WI American-occupied Japan & Okinawa ISOT from Feb. 1, 1946 to Feb. 1, 1943?

Sure -

Well the question is fundamentally what is the root of the American objection? Is it an emotional and irrational belief the region or its geography is poison? Or a more rational belief that expending units and shipping there per Churchill's 'good ideas' robs Peter to pay Paul and delays concentrations of shipping and aircraft and units to accomplish the vital Overlord landings in France and supporting landings in southern France?

If it is the latter, not the former, by summer 1943, with the fade-down of the Pacific War, the US (and British Empire) may have an embarrassment of riches in in terms of available shipping, ground units and aircraft, and not all of them may *fit* into axes of attack against France or through Italy, so the Americans may have the choice of having units enter Europe via the Balkans by some point in '43 or '44 or sit idle away from any combat fronts.

The two most efficient ways of getting forces a bridgehead in the Balkans involve doing so by getting forces onshore in places where they do not need to fight alerted Germans resisting on the beach or coastline. So Crete and Athens/Attica, always occupied directly by the Germans, make for an unattractive landing spot in that respect. Getting onshore of Italian held sectors of Greece (Peloponnese, Rhodes & Dodecanese, Albania) while they are surrendering and before they can be assaulted, disarmed, and often massacred by the Italians is more efficient early on than attacking German held coasts later. The second more efficient way to get bodies of ground forces into the Balkans without rough landings, Balkan D-Days, and storming sometimes mountainous shores, is to get a Turkish DoW coordinated with a massive secret airlift and sealift of Allied forces into Turkish Thrace for an assault on Bulgaria, liberation of additional Aegean and Black Sea ports, and pushing against minor Axis allied dominoes. This requires diplomacy and getting the Turks to play ball of course, but possibly could be done, using 'future knowledge' to augment American and British diplomacy, showing how Japan is done, Germany inevitably loses, how in the old history Germany evacuated weakly from Greece and the southern Balkans, how the Soviets occupied Bulgaria because Turkey was so late to join the war, how the Allies embargoed Turkey to make it get into the war, and how by the end of 1945 and early 1946, the Soviet Union was pressing Turkey for the straits and other territories and western support wasn't clear. The message is 'help us [Anglo-Americans] get into Bulgaria through your country sooner, or have a second Soviet-dominated border, now in Europe, and not just in Asia.


I get the theory behind this. The thing is the experience of the forces throughout East Asia in the early 1943 timeframe compared to the end of the war in 1945 would have varied. In China proper, ironically, Japanese forces probably would have more respect for Chinese Nationalist fighting power in February 1943 than they did by August 1945, because it was only after 1943, during 1944 and 1945, that the Japanese made sweeping, unprecedented territorial gains in southern China, shoving aside previously tenacious Nationalist resistance, during the Ichigo offensive. On the other hand, in line with your surmise, Japanese forces in mainland Southeast Asia, Malaya, and the Dutch East Indies in February 1943 had only known triumph so far, whereas by August 1945, forces had been driven from Burma, and survivors in Thailand and Indochina and Malaya had tasted defeat, as had some Japanese forces in sections of Borneo British forces reinvaded. Also, the Japanese forces in Manchukuo and northern Korea in February 1943 were undefeated [except for the Nomonhan check in 1939] and only just starting to get 'robbed' for replacement units, a great contrast to their smashed condition as the Soviets plowed through them in August 1945.

As I noted earlier, the most volatile uptime/downtime point of contact will probably be the 38th parallel in Korea. The US occupation force in Korea only numbered 45,000. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Blacklist_Forty The Japanese in northern Korea from 1943, not having experienced the late war atmosphere of privation, Japanese defeats, and Allied bombings, could be all full of 'piss and vinegar' and on a hair trigger trying to assault and retake Seoul and Inchon. MacArthur will probably have to muster his AirPower resident in Japan, Okinawa, the PI and carriers nearby, and his most combat ready formations, to reinforce General John Hodge's occupation force in Korea and definitively crush the Japanese challenge in North Korea, and liberate it.

