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Comment by Spooky23 | Hacker News Reader

The Japanese wouldn’t be able to sustain a US invasion, but they would have conquered Australia and would probably have forced the US out of the Pacific war.

That was the gamble. Success in 1942 meant Japanese domination of the entire Pacific, including areas of the Soviet Union.

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Ironically, if Japan had committed all 6 fleet carriers to the South Pacific in early 1942, they might have been able to conquer Australia. Instead they split them - two to the South Pacific, to be damaged in the Battle of the Coral Sea, and then the four remaining operational carriers to Midway. Had all 6 shown up at Midway... Things probably would have gone differently.

The things that show up in hindsight, of course.

I don't know that conquering Australia would have done them much good, though. It would have been hard for them to hang on to it. They might have stood a better chance of they'd concentrated on their original plan to grab oil in the Dutch Easy Indies.

> Success in 1942 meant Japanese domination of the entire Pacific, including areas of the Soviet Union.

Japan and the Soviet Union did not go to war with each other until August 1945.

Sure, because "Success in 1942" didn't happen.

It might've happened if Midway had gone differently.

I'm still dubious. Adding a new theater to the war when your other theaters are already stalling without a decisive victory is generally not a winning measure. The naval victory is only at best a temporary reprieve: the US is going to replace all its lost carriers within a year, and is similarly going to replace all the capital units [1] it lost at Pearl Harbor by that time. The Japanese didn't think themselves capable of mounting an invasion of the USSR before about mid-1943, by which point it was beginning to feel pressure on other fronts, and the IJA would start raiding the Manchurian army groups for manpower to keep from losing on the fronts they were already engaged in.

[1] Again, recall that to Japanese strategic thinking at this time, it's the battleship strength that matters. Carriers are just a sideshow.

They'd had some border skirmishes before WWII even started, with tens of thousands of casualties on each side. The 1941 neutrality pact was a result of a combined Soviet/Mongolian force defeating and removing the Japanese from Mongolia.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soviet%E2%80%93Japanese_border...

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