The Japanese rising sun is hoisted up the flag pole of Los Angeles' city hall. To the
south at the large American naval base in San Diego, Japanese imperial navy officers oversee
the conversion of a surviving American carrier into one to be crewed by Japanese sailors. A few
hundred miles away, Japanese troops march nearly unopposed to seize Las Vegas and the strategically
important Hoover Dam, cutting off water and power to the entire American southwest.
This is how Japan could have brought the United States to its knees and won World War II.
In our real timeline the war between the United States and Japan was a relatively short,
but brutal affair with combat spanning across the entire Pacific. While the confrontation
has been typically portrayed as a battle between titans, the truth is that Japan was
no match for the United States- even with half of its attention diverted to Europe.
Japan entered the war with 12 battleships, 13 carriers, 7 light carriers, 10 escort carriers,
18 heavy cruisers, 25 light cruisers, 169 destroyers, and 195 submarines. The
US on the other hand started with 17 battleships, 7 carriers,
1 escort carrier, 37 heavy cruisers, 171 destroyers, and 112 submarines.
The two fleets were fairly evenly matched at the start of hostilities,
though Japan had a sizable advantage in one key area: carriers. These floating airfields were now
the dominant weapon of naval warfare, though the world hadn't yet discovered that fact.
Hence why the Japanese raid on Pearl Harbor was in effect, a strategic failure- none of
America's carriers were sunk or even damaged in the attack, and losses to battleships,
cruisers, and destroyers did little more than simply slow the US Pacific fleet down.
While Japan and the US began the war on nearly level ground, by the end of the war there was
no comparison. The United States was the most powerful navy the world had ever seen,
with 23 battleships, an astonishing 28 carriers, 71 escort carriers, 72 cruisers,
377 destroyers, 361 frigates, and 232 submarines. Hundreds of
aircraft launched from the decks of the largest carrier fleet ever assembled,
as the US Navy swallowed up the surviving members of the Japanese Imperial Navy.
The staggering size of the US fleet towards the end of the war is indicative of Japan's greatest
challenge in overcoming its much larger opponent: America's industrial might was staggering, and
quickly brought to bear against its enemies. By comparison, the Japanese islands were not heavily
industrialized, with manufacturing concentrated in a few key cities and much of the nation operating
a 'cottage industry' model where goods were created in homes or small neighborhood shops.
The US on the other hand had invested millions into building sprawling transportation networks
to haul goods and resources from one end of the country to the other,
and its merchant navy fleet was one of the largest in the world. To make matters worse
for Japan, the American population was nearly twice as large as Japan's,
with Japan having just over 73 million citizens and the US having over 133
million people to work farms, factories, docks, and shipyards all over the nation.
But it wasn't just people that made America far stronger than Japan,
it was its access to natural resources needed for fueling a massive wartime economy. The US
had plentiful access to rich oil deposits, and in fact before the war was responsible for exporting
much of Japan's critically needed petroleum and petroleum products necessary for heavy industry.
Before the raid on Pearl Harbor, the US had used threats of embargo to attempt to curb
Japanese expansionism in the Pacific, before finally cutting off the oil supply entirely
and leaving Japan in dire straits. As of that moment, war was inevitable as Japan had to seize
alternate sources of oil to power its military and industry both, and most of these sources
would end up being British controlled, which was all but guaranteed to drag the US into war.
But the US was also rich in iron and other metals, as well as coal. The Japanese islands
by comparison were relatively resource-poor, and to finance the ever-growing empire, Japan
had been forced to invade a weakened China. The goal was to convert China into a massive factory
which would power Japanese expansionism across the Pacific, the Japanese Empire leeching off
China's abundant natural resources and manpower like a parasitic tick. Before the war between
the US and Japan, America provided over 74% of Japan's scrap iron and 93% of its copper.
In a very real sense, Japan ensured its own defeat by starting a war with America in the first place.
Yet Japanese leadership felt they had no other choice- if they acquiesced to American demands,
they would be forced to pull out of China and lose access to the natural resources
which would make it independent from the US. The choice was a grim,
but a necessary one in the minds of Japan's military leadership- and it didn't help that
it was also fueled by very skewed intelligence and opinions on the United States. For one,
America was believed to be fundamentally weak, a mongrel nation of mixed races and immigrants which
would be unable to pull itself together in case of war. Such diversity and lack of purity was seen as
a weakness by both Japan and Nazi Germany. It was also believed that Americans were poor soldiers,
and that civilian morale would crumble at the first sign of a military defeat.
These false assumptions sealed Japan's fate and
signaled the death knell for any imperialistic ambitions.
But what could Japan have done differently in order to win in the Pacific?
Manchuria would take a long time to turn into the industrial powerhouse Japan dreamed of using
to fuel its empire, and the conquest of the rest of China would take just as long. Militarily and
industrially speaking, Japan was simply incapable of challenging the United States. Therefore,
Japan would have to attack America directly in the first months of the war, while it still had
the advantage and the US was reeling from Pearl Harbor. But an ordinary attack wouldn't do.
To eliminate America's industrial might, there was only one thing Japan could do:
launch a full-scale biological campaign aimed directly at America's population.
