World War II History Thread

The battle of Khalkhin-Gol decisively showed the expansionist Japanese military that it was not a match for the Soviets – particularly while Japanese forces were still bogged down throughout China. The Soviets under combined their forces to stunning effect, while Japanese tactics remained stuck in a pre-modern mindset that valued honour and personal bravery more highly on the battlefield than massed forces and armour.

When Hitler finally invaded the Soviet Union in 1941 the Japanese, although tempted to join the attack, remembered the lessons of Khalkhin Gol and decided to remain on the sidelines, ensuring that the stretched Soviet military could focus its forces on just one front. This, in turn, meant that Nazi Germany was forced to fight a four year war on two fronts – against the Soviets in the East, and the British and Americans in the West.

Defeat at Khalkhin-Gol can also be seen as a major factor in the Japanese decision to expand into the Pacific. As expansion to the North-West was no longer an option, ill defended and scattered colonial territories made far easier targets. Even the United States was deemed a less formidable adversary than the Soviet Union and, if the Japanse had not lost at Khalkhin-Gol, they would surely have never attacked Pearl Harbour.

The numbers speak for themselves. The Soviets destroyed 75-80% of all German divisions -- 4 million soldiers -- and most of the Luftwaffe. Russia lost at least 14 million soldiers and a similar number of civilians.

The Red Army destroyed 507 Axis divisions. On the Western Front after D-Day, the Allies destroyed 176 badly under-strength German divisions.

When the Allies landed in Normandy, they met battered German forces with no air cover, crippled by lack of fuel and supplies, unable to move in daytime. Even so, the Germans fought like tigers. Had the invading US, British and Canadians encountered the 1940's Wehrmacht and Luftwaffe, the outcome may well have been different.

In retrospect, it is difficult to comprehend how Japan's leadership managed to rationalize their way around the economic facts when they contemplated making war on the U.S. After all, these were not stupid men. Indeed, internal Imperial Navy studies conducted in 1941 showed exactly the trends in naval shipbuilding I have outlined above. In the end, however, the Tojo government chose the path of aggression, compelled by internal political dynamics which made the prospect of a general Japanese disengagement in China (which was the only means by which the American economic embargo would have been lifted) too humiliating a course to be taken. Consequently, the Japanese embarked on what can only be described as a suicidal venture, against an overwhelmingly large foe. However, their greatest mistake was not just disregarding the economic muscle which lay partially dormant on the other side of the Pacific. In actuality, their chief error lay in misreading the will of the American people. When the American giant awoke, it did not lapse into despair as a result of the defeats that Japan had inflicted upon it. Rather, it awoke in a rage, and applied every ounce of its tremendous strength with a cold, methodical fury against its foe. The grim price Japan paid -- 1.8 million military casualties, the complete annihilation of its military, a half million or so civilians killed, and the utter destruction of practically every major urban area within the Home Islands -- bears mute testimony to the folly of its militarist leaders.

During the Nanking Massacre, the Japanese committed a litany of atrocities against innocent civilians, including mass execution, raping, looting, and burning. It is impossible to keep a detailed account of all of these crimes. However, from the scale and the nature of these crimes as documented by survivors and the diaries of the Japanese militarists, the chilling evidence of this historical tragedy is indisputable.

The Unit 731 functioned as an experimental labour for military medical research during the Second Sino-Japanese War and World War 2 in Manchuria, China. The aim was to research the perfect biological weapon with the capibility to kill thousands of people.

Among the prisoners were women and children. They were used to test the effects of grenades from different positions. Pregnant victims had their babies removed without anesthetics. Smomachs, limbs were removed, and blood loss has been studied. Parts of brain, lungs, liver were cut off.

Operation Sea Lion (German: Unternehmen Seelöwe) was Germany's plan to invade the United Kingdom during the Second World War, beginning in 1940. To have had any chance of success, however, the operation would have required air and naval supremacy over the English Channel. With the German defeat in the Battle of Britain, Sea Lion was postponed indefinitely on 17 September 1940 and never carried out.[2]

The great majority of military historians believe Operation Sea Lion would not have succeeded. Kenneth Macksey asserts it would have only been possible if the Royal Navy had refrained from large scale intervention[52] and the Germans had assaulted in July 1940 (although Macksey conceded they were unprepared at that time),[53] while others such as Peter Fleming, Derek Robinson and Stephen Bungay believe the operation would have most likely resulted in a disaster for the Germans. Len Deighton and some other writers have called the German amphibious plans a "Dunkirk in reverse".[54]

Adolf Galland, commander of Luftwaffe fighters at the time, claimed invasion plans were not serious and that there was a palpable sense of relief in the Wehrmacht when it was finally called off. Field Marshal Gerd von Rundstedt also took this view and thought that Hitler never seriously intended to invade Britain and the whole thing was a bluff, to put pressure on the British Government to come to terms.[55] In fact in November 1939 the German Naval staff produced a study (on the possibility of an invasion of Britain) and concluded that it required two preconditions, air and naval superiority, neither of which Germany ever had.[56]