World War II There is a strange phenomenon that was once summarized as: the Soviet army defeated the Japanese army, the German army Csul, the US army defeated the German army, and the Japanese army defeated the US army. The Soviet army almost easily crushed the Japanese army by flat push in the Zhanggufeng Battle, , the Nomenhan Battle, and the August Storm military operations. However, within one month of the outbreak of , the Soviet-German War, more than three million people were captured in the Soviet-German War, and thousands of aircraft and more than 20,000 tanks were lost. When the Germans faced the US military in the late stage of the war, they tried their best to concentrate their superior forces to introduce the US troops into the encirclement, but it was useless.
The US military ignored the German military's various strategies and tactics. You have a thousand plans, I have a "bulldozer". The US military only insisted on pushing the Germans. When the war is a firewall in the air and a firewall on the ground pushes over, no individual quality, strategy and strategy are used. The US military, with simple tactics, defeated the German army with superb combat art. But when the US military fights against the Japanese army on Pacific battlefield on . The Japanese army had the upper hand in the early stages of Pacific War .
Japanese troops have always firmly controlled the sea control of the Pacific Ocean for half a year after attacks on Pearl Harbor . During this period, the Japanese army swept Hong Kong, Malaya, Singapore , Myanmar , Thailand, Philippines , Indonesia and other places. In the Philippines battle from December 8, 1941 to May 7, 1942, 78,000 US-Philippine coalition forces confronted 50,000 Japanese troops, but the US-Philippine coalition forces surrendered less than a week. It was not until Midway Battle on June 4, 1942 that the US military took the sea control of the Pacific battlefield from the Japanese army.
, but even in the subsequent battles of Wright Bay, Iwo Jima, and Okinawa, the US military still paid a heavy price. The US military concentrated 452,000 troops, 2,500 aircraft, and 1,500 ships to capture Okinawa . During the Okinawa Battle, the US military used naval guns to bombardment, aircraft bombardment, tank shelling, and flamethrower point shooting from April 1, 1945 to July 2, 1945. In this way, the US military paid the price of 12,000 deaths and 60,000 injuries. The US military's hard fighting on the Pacific battlefield is in sharp contrast to the Soviet army's one-sided crushing of the Japanese army.
But the US military was not in this state at all when fighting the German army. So why did the US military fight so hard against the Japanese army in the Pacific battlefield? In fact, before , Japan's industrial level was second-rate compared with European and American countries: at that time, the United States had the strongest industrial production capacity, Germany could rank second, the third was the Soviet Union, followed by Britain and France, and Japan could only rank behind these countries. Therefore, Japan was ridiculed by the European and American powers as "poor imperialism." Japan's industrial level at that time determined that the Japanese Army was actually still at the semi-mechanized level.
Because the Chinese army had poor weapons and equipment at that time, Japan's semi-mechanized troops could still play a certain role in the Chinese battlefield. The strength of the Japanese Army can only be demonstrated in the Asian battlefield. If the Japanese Army is to be placed on the European battlefield of the same period, it will be completely different. This can be proved by the fact that the Japanese and Soviet troops were pushed evenly. But the US military mainly faced the Japanese Navy on the Pacific battlefield, rather than the Japanese Army that had fought with the Soviet army in Zhanggufeng , Nomenhan and other places.
The strength of the Japanese Navy was quite powerful in the world at that time. Before the Pearl Harbor incident, the Japanese Navy had hundreds of advanced ships including ten aircraft carriers (gross tonnage up to 1.19 million tons). This is equivalent to more than 70% of the strength of the US Navy, and at the same time, relying on its geographical advantage, it can control the sea power in the Western Pacific region. The "H Five-Nation Naval Treaty " concluded by the five countries of the United States, Britain, Japan, France and Italy on February 6, 1922 stipulates that the total tonnage limit of the main ships of the five countries is 525,000 tons each of the United States and Britain; 315,000 tons each of Japan; 175,000 tons each of France and Italy.
Japan has actually become the third naval power in the world after the United States and Britain.The navies of the United States and Britain need to safeguard global interests, so Japan actually has a certain relative advantage in this specific local area of the Western Pacific. In the Pearl Harbor incident on December 7, 1941, more than 2,000 people were killed, more than 1,000 were injured, 11 warships were sunk, 3 warships were damaged, 188 aircraft were destroyed, and 155 aircraft were damaged. The U.S. Navy was unable to exercise its due combat effectiveness for the next six months.
