Read this one in a book too: what if, on the heels of their attack on Pearl Harbor, the Japanese had landed a sizeable landing force and methodically taken over the islands of Hawai'i? What would the U. S. response have been? Could the U.S. even have responded without access to the bases on Pearl?

good question!

Did they have the necessary shipping to accomplish that at such a distance?

How big is this sizable force?

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The war against Russia will be such that it cannot be conducted in a knightly fashion. This struggle is one of ideologies and racial differences and will have to be conducted with unprecedented, unmerciful and unrelenting harshness. -Adolf Hitler

SP, I'm not tracking on the shipping. I think, and I am going out on a limb here, that they could have, and probably would have, "lived off the land" until they could be resupplied with goods from Japan. And considering the number of Japanese-born islanders already living in Hawai'i, I don't think they would really have been hurting too bad.

Sloniksp, I have't been able to find anything that gives the disposition of gound forces on Hawai'i on 7 Dec 1941. Everything I have seen so far concentrates on the ships in port and out to sea. So, going strictly on an uneducated gues, I would say troops in the vicinity of 40,000 to 50,000. Enough to take over the bases, keep in mind that the vast majority of all servicemembers were on weekend liberty and not on base (and thus had no access to their issued weapons), and enough to quell any civilian uprisings.

Are you suggesting they invade the Hawaiian Islands instead of the Philippines and Malaysia? I doubt they had the capabilities to do both. Also, the Japanese weren't very good at coordinating large scale landings, they hardly ever landed more than 1 division at a time.

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"If you want peace work for justice" -Pope Paul VI

Jon

JagdtigerI, yes, I am suggesting that. Maybe not instead of, but first, and then PI and Malaysia. I think they would have had more to gain if they could have taken Hawai'i out of the picture first. They would not have had to watch their back door. No Hawai'i means no place in the Pacific for the U.S. Navy to re-fuel and re-fit their ships and that would have hampered the U.S. in the Pacific.

I can't really verbalize why but I feel like this idea wouldn't be possible for Japan. I am sure DA or TA will come explain why soon (or mabye brndirt)

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"If you want peace work for justice" -Pope Paul VI

Jon

Or maybe me!

Lets imagine, that the 40-50k Japanese soldiers cramped in their vessels managed to somehow land in Hawaii undetected. Then what? Even if they had captured Honolulu what then?

Japan has no capability to support such a force so far away. Japan's oil situation isnt even being mentioned here....

What would Japan do with the British and American troops now able to set up defenses or evacuations from the Philippines and Malaysia?

Why even land a force in Hawaii?

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The war against Russia will be such that it cannot be conducted in a knightly fashion. This struggle is one of ideologies and racial differences and will have to be conducted with unprecedented, unmerciful and unrelenting harshness. -Adolf Hitler

The USN would have still had Midway.

One thing i know for sure is that if the Japanese had taken pearl,they would have had alot of fuel oil,large amounts of Fuel oil was stored in tanks at pearl that were left un touched by the japanese.

They would also have the American sub base facility's,large amounts of fuel+a close base to the west coast could mean that the japanese sub corps could oporate well off the San diago naval port.

I think that if the japanese could have befor hand,and i stress "befor hand" amassed large amounts of food/ammunition and most of all boots (infintry) somplace near Hawaii,then i do not see why they could have just conducted the airaid,then had the fleet land Marines on pearl aswell as other strategic areas,followed by have the main ground force comein and secure and completely take control of the islands.

They would need to have the Fighter planes fly a round the clock "cap" around the mainland American aprouches,because i would think the American CNC would want to strike back at the japanese asoon as possible with longrange bombers.

In the long run the japanese would have had to plan this out for years befor they went and did it.

Now if the japanese had landed in Hawaii aswell as Alaska or maybe even south Western Canada simotaniously,then this would have been a very big problem for the Americans.

Befor the American warmachine could have done anything to help England,it would have to do everything in it's power to stabilize the situation on it's own front befor really doing anything against Germany.

