History thread [split] from "New Rule - Promoting Terrorism"

[Gawdzilla Sama]

When people are desperate they reach for any straw they can find.  That's not news.

There was no straw with Russia. The Japanese knew this. Why Togo Shigenori wanted the ambassadors to talk the talk but not walk the walk has been the death of many trees.

[Icy]

There is a problem to compare the bombings of Germany and Japan with asymmetric warfare. The RAF tried to hit only military targets, but failed. The US Army Air Corps tried to hit military targets and failed. They both hit nada and suffered casualties while trying. We also need to consider the technology in the 1940s, they were able to hit city blocks, but not the industries. Sir Arthur Harris (Bomber Harris, the commander of the British Bomber Command) and his American colleague realized pretty fast they couldn't hit their industries, but they could hit the factory workers. The British and the Americans also tried to hit the civilians morale. They failed with that. 

Wars are usually divided into two types, I mentioned the asymmetric war. That means guerrilla war and terrorism (Vietnam, Afghanistan now and when the Soviets were there, Malaysia during the 1960s, the Kurdish fighting the Turks, Iraqis, Iranians, and the Syrians. Lebanon was in savage asymmetric war during the 1980s. The Israelis have been locked in a never ending war since 1967. 

The symmetric war has an asymmetric component, but the majority of the fighting occur between two or more warring countries and their armed forces. Examples of symmetric wars are the dual world wars, the Korean war in the 1950s, The Israeli wars in 1967 and 1973, the Falklands War in 1982, the entire Cold War and the planning for it was based on the concept of the symmetric war.  The asymmetric component of this kind of war are resistance movements, partisans, and the use of special forces.

[Minimalist]

https://foreignpolicy.com/2013/05/30/the...talin-did/

The impact of the Soviet declaration of war and invasion of Manchuria and Sakhalin Island was quite different, however. Once the Soviet Union had declared war, Stalin could no longer act as a mediator — he was now a belligerent. So the diplomatic option was wiped out by the Soviet move. The effect on the military situation was equally dramatic. Most of Japan’s best troops had been shifted to the southern part of the home islands. Japan’s military had correctly guessed that the likely first target of an American invasion would be the southernmost island of Kyushu. The once proud Kwangtung army in Manchuria, for example, was a shell of its former self because its best units had been shifted away to defend Japan itself. When the Russians invaded Manchuria, they sliced through what had once been an elite army and many Russian units only stopped when they ran out of gas. The Soviet 16th Army — 100,000 strong — launched an invasion of the southern half of Sakhalin Island. Their orders were to mop up Japanese resistance there, and then — within 10 to 14 days — be prepared to invade Hokkaido, the northernmost of Japan’s home islands. The Japanese force tasked with defending Hokkaido, the 5th Area Army, was under strength at two divisions and two brigades, and was in fortified positions on the east side of the island. The Soviet plan of attack called for an invasion of Hokkaido from the west.

It didn’t take a military genius to see that, while it might be possible to fight a decisive battle against one great power invading from one direction, it would not be possible to fight off two great powers attacking from two different directions. The Soviet invasion invalidated the military’s decisive battle strategy, just as it invalidated the diplomatic strategy. At a single stroke, all of Japan’s options evaporated. The Soviet invasion was strategically decisive — it foreclosed both of Japan’s options — while the bombing of Hiroshima (which foreclosed neither) was not.