The Ultimate World War II What-If: Japan Attacks Russia Instead of America

Michael Peck

Security, Eurasia

Could Stalin have fought a two-front war?

Fighting a war on two fronts is the military equivalent of driving a car while texting. It’s just a really bad idea, as Germany can attest. One reason Germany lost two world wars is because its forces were split between East and West. America and Britain also fought World War II in Europe and Asia.

In contrast, the Soviet Union could concentrate its forces against Germany, thanks to a 1941 neutrality pact with its long-time rival Japan. This became painfully obvious to Hitler during the 1941–42 Battle of Moscow, when the Red Army’s well-trained and well-equipped Siberian divisions reinforced the battered Soviet armies defending Moscow. Trained to operate in the harsh cold of Siberia, these fresh troops shattered the frozen German spearheads and sent them reeling from the gates of Moscow.

But what if the Soviet Union had also faced a two-front war? One of the great what-ifs of the Second World War is what would have happened if Japan had attacked the Soviet Union in 1941, when the Soviet Union seemed at defeat’s door as the German panzers drove deep into Russia.

The traditional narrative is that in mid-1941, Japanese leaders were split between the “strike north” faction, championed by the Imperial Army, which wanted to attack Russia. Opposing them was the Navy-backed “strike south” faction pressing for seizing the resources of Southeast Asia from their American and European masters. In the fall of 1941, with the German armies approaching Moscow, Japanese leaders made the fateful decision to declare war against the Western powers. The immediate impetus was a series of American and European embargoes in 1940–41, most importantly of oil, which left Japan facing the prospect of running out of fuel for its factories and ships. However, Stalin learned from Richard Sorge, a well-placed Soviet spy in Tokyo, that Japan would not invade Siberia, which the Soviet dictator to shift his elite Siberian troops from the Far East to Moscow, just in time to save the Soviet capital.