But pulling this off would take so much Japanese man power that it would have made there campaigns in southeast asia alittle more not as smooth for lack of better words.

Well, since I'm mentioned, I guess I should at least give it a shot huh? This is a quite detailed analysis of the FOLLY of Japan trying to force an invasion of Hawaii. There is almost NOTHING to gain from such a venture except the MINOR inconvenience of denying an enemy a base of operations.

Goto:

The Hawaiian Invasion, and other Nonsense


And scroll down to "other really crazy", and read up on the limits of Japanese transports...

You might also "enjoy" reading If Mahan Ran The Great Pacific War; by John A. Adams. He discusses at length the problems of such an invasion for Japan, logistically, tactically, and strategically. There were appoximately 60,000 armed military personnel in Hawaii plus a civilian militia who would be drafted/volunteer to help fight. Let's not forget that the highly decorated 442nd was made up mainly of Hawaiian men who were removed from the island after the Pearl Harbor attack and sent to the mainland for "further" training. They fought the Germans, and had felt betrayed by Japan and wished they could have fought in Hawaii.

Using the accepted ratio of invader to defender, a three to one advantage is the normal so the Japanese would need about 200,000 men, and supplies, to invade with any hope of success, not 50,000.

The War Department (by September 1941), prescribed an impressive allotment of antiaircraft and artillery weapons for Hawaii: 84 mobile and 26 fixed 3-inch guns for level and high altitude firing, and provision for replacing some of them as soon as possible with even more modern weapons; 144 of the newer 37-mm. automatic weapons; and 516 of the .50 caliber antiaircraft machine guns for action against low-flying aircraft. This ignores the shore batteries which existed, mostly six and eight inch cannon.

By the time of Pearl, the Hawaiian department had four antiaircraft regiments, and it was scheduled to receive a fifth before the end of the year, it and its personnel were still on the mainland on Dec. 7th but were on the island by the end of December.

In the year preceding the Pearl Harbor attack, the Army's officer and enlisted strength in the Hawaiian Department (ignoring Navy and USMC numbers) grew from 28,798 to 43,177, and Hawaii remained the largest of the overseas garrisons. Only the Panama Zone held more American troops when the Japanese attack on Hawaii came, there were nearly 58,000 Army troops on guard in the Canal Zone, but they could have been transferred to Hawaii if needed to counter an invasion.

Now, since Hawaii gained the Japanese nothing but another far flung outpost, what would be the advantage? Let’s not ignore the real Japanese experience at Guadalcanal. This shows the limits of their logistics tail when it came to supporting troops any great distance away from their main bases. The Japanese called Guadalcanal "starvation island", and the commander there pleaded with his superiors not to send more troops, as he couldn't feed the ones who were already there!

The Japanese navy literally had no fleet oilers, troop transport ships, nor cargo transports for supplies, and was reduced to using destroyers as supply ships and troop transports, a terribly inefficient way to transport men and supplies. The guantlet to run to Hawaii would be no less dangerous.

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Happy Trails,
Clint.

Would have probably motivated the Americans to put recapture of Hawaii ahead of European Theater.

Clint is absolutely correct.

The Japanese didn't have enough shipping to pull off an invasion of Hawaii and the other operations in Malaya, Philippines, Borneo, and the NEI. and these landings were extremely critical to the "Strike South" strategy aimed at seizing the raw materials, notably petroleum, which was the rationale for going to war in the first place.

Oahu was probably the most heavily fortified island in the Pacific in 1941. It would have required at least three divisions to assault and take the island; the Japanese had neither the troops nor equipment needed for a successful landing. Nor did it have the logistical wherewithal to keep three divisions supplied over the oceanic distances involved. Then there are the issues of air and naval support which would be necessary to hold Oahu; where would that come from when Japan was engaged in operations in Asia and the Southwest Pacific?

One thing you should do before delving into alternative history books is study the historical record so that you can make some informed judgments as to the feasibility and likelihood of the author's departures from reality. The Hyperwar series is a good place to start.