Therefore, the Japanese army was able to sweep across Southeast Asia and the southwestern Pacific. After the United States declared war on Japan, Nazi Germany and Italy, as Japan's allies, also declared war on the United States, so the US military actually faced two major battlefields, Europe and the Pacific. Since the United States implemented the strategy of Europe first and Asia first, the US military actually fought against the Japanese army with weaker combat effectiveness in the early stages of the Pacific War, and the elite main force of the US military was almost entirely concentrated on the European battlefield. This is not difficult to explain why the US military was swept by the Japanese in the Southeast Asian battlefield in the early stages of the Pacific War.
can gradually reverse the situation as the potential of American war is released. The United States has more than twenty times the territory of Japan, and the United States has a population of equally more than Japan. In 1939, the United States produced 5,856 aircraft, and in the same year, Japan produced 4,467 aircraft. By 1942, the United States produced 64,426 aircraft throughout the year, while Japan produced only 11,800 aircraft. In 1939, the total tonnage of merchant ships in the United States was 376,419 tons and Japan was 320,466 tons. But by 1945, the tonnage of merchant ships in the United States had increased to 5839,858 tons, while the tonnage of merchant ships in Japan was only 599,563 tons.
In 1942, Japan's annual coal production was 54.8 million tons, while the United States reached 580 million tons. Japan's annual iron production is 4.4 million tons, while the United States' annual iron production is 55 million tons. From 1941 to 1945, nearly 7,000 ships were produced in less than five years. This includes up to 150 aircraft carriers, ten battleships , nearly 500 frigate and 349 destroyers . In contrast, Japan only produced 17 aircraft carriers, two battleships, 61 destroyers and nine cruisers .
Under the long-term war of resource consumption, the strength of the Japanese Navy was eventually exhausted by the United States. The situation after the Midway Naval Battle from June 4 to 7, 1942 began to tilt towards the direction that favors the United States. While the Japanese army was fighting against the US military on the Pacific battlefield, there was also a considerable number of troops trapped in the Chinese battlefield and unable to extricate themselves. By 1945, Japan's domestic economy was completely at full capacity and human resources were almost exhausted. The failure of the Battle of Iwo Jima on March 26 this year not only caused Japan to directly lose 23,786 soldiers, but also allowed the US military to build the island into an airport for fighter and bomber to take off and land.
This greatly enhances the effectiveness of the US military's strategic bombing of Japan's political and economic and industrial centers. Four days later, the Chinese Expeditionary Force recovered all the lost land in western Yunnan and northern Myanmar and successfully joined forces with the US and British Allied Forces. Just one day later, the US military launched the Okinawa Battle. As of June 21, the Okinawa Battle caused 110,000 casualties and 9,000 captured Japanese troops, and lost 7,830 aircraft and 20 ships. The failure of the Okinawa Battle exposed the Japanese mainland directly to the attack of the US military. At this time, the two fascist Axis powers, Germany and Italy, as Japanese wartime allies, surrendered.
August 6 US military aircraft dropped the atomic bomb code-named "Little Boy" in Hiroshima, Japan. At this time, Japan placed all its hopes on the Soviet Union's mediation. Japan hopes to allow Japan to end the war with a more decent state through the Soviet mediation, but was informed by the Soviet Union that the Soviet Union and Japan are in a state of war from now on. On August 8, the Soviet Red Army and Mongolian army crossed the Sino-Soviet and China-Mongolia borders and began a "August Storm" military operation against the Japanese Kwantung Army. A day later, the US military dropped an atomic bomb code-named "Fatty" in Nagasaki, Japan.
At this time, Japan, which was in a panic on all sides of the war zone, had no other way out except surrender. The reason why people today think that the US military is struggling to fight on the Pacific battlefield is mainly due to the impression that the US military was not strong in the early stages of the war.In fact, the U.S. military only killed about 120,000 people throughout the Pacific War. This is to be placed in , the Soviet-German battlefield, , that is, the number of casualties in a battle. It seems easy for the United States to fight against the Germans on the European battlefield, but in fact the number of casualties is as high as 250,000. The intensity of war in Europe is actually stronger than that of the US-Japan Pacific War.
