Then there must have been an awesome Thanksgiving at my house . is my haul from black Thursday . D sorry for crappy quality <| sep |> There is not a good option . Go for some binoculars <| sep |> I actually get a really cold vibe from this , and if there ' s central heating then it ' ll feel humid like a sauna or inside of a bus . Maybe it ' s because it ' s cold in my room right now . <| sep |> The plan wasn ' t that terrible . The Soviet Union was in complete turmoil . Stalin was hated and they tried to kick him out of office . In retaliation for this , he did his purges . He eliminated anyone , and I mean almost anyone , who would threaten his power . His army was reduced to nothing . Finland fought with the Soviets and completely embarrassed the Soviet Union in front of the entire world . Stalin had perpetrated the mass starvation in the Ukraine . It was not that big of a stretch to go into the Soviet Union , eliminate a few hundred divisions from the order of battle , surround Moscow , and the Soviet Union would capitulate . For Japan , I earlier misspelled the location . It was the battles of Khalkhin Gol . Keep in mind that the German Blitzkrieg which is a myth , but a different topic was actually a Russian idea called deep battle from 1920 and the Germans learned it while doing field exercises in the Soviet Union in the 1920 ' s and 1930 ' s . The Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor because the United States had cut off their rubber , oil , and financial assets . The United States was a weak 2 ndrate power militarily . The total armed forces at that time was nothing . Japan predicted that a knockout blow to the fleet would cripple the US in the region and Japan could do what it wanted to . No one anticipated how fast the US would mobilize its economy to build its war machine . Even the Germans laughed at the US when they entered the war in Africa and rightfully so as the US performed terribly in the beginning . The Japanese had knocked the hell out of the British in places like Malaysia , Hong Kong , and won while outnumbered around 101 in Singapore which Churchill called the greatest embarrassment to the British Empire ever . They were a mighty force with a very impressive fleet . If you look at a map of the Japanese empire in 1940 you can see how many they had to conquer to get there . I recommend books over documentaries because they cover more ground . However , if you watch the Battlefield series you can see some battles in really nice detail covering both sides and their plans and motivations . As for your earlier question about the Eastern Front , I recommend Soviet Storm . However , these pale in comparison to books from Antony Beevor , David Glantz , Max Hastings , and Robert Forczyk .