HyperWar: World War II on the World Wide Web

How do they sneak an invasion force in? Transports are a lot slower so they have to either start a lot earlier than the CVs or the latter has to travel slower or they come inconsiderably behind the CVs. Any one of these makes the detection of the raid much more likely. Also consider what sort of support is coming with the transports. One reason the PH raid was successful is we had a good idea where the Japanese battle fleet was. If it dissapears a lot of alarm bells are going off and everybody is looking a lot harder. If it's not there then the invasion fleet has problems with shore batteries (not that it doesn't anyway) as well as surviving USN vessels. The CVs can't hang arround all that long either. If they do and launch repeated raids their available AC will shrink quite a bit after the first couple.

Yes, I agree with DA, lwd and brndirt1 would be a logistical nightmare just to transport the troops for an invasion. Plus the problem of keeping up with the carriers' speed. And keeping them supplied (assuming they had overpowered the American garrison in Hawaii and that would depend on the number of Japanese troops tasked to the invasion) would be next problem.
I had thought of proposing instead a raid instead of an outright invasion. But as I reviewed my own proposal, I disregarded it.

The Pearl Harbor attack worked for the Japanese worked because they kept things as simple as they could. Adding a land element would have made things more complicated for them.

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That's about it,
Fil

There were a lot of USN warships at Pearl, that would be pressed into being semi-mobile heavy artillery batteries.

Look what happened to the German offensives at Anzio when they met with shipboard gunnery.

Keep in mind, not all destroyers, battleships, and others were knocked out. The Pacific fleet, while heavily damaged, could definately have wiped out even a protected landing force. And it was a base, so they would probably be well prepared for a naval attack.

Please read and follow the What If guidelines before creating a What If thread. http://www.ww2f.com/what-if/21335-wh...rum-rules.html



Normally, we would have closed this thread at creation, as the originating thread does not meet requirements. As it has now gotten legs, I will let it go on.

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Best Regards,
JW

You should just make it so that all new members have to take a quiz on the What If Forum Rules before they can join..save you some of the hassle

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"If you want peace work for justice" -Pope Paul VI

Jon

Gents,

Along with the Sealion Invasion, this Hawaii topic has generated much discussion over the 68 years since Dec.7'41.

Once he realized the success of the historical air attacks on Pearl Harbor, Admiral Yamamoto expressed his own disappointment at having missed an opportunity to invade those islands and immediately ordered his staff to begin planning. A process which eventually led to the Japanese disaster at Midway.

I have long been convinced of "the Japanese might have pulled it off (but ONLY on Dec.7'41)" side of the debate but I hasten to add that the American invention and use of the A-bomb would still likely have been the end of the Pacific War. At least, I hope so.

Just a couple of years later than the historical 1945.

It is a long and tortured road but if you wish I can show you how and where the Japanese might have found the tankers, the freighters and the troops needed to invade Oahu on Dec.7'41, without having to abandon their first war priority, the capture of the Netherlands East Indies (NEI) oil sources. Nothing else was as important to the soon to be fuel starved Japanese Empire at that time.

However, in my opinion they didn't devote nearly enough thought to the subject of how to keep that oil after they had captured it, as they should have.

I believe that capturing Hawaii MIGHT have accomplished that for the Japanese, or at least that the Japanese might have convinced themselves of it before Dec.7'41, even if the American public did not later decide to "forgive and forget" an even more dastardly sneak invasion there.

A major re-vamping of Japan's entire Pacific War strategy would have been required, under Yamamoto's guidance, but would have required no imaginary warships nor invented troops. The Japanese HAD the military resources needed but just didn't use them as I'll suggest below.

In very brief summary form, the Alternative Timeline (ATL) Japanese would have had to decide to postpone their Original Timeline (OTL) invasions of Luzon, Guam, Wake and the Gilbert Islands so that the troops and shipping historically used there could be used to secretly carry Imperial Japanese Army (IJA) and Japanese Special Naval Landing Force (JSNLF) troops to Oahu. About 2.5 divisions worth.

