Play as · WW2 1939 · L2 · Japanese colony

Formosa - 1939

Formosa (Taiwan) in 1939 is a Japanese colonial possession since the 1895 Treaty of Shimonoseki cession from Qing China after the First Sino-Japanese War. Population is around 5.5 million Han Chinese and approximately 200,000 Indigenous Formosan peoples, with about 350,000 Japanese settlers and administrators. The colonial economy is the most economically integrated of Japan's pre-1931 acquisitions - sugar, rice, camphor, and increasingly aluminum smelting (using cheap hydroelectric power and bauxite imports) supply the Japanese metropole. The strategic position is the southward frontage from which Japan will launch the December 1941 strikes against the Philippines, the Indochina-Malay assault forces, and the Dutch East Indies operations.

Starting position

The Takao (Kaohsiung) naval base and the airfields at Tainan are the launching points for the Japanese Imperial Navy's southward operations from late 1941. The December 8, 1941 air strikes on Clark Field and Iba in the Philippines (about ten hours after Pearl Harbor in the same operational sequence) launch from Formosa. Through 1942-43 the colony serves as the rear-area logistics, training, and aircraft-production base for the Pacific theater - Mitsubishi and Nakajima aircraft assembly, sugar and rice for the Co-Prosperity Sphere, and the conscription of Formosan auxiliaries (including the famous Takasago volunteers from Indigenous Formosan communities) into Japanese forces. The October 12-16, 1944 Formosa Air Battle - US Task Force 38 carrier aircraft against Japanese island-based defenders - is one of the largest air battles of the Pacific war and breaks the back of Japanese land-based air on the island. The October 25, 1945 Republic of China handover establishes the ROC administration that 1949 will receive Chiang's evacuated government.

What turns the campaign

What the Japanese colonial framework wants is the integration of Formosan resources into the Co-Prosperity Sphere economic structure deepening through the war, the staging-base function for Pacific operations sustained without Allied disruption, and the colonial pacification project (which by 1939 has largely succeeded relative to Korea or Manchukuo) producing reliable wartime cooperation. What the Formosan population experiences is the wartime mobilization producing labor and military conscription at colonial-rear-area scales, the late-war Allied bombing campaigns that destroy substantial industrial and urban infrastructure, the food and consumer-goods rationing that the war's resource priorities impose, and the 1945 transition to Republic of China administration that the 1947 February 28 Incident and subsequent White Terror will mark as a different and harder occupation than the wartime Japanese one.

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