That's not what I wrote, my objection to Simon Jester was to him being condescending and what I what wasn't worth it was to address the irrelevant tangent of whether Elfdart's post
could be reasonably misunderstood.
What I am doing is instead addressing Elfdart's post as clarified by Simon Jester, and hes still mistaken, (not in a bad way, but in a way I feel I can help correct, I'm not putting him down) or rather right but wrong or wrong but right depending on how you look at it. He has oversimplified the Manchurian Strategic Offensive to down to the basic attributes of the campaign; i.e: of one more advanced, better constructed military curbstomping a less advanced worse constructed one and comparing the two situations and declaring them analogous based on these surface similarities.
My objection, now that I am back at my laptop and not my phone and can now clarify and post at length is that this is an oversimplification, the actual situations are actually vastly different even if there are surface similarities.
[My original nitpick of "Oh hey what you said about the Japanese is wrong" I am disregarding as resulting from a misunderstanding, I am now instead making a
new argument based on my understanding from Simon's clarification.]
Since my OP is now inconsequential;
One thing I always try to keep in mind is that when the fearless Japanese faced off against the Red Army in open terrain in 1945, the side with real tanks, real AT guns, real air support and more modern small arms and artillery beat the bitter dogshit out of the one with ineffective, antique weapons.
(dropping the sentence in parenthesis as implicit from the context provided)
Is still mistaken in the sense that I disagree with his analogy because I feel that he is oversimplifying the two, very different campaigns and is implying the misleading statement that "more advanced" militaries can always be expected to defeat less "advanced ones" (for a given definition).
The situations between 1940/41 North Africa and August 1945 were very different. The attacked in the former were the Italians, who did not understand their adversaries or planned accordingly. The British struck me as reacting to the situations and taking advantages of opportunities as they presented themselves, and did not "plan" on counter attacking the Italians in the manner they did. Or planned on how to best take advantage of it when it inevitably occurred, we only need to see the British difficulties managing over a hundred thousand Italian POW's and Churchill's Greece diversion for this to be readily apparent. Additionally the Italians were numerically superior, but logistically reliant on supply and reinforcement from the homeland, the attack and defence would always rely on how well the navy could safeguard supplies.
Also the Italians, while the attackers did not realistically plan or prepare for an attack on British Egypt, and were woefully under equipped for the task at hand.
Operation August storm differences are numerous and substantial; the Russians the "more advanced force" were the attackers, additionally they planned, trained, and prepared for months for the campaign down to the unit level, hand picking formations best suited to engage in the terrain of their particular zone. The Soviets were quantitatively and qualitatively superior in virtually every category and held the element of strategic surprise in that while the Japanese
were expecting the Soviets to attack, underestimated the date in which the Soviets could operate and were in the middle of redeploying their forces to more defensible interior positions.
The Japanese for their part, while numerically inferior and possessing inferior weaponry did not so grossly underestimate their foe as the British did. The Japanese nonetheless still had hundreds of thousands of troops in Manchuria, the Kwangtung Army was arguably one of the best armies the Japanese had on the mainland. The Japanese hadn't
learned nothing from their 1939 encounter with Zhukov and had prudently given their material and strategic situation wisely decided their best course of action was to prepare as best they could, and hold off as long as they could. The Japanese were also not as dependent on the Home Islands for resupply, the Japanese had spent the better part of a decade colonizing and industrializing Manchuria providing a certain degree of self sufficiency for their Manchurian forces, not nearly enough but it was far better relative to the Italians.
Finally the IJA had a vested factional interest in the defense of Manchuria as the corner stone of their influence in Japanese politics and the lynch pin of the new Japanese Empire, and was dedicated to its defense. The same cannot easily be said of the Italians with regard to Libya, I'm certain Mussolini and other imperialists felt it was important but I question to what extant the Army really wanted to defend Libya and place most of their proverbial eggs in that basket.
In a way August Storm can be said to be writing and applying the finest operational art to the attack against a understandably off balance opponent, the Italian Egyptian Offencive can be more easily said to be an text book example as to how
not conduct important offensive operations (especially against a somewhat prepared and capable opponent, even if under strengthed).
So yes, the side with "superior armaments" curbstomped the side with "less superior" armaments, that much is true in the sense that "it happened." But the situations are nevertheless not identical and so the analogy breaks down, like most analogous when we look past the surface similarities and see what actually happened. Why do I feel this is important to emphasize? Because there can be situations where simply being the better equipped side may lead to organizational complacency if you just categorically assume that better guns and on paper organization and planning will result in victory and that this is a dangerous assumption to make.
Since for example we have a compelling precedent in that the Chinese Red Army, lacking in "real tanks, real at guns, real air support, modern small arms and artillery" was able to pull a reversal and defeated the superiorly equipped Nationalist Army of Chiang Kai Shek, which was supplied with modern American and Soviet weapons, while the Chinese Red Army made do with captured Japanese and pre war German equipment.