I can show the availablity of 1,680,000 tons of shipping and an additional 41 Japanese tankers for this "instead of" invasion scenario.

Note however that the OTL Japanese landings on the Philippine island of Mindanao would in fact be slightly strengthened and advanced in schedule so that Japanese land based air (LBA) flotillas could operate from captured American airfields near Davao there in order to isolate and air blockade the American forces still holding Luzon. As per the OTL, Mindanao LBA would co-ordinate with Formosa LBA to suppress the American warplanes and USN submarines/tenders based in and around Manila. Once those American air and sea forces were driven back to Australia or destroyed, Luzon would just become a very large and self-feeding prison camp, already well isolated behind the ATL Japanese frontlines. NO threat at all to the yet to be established sea lines of communucation (SLOC) between Japan and the NEI's oil.

The Japanese would need several more months to both capture and repair the NEI's oil installations (as per the OTL) and during that "slack time" there were many Japanese shipping resources laying idled that COULD have been more boldly used for a Hawaiian invasion instead.

I would point out that Oahu WAS very heavily defended by two Divisions of the US Army, the 24th Infantry and 25th Infantry. Only by the delivery of a surprise atttack greater that the OTL Dec.7'41 raid could the Japanese hope to seize that island fortress and later, the only weakly held other Hawaiian Islands. Details to follow should you find the ATL Japanese strategic premise detailed below to be acceptable.

There is indeed a good arguement that once captured, the Japanese would have had a difficult time in supplying Hawaii over the long term. In the short term however the Hawaiin Islands did have food supplies sufficient for 90 days for all souls (both invader and invaded) not counting the nutritionally empty sugarcane and pineapple crops growing there, nor fish from the seas surrounding (400+ fishing sampans operated out of Hawaiian waters mostly to supply the pre-war export market to the US west coast).

Considering the historical Japanese record of NOT feeding prisoners more than staravtion diets while working them to death, I estimate that the Hawaiian Islands would be fed for about 9 months after capture WITHOUT the Japanese importing any food at all, if necesary. Each and every Japanese ship that did arrive there with food however would leave with a well publicized human cargo intended to both shield that vessel from USN submarine attack and to reduce the number of mouths that needed to be fed there every week.

This would bring them to the time when Japanese successes in repairing the NEI oilfiels would mean that the tankers used for the Hawaiian Operation would be REQUIRED elsewhere, instead. About a year later.

That year would NOT have been wasted by my ATL Japanese.

Provided that their invasion of Hawaii had withstood the inevitable USN Atlantic Fleet counter-attack via the Panama Canal, round about the end of January 1942, that is. Again, details to follow if the discussion goes on that long ...

Had that string of defeats actualy come about, the American West Coast would have been virtualy defenseless and Lend/Lease would have been politically impossible to continue. Both the UK and Russia would have been at the mercy of German forces and Hitler's whims as the Americans rebuilt their west coast defenses.

Yamamoto's "war winning" plan (and not that I think that it would have been guaranteed to have worked) was to then offer to trade the Hawaiian Islands and 500,000 American hostages (including those from the Phillipinies, Guam, Wake, Midway etc) for a comprehensive Pacific wide ceasefire agreement and American recognition of the new expanded boundaries of the Japanese Empire.

As far as I can think, the ONLY possible (if still unlikely) way that the Japanese Empire might NOT have ended with atomic fireballs.

I'll buy that

After 1 March 1942, the Japanese military leadership decided their war plans had been too conservative and pessimistic. They had expected to suffer a loss of one-fourth of all their forces in their offensives to date. In fact, the losses had been negligible. There offensives had been successful beyond there wildest expectations. Accordingly, Tojo and Yamamoto worked out a compromise agreement to extend the strategic objectives of the war plans to encompass an even larger area for the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere. (Manchester 293-294).

Yamamoto's task was to advance Japan's control of the Pacific onwards to Alaska and Midway..... Yamamoto was to advance from the Aleutian Islands and move down the coast of Alaska through Dutch Harbor and Juneau towards Washington, capture Hawaii, and use Alaska and Hawaii as bases for further raids upon the Pacific Coast from British Columbia to California.