In our real timeline, Japan hatched a plan to launch biological attacks on California during
the latter stages of the war. The plan was one of sheer desperation, and would not have
done anything to even moderately affect the American pacific campaign. However,
if such an attack had taken place at the start of the war, perhaps history would be different today.
Call it a biological Pearl Harbor, and using the same tools Japan experimented with in our
real timeline. Developed specifically to get close to well protected US shores and launch
attacks on coastal infrastructure, special Japanese submarines were designed that could
house a small number of planes within. Once near the US, these massive submarines- the
largest ever built until the nuclear ballistic missile submarines of the Cold War- would remove
an outer shell to reveal a small flight deck from which fighter bombers could be launched.
But these planes wouldn't be loaded with conventional explosives, rather they would
carry deadly pathogens with one goal: unleash a plague in the United States.
Japan had a great deal of experience with biological warfare even before war with the US.
The infamous Unit 731, or the Epidemic Prevention and Water Purification Department of the Kwantung
Army, had been carrying out experiments with living humans. And these experiments involved
some of the deadliest diseases in the world, including Anthrax, bubonic plague, botulism,
cholera, and smallpox. An estimated 500,000 prisoners of war, including some Americans,
and civilians would all die at the hands of Unit 731, as Japan experimented on
captives and dropped bombs laced with deadly pathogens in the heart of Chinese cities.
To prepare for an attack on US cities, Unit 731 personnel had experimented with plague bombs.
This foul procedure involved infecting many Chinese and Allied prisoners of war
with the plague, and then harvesting their diseased flesh in vivisections
conducted with no anesthetic. As one Unit 731 medical assistant recalled after the war:
““The [Chinese] fellow knew that it was over for him, and so he didn’t struggle when they
led him into the room and tied him down. I cut him open from the chest to the stomach,
and he screamed terribly, and his face was all twisted in agony. He made this unimaginable sound,
he was screaming so horribly. But then finally he stopped. This was all in a
day’s work for the surgeons, but it really left an impression on me because it was my first time.”
Thousands upon thousands of civilians and POWs were similarly processed across
Japanese prison camps, receiving no anesthetic because of Imperial
Japan’s deep belief that everyone that wasn’t Japanese was an inferior race.
So how could Japan use biological warfare to bring the US to its knees?
In our hypothetical scenario, Japan realizes that to topple the US it's necessary not just to
destroy its naval forces, but target its civilians so it cannot bring its industrial might to bear.
This requires an attack using specialized submarines developed just for this task,
with their fighter-bombers loaded up with bombs containing all sorts of virulent plagues. These
Aichi M6A Seirans have been specifically built for what has been dubbed Operation
Cherry Blossoms At Night. The planes will drop plague bombs in the heart of San Diego,
Los Angeles, and Portland to begin with, but more attacks will follow.
Supplementing the submarine-borne attack, Japan releases thousands of balloons also
carrying plague bombs. These balloons will float over the Pacific on intercontinental
air currents before falling over Canada and the US. In the real world, Japan released 10,000 such
balloons carrying conventional and incendiary explosives, but managed to kill only 6 people.
As Operation Cherry Blossoms At Night is put into motion, Japanese saboteurs across the US
also go into action. These covert agents carry briefcases which have been modified to spray
deadly pathogens with the click of a button on the handle. In major cities across the US,
these agents spray tens of thousands of unwitting civilians. They too will be
poisoned by their own weapons, but such is the fanaticism of imperial
Japan that the agents consider it an honor to die in service to the Emperor.
Carried out in conjunction with Pearl Harbor, the biological attack goes unnoticed at first.
However, within days the first victims are showing up in hospitals across the US,
all with the same symptoms. Immediately it's become clear that the United States has been
subjected to the greatest biological attack in human history, and the federal government
scrambles to come up with a national response plan. But the cities affected grow by the day-
the incubation period means many people don't show symptoms for as much as a week,
by which time they may have traveled to a different city altogether and infected others.
Panic spreads across the US as emergency quarantines are put into place. Victims
begin to die by the thousands, fueling even more panic. Hospitals are overwhelmed immediately,
social services stretched to the breaking point. With the attack on Pearl Harbor,
the US needs to rebuild its losses quickly- and more. It needs tanks, armored trucks,
and artillery for Europe- battleships, submarines, and aircraft carriers for the Pacific. But as
workers rush into factories, they bring the deadly diseases with them. The death toll skyrockets, and
factories inevitably have to shut down, bringing American industrial power to a screeching halt.
This buys Japan as much as a year to prepare itself for a confrontation with the US and
secure additional vital resources. Ultimately though, such a massive biological attack would
be logistically impossible, and a limited attack against the West Coast- which is all
that would realistically be feasible for Japan- would simply not be enough to stop the United
States of America from steamrolling imperial Japan. The cold, hard truth is that there is
no realistic scenario where Japan could have won World War II, and in fact the US could
have lost every major battle of the war and still defeated Japan through sheer weight of numbers.
Now go check out how World War 2 Didn't End How You Think It Did,
or click this other video instead!