That process should start to have salutary effects on Japanese attitudes in northern Korea, Manchuria, and China that have been in denial, fairly quickly. The Americans will have to arm up southern Koreans and liberated Koreans with captured Japanese arms to quickly augment infantry, and they won't be able to afford to be picky.

This sudden reemergence of the Japanese threat to Korean Seoul won't solve everything, but should hopefully have some salutary effects on some of the nasty political divides that were roiling southern Korea by early 1946 and poisoning US-Korean relations. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Army_Military_Government_in_Korea

I think the renewed, even if only brief, Japanese threat to Seoul and the south, and the project of liberating northern Korea from *Japanese* would logically have the effect of papering over right-left Korean divides and improving US-Korean relations in the moment. The Korean leftists would obviously know they would be screwed with a Japanese comeback, but Korean rightists and landlords, even those who had previously been collaborators with the Japanese, would have to fear that Japanese returning to control would have no patience for their explanations for why they stepped in and took over government roles 'above their station' and would butcher them the same as anyone else. So all Koreans would have to fight a Japanese comeback, and even past collaborators could earn some redemption in that fight [though domestic enemies could be loath to admit it]. Meanwhile Americans and conservative Koreans won't be able to afford to mercilessly pick on leftist and Communist Koreans, and will have to let them enroll in the fight to drive the Japanese out of North Korea or get them to surrender there. And the Communists, whatever reforms and changes they would want, would know things aren't geopolitically favorable for them to bid for monopoly power considering the absence of a Communist North Korean zone and inability of the Soviet Union to act in the region.

You're right, I guess the effects won't be instant. Anything coming from the Far East only comes through the limited TSR, and it's a delicate balance how to apportion Lend-Lease versus combat units. Future info can be useful, if believed. I imagine Stalin would be skeptical but willing to test out tactical, operational, and technological information handed over. He may or may not understand butterfly effects and how after a bit, reactions change, so future history isn't true, without it being a lie. Whatever the net effect is, it should be helpful to the Soviet war effort, sooner or later, even if we are not talking about something as quick as a few weeks.

What are the keystrokes? - the 'upload file' button on the bottom I originally saw [don't see it now] didn't respond in any way by browsing my image files, it would just jerk me to the top of the page]. The insert image file forced me to put in an http: URL.

lordroel,

Thank you sir.

No problem.

1943 Japan is cur off from what remains of its empire, minus Japan, South Korea which are gone, it still has Formosa which mind end up being the de facto home for the 1943 remains of Japan.

Governor General of Taiwan, admiral Kiyoshi Hasegawa might place himself under General Shunroku Hata, Supreme Commander of Japan's military forces in China ore might act alone, especially if 1946 MacArthur has the emperor broadcast a second surrender message, this time for the 1943 Japanese forces.


For cross-referencing with the other map, here's a Pacific control map, although be warned it is from July 1, 1943, not Feb 1, 1943

Referring to that image, the refugee IJN ships that fled west to be near the Indonesian oil supplies they would need are located here:

 

That is Linga. 

Here is Tawi Tawi. 



The situation to the south is NOT TOO GOOD if you are 1946 7th Fleet. 



Hosagaya was the Japanese admiral who screwed up Operation AI and failed to rendezvous as ordered with Yamamoto's main body after Nagumo got himself sunk off Midway Islands Atoll. Like Inouye who botched up Coral Sea, who Yamamoto also fired and beached into a ceremonial job, Hosagaya was considered a peace-nik and somewhat "timid" by Japanese standards.  He was not the sort of go-it-alone rugged individualist who would act on his own book. 

Shunroku Hata was a "politically reliable" officer for the Modernist Faction in the Japanese Army. Though he was not the brains behind Ichi-Go, he was most quick to take credit for it. 

Based on his record as a war criminal, the Americans were "lenient". He was just as guilty as the other Japanese generals like Homma and Yamashita, when their troops ran amok, and for much the same reasons. The man in charge who gave the order is responsible for the results of the order.  He gave the orders that resulted in 250,000 Chinese civilian mass murders and deaths during Ichi-Go.     
 

What will happen if the uptime version of a person sees their downtime version?