(Manchester 293-294; Garfield, 4-8,44, Layton, 383)

Japanese air bases in Alaska would be within three hours bombing distance of the Boeing aircraft plant and Bremerton Naval Shipyard in the Seattle, Washington region (Garfield, 16) At the time 60-70% of the total US Military aircraft production was here on the West Coast within 10-100 miles of the coastline.

BTW Japanese submarine-launched scouting type aircraft were sent over Seattle(Craven, 277-286)

References:

Manchester William: American Caesar: Douglas MacArthur 1880-1964. Boston, Mass.: Little, Brown and Co.; 1978. pages 293-294

Garfield Brian: The Thousand-Mile War: World War II In Alaska and the Aleutians, 1st edition. New York; Ballantine; 1969. pages 4-8,16 & 44

Layton Edwen: And I was There, Pearl Harbor and Midway-Breaking the Secrets, page 383

Craven Frank Wesley & Cate James Lea: The Army Air Forces in World War II, Vol. 1, pages 277-286

Jagdtiger1, in your posting #7 you wrote,

The Malaya/Thailand invasions continue on as per the OTL Japanese plans.

If you were to do some google searching you would find that the OTL Japanese had on several occassions put 2 divisions ashore at a time on the Chinese coast between 1932 and 1940. It is not widely known but as the Pacific War got going, the Japanese were the world's leaders in amphibious landing techniques and technology. Their 3 sizes of daihatsu beach landing barges had no rival anywhere and their amphibious landing crews had trained for years in China combat. Hence their unbroken (save for the Wake Island #1 setback) string of Pacific Island invasion victories over the first 6 months of the Pacific War. It wasn't just luck.

One very important point to note though, is that the OTL Japanese specialised in "landing where the enemy wasn't". Unless there was NO other choise (such at Kota Bharu on the north end of Malaya, Wake Island or Corregidor). More specifically, they chose to AVOID prepared and manned defended beaches in favour of landing AT NIGHT on undefended beaches, a few miles further up or down the coast before moving inland to hook around behind the then surprised beach defenders by dawn.

They did train and regularly used light naval units such as minesweepers and the invasion convoy escorting destroyer group (often led by a light cruiser) for the close range direct fire "over the beach" naval gunfire support mission. Neither the IJN's 1941 heavy cruisers nor their battleships were trained for close support "over the beach" gunfire that was developed by the USN several years later during their numerous Mediterranean and Pacific Island landings. Never was IJN gunfire able to "peel bunkers off the beach" as were the USN's battleships able to do at Normandy and Iwo Jima. Both the IJA and the IJN's JSNLF troops prefered undefended beaches suitable for barge landings as identified by extensive pre-war scouting. In the case of Oahu, Yoshikawa of Japan's Honolulu Consulate was the man who would have performed that intell. gathering function.

Certainly in the case of Oahu, any Japanese invasion would by necessity HAVE to be a night landing, in complete secrecy, before dawn on Dec.7'41. If the American 24th and 25th Infantry Divisions were pre-warned and allowed sufficient time to deploy to their assigned beaches, and to dig in there. then no Japanese invasion would be likely to survive the attempt. My ATL Japanese invaders MUST get ashore on Oahu "where the defenders aren't" or they will certainly be destroyed in the surf by prepared American firepower.

Only the particular set of truely bizarre Oahu circumstances observed and regularly reported to Tokyo (via coded commercial telegram) by Yoshikawa would allow the success of an ATL Japanese invasion attempt there. In order to explain those circumstances, much reference will be made to Gordon Prange's thick Pearl Harbor tome, "At Dawn We Slept" so it would be best if you were to have access to a copy in order to follow along.

How in the world can the Japanese get that close to Hawaii without being seen? Given their lack of experiance in invasions how are they going to possibly get major forces ashore before the US can react? What kind of support do you think they could assign to this invasion?