notably border states like my very own.)

In any case, I didn't mean to say that the U.S. was universally friendly to immigrants of any sort. It never has been and probably never will be. It's too large a country with too many complex subcultures that quite often dislike one another, let alone anyone from "outside." Just that maybe it makes sense that attitudes here towards Japan might not have been as bad as those in Britain for the two aforementioned reasons: Britain was more strongly opposed to militant nationalism (maybe because some of it was right next door), and more of us actually were of Japanese descent. (Not a lot, mind you, but a few. I suspect the percentage of Japanese Americans was higher than the percentage of Japanese Englishmen.)

While our relationship hasn't always been friendly, it's always been important. We've been strong trading partners pretty much since Commodore Perry opened the place (at gunpoint.) Which might be a nice characterization: We have closer relations with Japan than England with Japan in part because we've pointed more guns at them and said "You will have closer relations with us now."

I think I was perhaps overly vague, and for this I apologize. I do not wish to say that Japan and the U.S. have always been staunch allies, merely that our two countries have long been tangled up in one another's affairs. I think this has usually been beneficial to both, but there have certainly been periods of profound tension, and WWII is the great exception that generality.

 

Just reading "The General" by Jonathan Fenry - about De Gaulle and this surprised me. Thought it was worth bringing to your notice - interested if there is any more factual info available. No dates supplied by Fenry but comes immediately after Mers el Kebir in the Book and is given as an example of Vichy trying to exert some independence.


In Asia, the French governor, Georges Catroux, was cashiered by Vichy for giving in to Japanese demands and cutting off supplies to China without consulting the government in France; his ability to resist Tokyo had been undermined by the refusal of the still neutral UnitedStates to supply 120 fighters and anti-aircraft guns for which France had already paid. Petain told him to come home; instead, Catroux flew to London and joined the Free French. His successor tried to hold back the Japanese, but they gained the upper hand in two days of fighting that cost eight hundred French lives. After Vichy recognised its 'pre­eminent position' in the Far East, Tokyo tookcontrol of airports and major harbours and forced the French to cede territory in Laos and Cambodia to the Thais. Vietnamese resisters,including the Communist Ho Chi Minh,sought refuge in south-west China and began to gear up for guerrilla warfare. But, though 740,000 square kilometres of Indochina remained under the tricolour flag, France's Asian colonies became a Japanese satellite, compared by de Gaulle to a great crippled ship in the fog which he could not reach.