Interesting scenario 1) The carriers would still have been loose - and air power as we all know changed the value of battleships 2) The loss of Pearl would have been a strategic and psychological loss - but the US would still have been able to effect a pincer response if they moved some of their Carriers to Australia 3) US submarines could have helped to neutralise a captured fleet. I imagine that this would have been directed to occur within days of the loss of such capital vessels.

1. U.S. Carriers would still be available, but would have to base from San Diego or Australia; Midway Island most likely would have been captured in this event, giving Japan total control of the Pacific, as well as the massive quantities of oil stored at hawaii. Given U.S's inability to deploy from anywhere but SD, Japan certainly would have focused on bombing / intercepting anything coming from there. 2. Pincer attacks could have been effected later in the war, but in '41 we had, I think, only 3 carriers in the pacific. If Japan had seized Pearl, they could have added 7 battleships to their fleet, which probably could have bullied their way into sd harbor and destroyed the remanants of the us pacific fleet. 3. I don't know what the U.S. submarine fleet looked like that early in the war. But I do know that until late in '44 their torpedoes were largely ineffective, running too deep and very often not detonating on impact.

if japan would of done that California would be a infested colony of hte bubonic pleague what htey had used in china usa would of been dead crippeld the soldiers would of still ben out to sea but them halfe way ther knowing ther fighting for a dead country loosing batttel no food no weapons no planes usa would of died

No. Assume the worst, the facilities are still intact. At that time, it was easier to replace the trained manpower than the dockyards and tank farms of Oahu. There is no long term contamination. The residue washes away with the rains and some hosing down and all those facilities are intact, as is a major battleship force.

Try to restrain your enthusiasm. The conditions you seem to assume didn't exist. Japan had no such capacity to devastate America. It wasn't a question of will. It was a lack of actual capacity. For that matter, you appear to have grossly misunderstood the nature of the plagues they worked with, how they are spread, what their natural limits are, etc.. Give Japan all the hardware you want, all the germs, all the ability to deliver them, it wouldn't have killed America. It wouldn't even have killed the west coast of America. Biowarfare has been exhaustively studied both in military projects and in civilian studies in both NATO and the USSR for literally generations. There is actual information out there, should you care to look it up..

Interesting thread especially since the Japanese used gas in significant quantities in China in the early 1930s. Interesting to note the Italian used gas against the Ethiopians at the same time, Mussolini's son-in-law writing a poem about how his gas bombs from his aircraft burst among te horse borne tribesmen "like flowers blooming in the desert"...charming as dinner company too, I'm sure. The question is how aware were we in the US of the gas threat? Could we cope? Better still, could we retaliate? The guys who seem most alive to gas warfare were the Brits. People forget that in 1940 when delivering his "we will fight them on the beaches etc." speech, Churchill finished with "we will flood the beaches with gas" (or similar words if you'll excuse my memory). Indications are he meant phosgene or di-phosgene a heavier than air gas useful for "pouring" down hill and floating across land and water. The effect is to cause the breather to "drown"; like very rapid pneumonia. The Brits were so aware of the Japanese use of gas that they moved in summer 1941 an entire Chemical Warfare battalion in a 14 ship convoy with their mustard and phosgene to Rangoon where they spent a lot of time running around the city wearing gas masks so the word would get to the Japanese: "you use gas, we use gas". This engineer batallion was allocated as army corps troops and equipped for deployment tactically by combat engineers using large mortars and katyushka multiple rocket launchers. Equally they could have filled a few bombs for the air force. Oddly I can find no evidence at all for US preparation of gas supplies or specialist troops for handling the filthy stuff. I have checked the US Army Corps of Engineers (who would be responsible for both tranpost/storage and tactical use by pipe/mortar or filling the shells for artillery and aircraft) and cant find a lead until April 1942 and this batallion was earmarked for later use in the Torch landings. It appears as though our "gas" strike capability was zero. Given our general unpreparedness (read Stilwell's memoirs for a sobering commentary) this is not surprising. It seems as though both Japan and Italy viewed gas as something to use against unprepared tribesmen up to and including Chinese soldiers and civilians. Neither seems to have though of using it against Britain or the US, in the former case because of clear retaliation, in the latter because they suspected the same. If anyone has any details of CW circa 1940/1 in the US I'd like to see it.

P.S. Odd that the Brits in the UK thought the Japs serious enough to send gas to Burma, while the Brits in Singapore....

Excuse me hogging this thread but I should mention Taranto, shells, effect and clean up. 1. Yamamoto emulating his alma mater (he was trained as a young officer at Britannia) studied the British 1940 aircraft carrier attack on the Italian naval base of Taranto and devised a daylight version on a larger scale. 2. His targets were the fleet capital ships. The Japanese went to a lot of trouble converting naval shells into bombs which would pierce deck armor and training coordinated attack. 3. A chemical attack would not have sunk ships. It may have caused larger short term casualties but so what? There was never a land invasion. 4. If a land invasion had been planned then (a) the fleet would have had to be destroyed AND (b) there would have been widescale gas bombardment both (a) and (b) being beyond the means of the Japanese carriers. 5. If (a) and (b) had been achieved then the occupation would have been very difficult. A gassed area requires extensive clean up. The Germans and Russians preferred "Bomb Z" (hydrogen cyanide) because it evaporates after 15 minutes. Mustard and phosgene can linger for weeks - in fact mustard soaks into wood and has a nasty habit of reappearing when warmed by people sitting on chairs for example. You have to burn all wood, textiles etc...a lengthy process to make any gassed place habitable. 6. The aerial bombing was very well planned and executed as it was. The mystery is why the Japanese didn't try a landing. No need for gas. They could have taken Hawaii as it was.

We might note that, essentially, all the Western paeticipants in WW2 knew very well of the threat of gas warfare and had prepared, to some degree, to fight a war in which gas was used. It's easy to overlook, but it wouldn't take deep reading to see that when fighting began - actually, at each of the early stages of the European War - the local media wrote of the danger of gas attack and in many cases there were extensively publicized civil defense plans. There are literally hundreds of published pictures from 1939 and 1940, in the UK, of uniformed personnel, civil defense workers and civilians wearing gas masks, for instance. It actually surprized many that Hitler never used gas on the battlefield. America was equally alert and prepared. Literally thousands of American servicemen had suffered injuries in WW1 gas attacks, after all. Again, if you check major papers of the era - 1941, even before Pearl Harbor - you'll find open references to the threat of gas attack. Local American civil defense workers were, at the very least, warned of the possibility. The atomic bomb was a general shock to the world. Gas was not.

Nonsense. Gen Short would look good in history if Japan attempted to land on Oahu. And Japan was not in a strong position with chemicals in 1941. Nor was the navy equipped or trained to use them in an attack. Chemicals would not have disabled the fleet, and amphibs don't do well in the face of battleships. The distances make the logistics really hard - almost impossible. I did it once in a sim - and actually won the battle - but lost the war because I sent too much shipping to the central Pacific!