Japan was not, repeat, not, an inconsequential ally of Germany.  I have a cousin still aboard the USS Arizona and an uncle KIA on Bougainville.  Both Marines that might not agree with your assessment of the quality of the Japs.

Yes, they were. Even the CiC of the Combined Fleet, Yamamoto, knew the Japanese would only be victorious for six months and it would be downhill after that. The army, which dominated the Japanese government felt the US would sue for peace after a few defeats; the navy knew better. The problem with the German/Japanese alliance is they never actually were allies. Real allies work toward the same strategic goal, they don't conduct their own separate wars. WW2 would have had an entirely different outcome had the Japanese kept going once they had broken into the Indian ocean. A Japanese naval force in the Indian Ocean would have allowed the Italians to sustain themselves in Ethiopia, and had disastrous effects on the British Middle East and Indian position. Britain may have had to drop out of the war. Instead Japan went in the other direction.

Want to learn about what really was going on during WWII?  Read "Ultra Secret" By Fredrick William Winterbotham.

The best logistics or weapons don't necessarily dictate the outcome of a war.

LOL!

Amateur.  Logistics is what determines the out come of wars.

I'll see your LOL and raise you one LOL, tell that to those less than 1000 remaining German POW's who invaded Russia.  Logistics don't mean squat if you don't have the people power with a will to win.  Your probably right about me being an amateur, my meager 3000 combat hours are probably much less than yours.  It's da peoples man, da peoples!

Logistics is EVERYTHING and that's where the Nazis and Japanese failed. It's a failure of logistics when you invade a country as expansive as Russia and don't have a mechanized army. The Nazis - once you got past their few Panzer divisions - were a horse draw/marching army. To conquer even western Russia you needed a motorized army. Didn't the Nazis ever pick up a history book? How could they have allowed themselves to caught without any cold weather gear. Hitler believed in the occult. He could have held a seance and asked the ghost of Napoleon about that one. And the Japanese? Their logistics were so bad they were reduced to cannibalism on their island outposts by the end of the war. And how could you go to war to obtain the riches of Southeast Asia and Indonesia, and give absolutely no thought as to how you were going to transport those riches back to Japan - and protect them on the way there. As for you 3000 combat hours obviously you didn't learn shit, if you don't understand the importance of logistics. You're like those Japanese generals who believed that "fighting spirit" was more important than a functioning supply system.

I miss tbone.  That is all. 

Logistics is EVERYTHING and that's where the Nazis and Japanese failed. It's a failure of logistics when you invade a country as expansive as Russia and don't have a mechanized army. The Nazis - once you got past their few Panzer divisions - were a horse draw/marching army. To conquer even western Russia you needed a motorized army. Didn't the Nazis ever pick up a history book? How could they have allowed themselves to caught without any cold weather gear. Hitler believed in the occult. He could have held a seance and asked the ghost of Napoleon about that one. And the Japanese? Their logistics were so bad they were reduced to cannibalism on their island outposts by the end of the war. And how could you go to war to obtain the riches of Southeast Asia and Indonesia, and give absolutely no thought as to how you were going to transport those riches back to Japan - and protect them on the way there. As for you 3000 combat hours obviously you didn't learn shit, if you don't understand the importance of logistics. You're like those Japanese generals who believed that "fighting spirit" was more important than a functioning supply system.

The "logic" behind the invasion of Russia was that Poland fell in 46 days, France was completely conquered in 43 days, Denmark was conquered in 6 hours. Hitler was applying the same reasoning behind the invasion of Russia and thought it would fall after 3 months. (Souce: Victor David Hanson "Father of us all").Hitler was intelligent, but he was fool and didnt have any wisdom. And you are right about the national socialist being occult, the only history he read was occult articles, and his occult religion outlined in Ostara and by Guido Von List said that the German people were a mystical race and many NSDAP/SS believed they had power of telekenisis etc. If he had read the history of Russia, from the tactics of Peter the Great, Ivan the terrible and Alexander I, then they would have known Stalin would use scorch eart tactics.

For these occult reasons Hitler declared war on the USA, because they viewed the american people as a mix of black and white untermenchen which could not put up a fight against the more pure germans. This was the greatest miscalculation of WW2, and just show how much a fool Hitler and the rest of NSDAP was (Lets not forget that Nazi germany was run by The National Socialist Party of Germany and that Hitler was just one man out of many).

Both the Japanese and Germans believed they were ethnically superior, which made "fighting spirit" and "ethnic purity" bullshit more important than logistics and scientific analysis of enemy war capacity.

although the U.S. still didn't directly participate for another year.

Don't forget the massive amount of war material, capital, resources and tanks/planes that were shipped to USSR and GB which made both countries possible to continue the war, without these resources both GB and USSR would have fallen.

EDIT:

I'll see your LOL and raise you one LOL, tell that to those less than 1000 remaining German POW's who invaded Russia.  Logistics don't mean squat if you don't have the people power with a will to win.  Your probably right about me being an amateur, my meager 3000 combat hours are probably much less than yours.  It's da peoples man, da peoples!

Again, there was never any will of the Russian people and the fact that destroys your entire argument is the fact that the Russians had machine guns at the back of the line killing all people who tried to escape. If there was ever a people with the will to win a war then it was the germans, they had the morale, the invincible mentality and the belief that they were superior in every aspect. It was US resources that saved the USSR, your crackpot theory about "Der Triumph des Willens" dies with the Russian commisars and SS.

Gotta go with Giles on this one. Logistics really is everything, and the bigger the battles, the more logistics matter. Talk about national determination and will to win on the part of the Russkies is piffle. Russian officers had to literally force recruits into battle at gunpoint early on. As a nation, the USSR gave up tens of thousands of square miles of the most productive part of the land mass of the largest nation on Earth at that time, and sacrificed MILLIONS of men and women just to slow the poorly-prepared Germans down enough so they could literally move the capital machinery they needed far enough east to be out of the Nazi reach, to make the T-34s (their equivalent of our Shermans) and Yaks and other tools of war that finally turned the tide after years of miserable defeat and retreat. In the first six months, in addition to horrendous battlefield casualties, the Germans took 3 million Soviet prisoners (most of whom never returned from captivity), and sat within sight of Moscow's outskirts.

Hitler was an idiot to invade the Soviet Union, particularly when he had already achieved his European goals (except for England), and particularly when his move was made so late in the summer. (I often wonder how differently things might have turned out if he had launched Barbarossa in, say, early or mid-May.) But as poorly as the Germans were prepared for the conflict -- as Giles points out, they were only fractionally mechanized -- they caught Papa Joe with his pants all the way down, and they damn near pulled it off. Even the Germans were far better positioned logistically than the Russians, who were in almost complete disarray.