Two years later, the situation hadn't really changed much. The Japanese were even more bogged down in the war in China than they'd been two years earlier[2] and were running into serious issues with regards to resupply, oil and rubber in …show more content…
In 1941, the Imperial Japanese Army had 51 divisions. 27 were engaged in fighting the Chinese. That would have left 24 to spare going against the Soviets. The Soviets would have been able to detect a troop build-up that large and wouldn't have moved their own forces. The Russians had 31 divisions in Siberia at the time and would have had considerable depth in defense, not to mention a very bitter winter for which the Japanese would not have been prepared.
Even if the Japanese had managed to push past the border with the Soviets - something that they had not successfully done to that point - they would have been in trouble very quickly. Siberia was, and still remains, underdeveloped in infrastructure, including roads. Making speedy progress would have been impossible, and making slow progress would have chewed up a massive amount of oil and rubber, things that the Japanese were already running low on thanks to an embargo. Sure, there's oil in Siberia, but that was a barely tapped resource in the early 1940's. The Japanese couldn't have relied on …show more content…
One would have thought that, in the event of a war with the Soviet Union, the IJA would have shared trucks and other such logistical support vehicles with the Imperial Japanese Navy. In truth, the IJA and the IJN were engaged in a near constant pissing competition and rarely cooperated on such matters. The IJA could not have gotten very far into Siberia without running out of ammunition and food.
And again, that's if they didn't get beaten back at the border.
This leaves the question of the pincer: would a Japanese attack have allowed the Nazis to successfully complete Operation Barbarossa's objectives? Well, probably not. While it's certainly true that being able to transfer troops out of Siberia helped the Soviet war effort, the Nazis only made it to Moscow in October of 1941 and weren't doing well by that point. Most of their motor vehicles - trucks, tanks and the like - were out of commission and there had been substantial casualties to that point. The German war effort was largely reliant on horse-drawn supply lines by that point, so that the Nazis were on the very edge of their non-winter operational abilities in the Battle of Moscow. When winter hit, the Germans weren't prepared and couldn't get winter supplies to their troops. It's therefore unlikely that Moscow would have fallen. The Soviets likely would have taken longer in pushing the Nazis away from Moscow, but it still probably would have